Our arrival in Melimoyu began hazily, with an iPhone alarm sounding over snores through a greasy, faux-leather, fluorescent-lit cabin following a 9-hour overnight on a ferry. The boat had been heaving through the darkness of night—soothing, I thought, even between attempts of sleep—as we traversed the tumultuous Gulf of Corcovado. I read snippets of Roberto Bolaño's satirical and dark novella, Nocturno de Chile ("By Night in Chile" translated title), between naps, and the dark rantings about the nature of the long skinny country and its literary world seemed both close at-hand and far-away as I folded myself into a remote but undeniably Chilean corner of the place. The dock in front of us, we gathered our bags, tucked into our jackets the last warmth of sleep, and stepped outside into the cold, dark, and wet.
Both Nocturno de Chile and Travels in a Thin Country (which I mentioned in #74) address Chile's relationship with itself. Despite being very different in content and author, they share the sentiment that Chile has a strained relationship with itself culturally. It is an isolated country, itself somewhat difficult to traverse; its biggest neighbor, Argentina, seems to incite an ongoing inferiority complex of cosmopolitanism. And to enter the realm of Chile's most famous cultural world of the 20th century (authors/poets Mistral, Neruda, Donoso, Allende, Bolaño himself), it seems like a stint abroad was necessary for fame or, in Mistral's case, a byproduct of her success. The protagonist in Nocturno de Chile writes essays about the Chilean authors of his time but describes it as "embryonic" cultural scene, while he and his circle of literary friends focus more on European references. Perhaps the literature was just (is still?) young, and the world of Chilean writers too small and separated to do anything but look elsewhere in the world for context.
I felt embryonic too: exiting the ferry boat and entering the fjord was a sort of primordial fever dream. It was barely dawn, and the low, metallic sky was squeezing out something between rain and fog. In any direction we could feel the looming presence of the mountains and volcanoes, but their contours were shades of black too obscure to differentiate. The hollowness of cold and poor sleep blended with the vacuous nature of awe and we piled our bags into a boat. We had been greeted by a frank, chipper man named Alex whose garb suggested he was prepared for this dampness every day, and he quickly piloted our boat across the fjord to a lodge where we would spend the next few days. More sunlight made its way diffusely through the cloud layer as we moved along the surface of the water, and suddenly it felt like we had crossed the ethereal threshold between night and daybreak. A tractor waded into the waves to help bring us to shore dry, and we stumbled, weary but now awake, into the bright, clean, and dry wooden lodge. Regardless of any descriptions I've read about Chile's backwoods, few things speak stronger to a sense of civilization than food and hospitality at the end of the earth.
A fjord is a type of estuary (where a river meets the sea), and we were there to study a phenomenon that mostly occurs in estuaries: internal waves. Just as "surface waves" (like what surfers ride) are at an interface of two fluids of different density—water and air—there can be be "internal waves" at the interface of two different masses of water. The waters in fjords often exhibit strong stratification, with less-dense freshwater from local rivers floating atop a more-dense layer of saltwater. Where these two different layers meet, waves can occur. My colleagues had investigated this system as the internal waves were visible from aerial imagery (they show up as broad bands of smooth and choppy water, as the internal waves heave water to the surface and smooth out the texture).
The bodily reality of environmental fluids field work (wet, labor-intensive, geographical in nature) has attracted me as someone with a strong predisposition to living in my head. My role on the trip was mostly support, however (tie some knots, look at some data, help guide some decisions) so I had time to think and stare off into space. Nocturno de Chile was sticking with me, reminding me of my humanities side. Simultaneously, it plainly probes the role of the intelligentsia in the world: it is an ouroboric critique of the insular literati in Chile as well as the value the church, with the protagonist's ostensible profession (priesthood) yielding little benefit for anyone and his greatest achievement (teaching Marxism to Pinochet) a dead-end that nobody notices. Bolaño's belief systems (leftist revolutionary and atheist) and feelings towards his motherland (distaste) are on plain view, the protagonist a metaphor for Chile itself.
While in the fjord, I was in a beautiful place, eating fresh seafood and bread every day, enjoying jokes about technical questions with friends. I'm having a better time in Chile than Bolaño did, perhaps, the product of being a privileged visitor and 22 more years of change. (The book is from 2000.) I couldn't help but think about the role of the critic, and the uphill battle to argue for the value of criticism against a sea of problems at lower rungs on Maslow's pyramid. I'd love your suggestions and conversation on the topic. But I see a void of writing (criticism?) around environmental relations that genuinely builds new language, standards, and narratives for the 21st century. To me, lots seems too quippish, sappy, or built upon an outdated assumption of human-nature dualism that is tough to shake.
One of the great joys of the flavor of environmental science I do is the assembly of the analysis. My team has baked-in expectations of the behavior of the system into how our sensors work, how our models run, and what we expect to see with our own eyes. This constrains us, applying blinders to what we can sense in the environment, but also allows us to participate in our understanding of the world. We get the gratification of either being correct or being surprised, both of which are interwoven with our self-awareness of our own knowledge. (That's a lie—there is often frustration when something goes awry, but of course it usually offers a lesson, too.) Chile has a great opportunity to be a leader in this kind of science, given its strong universities and pride for its incredible geography: this it should own without self-consciousness.
Early in Nocturno de Chile there is a metaphor about an estuary and the literary community of the protagonist's host and friend:
Both Nocturno de Chile and Travels in a Thin Country (which I mentioned in #74) address Chile's relationship with itself. Despite being very different in content and author, they share the sentiment that Chile has a strained relationship with itself culturally. It is an isolated country, itself somewhat difficult to traverse; its biggest neighbor, Argentina, seems to incite an ongoing inferiority complex of cosmopolitanism. And to enter the realm of Chile's most famous cultural world of the 20th century (authors/poets Mistral, Neruda, Donoso, Allende, Bolaño himself), it seems like a stint abroad was necessary for fame or, in Mistral's case, a byproduct of her success. The protagonist in Nocturno de Chile writes essays about the Chilean authors of his time but describes it as "embryonic" cultural scene, while he and his circle of literary friends focus more on European references. Perhaps the literature was just (is still?) young, and the world of Chilean writers too small and separated to do anything but look elsewhere in the world for context.
I felt embryonic too: exiting the ferry boat and entering the fjord was a sort of primordial fever dream. It was barely dawn, and the low, metallic sky was squeezing out something between rain and fog. In any direction we could feel the looming presence of the mountains and volcanoes, but their contours were shades of black too obscure to differentiate. The hollowness of cold and poor sleep blended with the vacuous nature of awe and we piled our bags into a boat. We had been greeted by a frank, chipper man named Alex whose garb suggested he was prepared for this dampness every day, and he quickly piloted our boat across the fjord to a lodge where we would spend the next few days. More sunlight made its way diffusely through the cloud layer as we moved along the surface of the water, and suddenly it felt like we had crossed the ethereal threshold between night and daybreak. A tractor waded into the waves to help bring us to shore dry, and we stumbled, weary but now awake, into the bright, clean, and dry wooden lodge. Regardless of any descriptions I've read about Chile's backwoods, few things speak stronger to a sense of civilization than food and hospitality at the end of the earth.
A fjord is a type of estuary (where a river meets the sea), and we were there to study a phenomenon that mostly occurs in estuaries: internal waves. Just as "surface waves" (like what surfers ride) are at an interface of two fluids of different density—water and air—there can be be "internal waves" at the interface of two different masses of water. The waters in fjords often exhibit strong stratification, with less-dense freshwater from local rivers floating atop a more-dense layer of saltwater. Where these two different layers meet, waves can occur. My colleagues had investigated this system as the internal waves were visible from aerial imagery (they show up as broad bands of smooth and choppy water, as the internal waves heave water to the surface and smooth out the texture).
The bodily reality of environmental fluids field work (wet, labor-intensive, geographical in nature) has attracted me as someone with a strong predisposition to living in my head. My role on the trip was mostly support, however (tie some knots, look at some data, help guide some decisions) so I had time to think and stare off into space. Nocturno de Chile was sticking with me, reminding me of my humanities side. Simultaneously, it plainly probes the role of the intelligentsia in the world: it is an ouroboric critique of the insular literati in Chile as well as the value the church, with the protagonist's ostensible profession (priesthood) yielding little benefit for anyone and his greatest achievement (teaching Marxism to Pinochet) a dead-end that nobody notices. Bolaño's belief systems (leftist revolutionary and atheist) and feelings towards his motherland (distaste) are on plain view, the protagonist a metaphor for Chile itself.
While in the fjord, I was in a beautiful place, eating fresh seafood and bread every day, enjoying jokes about technical questions with friends. I'm having a better time in Chile than Bolaño did, perhaps, the product of being a privileged visitor and 22 more years of change. (The book is from 2000.) I couldn't help but think about the role of the critic, and the uphill battle to argue for the value of criticism against a sea of problems at lower rungs on Maslow's pyramid. I'd love your suggestions and conversation on the topic. But I see a void of writing (criticism?) around environmental relations that genuinely builds new language, standards, and narratives for the 21st century. To me, lots seems too quippish, sappy, or built upon an outdated assumption of human-nature dualism that is tough to shake.
One of the great joys of the flavor of environmental science I do is the assembly of the analysis. My team has baked-in expectations of the behavior of the system into how our sensors work, how our models run, and what we expect to see with our own eyes. This constrains us, applying blinders to what we can sense in the environment, but also allows us to participate in our understanding of the world. We get the gratification of either being correct or being surprised, both of which are interwoven with our self-awareness of our own knowledge. (That's a lie—there is often frustration when something goes awry, but of course it usually offers a lesson, too.) Chile has a great opportunity to be a leader in this kind of science, given its strong universities and pride for its incredible geography: this it should own without self-consciousness.
Early in Nocturno de Chile there is a metaphor about an estuary and the literary community of the protagonist's host and friend:
It occurred to me that my host was, without a doubt, the estuary in which all of our land's literary craft, from dinghies to freighters, from odoriferous fishing boats to extravagant battleships, had, for brief of extensive periods, taken shelter. [...] But in fact, I reflected, [his] house was a port.
An estuary is, virtually by definition, a place where all of the runoff of the land accumulates. And, in Bolaño's metaphor (and often in reality), it is also a port. A place of collection, a place of accumulation, but also a place of voyage and exchange and possibility. For all Bolaño's bitterness, I think an estuary like this is worthwhile. I hope you're finding your estuary. This trip, and the book, gave me reminder of mine.
By night, in Chile,
Lukas