At the library armed Minerva with helm and shield and spear strides forward barefoot, in a robe and exposing a green knee. There is something very angular about this Minerva, a rectilinear austerity of determination (genitive of source). Her statue stands near the entrance and is poised heading resolutely away from that repository of learning.
From my H13 I looked into an H74 and saw a smooth shoulder, a round chin under rose lips, and billows of black hair. The girl leaning near the door, facing north and heading south was no angular Minerva. Minerva’s hair I’ve never noticed, but the hair of most Colombian girls is glorious every morning, with an unartificial, disheveled charm to its abundant quantity. I noticed too on the top of an insurance building the vegetation rampant in the sun, like shining hair.
I tried to exit the H13 at the Third Millennium Park, but the glass doors permitting people to enter the station from the bus were unresponsive. The bus peeped and hissed and was ineffectively indignant. I think it is a failure in the device onboard the bus because this never happens without there being an antecedental series of refusals on the part of the doors in previous stations along the way. I walked along the narrow ledge and leapt onto the pavement, thus exiting without being numbered at the turnstile that delimits the space for which one pays and the free world. What was odd was that I should lead the way and not the Colombian still engaged in knocking on the glass door.
The morning sun had long reached over the great cliffs that overlook the center of town. There the jungle hung poised and upon us came the shafts of the sun. The vegetation on those rocks seen from a distance has a look of tenacity and siege, as if it were there for war and hangs waiting to move forward. The few buildings on those cliffs stand triumphant.
From the Third Millennium Park you walk up the slope toward the old San Victorino neighborhood where the mobile vulgus of the Revolution resided. On Saturday morning Bogota’s medieval crowds are gathering, the ambulating coffee sellers go in their white coveralls carrying gallons of coffee on back-pack rigged metal cylinders, cell-phone minute sellers are standing with four or five phones chained to their belts—I saw the chain leading away from one, under the long sleeve of a nun’s black habit and up to where she was holding the phone to her ear, the carts are positioned, the plastic spread on the sidewalk, the iron blinds thrown up and merchandising in progress. Calls of breakfast are heard and the halt, the lame, the maimed and deformed, the blind and every kind of panhandler claims a corner by the passing throng from which an intermittent rain of coins begins.
At the military museum a military unit entered a sub-compact Chevrolet. As the guards moved the barrier and let him onto the unrestricted road, they all exchanged glaces without saluting. Guns passing in a darkness of recognition and ritual, and the ghost of Matthew Arnold.
After this it was I went to the library, and on the way I saw a dead pigeon huddled against a bollard. The pigeons are prodigious here, and they must die prodigiously. I’ve seen one dreaming in the water of a fountain, and this second one was by the road, waiting to be swept by one of those whose lot is the endless sweeping of the unending litter of Bogota. It raised the question—this my second dead pigeon—of where the pigeons go to die. It is like the enigma of the chicken bones: so many chicken bones there must be in a city whose digestion can be said to be maintained by the continual passage of the meat, the grease and cartilage of this roasted, boiled, stewed, grilled, griddled fowl. But the bones? Where do they all collect and amass? And the pigeons dying on rooftops, in inaccessible corners, in the tops of palm trees, the bottoms of fountains or deep inside the mysteries of evergreens, who takes them up and gives them burial?
Far away to the south, among the mountains that even the poor have not yet covered they must all be buried, the pigeons and the chicken bones and feathers, decomposing under the clouds now gathering over the city to protect us from the sun. In a damp room I tell my students that a present perfect in English is formed by the auxiliary Have in the present tense and the past participle, and we learn how it is used to talk about life experiences, how the past simple comes into play when we want to get more specific.
Everything is reducible to simplicities, except for some irreducible complexities, you know. I have learned from this class and another student at the same level, that there are people with no love of learning for the sake of learning. For these it is that educational romanticism invents the theory all the world will one day laugh at about multiple intelligences: ways to distract them from the boredom of the interesting while they are not watching a TV in which they do not believe though they watch at least 3 hours every single day. I teach them simplicities and hope they will one day wonder at the irreducible complexities and learn not to worry them, though I’m more worried they’ll never learn to see them.
And Minerva? Curiously, it is to the south that paralyzed Minerva appears to be headed. Minerva must be fed up, and she wants to sit among the decomposing pigeons and the fantastic mounds of chicken bones, or to poke around and find in all that abundance and complexity that by the worms and maggots is being reduced to simple soil some better, new austerity.
* * *
On the dangers of literacy.
Unknowing 