NOACVS 30-55

"Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler, " Juan Felipe Herrera
Pg.31

" I look at myself put letters on paper and all I can conjure is the loss of time, the delving into bodiless terms and the thousand layers of empty space around me. The ink is mind. The mind has no barriers. The paper is breath. The word is deep silence."

It seems as though Juan is in a deep meditation when writing poems or anything in particular. "The ink is the mind" relates to the fact that whatever you think is written down with ink. I believe that not only is the ink the mind but also the translator. The ink is responsible for making your thoughts visible to the world. It releases the unknown questions of life, the emotions you feel, and just about anything your mind thinks about. Since the mind has no barriers neither does the ink, so there is no barriers for writing. There are no guidelines or rules to writing. It all simply comes from the complex compositions of unanswered questions, prophecies, and philosophies. The contradictions and simplicity of writing comes from the set mediation of the mind when the paper is a symphony of breaths that let out the thoughts and the words describing them efficiently in silence rather than speech.

"Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler," Juan Felipe Herrera
Pg.42

"Is it the fact that we never did fall, truly alone and shivering, into the furnace of an authentic experience and explosion of community across assigned boundaries and voices, into the colossal and marvelousn thing called change, called reality, this Thing-just-like-this? Wipe my face, squint, make sure I say what I meant."

In this quote, Juan appears to be questioning the genuineness of this modern day world. This world filled with monotonous societies and dream-like lives with the hopes of no consequences. Has human's in the modern day really felt the experience of falling of maybe making a mistake? Society has always been afraid of change, but whats to fear about change? It just throws a curveball at the way things are or have been for the past millenium or so. Why do we fear adjustment, unknown, and difference? The reason why things remain monotonous is because society is afraid of taking chances with the possibility of failing. So society continues to stay unoriginal and remain neglecting diversity.