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Decembris São Paulo-Santos reached a million only in 1930, but on its streets, without ever traveling on open highways, you can drive 170 kilometers over an east-west axis through its present agglomeration of almost twenty million Like South America's other gargantuan urban zone, the Rio Plata megalopolis reaching out northwest-west-southwest from Buenos Aires Like all the auto-strung cities of the world Even Atlanta, LA, DC, Seattle and Bay Area traffic is fluid by the Asian-South American measure After sleeping, eating, telebishion, shopping and sex, probably the most universal contemporary experience is sitting in a car, bus, van, jitney, hogwagon or truck blocked by traffic Our slab—the asphalt, concrete footings and buttressed walls—seals the soil below the sprawling urban world But the organic earth, blanched, is waiting there below, waiting under everything Importantly, a raga is invoked by the ascending and descending sequences of the notes, their hierarchy of importance, and by associations with a time of the day or night, and particular sentiments and emotions to which the raga is attached A Karnataka song is preceded by Alapaba, without rhythm, an extremporaneous comment on the raga's features Then while a sarangi (bowed instrument) or violinist follows the vocalist's improvisations of the raga, the tabla provides the tala or time measure, as a tamboura lays down the basic shruti or pitch Flexibility of pitch for the ragas and their microtonal ornaments, rhythmic complexity, and a constant drone that carries across the piece like a silver arc connection to another time True in both raga traditions, Karnataka and Hindustani Lunar silver light arc Sumptuous and abundant dream travel Goofy gringo awe akimbo agape at such ancient things, the far-reaching past as real as the givens of gravity, of hot and cold, of time itself Once visited a village up the sierra from Morón de la Frontera to deliver some pesetas after a horse trade in Fuengirola down on the coast The men came out to talk On the cante jondo plateau, of soleares, bulerías, siguiriyas There that afternoon could well have seen Diego del Gastor, perhaps the greatest of all Andalusian Roma guitarists But didn't know about him then, not even his name All the missed awareness The bare dull boring blank disinterest of ignorance A soleá falseta Gypsies standing there in the high tableland Sierra Morena afternoon, the men under Cordoban hats or berets, wool scarves worn rakishly and high in the cold wind The women immensely attractive, their frank stares and emphatic Roma flair Standing in the doorways Denizens of the deep Iberian past, to Andalusia from the Sind via Islam and North Africa, they abide beside but apart from whomever lives nearby Singing guitar-slamming ragas through the centuries all the way Dark visages, beseeching wails Cadmium carmine, currant, minium, orient red, red current, English red, vermilion, English vermilion, all of that strong red called Goya Spain's grand universality reaching back Through its empire of the greedy, pious soul Góngora's Seven Courtly Sins. Ambition, envy, rumor, ceremony, adulation, scorn, favoritism Now instead of courtly power, across the urban world it's office and tech-rep people in corporate locales who superintend buttinsky silliness Chronic bureaucratic sullenness, shameless ignorance, in-your-face stupidity, sarcastic sloth, computerized anonymity, backbiting cupidity, general nastiness Disinterested boredom Desktop icons like those fatuous braided and gilt Serbian general-officer fatigue hats Stubby macho-porky middle-aged killers of the Balkan Nineties wearing high, pompously braided hats shaped like fast-food server paper caps In the long bristly line of toughs, Roman cohorts, Spartans, Assyrians, samurai, Israeli citizen soldiers, US Special Forces, Rumsfeld's Copper Green SAP, French Foreign Legionnaires Every burrhead military type Exhilaration forced into military grotesque, goose-stepping patently derived from euphoric struts The same transmogrification of emotions that generated Brahms and the Third Reich in nearly the same historical breath Like Argentina's perverted strident national scapegoating, self-pitying rhetoric, mustering whatever it takes to preserve its illusion of suffering outrageous fortune Every country with deep and complex self-justifying myths Like Serbia in the 1990s, stunned at what it did, trying to blame it on somebody else, anybody else, everybody else If "Potata," Perón's first wife, had not died of cancer, he might have spent his career commanding the alpine garrison at Mendoza where he was sent in 1941, when he came home from attaché duty with the Italian alpénisti divisions If he had stayed in Mendoza he could have spent his promotion years neutralized and writing about his hero, San Martín, living out the scenes of San Martín's Andes march With no Perón, maybe no Pinochet, perhaps no late-century South American fascism at all It was so very different at the end of Spanish and Portuguese rule in South America When San Martín met Bolívar in Guayaquil in July, 1822, he failed to induce him to support a monarchical solution for governing Peru, then left for Lima and disappeared into impoverished European exile "Here where I am, there are too many stars. // There are to many men. The innumerable // Generations of insects and birds, // Of the star-studded jaguar and the serpent, // Of branches that entwine and intertwine, // Of coffee and of foliage and of sand" Livid violet, a light grayish red that's bluer and very slightly lighter than ashes of rose That then bends toward tern white as if in with the wind off the winter ocean A manifest, a single Forster's tern in winter plumage sitting low on the swash looking out across the Atlantic towards Portugal, sea breeze ruffled tail, herring gulls stalk by it chest-bumping it but it holds its ground Sard is a clear or translucent deep orange-red to brownish red or cornelian This water and sand are very cold, the wind even colder A full moon is rising in the white cold Silver arcs lift off toward raga dreams +++++++++++++++ Sampling credits to Góngora's, Soledad Primera; Michael Perna; Octavio Paz.

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