Letters from the Desert

The Desert of Memory

Six days ago, while I was in Iquique, the philosopher Helen de Cruz died in the United States, from a long illness which her friends and Facebook friends were familiar with as a result of her Facebook posts. I knew Helen only as a Facebook friend. We came into contact in the immediate post-Brexit period, through the One Day Without Us campaign. Helen was one of many Europeans who had their hearts broken as a result of Brexit, and left the UK to take up a new post as chair of philosophy at Saint Louis University.

We followed each other, and sometimes commented on each other’s posts. In addition to her work as a philosopher, she was a talented artist, a writer of short stories, speculative fiction and novels, and a student of the lute. Knowing that I liked John Dowland, she would sometimes tag me in posts showing her playing some of Dowland’s pieces. I understood that she was a special person. I remember when her book Wonderstruck came out - I don’t remember the exact words - that she expressed her desire to write a book about the importance of wonder in life, in order to combat the evil that was coursing through the world at the moment.

An admirable desire, and Helen clearly had so much more that she wanted to accomplish. When she began to discuss her illness on Facebook, I was impressed by the honesty, lucidity and that she brought to her predicament. She railed against the unfairness of it - dying in her late forties when she still had so many things she wanted to do, people and things she wanted to see, and books she wanted to write. I sometimes wondered, reading her terrifying accounts of grappling with the US health system (doctors on the phone haggling with insurance companies over painkilling drugs etc), whether she was an indirect victim of Brexit.

I can only speculate about that. What I do know, is that at a time when so many people who bring evil into the world live far longer than the world needs them to, is that the world lost someone very special when it lost Helen. But this is the thing about death - it doesn’t have any moral criteria. People will die young and they will die old, and more often than not, except in the case of a preventable tragedy, there is no sense to it, and no reason for it.

The Chinchorro people knew this, 7,000 years ago, when they first began to preserve even the youngest members of their society, who had been inexplicably taken from them. I had just left Arica, when I read of Helen’s death in a family post, which poignantly expressed her overriding wish: to be remembered. I’m sure she will be, by those who knew and loved her, and also by the people who came into contact with her through her work, and through her posts on Facebook - a medium that she hated but still used.

But for most people, the brutal but inescapable fact of life is this: that when you die very little of what you saw, felt and heard during your brief time on earth will be remembered for long. Like my great grandparents, and the wider constellations of aunts and uncles connected to my parents’ families, most of us will have vanished or faded so far into the past that no one will remember our names. This knowledge can be a hard thing to bear, and human beings - regardless of the cognitive powers of elephants - are the only ones who have to bear it.

Why is it so hard? Because it’s lonely to think that we are born and then we die, and that’s it. Some of us find solace in religion - not my case I’m afraid. Others seek power on earth in order to create their ‘legacies’ - no matter how detestable. And many of us just hope our children and our grandchildren will carry some visible trace of who we were.

This question of memory was one of the reasons why I came to the Atacama, and also why I was intrigued by Chinchorro culture. Because even before I saw them, those mummies, buried on beaches thousands of years ago by a people with no literary culture, seemed to me to be a particularly poignant and moving expression of that elemental universal human desire: to leave something of ourselves behind, and let the world know that at one point in time, we were actually here, and that the people we have lost were actually here.

At the same time, these aspirations are often at odds with the limitations of individual and societal memory. During the flight to Santiago I read Jorge Luis Borges’s marvellous story ‘Funes the Memorious.’ In it, the narrator tells the story of an Uruguayan acquaintance named Ireneo Funes who has the ability of total recall. Unlike the narrator, Funes can remember everything he has ever seen, thought, felt or read. This mysterious ability is the result of a horse-riding accident, which paralyses him:

He told me that before that rainy afternoon when the blue-grey horse threw him, he had been what all humans are: blind, deaf, addle-brained, absent-minded…For nineteen years he had lived as one in a dream: he looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything. When he fell, he became unconscious; when he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories.

Lying on his bed, Funes remembers everything, over and over again:

These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: ‘ I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world.’

Borges often delivered variants on this theme: novels that don’t end; maps that become so detailed they become as large as they territory they describe. But Funes also captures something that is also essential to the human predicament: that we are only ever partly-conscious of the world we inhabit, and our memories must inevitably boil down human experience to a few remembered details; scratches on the surface of time; flowers by the roadside; photographs that preserve special moments the way we want to remember them; books; statues; memorials; gravestones.

All of this goes on in every society, and it also goes on in the Atacama desert. And perhaps because so many complex and surprising human histories have been played out in an environment that is still largely empty, barren, and seemingly indifferent to humanity, humans have often gone to surprising lengths to leave behind some reminders of their presence here.

These messages might consist of prehispanic Indigenous geoglyphs carved on mountainsides like the ‘giant of Tarapacá’, where even non-Indigenous Chileans come from as far away as Iquique to mark the summer solstice and seek blessings and good luck:

Almost every road in the Atacama is dotted with the shrines or animitas, with which Chileans, even more than most Latin Americans, honour and remember their dead. These shrines are often extremely elaborate. They can be large cabin-like structures built from brick or wood, with the names of the departed, paintings or photographs, and decorated with dried flowers, the Chilean flag and other mementoes. Others are little miniatures; the poorest and most humble might consist of a few stones and pieces of wood. Sometimes, these dried flowers are the only splash of bright colour amongst the beige and grey.

Animitas often commemorate an accident or premature death. Some are illustrated with montages of motorbikes or cars. Others consist of modern geoglyphs showing human figures made with stones, with the names also written in stones. One structure I passed yesterday, simply read ‘Yeye le recordamos (Yeye we remember you’ laid out in white stones on a hillside. There were no white stones on the hillside, so whoever brought them there must have gone to some considerable effort to create this monument.

Why do people do this? Why proclaim the name of someone who will always be a stranger to those who see it, few of whom will ever stop to find out anything more? Perhaps for the reason that Helen de Cruz wrote her books, and for the same reason that the Chinchorro adorned their mummies, because this is one more way of remembering the departed, and ensuring that other people remember them too.

Animitas have a long history. Some of them have been left by miners and nitrate workers from the last century, and have no names at all. But someone felt the need to leave a monument in the desert to commemorate a person they had known and cared about. Perhaps they saw the desert as a blank canvas on which messages like this could be written. Perhaps they knew or sensed that such monuments are likely to last a lot longer in the desert than they are anywhere else, and insisted on proclaiming even the faintest physical memory of the person they had known, regardless of whether the world cared or not.

Whatever the reason, these shrines take their place amongst the cemeteries of nitrate owners and nitrate workers; of Indigenous peoples, miners, soldiers and Chinese slaves who once worked on guano production in the nineteenth century. And there is also another kind of remembrance that has also become part of the iconography of the Atacama in recent years: the commemoration of political prisoners and political dissidents whose remains were hidden and buried in the desert and were never meant to be discovered.

That will be the subject of other posts. But in reminding us of this human desire to remember and be remembered, the shrines of the Atacama, like the Chinchorro mummies, should not depress us. To be depressed by death is as pointless as being depressed by life. To think of death as morbid, is to think of life as morbid.

And as I drive though these lonely desert roads, I will continue to see these shrines as poignant affirmations of the same desire that Helen de Cruz expressed, and also as reminders that even in the world’s driest desert, there have been humans here, who have left these little marks of love and tenderness for passing travellers to take note of, for a few fleeting seconds.