TIMEOUT!!!

It´s incredible the power an audience has over me. Writing on the island, I just wrote. Without stopping, I write about 2,000 words per hour by hand. That´s a rough estimate, of course, because the 700 peso (+/- $1.50) journal I write in doesn´t have that handy "word count" feature. When I sit down to type a blog entry, I can easily spend an hour appreciating my navel before I write the first word. There´s a lot of pressure on that first word, obviously. It has to be a good one. It used to be you had to hook the reader with the first sentence or the first paragraph, but I don´t think that today´s reader has that attention span. Especially blog readers. You could be watching a hilarious video on youtube right now instead of reading this sentence (I appreciate that you are reading this sentence). That´s pretty tough competition. So I fret over each and every word. Each one must be precise because you´ve got other ways to kill time, and they´re "bookmarked" or "hot-linked" (is that a term?) so something better is just one click away. On Isla Mocha, nothing is one click away.

On the ten hour bus ride from Santiago south to Tirúa, the small screen which scrolls messages in red lights displayed but one message for the duration of the trip: TIMEOUT!!! Just like that. All caps with three exclamation points. TIMEOUT!!! At first, I didn´t think too much of it because it didn´t mean anything. In fact, I hardly noticed it because my brain is so well trained to scan the environment for useful/necessary information and filter out the nonsense. Each time I looked up I saw it. And then I saw it, TIMEOUT!!! And I was a little spooked. Wait a minute... why does that say timeout? Why timeout in English on a Chilean bus? Oh my god, I think... no, Michael, I know the idea you´re about to have and it´s crazy... but it´s just too weird. I think it´s a special message for me. The bus is talking to me. The bus is talking to me, and I´m listening. I´m having a conversation with the bus. And the bus was right. I needed a timeout - an escape from the television, the internet, the noise of the city, the air of the city, the city, and from the audience of other human beings. Because anytime I interact with human beings it has an "audience effect" on me; I choose my words, my gestures, my very personality based on what will work best (read: make you like me the most). I spent the vast majority of the seven days on the island in silence - not silence in the sense of making no noise with my mouth (though I spoke very little) but silence as the opposite of living my life as a performance. According to Merton, it is not speaking that breaks silence but the desire to be heard. I love that sentence - so simple and so true - because verbal "silence" can be just as loud as shouting, can´t it? Think of the energy of passive aggressive silence, pouting silence, vengeful silence, "please pay attention to me!" silence.

Without an audience, I wrote three hours a day for a total of twenty hours over the course of the retreat. The 40,000ish words were about half what I expected to write. On the first afternoon, as I waited in Tirúa for the plane to Isla Mocha, my first of three pens ran out of ink. I realized with panic that I had vastly underestimated my ink needs. With only one new pen and one half-used pen remaining, I searched the town for a pen. I found nothing but Bics, and I don´t write with Bics. That might sound haughty and elitist for an unemployed blog writer, a quirky idiosyncrasy that would be cute if I were a Nobel prize-winning author perhaps. It´s exactly the kind of detail that would be perfect for the tour of the writer´s home. And this was Michael´s closet. Unusual, obviously, to have a closet so far from the bedroom, but according to legend, he never wore clothes in the bedroom so the closet had to be in another room so he could undress himself before entering his sleeping space. Ah, and there on the desk you see the pen. He only wrote with liquid gold, which is why you see the glove there; the pen was very hot. It has nothing to do with the price nor the appearance of the pen. I simply can´t write fast enough with a traditional ballpoint pen. I need liquid gel ink - so fast, so smooth. I need to write quickly to outpace my mind. If my mind can keep up with my writing, it will try to make it perfect, and - in so doing - accidentally kill it. My mind wants to fix my writing, make it neat and presentable, more likeable, like a kid on school picture day. Gotta dress it up, come its hair, remind it to smile. My favorite school picture of all time is from second or third grade. I had clearly just had my hair cut in preparation for the big day, and the barber left my bangs as straight as a ski slope. That´s what my mind does to my writing - trims it with all the best intentions and a bad eye for quality.

And what a gift the shortage of ink was. Writing only three hours a day freed me to explore the island. There will be other weeks to write in my life, but there may not be other weeks on Isla Mocha. So I took advantage of the miles of beautiful beaches and the white sand road that encircles the island. I danced with the waves and walked barefoot on the endless road. I took my time preparing my food and eating it. I noticed my senses. I even tried to do absolutely nothing once or twice. That was the hardest. My mind really hates doing nothing, especially on vacation. That´s why I turned Tirúa upside down looking for more pens. If I ran out of ink, I´d be stuck on an island with nothing "productive" to do. I might start to ask myself scary questions like Why am I here? Am I doing enough? Why do I get to eat, sleep and do nothing? Because I´m on vacation. I´m not talking about Isla Mocha, this week. I´m talking about your life. Oh, crap. See. Too bad you couldn´t find any more pens. Both of the times I did nothing it made me cry. The first time out of loneliness and the second time because I thought of sand castles. I remembered making sand castles with my brother and my cousins, Thomas and Elizabeth. It was a rite of summer. We´d march down to the shore with our plastic shopping bag full of the best equipment. And when it was time to make the Sand Castle, we didn´t frolic or skip or giggle as we approached the beach. We arrived with the severity of a construction team on a tight schedule. The tide is coming in, and we´re going to stop it this time. We´ll do it right this year. And so we tried every year to build not just a castle, but a dam, a structure that would stop the tide, divert the waves, do whatever it took to survive. And it never did. The tide is controlled by the gravity of the moon. We were trying to stop the weight of the moon with piles of sand. So I sat at my picnic table on Isla Mocha and cried because that´s ridiculous, and because I love my family, and because I used to be a kid who didn´t know anything about the gravitational force exerted by the moon.

Well, my mind quickly put a stop to all that sentimental nonsense because it had a brilliant idea. Let´s make a sandcastle! Here! Now! My mind processed my emotion and sold it back to me as an idea, a plan, a project, something to do. I stood and went to the trash where I found an empty two liter Coke bottle, which would make the perfect mold for turrets or towers on the castle. I washed the bottle and cut the bottom part off with my pocket knife. Making something out of trash with a pocket knife, I felt - for the first time in my life - almost handy. The circular edge of the mold was sharp, far too dangerous for children, but fine for a grown-up sandcastle builder. Feeling giddy, I almost did skip to the beach this time - only to discover a brutal wind. If I set my mold down, it required a weight to prevent it from blowing away. Waves are supposed to destroy sandcastles, not wind. Furthermore, building a sandcastle should feel futile perhaps, but not miserable. I gave up. I tried again the next day, but, with only thirty minutes until the departure of my return flight, time ran out. It didn´t feel like failure; it felt poetic because it made me think that not building a sandcastle is really the same as building one. I guess that´s the kind of thought you have when you start having conversations with buses...

I have SO much more material to share from my week on Isla Mocha, but time is short; I leave for Peru on Friday. I think that the photos I took will tell many of the stories for me, and certainly give you a better picture of the island than words could. You can see them here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elgringoandante/
I will probably write another entry tomorrow before departing because I don´t know when my next opportunity for an update will come.