October 27, 2007, 92° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, Ceyba tree, rainforest

October 28, 2007, 90° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, rainforest

November 7, 2007, 80° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, bananas and rain

November 10, 2007, 87° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, canopy and ant nest

November 11, 2007, 80° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, banana, light and wind

November 16, 2007, 83° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, leaves

November 21, 2007, 80° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, canopy

Friday was a day like that and it began with a trip to Tena, I rode with Angel, Jenny…

and Naya, their daughter of 20 months.

It takes an hour to reach Tena, a town of 30,000 people at the headwaters of the Rio Napo which descends into Peru to join the Amazon.

The road from the Cabanas to Tena is paved in anticipation of a big, new airport even though the airline that once flew here has stopped, since most people can only afford the bus. The road is dotted with gardens cleared from the jungle and sensible, wooden houses, built on pilings to catch the breeze.

In Tena the architecture is basic. But there is one extraordinary exception…

The Politecnica Ecologica Amazonica. If quality architecture in the global age is a fusion of periods and cultures, then this may be the best building in the world. Built on Inca-inspired terraces, the façade features a Greek colonnade surmounted by a Chippendale pediment not unlike the ATT building in New York. The undulating glass porches which line the sides are separated by four story columns with palm tree capitals at every floor. Living vines climb to the finale of a fifth floor which sports a quartet of Wright, Prairie House style roofs and Medieval towers. Wow! So as not to ignore Asia, there is also a small adjacent building with a Taj Mahal style dome.

The Politecnica is a hopeful thing, but since no one seems to occupy the building, it is also a futile thing, just like the airport. These grand plans may or may not bear fruit, but the soul of Tena is the street life, which is gritty and sweet.

The commerce of Tena is daily need like selling produce from the home garden…

or Tilapia from a local fish farm…

or pollo asado…

or clothes…

or beauty.

There are several parks in town and like all good, town parks they have statues…

and people hanging out…

and small celebrations.

We got home in time for a lunch of lemonade, beans, rice, and papaya and the temperature and the humidity peaked and all movement stopped.

When the heat passed, I went to the Rio Napo to walk along the banks and look at the final hour of sunlight through the palms and grasses.

Nice day.

Standing at the easel studying the landscape, I realize that converting this visual cacophony into an “artistic composition” requires willful incomprehension. There is no subject here, only a density of detail. Dynamic lines and suggestive forms abound, but to comb clarity from the tangle, to make the impure immaculate, is to misconstrue. People like to differentiate and rank to make order; it is said to be an ancient need to differentiate prey from camouflage or a modern need to build the ego by distinguishing it from everything else. But these evolutionary strategies and psychological accommodations do not separate fact from fiction. The truth about art is here in the rainforest; the world is competitive chaos and artworks that represent the world as a series of discreet and understandable moments are lies. And artists are nothing more than agents of denial and perpetrators of delusion!

It would be treachery to represent this in the traditional manner, and isolate a few forms from the morass and enshrine them in layers of smoothly unfolding space. No, the truth is that there is little middle ground or deep space in the jungle. All is compressed into a block of foreground which is itself sliced into infinite parallel planes, each with it’s own drama.

It’s deceitful to separate the mist…

from the leaf,

or the leaf from the butterfly,

or the butterfly from the light,

or the light from the water,

or the water from the root,

or the root from the tree,

or the tree from the owl,

or the owl from the prey. Making a comprehensive picture of this anarchy is impossible. This is all too much. I’m overwhelmed. I’m going to lunch. Damn, I stepped on the grasshopper.

Two
This morning a million red-bottomed ants hurry to the forest floor via the highway. The opposing 4 lanes of this 8 lane intrastate are not side by side, but superimposed, so on-coming traffic is either dodged or mounted. Dead leaves, whose empty veins are the last to rot, pave the road in slippery shades. A finger sized stick, stripped and smooth on one end and flowering with mold on the other, is easily traversed by this living stream of air breathing invertebrates, who hook and climb in unison to make a knobby ribbon of thoraxes and abdomens that arc over the cylinder on six-times-a-million legs.

Upon arrival they spread out to recover the dead and pillage the living. A squad reconnoiters a lace-winged grasshopper crushed by a careless human step. Since the carcass is too large to recover whole, a division of labor is imposed and an artful dismemberment is commenced. The juice of the head is already being sucked by a dozen small beetles, so labor is focused on removing the legs and sectioning the abdomen for transport. Within an hour nothing but a little stain is left and the red-assed squad is headed to base carrying a hind leg. Since the limb is awkwardly long and the serrations along its length catch easily, the load is assigned to three ants who enter traffic carrying the leg like a telephone pole on an eighteen-wheeler. Up to speed in the cruising lane, the leg-transport team is passed by a speeding group of eight who carry a whole millipede raised like the Madonna in a holy day procession. All march safely home and the forest floor is swept clear for the next bit of protein to fall.

Through this forest passes a stony road, which is under siege by the jungle. Over the edges of the lane, the biomass bulges to reclaim the light and space. The soil is shallow and trees are easily unmoored by the tropical storms which routinely sweep through, dropping leaves as big as baby blankets, and white trunks, like bleached carcasses, into the road.

One morning I set up my easel on the side of the lane, when a thin man appeared at the bend and began to clear the road. As he worked, he kept his body low, torso parallel to the ground so that his machete could sweep an inch above the surface, neatly slicing grass at the root. Sometimes he straightened and used a rod held in his left hand to position shoots for severing by the blade in his right. Bending at the waist, he also used the rod to push refuse to the side and the tip of the machete to impale large debris and flip it into the bush. He was dressed in long green pants, rubber boots and a rust-colored tee shirt and as he progressed toward me, I noticed the toughened complexion and enlarged joints of an older man. The skin of his face, pulled tight over his skull, was stretched irregularly around a damaged right eye. The asymmetry of his face, however, did not confuse the benignly sober look he gave me when he arrived at my easel and introduced himself as Antonio. Since I don’t speak Spanish, our greeting was as incomplete as an embrace without arms.

Through gesture he asked to see what I was painting and I showed him a composition inspired by an orange-dotted butterfly that had been commuting between us. He smiled and laughed a little over the image and said that it was good. In pantomime, I returned the complement and praised the efficiency of his work. We bowed and smiled and got back to our tasks, now companions.

By noon he had cleared one side of a half mile of road. After lunch as the temperature and humidity continued to climb, he began on the other side, adeptly defining an edge between road and jungle. On his return trip down the road, he stopped again to check on my progress. I looked at Antonio, who was dry and calm, through spectacles fogged by water that gushed from my brow and cascaded merrily over my nose. Although he registered my distress, he did not embarrass me by noting it. Once again he complemented the picture, and returned to his work.

As he moved down the road, I realized that Antonio’s performance was one of the most poised I have ever seen. The action, clearing a mile of road in a day, was well defined, necessary and challenging. The pacing of the event was hypnotically engrossing. His stately rhythm was a result of a body perfectly attuned to its climate. The movement was elegant. Each of his gestures was composed to cut and clear without waste. His understanding of the heft, hardness and edge of his tools was absolute and, consequently, never awkward. In contrast to my sweaty performance under the mixed canopy that day, Antonio demonstrated that grace is self-made not bestowed.