Blog 3-Second visit to La Fabrica

To write the thing I want to notice or the thing I don't want to forget...I reread that last sentence in my last entry. Actually, that had always been my writing struggle. Maybe my life struggle...to be in the present or to have most of my mind dog bone chewing on my past. It was early in the morning and I was the first to arrive at the Fabrica, set up my laptop, and begin to write. I breathed deeply, held by the lovely morning light. Even though I was alone, I wasn't alone. What Anacaona said was maybe true. To experience writing as an isolated act was a delusion. I saw it was another distortion sprung from the false capitalist narrative that we are alone, always alone....I'd been afraid I wouldn't find the tile Anacaona gave me on the Fabrica's website TODOS, a little icon she made from a photo she took of me with her phone, my face framed by my short brown hair, embedded amid thousands of icons, tiles of faces, all of us, Todos in Palenque. But I'd found me, clicked on my tile, opened my own child webpage, dove into the story of my story.
I looked up from my laptop and gazed through the seapines and the coconuts that surround La Fabrica. A tiny carablanca monkey perched on a firm frond and poked his pinkie nail into the soft eye of a small coconut. I watched the young monkey tilt his head back, pour the coconut water down his throat, slam the hollow coconut to the ground inches away from me, and swing off. All the while he'd been looking into my eyes.
Every week the Todos page grew, exponentially sprouting child pages. I'd bookmarked mine and a few others, here in Anacaona's favorite project, La Fabrica de Escritores, where she got us to write our stories. She had a crew, mostly young women, who went out, photographed all of us with their phones and collected us. “Our censo,” she said. “Todos have a tile but some of us show up and occupy it.” For the first time since I stopped working as a reporter for Verdad twelve years ago I felt I had something that needed doing with my writing.
This morning I'd come to La Fabrica with my backpack. Just before we left the City for Palenque I'd stuffed it with as many notebooks, appointment books, photos, as I'd been able to fit in this one bag, even some of Machi's childhood art; things I'd grabbed almost at random, as we packed in a hurry. I also had the smaller woven sack with my flashdrives, and I had my laptop, full of files of my writings, videos and photos. I scanned my phone full of images, text messages and emails. Before we left I made a half-formed plan to write some kind of personal ethnography of my wage enslavement life, maybe more a reckoning of my liberator life, and that must include my writing life. I imagined I'd do all this writing in the moments between efforts to find Ori. Was this random collection of artifacts my life? I was discouraged, ready to stop before I started. Did I really want to spend my days looking at my past? I longed to go off and wander the narrow paths among the makeshift shelters of Palenque.
What was it that Elba Luz read, 'How can I be discouraged about something that hasn't happened yet?' All my discouragements must belong to my chewed up dog-bone past. I'd been on Cayo Karaya now close to three weeks. All of my whole life led me here, led us Todos here, and yet I could barely make sense of my life before Palenque. What happened? I barely knew and yet my life was nearly used up, gone. Despite this assortment of artifacts in my sack I felt my life was unhappening, storyless.
Since I got here to the encampment I now knew they called Palenque, until Anacaona brought me to La Fabrica, I'd been writing on a dune on playa Caracol, close to where my son Machi built our lean-to three minutes away from the beach; and yesterday I'd written at Migajas, the fonda in Coral where Anacaona found me. I'd been writing in the dark for a lifetime, until Anacaona at last led me to this place, this Fabrica. She said, “We created the Todos page so that by writing our stories of how we found our way to Palenque we'll discover how we have finally Todos figured out our ways out of pseudoreality to revolution. No matter what we thought our life was about, or whether we did this awake or in our sleep, our life was really never about anything else but this, how do we make a world that's good for all of us, Todos, out of this world that's good for a few? Whatever we were doing, we were either making or unmaking the revolution. We want to record what we know, so that if we get lost in pseudoreality again, we'll have the map to what's real.” When I looked up my carablanca friend was screeching from a high branch over my head. Another, smaller, carablanca had joined him. Both of them looked down at me just as I looked up. They held my gaze and raised their lips into teeth bearing grins.