Patagonia!
An enchantress! enticing many, and once enfolded in her arms rarely
letting them go. Where is it exactly? South A. And yet it's landscape
reads like no country ever seen. And yet it's climate reads as 'all
weathers'. And yet the mind despite being told cannot grasp its
geographic position, wondering, somewhat confusedly, if it exists at
all. How did Bruce Chatwin get there? Those details are omitted; he
is there! Drawn there by a piece of skin with reddish hair. For six
months he'll rub along with the inhabitants, who represent different
tongues, different cultures and different religions, and which like
themselves they've established in Patagonia. O Patagonia! The place
for everyone! Adventurers, refugees, missionaries, outlaws etc. Can I
really
believe all that I'm reading? Is it really
possible Chatwin met all these people? Is Patagonia the enchantress
or Chatwin the caster of spells?
*
A
road that's hardly a road, then a track that isn't a track, yet
Chatwin would have it that all roads and hardly roads and all tracks
and tracks that aren't tracks lead to Old Pat. Perhaps he's right?
For his theories concerning the origins of Conan Doyle's Lost World,
Swift's Brobdignagians, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Shakespeare's
Caliban are compelling. Perhaps all artist-drifters drifted in mind
if not in body to Old Pat, led there by writings of actual voyages,
led there by events that happened to captains and sailors. Old Pat,
its actual or fictional reality, speaks to those who feel like
strangers anyplace: their roots unable to sink into any soil where
there's not solitude, birds and space.
*
Can
Patagonia ever be adequately explained to an unseeing brain? Its
history of peoples fantastic, full of characters you might find in a
Joseph Conrad or John Steinbeck novel. Peoples and events mirrored in
life or art; which blurred. The real, the stuff of movies or the
product of an inventive imagination; the artistic, a yarn twisted or
exaggerated by the teller and seeming more suggestive of fact. Each
though containing some substance of truth, buried deep or plain to
see.
*
A
collection of stories, of sea, of tent-dwelling; everything
remembered put down, for house-dwellers who never part from their
possessions to read. Disordered they might be, and perhaps repetitive
in their telling, but to those who abide in one place they tell of a
different life: a life lived, though it may seem, when pieced
together, too incredible to be true.
*
Large
stories proved by the existence of photos or a camera crew; by
spinsters – the adventurer's unmarried sisters – with sad skin
and thinning hair, or sad hair and thinning skin, and crushed
spirits; by intellectuals reading many books and, when not, gazing at
stars; by souvenirs – some physical object legally or illegally
obtained – of ridiculous journeys.
*
A
land of myths and contradictions, of eccentrics and exiles; its roads
scattered with the hopes and wrecks of life: mining towns, ranches,
Indians, bones and animal skins. Its beauty said to be
'metaphysical', its reputation dangerous and unpredictable. Down in
Patagonia!
Picture credit: The Drifter, Andrew Wyeth (source: WikiArt).
From
journal entries, written in the course of reading In
Patagonia by Bruce
Chatwin (Vintage Classics, 40th
anniversary edition), November 2021.
