Here

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes 

It is dusty here—sandy.  The dust here, though, isn’t like in Arequipa, where I’ve been living and working since I moved to Peru almost two months ago.  In Arequipa, the dust seems a composite of a mixture of pummeled debris wafting from industrial parks in our neighborhood and volcanic ash.  The house next to mine, a tannery, where a group of women infinitely chatting and pushing a wheel twice their size round and round, moving along a leather-making mechanism whose purpose lies beyond my understanding.  When I walk to the market, I dodge long steel poles whose burden is shared between two frowning men wearing denim dredged with that same beige brown dust.  

It is also partially volcanic ash, this dust, blown centuries down into this valley.  The city of Arequipa is framed by three volcanoes that reach high into clouds exalted.  Though the state of Arequipa has seven smoking mountains.  When I’m up before six, before the fog and pockets of clouds swallow the three visible from the city, I catch glimpse of their snow-dusted peaks and bow, in admiration for their elegance, their regal patience.  Opposite them in the valley is the cerro colorado, or the colorful range.   When you look up at these multicolor mountains––their palette determined by the array of ever-weathering minerals––you notice that overlaying the spectral earth are gray powdery hyphens.  Those are that same centuries-old volcanic dust I drag onto my dark floors if I don’t take my shoes off before stepping into my apartment.  

No, here, dust is the wrong word.  It’s sand: small, bitter grains that give you hard little bites on the thigh when the wind kicks up.  Here, in Huacachina, the only natural oasis in South America, lies the small emerald lagoon encompassed by sand dunes reaching 1,600 ft in height.  In the doorless tuk-tuk that took us from the Ica bus station to the oasis, my partner commented how dusty the air was here.  As we climbed out, all knees and potholes, he realized that it wasn’t that the horizon was opaque with dust, but that it was a sand dune whose top he couldn’t see from inside the car.  

It is our second time here this week.  We spent two days here, just us two, then we went to another town in the state of Ica, and came back to see friends who we agreed to meet here.  The concierge noticed we were back.  So did the bartenders.

“You were here a couple days ago.”

“That’s right.”

“Most people don’t come back.”

A place returned, this has become.  A place where I’ve been spending time with people I’ve only known for a month yet who nonetheless feel like long-time friends.  It’s funny how that happens.  By ‘that,’ I mean:

That inevitable yet always magical experience of strangers converting themselves into friends.  People whose existences you weren’t even aware of no less than some weeks ago now being people who you speak to on a weekly, if not daily, basis.  I have laughed more this week with these former-strangers than I have in total over the past few months.  

That, as Mary Oliver writes, “to be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough.” 

That, although the same amount of time passes each month (except for the whole 30/31/28 days thing), there are some months when everything happens and some months where nothing happens, even though things are, without fail, always happening.   Again, Mary Oliver: “All things are meltable, and replaceable.  Not at this moment, but soon enough…”  At least cosmically, I think that’s true.  

That that finding of self and world in new places happens always, how our minds, also without fail, grasp to adapt and transform things into the normal at every challenge.  

That ‘here,’ and ‘being here,’ is always true for every person in every moment whereas we all occupy different ‘here’s and different levels of here-ness.  

That, however, the sentence ‘I am here,’ that exertion of certain existence is not something all philosophers take as through-and-through true. 

Being-there.  For Heidegger, human experience is defined by that very idea, dasein; our negotiation and interpretation of existence is one bound by place and time, by ‘hereness.’ To consider what it feels like to be where I am, the topic we took on for this newsletter, is to investigate what worldly creations, both independently existent and internally imposed by my interaction with externality, create my understanding of ‘being,’ ‘being-here,’ and ‘being-there.’  

Other people, these people who sit here sipping shaken citrus drinks with me, comprise one of those worldly conditions––indeed, a primary one.  As Marcus Aurelius writes (and I quote regularly), “people exist for one another.”  Sartre writes that “hell is other people;” my partner wants to change that into “heaven and hell are other people,” because while people are endlessly complicated, the doing and undoing of those complicated threads that weave into the creation of “life” and of “here” is exactly the material we need to be.  

I think Sally Rooney captures that sense rather perfectly in Intermezzo when she has Margaret narrate that “the demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.”

More life, more and more of life.  What is our life but the known?  And, as Mary Oliver asks, “who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?” 

Would you not, I ask, feel the joyous here, everywhere? Well, I’ll try.

Because, until I’m melted, replaced, returned into dust, here, being-here, is all there is—and in all its complex and difficult glory, it feels great to be here.