When I was 21, I stood on what other people once thought about the end of the world. It is a post called Fisterra in the region of Galicia in Spain. The so-called Fisterra comes from the Latin ‘Finnis Terrae’, which means ‘Land’s End’. It is a popular place of pilgrimage.
You can reach The Cape of Fisterra after climbing a constant slope. As I went along, the sun warms on my back and the pilgrims around me, also about to finish their Way, wallow in a mess of excitement and worn shoes. At the top, I sat on a huge black rock and looked at the infinite sea.
When I tried to get to the precise point where the sea stopped and the sky started, I couldn’t locate it. I wondered, what’s a “end” look like?
There is a very glorious booklet, entitled “Taiga Syndrome” through Cristina Rivera Garza, translated through Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana.
The narrator travels to Taiga, a border of the city near the tundra, to instantly locate the wife of a boy who fled with a dancer.
Before the narrator leaves, she has a verbal exchange with the man. He tells the narrator: “Some taiga population begins to suffer terrible anxiety attacks and makes suicidal attempts to escape Array… Impossible to do when you’re surrounded by the same terrain for five thousand kilometers.”
The narrator assimilates the Taiga, and the boreal forest that is very close to it, at the end of the world: “I, the symbol of the abyss. Above all, the words “end of the world” “connected”.
The moment the wife periodically sends her husband telegrams of her affair and says, “NEVER IF I PROCHE.”
In Fisterra, when I looked towards the horizon to locate the viewpoint where the sea was with the sky, I looked for a point to position myself. I even felt disoriented.
The end of the world, the end of the pandemic, the end of racism, an end is a liminal area: an area between things, an area close to anything else, a moving area. The remote never gets close.
When I looked into the ocean, my ideas, my identity, my bones, my breathing didn’t stop, it didn’t stop.
Last Friday, I went for a walk in Notch Mountain. I walked fast, basically with my head forward, until I crossed the tree line. When I started with the laces, I slowed down to look at the valley at every turn, at each small end.
When I got to the senses, I ate my sandwich and wandered around for a while. First to the shelter, then to the left, above the ridge, then to the most sensitive of a hill of rocks to be in the crosshairs with Santa Cruz.
Looking at the shelter, I remembered that this post was a pilgrimage post.
At the end of “Taiga Syndrome,” there’s a very moving paragraph that I like to revive and unpack: “Placing someone is also a non-secular exercise. Look at this: your knees. They are used to kneel over reality, also to crawl, terrified. You use them to over a lotus flower and say goodbye to immensity,” the narrator says.
He had returned from his pilgrimage somehow, changed.
In Notch Mountain, in the taiga, in front of the Cape of Fisterra, how do I locate myself? In any goal, how am I going to be where my feet are anchored if everything is a dark ocean, or a thick boreal forest, or unlimited thorns of ridges and snow embedded across the edge of a cross? How can I escape if I am surrounded by this dark and impenetrable mass? And what’s an end anyway, if there’s a start after?
The concept of the end of the country induces an obsession with perception. Standing on the black rock of the Fisterra coast, I became obsessed with seeking to perceive myself in the context of Spanish culture, where my identity fits. When I stood at the most sensitive of Notch Mountain, I became obsessed with the concept of looking to wade through my position in this nebulous existing reality.
Sometimes, in Taiga, the narrator is absolutely helpless and disoriented. The barriers blur, she is suspended and fears fail, not locating the couple. These emotions so unknown to me right now. However, an ending, due to its immensity, allows new ideas, new cultures, new tactics of hunting each other, of infiltrating. Once you’re disoriented, there’s an unlimited area to open up to things you never imagined.
At the end of the world, you can in the lotus flower. A lotus: symbol of purity, enlightenment, but above all of rebirth and self-generation. Lotus flowers can grow in the dirtiest water, but what blooms on the surface is a flower.
Anna Suszynski is editor-in-chief of Vail Daily. She can be [email protected]. Follow her on Instagram on annasuszynski or on Twitter on anna_suszynski.
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