Thoughts of Quilmes

The picture that first greets you as you enter this blog comes from the Ruinas de Quilmes near Tucaman, Argentina. I visited this site in June 2014 during a month long trip to Argentina. The experience had a certainly spiritual tone that the visiting of any location of long lost civilizations normally is. The Quilmes lived in Inca-inspired city on the base of a mountain, with a view at all angles of other mountains and long, wide valley. This area, now full of towering cactus, was home for many hundred of years of a unique people, with intricate cultures, ideas and lives, who held out the Spanish for 150 years until they were finally conquered and forces into their own Trail of Tears toward Buenos Aires. To stand in a place where thousand of children were born and learn to make sense of the world made me wonder how much one's environment shapes the mysteries and questions one has about the world. This place, so immensely beautiful, would have inspired a native inhabitant to indescribable awe. Like the Grand Canyon, I ask, what vision of the world does one have who is born here and lives most of his/her life in that one spot? How is that different from Michigan, or Italy or Algeria? A young man when we arrived gave us a brief introduction to the history of Quilmes. He said that the inhabitants spoke a language related to Incan, now long long lost. What knowledge did this language hold? What poetry did it have that could explain, expand, and lay out the beauty and terror of the world?