For example, they’ll say things like “Siesta Key is considered one of the 5 most beautiful beaches in the US.”

This is something my mom has said often.

She doesn’t say “I love Siesta Key,” or anything else that reveals her emotions about the place, but just repeats “Siesta Key is considered one of the 5 most beautiful beaches in the world,” like an advertisement.

[I almost wrote, "She doesn't say 'I love Siesta Key,' or anything else that reveals her relationship with the place," but I feel like the way she says that actually does reveal her "relationship." As opposed to demonstrating an emotional dependence developed over time (my own simplified definition of a relationship) it shows that "how she feels" about the place is more a mental construct "frozen in time," created out of her motivation for moving there and her need for social reinforcement that moving there was a good choice.]

I often do the same thing.

When I lived in Seattle, oftentimes I told people more or less “Seattle is good because you have easy access to the mountains.”

Like the way my mom talks about Siesta Key, by focusing on “access to the mountains,” I was effectively obscuring my actual relationship to the place, reducing it to a single abstraction.

Here’s another example:

In one of Lola Akinmade’s recent posts, a woman said: “I’ve just been back from The Gambia. . .Desperately poor country. Desperate. . .But they’ve got 500 species of birds!”

All three of these cases show how people tend to think about things in the context of their value, or their perceived value, even if they are abstractions, such as the “beauty” of a beach or the “proximity” of a wilderness area, or in terms of their “resources” such “500 species of birds.”

I feel like all of this represents a kind of “commodified” thinking similar to the commodification described in Marxist economic theory: “economic value is assigned to something not previously considered in economic terms; for example, an idea, identity or gender. . . ”

I feel like commodified thinking leads to negative situations.

These negative situations are created out of the following cause / effect pattern:

1. Commodified thinker isolates whatever is being “valued” from its temporal, historical, and cultural, and environmental context.

2. The thinker then knowing or unknowingly overlooks or ignores potentially fundamental relationships between what is being “valued” or looked at as a resource and those things’ (a) existence vis-à-vis their “place” or “role” in the environment, (b) their evolution over time, and (c) their potential development / destruction in the future.

I feel like commodified thinking is a way of insulating yourself from certain realities.

It is also seems like a way of “framing” reality or shaping it for your own purpose / advantage.

Commodified thinking is a byproduct of (a) growing up in a society that has traditionally viewed the natural world in terms of resources or something to be “managed,” combined with (b) attempting to do what is in one’s self-interest as it applies to that society.

Commodified thinking has origins in Western thought, leading back to Reductionism, beginning in Ancient Greece.

The opposite of commodified thinking is thinking about something in terms of its relationships to everything else.

This is also known as Holism.

An example of holism: Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” [this example is from Wikipedia].

Usually I feel alienated however, by writing or journals associated with the word “holistic.”

I feel like there is a paradox in that only through describing what happens in one place to one person can you effectively “show” the relationships / truths that can be interpreted or “seen” everywhere.

This is how I define whether or not something has literary value, and it tends to be a “guiding principle” when deciding what to read, what to write, what to publish.

Which all takes me back to the beginning, and makes me wonder if that isn’t just another form of commodified thinking.

It was the only day of the week I wore my nice pants.

Much of your work is built around juxtapositions, a classic example being the story “C-130.” How did this style evolve?

My earliest story attempts were rip-offs of Amy Hempel. I’d take her stories and then rewrite them using different settings, different situations, but basically just copying the way her characters’ motivations / emotional states “saturated” every line. They were terrible.

“C-130” was an experiment in using this same concept, only exporting the subtext from characters’ interactions and dialogue to the associations a reader would create in his or her mind through various juxtapositions. It was a way of writing “cinematically.”

In Argentina we have all these Ford Falcons. They were the vehicles used by the militares during the disappearances. But it’s not like after the dictatorship ended these cars went away. They’re all over the country, sold from one person to the next. I was traveling through Patagonia–a little town called Esquel–and I saw a Ford Falcon driven by this old campesino. So I just started inventing the history of this car. Each little scene–the mechanics assembling it in Buenos Aires, the militar driving it home and then taking his wife for a ride, the officers putting blindfolded prisoners in the backseat, the vehicle being sold, then sold again in a different province, and then sold again to this campesino and him using it to drive up into the mountains each day–I “saw” all this suddenly and wrote it and it felt different than the Hempel style. I didn’t think about it this way at the time but the whole structure is really a way of leveraging dramatic irony. The reader always knows more than the characters.

“C-130” and pretty much all the stories in that collection use the same “template.” I grew up in Marietta, Georgia, which is the suburbs of Atlanta. There was a plant there–Lockheed Dobbins–that produced the C-130 airplanes used all over the world, including by Fuerza Aerea Argentina to throw desaparecidos into the Rio de la Plata. I saw a kid skateboarding one day in Marietta. He stopped for a second and watched as a C-130 flew really low–it was landing at Lockheed–and I just started seeing that story–the kid, the plane, the pilot, the same pilot but 20 years earlier delivering the plane to Argentina, the kid just being born, a young Argentine couple with their newborn.

A middle aged man rode up on a 4-wheeler.

He was looking for horses that had gotten loose.

“Do you ever see horses out here?” he asked.

“Yes, but I haven’t seen them out here in a week.”

The man nodded. He was standing up on the footpegs of his 4-wheeler and looking around.

“There’s a paisano that keeps his horses out here,” I said. “But I haven’t seen him in a week.”

The man said gracias and then rode off.

Afterward I thought about how I said these things in Spanish.

Hay un paisano que tiene caballos aqui.

I thought about the word paisano.

I thought about how I could say this word in Spanish and it had these different connotations that were somewhat but not exactly like “peasant” or “farmer,” and that there was nothing derogatory about these connotations, but instead they seemed to exist outside of positivity or negativity as if when you said paisano it was just like saying “a man” or “a tree.”

Un paisano.

I thought about how words in English seem “infected” by connotations and associations.

I think of certain things beyond just “white” and “man” when I hear or read or say “white man.”

I think of certain things beyond just “black and “man” when I hear or read or say “black man.”

Describing someone by his or her physical features is culturally accepted in Latin America. You can call someone “gordo” or “flaco” (which is how I’m often addressed by someone who doesn’t know me, “che, flaco” or “che, loco”) or “negro” or “moreno.”

None of this is insulting.

In Spanish you can totally say “hey, did you see a big fat black dude a couple minutes ago?”

You can “see you later fatty,” to your wife, in public, without it sounding negative.

As I went back to work on the land I kept thinking about how this is a more natural and freer way to think and talk.

And I kept thinking how there must be (or have been) even more natural and freer ways to think and talk that either exist or have existed someplace and in some point in time.

photo by laura bernhein

started digging postholes.
looked at position of sun.
took off shirt.
kept digging then rested

photo by laura bernhein

looked back at layla sitting on the blanket by the mid and felt and thought and visualized several things at once including this scene in mexico when lau and i had just met:

photo by laura bernhein

repeated loudly: ‘the mid has been deployed!’ until i heard layla shout: ‘middipoy!’

photo by laura bernhein

That doesn’t mean that we “like it better” necessarily.

There are things I like about here more than I like there.

There are things I like about there more than I like here.

When I say “we live in Patagonia” people form certain images in their minds.

Before we moved here, whenever I thought “damn, we’re moving to Patagonia,” I formed certain images in my mind.

The images I formed were mostly wrong.

I believe the images that people form are mostly wrong.

A couple days ago a TV producer described me as “being down in Patagonia in your bliss.”

I feel like this is wrong.

But I feel like this is so common.

People don’t want the truth, they just want the particular concept or brand you represent that they can “resonate with.”

I’ve written a lot about the Colque family that lives next door.

Layla and I were just walking around with two of the little girls, Fatima and Abril, and one of the little boys, Anton.

We were out by the road picking apples. On the other side of the fence, the older Colque kids were playing soccer with a half-deflated basketball. One of them dribbled it around the side of the house and then another one was screaming “Faggot, faggot” (Maricon).

Over the last couple of days someone has dumped a bunch of trash on the sandpile where the kids play. Today I pulled out a board with this gnarly nail stuck through it. I showed it to them, more as a way of saying ‘watch out’ than ‘throwing trash is wrong.’

The truth is that people throw trash on top of kids’ sandpiles here.

the truth is that the kids chase each other screaming “faggot!”

This is the truth about Patagonia.

There’s no “bliss.”

And that truth is stronger than any “message” I might try to give them about trash or their language.

Any “message” I might deliver is equivalent to that TV producer’s concept of this place being my “bliss.”

It may exist as a concept in my mind, but it has no truth at ground level.

And thus to try and “apply it” is a way of reducing or obscuring truth instead of recognizing it.

But I believe this–trying to apply concepts–is the way most people think.

And it is always the way thinking is “attributed to” more than one person, say a group or party or organization.

The packages and categories allow one (or many) to add or subtract things to truth and thus “use it for their own purpose.”

They use it to gain power over others.

They use it to lie to themselves as a way of justifying things.

They use it because “hey, it’s business, not personal.”

They use it because it’s “company policy.”

They use it because “this is how it’s done.”

They use it because it’s a “commandment.”

They use it because it’s “in the bylaws.”

They use it because it’s “marketable.”

They use it because it’s “hip.”

They use it because it’s “moral.”

They use it because they’re afraid.

There are things I can do though.

I can pick up the trash.

I can stay at ground level.

I can tell my story.