During my first trip to Colombia, at the Plaza de Armas in Cartagena, I saw a man with a sloth clinging languidly to his torso. The high noon sun was motionless, a massive scorching ball of fire in the dense blue sky. Ripples of heat rose from the white-washed stone of the plaza, inducing an array of vaguely stimulating visual hallucinations. I made eye contact with the sloth and it looked at me as if to say: ‘Don’t scorn me because I’ve developed the capacity to chill the fuck out.’ I was holding something radically deep fried at the time, and fry oil was dripping down my palm.
The man with the sloth didn’t appear to want money, and this surprised me somewhat. He just wanted to reveal the sloth. To celebrate the almost divine laziness, the enlightened detachment of the animal.
An American tourist in a blood-red bandana and mean looking sunglasses turned to me and said: “It has half the metabolic rate of an ordinary mammal its size.”
I nodded and said, “Yeah, it eats leaves that even the most hardened herbivore wouldn’t dream of eating. Leaves that look like they belong to the plastic plants middle-aged women buy at Walmart. Thick and waxy leaves, by definition completely indigestible.”
He gestured toward the sloth and said, “Look at him, he’s drooling.”
The statement seemed like a personal assault on the sloth – and having imperceptibly projected my own conscious state onto the creature, I found myself offended. I shot back, “You can’t call it drool, man. The concept of drool belongs to the human world, not the sloth’s.”
He kept his eyes zeroed in on the sloth and in a detached, scientific tone he said, “Drool – the accumulation of saliva in the area around the lower lip. It’s happening. The tipping point is nigh, it’s about to run down his chin.”
I took a methodical bite of the deep fried conglomeration of potato and cheese I was cupping in my right hand. I leaned in and took a deeper look at the sloth. The pool of saliva gathered in the corner of its mouth was indeed approaching a tipping point. “Chin?”, I said ponderously. “I don’t see a chin.”
And then the tipping point, and the American said, “The sloth, he’s officially drooling now.”
“Are we looking at the same animal? I don’t see a chin.”
The American lowered his sunglasses, narrowed his bloodshot eyes on me and said, “It’s a dramatically receding chin, but a chin it remains. And the rivulet of saliva flowing from his mouth, obeying the law of gravity, that, amigo, is drool.”
“Sloths don’t drool. Human beings drool. Babies, in particular, drool. It’s a concept denoting a very human activity. You’re projecting – anthropomorphizing the action of sloth saliva because you don’t actually understand what’s happening here.”
He sighed, and closed his eyes meditatively, letting a wave of anger or frustration subside. “By the standard definition of the verb ‘to drool’ – a definition, by the way, you’ll find in any dictionary – that animal is drooling.”
“Right now, that animal should be hanging upside down, unconscious, from a tree branch. Instead, he’s blinking around in wonderment at a world that isn’t his. In the sloth’s world, there is no drool,” I said, neither believing nor disbelieving what I was saying.
***
Earlier that day, pasty-mouthed and drenched in sweat, my being seemingly stretched over an atemporal expanse of dream landscape, I had completely forgotten what country I was in. I felt like my own country, a two-dimensional exponentially expanding disc, colonizing the antipodes of consciousness, spreading outwards in all directions – softly, militantly. The disc occasionally rotated on its axis, or tilted into bleached, scowling nothingness. One disc would unexpectedly be pulled from the field and replaced by another – like an exchange of playing cards in a hand. These were inscrutable countries of the mind, with populations and square mileage and GDPs that eluded calculation. They lie outside the crush of capitalism in a full-blown alternate dimension sort of way. And it seemed to me as I grappled my way back into consciousness, blinking dumbly at the flaking plaster ceiling, trying to reconstruct the tenuous relationship between subject and surrounding objects, it seemed to me that the real reason we travel is to discover these countries of the mind.
Encountering the sloth, I decided I wanted to return to these two-dimensional dreamscapes that preclude bipedal movement or even the existence of individuals, projections or otherwise. To travel in the countries of the mind, I needed to slow my movements down, to blink at two frames per second – I needed to drool a protracted, profound drool.
***
I turned back to the American, his presence as inexplicable as the sloth’s. He wore a tight red t-shirt that read ‘The family that trucks together, stays together’, the inane phrase above a cartoon image of a family bursting from the cab of a transport truck. I said, “Their universe is a canopy that extends from here down to the southern limits of the Amazon. They move with exquisite precision, slowly and fluidly. They’re on the cusp of entering the Unified Field.”
The American nodded absently, his gaze still fixed on the sloth. He brought a cigarette to his lips, lit it and took a stylized drag, exhaling great plumes of smoke through his nostrils. He gestured towards the sloth and said, “Don’t get the wrong idea, man. Drool or no drool – I have nothing but respect for this animal. Do you see how it’s fur grows from the belly out, then down around the back – the complete opposite of any other terrestrial mammal I know of.”
“Good eye,” I said. “I think it has something to do with them spending most of their lives upside down.”
He pondered a moment. “It’s the effects of gravity over the course of evolutionary time.”
We were resolving our differences, coming to some kind of agreement over the nature of the sloth, and not this particular sloth, but the sloth in general. I took another bite of whatever fried thing I was holding, and made a conscientious effort to chew slowly, to chew like the sloth would chew.
A certain unspecified amount of time passed, obscured by the vaporous high UV radiation of the equatorial sun and the metamorphic buzzing of cicadas. The American was still there, waiting for my response, the conversation still hanging in the ether. “The sloth,” I said, “confounds gravity. It persistently refuses to obey the laws of physics. It spends its life upside down, in trees.”
“On an eco-tour in Costa Rica I saw the rotting corpse of a sloth still stubbornly clinging to its branch. Upside down. Defying gravity post-mortem.”
I took a moment to conjure a good mental image of this, the sloth skeleton hanging upside down in the tree. I said, “They leave the trees only to piss and shit. Did you know that?”
He took a deep drag of his cigarette, holding the smoke in, and exhaled through the nostrils. The smoke hung in the air, motionless, an amorphous fog drawing us in. He picked a fleck of tobacco from his teeth and flicked it aside, turned to me and said, “Yep. We were told that on the eco-tour. Once a week, they climb down, dig a hole, and shit into it. How do you forget something like that?”
“You don’t,” I said. “They cover up the hole, they climb back up, they eat, they sleep.”
A crowd had imperceptibly gathered. There was now a sheepish young woman standing directly beside the Colombian man and his sloth, having her photo taken. She smiled, the man smiled, the sloth chewed, staring through the crowd into the Unified Field. The woman pulled a greasy note from her pocket, but the man refused to accept it, he held his palm out, refusing, saying something in Spanish that approximated: ‘I am not here to prostitute the sloth, Eugenio.’ And the woman had the photo now – her and the sloth, in Plaza de Armas in Cartagena. A life defining moment, depending on your perspective.
The American observed all this with stoic curiosity, and I sensed that an idea attached to a need was developing in the dark recesses of his being.
An incalculable period of amorphous tropical time passed where we just stood and stared at the sloth as it brought a leaf to its mouth – it felt like ten minutes but I couldn’t be sure. I turned to the American and said, “The sloth’s name, apparently, is Eugene.”
He said, “I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but I think I need a photograph with the sloth. A memento I can stick on my fridge to remind me …”
“Remind you of what?”, I asked.
“Well, I was in the war, so …”
“The war?”
“The war formerly known as Desert Storm. The Persian Gulf War Part One. Numero uno. Prior to the currently unfolding sequel.”
“Oh, that war,” I replied.
“Sloths don’t storm deserts. They’re oblivious of the difference between tactics and strategy. They climb and hang rather than shock and awe.”
I took another bite of the fried ball, the thing I was eating tailored specifically to an omnivorous bipedal primate of the Colombian variety. Oil was now dripping off my palm and onto my left boot. I chewed, reflecting on these words, and swallowed. “Did you say once a week? They only shit once a week?”
“They move at a pace that precludes the possibility of war or invasion or friendly fire. Hell, they even eliminate their feces in a mindful, non-invasive manner.”
I couldn’t argue with that. After the drool debate spiraled down the semantic rabbit hole, I couldn’t be bothered arguing about anything. There was the raw context, that was it. And the sage-like presence of the sloth, here to be adored and photographed – no charge.
The American continued, “We had to fire on villages – enemy soldiers hiding out amidst women and children. These were externalities.” He paused and lit another cigarette with the glowing butt of the one he just burned down. “Sloths aren’t familiar with that concept either.”
I said, “Maybe if we only shat once a week, maybe then – we’d move slower, consume less energy. And bomb less villages.”
“Possibly, but metabolism is only part of it. Many of the great tyrants of history suffered from chronic constipation. It’s more of a perspective, a kind of inverted world view – looking down from the heights, upside down. And keeping movement to a bare minimum.”
“We need to drool like the sloth drools, is what you’re saying – granted that the word ‘drool’ can very well be replaced by any number of potentially more accurate signifiers. That what it’s doing is not necessarily drooling, but maybe something beyond drooling. Post-drooling. Transcendental meta-drooling. ”
“If that makes you happy. For me, the word drool suffices. It describes the action. It signifies the fucking action.”
The American handed me the camera he had looped around his neck, and gave me the wry look of a tourist about to have his photograph taken with the exotic other – the photo you can point to and say, I was there. He approached the man with the sloth, making the appropriate gestures – the passive slouching step and the thing with the hands indicating exchange or ritual interaction – and took his position beside the sloth. He smiled and removed his sunglasses, he crouched in, leveling his dark, haunted eyes with the benign, fathomless peepholes of the sloth. He was on the verge of snuggling, his ear brushing up against the wind-swept head of the sloth. With his right hand, he reached across his torso and took the sloth’s prehistoric claw in his hand – a stylized gesture, like two high-profile Japanese business men shaking hands for a press photo. He smiled, the sloth chewed its reality-dissolving chew.
I brought the camera to my face. I adjusted the lens for a tightly crafted medium shot and pressed the button.
