Pix & Texts, Poetry, Commentary, Politics, etc.
I (Stephen Vincent) and George Albon will be reading tomorrow evening in San Francisco at Books & Bookshelves at 7:30.
Books & Bookshelves - David Highsmith, proprietor. is located in the Castro at 99 Sanchez St (at 14th).
It will be nice to see you there. If it is thirst and poetry that drives you,
Management advises to BYOB.
Fuller webby details, go to:
http://booksandbookshelves.blogspot.com/
Undercover of night, they first appear - The Bicycle Ghosts - as this one, last night, on Cumberland off Dolores. Gas prices go up, and the dark bike-horse ghost appears, an eternal, rolling punctuation mark here among notices of GRACE and CHEAR.
The public imagination - plundered by ghosts - is suddently sundered with messages in which fossil fuel poisons the present, past and future. Or, simply put, cars = danger, engines = danger, exhaust = danger.
The earth is dying. The earth is dying. Lay down your dumb weapons. Or,
Rise, bicycle, rise.
& yet, as for a long while they must, cars will sit neither silent nor benign. Yet, we welcome explosion of messages across immobile wheels. Or, unless you are in a Hell-Bent greedy, collective, self-destructive rush: Alter reality or die.
A few weeks ago, I phoned my mother for a little conversation. Frankly, I keep thinking she is about go over to the other side. Typically, as I often do, I ask,
“How are you feeling, Mom?”
“Oh, it’s been wild around here.” She almost seems giggly.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“No, I don’t think that will be for the benefit of either of us.”
I remain unsure of the source of my mother’s sense of authority. Or, if she is just covering up for not having the words that can describe, say, the dream from which she has woken.
Othertimes, even when makes a paraphrase, she can be relatively precise.Before reading her Marriane Moore’s poem, The Steeplejack, I ask her if she can describe what such a person does?
“Yes, he’s up there doing his thing.” She tosses that one out, as if she has a ready image of a man hanging on to the side of a pitched roof. I suspect there were many more such men up the sides of chimneys when she was young.
Yet, there is her theme of a constant loss over which she has absolutely no control, at best, an angry sorrow. I read her Marianne Moore’s poem, Dahlia, and ask for its meaning.
“I used to know what it is all about. But I don’t anymore.” She brushes away the question.
Maybe we are hearing the voice of a once generation quite insistent in its desire to learn and authoritatively comprehend the way things work. Pehaps. Or maybe it’s just one of the illusions carried by the leaders of any generation.
In the midst of my mother’s recurrent depression, I ask, “Mom, do you know what I mean when I suggest it is good to practice radiance.” I often suggest to her that if she beomes radiant, she will make us happy, as well as her own self. And who know what happens on the other side. “If you arrive radiant,” I suggest, “Folks will be happy to receive you.”
She does not answer.
“Mom, what does it mean to be radiant?”
“To come out and be yourself.” Such a simple, straight ahead answer. It gives me a quick flash memory of times when her faced glowed. It was usually after she and her friends had showed thier stuff and won a political battle against one conservative interest or another.
Sadly, I suspect she has given up hope on any such dignified concept of ’self.’
Often I put a vase of beautiful roses or dahlias in front of her on the kitchen table.
The flowers make her face brighten with delight, an immediate sense of pleasure, one that is quite contrary to her depression.
Gosh, I wonder, whatever number of years from now, what will I think if my son and daughter begin to imitate ask me all these, maybe, silly sounding questions.
Minimally, I will enjoy my children’s patience and company. Additionally, I hope my use of language is just as appreciated, interesting and remembered!
Episode I As my mother goes breathing
As remains my calling (!), I continue to spell my brother, David, to take care of my 92 year old mother on Friday or Saturday evenings. He is a longtime Board Member of the Masquer’s Theater in Point Richmond. As pictured above, after dinner, he dawns a flashy shirt and tie and goes off to sell raffle tickets to the folks in line before the play begins. When we finish our dinner of Swedish meatballs, my mom and I continue sitting at the kitchen table. Without the sound on, I keep an eye on the television and the Celtics/Pistons play-off game. (During the College and NBA play-offs I become a basketball fanatic. On the table, however, I have a big thick copy of Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems. As most always, unless the poems are too sad, my mother welcomes the opportunity to hear me read aloud. Last week, I read Moore’s poem, The Steeple-Jack, much to her pleasure. It is also favorite Moore poem of mine. I remember when I first read the poem in 1960. It was in a small paperback anthology that I took to Paris for my junior year at the Sorbonne. It was a cloudy, almost rainy day and I was standing still on the sidewalk in a line of students waiting to get into the University restaurant for lunch. A perfect weather for the gray, seaside New England village pictured in the poem:
Durrer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at: with sweet sea air coming into your house
in a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.
Though I can no longer stir my mom to write an intentional poem, she often becomes critically attentive and much more alert when I read her poetrt. I suspect it is the rhythm and tightened formal structure of language that makes her want to listen closely. She seems to empathetically move right to the inside to whatever the piece. Usually, while her concentration is close, I ask for a comment after each stanza.
“It’s kind of exotic.” Her instant critical response takes me by surprise. I always liked Moore’s opening. Indeed, I believe my mother is possessed of a righteous, empirically biased background and one that I parallel with Marianne Moore’s sense of both factual and imaginative precision. And here is my mother, and now I think quite rightly in this stanza, pointing out that Moore the poem’s setting a gratuitious ‘exotic’ tableau - Durrer and the whales with those finely ‘etched’ waves, etc. It’s as if my mother is implicity reprimanding Moore; the poet is making the poem’s envelope too pretty - the town and seascape ought to be presented in a both severe and modest manner. Yes, my mother - descendant of New England and west coast ship-builders - implies that the poet ought watch her manners and not make pretty where pretty won’t do. Don’t hedge on the harsh!
Ironically, my mother’s maiden name is Moore.
She announces that she wants to go to bed. I am happy about that. I can see the rest of the basketball game, which is a good, well fought one! I put her under her covers, give her eye drops, and wish her a goodnight.
“I enjoyed this evening very much,” she tells me, once she is in bed. She always likes to hear poems, which pleases me, as well. I rush to the back room and watch the rest of the game. It’s over at nine. I turn off the Television. “Help me. Would somebody help me?” I hear her voice through the audio-surveillance system that David has set up between the rooms. I rush to the bedroom. I turn on the light. She is gripping the handrail on her bed as if she wants out.
“Someone needs to take care of my family. They are all out.” Her eyes are wide open, agitated.
“We’re fine, Mom. Not to worry. It’s time to go to sleep.” She lets her head fall back, and looks at me intently.
“Well, what are you doing with your life?”
“I am a poet, an artist, a photographer, a maker of books.”
“That’s all well and good but tell me why are you gaining ten pounds everyday? It does not look good.”
I am embarassed. I have gained weight.
“I am working on loosing it, Mom.”
“Well, won’t you?”
“Yes, Mom. Now it’s time to go to sleep. Can you close your eyes and pretend you are a bird flying high in the sky going off to a special place full of dreams?”
She closes her eyes and does not answer. I shut off the light and go back to the television to see the analysis of the Celtics’ defeat of the Pistons. Before I can sit down I hear her voice again through the audio-transmitter.
“Help me. Will someone help me?”
I go back. I don’t turn on her light. I see her face framed by angle of the hall light. Relieved, I think, to see me, her head lifts a little, while her eyes rise like intense, brown marbles. She does seem truly frightened. Her lips are tighened in a way that I know she is about to ask a hard question, and that she will expect an appropriate answer. In a perfectly firm voice she asks, “Can you tell me the implications of all of this?”
It’s as if she lying on a platform and has been looking up hard into some ultimate, existential darkness - one that we each, no doubt, will inevitably face or confront.
Can you tell me the implications of all of this?
I suspect Samuel Beckett would have loved a question like this.
“Try to close your eyes and dream, Mom. Pretend that you are a whale and you are going way down into the darkest depth of the ocean. And think of all the pretty fish that you will see!
She closes her eyes and I leave the room quickly. It’s time for me to go back home.
Episode II - As my mother goes breathing
Last night, again, I took care of my mom. Already, during dinner, even though she chews her chicken pieces, rice and carrots with vigor, she seems quite sleepy and/or spaced out. Yet, when we finish, she says yes, when I ask if she wants to hear some poems. I have been back to reading to her from Marianne Moore’s Collected. Tonight it is two poems with which I am not familiar - “Sojourn in the Whale” and “When I Buy Pictures.” After each one, when I ask her if she likes the particular poems, she makes a barely audible yes. While I was reading, she makes an also barely audible hum, in response to the language.
She clearly wants to lie down to sleep. I pull her up by her hands from her chair to lead her to the bathroom. It’s getting harder for her to rise, and her legs have become weaker. She asks to sit down again.
“Are you alright?”
“I am dying down to my waist,” she says. She sounds like she is perhaps totally conscious of some process of death beginning to claim her body. Or, alternatively, now lack the words, she wants to say her lower back aches. To help any tightness, I rub her lower back for a short while.
I get her to rise again. Firm footed, I hold her hands to help guide her walk. Without moving her feet, she clears her throat, looks me in the eye and says, “It is hard work.”
“What is hard work, Mom?”
“Dying.”
Again, she seems to have a total clarity as to what’s up. As much as she often makes it clear that she wants be on her way out of this life, she realizes the gods will give her no short-cuts.
I manage to get her into bed. She seems more than ready to start falling to sleep. I turn out the lights and retreat to the Family Room where I can listen to her sounds through a walkie-surveillance system. I take out a blank accordion-fold book:
The last time I was here, I finished two panels of a new series, As My Mother Goes Breathing.. She is much less anguished then last week durng which I my haptic was responding to an endless purge of dark moans. It was painful to regiser her plight. Yet, as tonight’s breathing progresses, particularly as she exhales, each breath is accompanied by a sing-song moan, rising and trailing off. Perhaps I am hearing a lament, or, perhaps, just a letting go. What’s curious, almost rhapsodic - since her bedroom window is opened - the moans are mixed with the sounds of City (Richmond) to which she gave and staked so much of her public life. The paced bellowing wail of the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe freight trains; the piercing whistle of the mocking bird on the house roof, under which a flock of birds chirp while the sun descends; an occasional siren, the acceleration of a car, then two.
As I listen and let my pen respond to these various sounds, it’s odd to imagine a whole town in which most of its citizens are oblivious to the gradual letting go of one of its own, particularly my mother, a once distinguished public figure who was once so important to the making of its civic life. Where, in another culture or time, the dying of an important figure would draw in the sympathetic response of an entire community. It is said, for example, the African-American gospel, Swing Low Sweet Chariot has its origins in a West African village. When it came time for a Chief, and maybe anybody else, to die, the community would put the person in a canoe above a steep waterfall. As the vessel approached the falls, a choir of voices would sing out as if to call down he deities to pick up the death-craft as it falls and take it way to the realm of the ancestors.
Who knows, beyond myself this evening, who is listening to the call of my mom?
Much talk and authority goes to DNA these days. Curious it’s power to shape lives - or trace the shape of a life as evidence of presence, particularly a criminal one. Yet, DNA is not at all visible to the naked eye.
I don’t have anything against mystery, as such, indeed, karma attribution aside, things are mysterious enough, and that provides excitment. Like, I understand, the New York Police routinely refer to homeless people as skels as if they are actually skeletons, a species that is already doomed!
I find the fact of the cop’s expression as both sad and mysterious. Certainly not my favorite kind of mystery.
Today I like the mystery of association. The way I can see my mouth, maybe even my face, reflected in the face of my first grandchild. The way the genetic spiral keeps circling about itself, that double-helix in the DNA manifesting as visible flesh veiled over blood and bone! Grandfather and son as ships meeting, touching lightly and passing in the proverbial night.
I was once told by my son’s pediatrician that things are not so immediately simple. I asked him why my son and daughter did not look that much like me. “The way you look can go back 20 generations on either side.” A spiral with a long reach. Then, who knows, what gambler, banker, trader, horse thief, etc., etc. might lurk still waiting to be re-born! Or artist and/or poet, for that matter. To become born not such a simple thing!
“Stay present” - as practitioners of Buddhism say - does seem the most practical advice for taking on all the various odds. I like the look of my grandson!
It’s July 4 - Independence Day - & it seems important to get out of the way from the omnipresent, much too familiar Red, White & Blue. Not to be counterpatriotic, but even that if you want. I just think it’s important to liberate other colors, such as apricot and/or peach, whatever may be their multiple variations. That is, liberate oneself to look elsewhere, and, simultaneously, witness the way other colors have no problem declaring a presence, such as this rose on Church Street:
Without much manipulation, it appears quite willing to make him/herself known, gently chubbing its body - its open, pale peach petals - over the black iron fence staves and rail.
A rose is a rose, and all that, Gertrude! Beyond, or into the object (the rose), I suggest, maybe the most important issue is the way one stops, looks intimately, then says Hello there, Rose, or whatever comfortably passes, as such.
Perhaps, it is a Rose by another name. As, no doubt here among us, lovingly and/or despairingly, there are many who call a country by so many other colors, so many other names.
This is a much belated Haptic response to the Saturday afternoon (May 30 - 31) part of a Conference that I never quite got ‘my arms around’ - tho it gathered together many interesting poets - both as speakers and audience. At its core, its subject was the violence or sense of violation - that poets and (poetry) communities can visit upon each other (in person, publications and/or blogs ). Definitely is a good quesiton to address. I suspect the meta-question is whether or not it’s possible any poet(s), and/or new aesthetic proposition (such as say Language Poetry ‘back then’) can assert and position itself without doing personal and/or collective damage?
Does a new group formation require knocking out perceived opponents, etc. A kind of exclusive ‘our way or no way’ approach to all those ‘others.’ ?? Or are there group processes that might ‘civilize’ the process? (Clearly, on many issues, this country has taken, to put it mildly, a repressive approach).
The subject by itself touches on such primal issues - such as violence and/or various forms of abuse, including ‘erasure’ - that I sensed a shyness by folks - as out or insiders about going direct and critical at the means or process of any figures or groups.
It was more of a protective dancing around the “larger” edges. (I suspect also that people attending wanted to keep the spirit of things ‘positive.’) I do not know whether the creators of the Conference, which included poets Chris Chen. Cynthia Sailers and Stephanie Young, will decide to re-ignite another gathering to keep ‘the probe’ on, to continue to make the discussion more transparent, more protective. The need to face (unmask) the mix of gender, ethnic and aesthetic issues (& let’s not forget ‘class’), however, is undoubtedly at the core of much fire in the culture at large (and have been for a long time). How to organize and moderate a forum which does not go up in smoke or silence is inevitably a brave challenge.
Maybe it was the distancing from the subject - and not being able to get a full handle on it - that made my own mind blur. Instead of listening for content (tho some of it was moving and wonderfully articulate, indeed ‘unmasking’) I found myself moved to make the haptics now set within these paragraphs. In effect I was more taken by letting my pen (Faber-Castelli, India Ink Brush) follow the voices - that is to follow a line or a shape of argument; to register tension, anger, humor, sometimes pleasure. In spite or on account to Conference’s title, I did not sense the expression of much overt aggression or violent sentiment (not that that was the objective).
Sometimes I was astonished by the way different poets - while reading from their papers - would structure their sentences, or delve back and forth across an idea while pursuing an answer to a question, a kind of thinking out loud. It was interesting, for example, to let the pen follow Rob Halpern’s talk/argument in which he presented the editorial challenges of gender, Lang Po, New Narrative, et al, faced by the late Steve Abbot in a late 80’s San Francisco magazine called Soup. Rob’s manner of presentation was to argue through multiple propositions, then construct and test temporarary resolutions for each, all while almost impossibly putting the entirety into one extended sentence.
Rob’s charge with the language was, perhaps, similar to the proverbial cowboy putting multiple lasso loops around the head and belly of a steer that refuses to lie down with one throw of the rope! Whether Rob finally quelled his subject is probably beside the point - he certainly knows how to passionately raise the details of an issue, as well as keep the haptic pen moving without stop, except for the circling of a loop/a knot - the temporary resolve - before launching into the next proposition.
The Haptics here may give, at least, a mirroring sense of the twists and turns, as well as luminous moments, continuously woven, as they were, among many voices during the Saturday afternoon part of the Conference. Indeed, I was registering more than voice, but the tensions, currents, rises and falls - variously vibrating as both rhythms and melodies among the audience(s) with whom my pen was joined for the aftenoon. Wonderful stuff, actually!
Follow-up notes by the organizers & others can be found here:
href=”http://sptagrression.blogspot.com/”
All “Haptics” copyright, Stephen Vincent
Entry structure at Ek’ Balam, a Mayan site.
Welcome! What follows here are my photographs and commentary on visits to and explorations of a number of Mayan ruins in the Yucatan - so much of which I and Sandy, my partner, found to be a continuous source of astonishment. Other than Yucatan Peninsula, the good guidebook from Moon, I carried a copy of Charles Olson’s Mayan Letters which were ones he wrote from the Yucatan to Robert Creeley in 1952 (53?). Olson was there for six months to study glyphs et al to see if we could get a grip on the Mayan language and its world view. It was not just a scholarly pursuit, but a search to impact the shape of the way he would envision and construct the making of his own poems. Olson’s work was deep and powerful influence on my own early life as a poet in the 1960’s and 70’s. Being in the Yucatan for the first time offered me the opportunity to revisit the figure of Olson. Yet, as the days moved on, his presence as a figure became less, while the presence of the different ruins became enormous. Enter & enjoy. (I do appreciate comments. On account of spam issues, please use my email address at the top left of the sidebar).
Later, gradually.
**
Imagine Charles Olson - 6 feet 9 inches tall - in ascension here(Uxmal, Yucatan, 1953)! Topmast, indeed. So much more close to the stars. Conch
to the ear. Listening.
In reading, and re-reading the Mayan Letters, his correspondence with Robert Creeley. It might be instructive to imagine Olson - not that many years away from the publication of Call Me Ishmael (1949), his exploration of Moby Dick & Herman Melville (which I have not read in a long time.) Instead of a whale ship, to see Olson rising up a Pyramid at night - as if a ship’s mast - to read the stars, as certainly a Captain must do. To pretend himself a Mayan looking at the stars - who mistook Venus for one - and the passage of the moon as a way to determine Knowledge - to calculate Time in the largest possible sense, then to take that knowledge and convert it into an architecture as in these various pyramids including the number of risers to the steps in each quadrant (91), the coordinates of north, south, east and west, etc. Then to make the pyramids be composed of temples to service both messages from the gods, and to determine the lay of relationships within the community, the harvest from land and sea, etc. The pyramid as a knowledge factory. Then, for Olson, to honor the language of glyphs, to try to decipher the location, vitality and power of words within the mythos and regualtion of this community.
He was writing to Creeley while Joe McCarthy was still at the height of his vengeful power. The Senator was stalking America - maiming ’souls’ left and right. McCarthy an Ahab of sorts out of the heartland of the country. Simulataneous Olson among the Maya in the Yucatan stalking something that he could put a stake into and claim as a guide back into the wilderness, the bewildered condition of America. Olson. a bit crazy (at sea) too; Creeley a lifeline - writing to him - a way not to capsize, totally!
Stele with Glyps, Uxmal, Yucatan
*****
It’s impossible to not be taken by the sheer “factuality” of a ruin. The inhabitants, indeed, are long gone. The rituals are not performed. Community life is - at best - ghosted. Yet, the elements of architecture - whether entirely broken down, or partially, or restored - provide a concrete clarity, a resonant presence. What might one mean by that?
I appreciate our guide at Chichen Itza who points out the vertical inset of a parallel series of cylindrical stones on a facade. The rain’s penetrating, phallic force made solidly manifest. I find this concentrated stack of them - as if an inventory still in waiting. There is a way in which Olson’s imagination gravitated to this kind of concrete manifestation. Where a word could not slip away, or become hazy, but located itself as both spoken and a textual fact. A word at its best made a clear location for itself. It drove Olson to physically feel and try (unsuccessfully) to probe and interpret the concrete significance of glyphs. The way one might stroke one’s fingers across a set of glyphs as if a blind person reading braille:
If Olson was - as I think he was - trying to get to the foot of a language, that is the ingredients that precede and support the making of the word, amd from there to the structure of words (a made syntax), he was no doubt knocked out by these ruins in which process - by virtue of its inevitable entropy - is always revealing itself. In the ruins, we are frequent witness to the infrastructural elements that support, for example, the making of a wall.
It’s possible to see the rounded rubble of stones as constituent, an absolute preface to the precisely cut and composed stones that create the walls, temples and pyramids, and temples within pyramids. In the mid-twentieth century desire of poets and artists to destruct rhetoric, or any stale architectural or aesthetic form, there was a shared instinct to get underneath everything, to examine process and check out the originating elements - from myth to stone.
In fact, in certain facades a visual language - the mythology that informs the life of a site - becomes impressively manifest.
A detailed look at this wall at Uzmal becomes a local realization in which natural elements of the landscape combine with a narrative of (re) birth and an unfolding maze (or labythinth) of a life (personal and/or communal). The diamond shapes of the snake’s skin are repetively manifest, enlarging the natural snake into the felt, mythic presence of Snake. The snake’s head and tail weave through the structure - to be repeated again - like a serial music - further along the facade. What is particular to the jungle beyond the site is accomodated and given a larger, function in the community’s consciousness. The snake’s presence permits the release of myth, a consumate sense of rebirth. Look inside the snake’s mouth.
Is it a woman’s face? Is the snake - emerging from the labyrinth - releasing ‘us’ out of darkness into a human form back into the visible world. Or, in a mythology that most of us cannot know, are we witnessing the birth of a goddess? Is she - on the right - the one who stands here on high?
An Empress who shares her power with the man we might normally call a freak. He with one arm longer than the other, and one hand with four fingers. The guide book says the Maya attributed special powers to those born with unnatural features.
How much power did we - the young - give Charles Olson, 6′ 9″ in the Sixties? Did he not - a kind of Father - speak with amazing power and introduce us - it seemed - to the power of these other worlds (the ocean, the Maya, etc.)?
I am not sure Olson - when he recounts myth - if he is only paying lip-service to the stories he is given. What, going back to start of this piece, is he more fundamentally interested in the weight, the rhythmic articulation and accumulated power of these stones?
Invite youself to sent on a stone bench, one of several that occupy the simple openings of rooms that line the pyramid’s ground edge. Feel the bench’s smooth heavy stone substance under your thighs, the curve of its wide edge behind your knees. Sense the privilege of the counsellor who sits there, the weight of his authority backed by accumulated weight and presence of the pyramid. It’s no small power, in fact a radiant one. Session over, one leaves the bench, steps down on to the grounds and walks with an expansive lift to one’s entire torso, head, arms and legs. The architecture and stones principle to this fresh provision.
So much is written about the position of Death in Mexico. The transparent current between the living and the dead. I was about to say curtain not current. There is no curtain. When you climb a pyramid’s steps – with scissor sharp edges – it is to rise up with and over the dead. They touch your feet, they touch your palms.
This grid of skulls no different in precision than a grid by Sol Lewitt (a prolifiic maker of both minimal and monumental pyramids). Function? What is the function of going face to face with skulls. It is impossible to be among the dead – whether their ghosts be measurable or invisible – without, as one might say coming to life. To erase the dead is to erase the present. Amnesia is a form of death. Tell the story, act out the story, make the story present. In its own time, it’s own form. We know this. Practice, the act of accomplishing the story’s formal fullfillment is another function. Imaginative, Aesthetic, and no doubt, one of courage. Not to worry. Nothing ultimately gets away. An untold story, a dead story remains in the wash. Such are in the nature of skulls. To return and do it one more time. The aforementioned spirals through which the snake works his or her way to rebirth. A DNA of building the layers/levels and interiors of the pyramid - that is, until the Spaniards arrive.
It is said some where that Charles Olson liked the teeth, the manifest orality of the Mayans and their culture. It makes me wonder two things:
1. Did some of the thrust for imagining “Projective Verse” find its origins among the faces of gods and animals that he found within the ruins.
2. In addition to his reading of Moby Dick, did Olson’s imagination of a large work that would contain Gloucester in the Maximus poems emerge from the architectural, visual and history holding magnitude that he found realized above and within the grounds of the pyramids (as well as the codices) of Chichen Itza and Uzmal? Instead of Gloucester’s Atlantic, the Mayan jungle equals a surrounding sea.
My time is limted for such research. I will let the imagination - let alone one’s familiarity with Olson’s work - hold these ideas in place for the moment.
(So as not to overly confuse anyone, Ek’ Balam is the site of pyramids pictured here - as well as the mouth, and my partner, Sandy, climbing the steps. The skull grid is located in Chichen Itza).
*****
Covento de San Antonio de Padua
Probably everyone, including myself, has a quick thumb-nail knowledge of 14th and 15th century Spanish Colonialists and the evenutal destruction and transformation of indigenous cultures, including the Mayan. And the way Mayan Churches were built on the backs of Mayan laborers and craftsman. Witness, for example, if you can the extraordinary Baroque cathedrals in Oaxaca. Nevertheless, as we travel, I had an over-riding question. What was it - in the case of the Yucatan - that rode to the heart of the Mayan converts? What was offered to make up for the humiliation of custom and culture. How did the Church replace the manifest power and presence of Mayan gods, a cosmic and world vision, and the regulations of its required edicts? The town of Izamal provides strong evidence of both. The combined Convent and Church - finished in 1562 - sit atop what appears to be the first level of a pyramid - once the central site of an important temple was leveled under the command of Fray Diego de Landa. Here is the side of the base of the original pyramid:
The structure also provides - outside of St. Peter’s in Rome - the largest atrium in the world.
Walking under the mustard yellow arcades it is hard to not to sense the presence of the ghost of the severed pyramid. Landa was also the priest who ordered the burning of Mayan codices, only then to write a book about them and preserve an edited view of much of what can still be known , (Only three codices are known to survive). At some point, Landa apparently came to his senses enough to slightly moderate his religious compulsion to commit what would have been absolute cultural genocide. An underpainting in one of the Convent’s hall ways presents evidence of the original missionaries:
Instead of Mayan glyphs - that so enraptured Charles Olson and others - the 17th Century completion of the Church site (1648) - as might be expected - is acknowledged on a stone tablet inscripted with chiseled Roman letters:
One wonders if the script was rendered by a Mayan? And what, if he was a maker of lime-stone steles composed of glyphs, what was his experience of cultural erasure?
What happens when we go inside the Church?
The Saints rise behind the alter. It is not until later that I am take by the thought that the icons practically rise in the shape of a pyramid. Instead of the stone temples within various levels of a pyramid, however, the adherents of Church doctrine are visited upon by the Saints, and no doubt their stories reiterated by the Priests:
It’s the cloth - as much as I, a non-Catholic, can know - that imparts the sensual compassion and charity of the Church. About a black Christ, we find this incredible white Mayan appearing garment projecting roses. It is suggested that the ancient Maya wore a cloth similar in design to one we find woven about the Cross and still found among contemporary Mayan villagers. One might wonder if its original aesthetic and sensual quality elicited a similar association with Christain compassion for the suffering of the living.
These simple iconic artifacts must have been quite seductive and persuasive while, at the same time releasing a heart-felt sense of the compassion of Mary, Mother of Jesus, and, by extension, mother of the Church in the New World. Ironically, in this corridor underpainting of Mary - upon close looking - we actually see a Mayan work-force, their machetes raised in the air. What could they not be but captivated slaves, coerced to serve the Church with their labor.
On the other hand, who could not be touched by this Mary and her manifestation in cloth? In contradistinction to what? I am not about to be an arbiter - particularly ignorant as I am - to what, as much as it did, compelled Mayan’s into the Church. Was it a culture full of contradictions that was about to fold anyway? Was the presence of the Spanish so violent and oppressive, was it better to reach out as much as possible to the proposed generosity of the Church and its alternative icons? I assume there is evidence that goes in both directions. Possessed of superior fire power, and no tolerance for the Mayan other, the Spanish conquerors and Catholic adjuncts obviously ran the new show. Pluralism was not about to be accomodated.
But there we have it. Your God or My Gods and the twain will not survive together. Imperial Greed will savage your books, your temples, etc., etc.
It is one of the ironies that among the surviving codices, the arrival of the Christians are documented. One suspects that this work was permitted because Landa could not fully break away from the awesome character and craft of these works. And so why not impress the limestone paste with an acknowlegement of the missionaries?
Yes, it’s hard to account the depth of what accounted cultural genocide - I mean how does one real account for the loss. Like is what is going on, what is ghosted under this convent? Much of the time - there among the guided tours of pyramids - the focus is the line between the living and the dead, particularly those rendered dead - indeed the victors - after the ball game, or various forms and reasons for self-sacrifice. These views marginalize the multiple other levels of play, of dream, of thought, whatever was operative and how in the culture.The etchings on stones of figures and birds, etc. gives us a bit of a peek.
However, it’s the visual and figuratieve contents of the remaining codices that intimate the most - no matter that the translations are still in process, an understanding barely glimpsed. Here are a few from Alexander Humbolt’s 19th century artist renderings from his explorations of Yucatan and the Maya. Please excuse the poor digital quality of the images. Indeed, maybe it is appropriate to reproduce these images as through a glass darkly - for how much is possible otherwise to look through into this vertitably other world. Indeed - as something was deeply vanquished, maybe call it spirit, where and how did it go?
Or is that the question? In real time, among the Maya, how did anyone imagine going anywhere:
Did these flights take place in the tucked in head of a man dreaming?
What were the dances - motion and temperament - when they arrived there? Was it a root-drug induced space?
What were the structures that articulated the space of the dance, the space of the dream??
Can we ever imagine the full pantheon? And like those pictured Saints above the Church Alter is it possible to know the history of each figure, function, purpose, the reason why one became part of the freize, the beauty of memory, icon by icon?
What was going under this convent, or in the space above? An otherwise invisible intervention into the sky over the Church? Maybe these foggy little images provide a minimal glimpse? It remains amazing that Father Landa et al could take it upon their mission to extinguish such an astonishing legacy! So odd the willingness to kill what is strange, what cannot be immediately known, the potential threat to one’s own cosmos. Astonishing. Or is it?
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Charles Olson is obsessed with the source of Language, the Language Well. If we take away everything else, where does it (language) come from? Where is it’s DNA? Stripped of capitalism - language to promote sales, etc. - what is its origin, function? I suspect similar to Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, Charles Olson applies a mystic/cosmic factor into the equation of the Letter. To that, to the Letter, he entwines the Body. There, in the wrestling match between Body and Letter, the poet emerges with Syntax: that is those translucent machinations of which - if composed accurately - deliver the community into an Ordered Realm. The Order, however, comparable to a slithering snake, is in a constant state of Change.
Witness the turtle on the upper-edge side of the temple at Uzmal. Imagine the temple as a House of Language - an original source and residence of glyphs. Imagine the person, the poet, who put down the letters on the turtle’s back. But first, imagine the poet as a figure inside the Observatory , an Observatory in the form of a conch, the kind found taken from the nearby ocean.
Imagine the poet aiming his eye and ear to the observatory heavens in a state of close looking, close listening. Imagine what is mirrored through the Observatory lense. Imagine the Observatory as a Cosmic Knowledge Factory.
Imagine that the poet is insistent that the study of sun, moon, Venus and stars will provide the map, provide an audio/visual guide to the expectations of one’s days. Imagine the poet recording this knowlege with his with a tools that incise glyphs - those reflections - into a limestone paste while adding colors. Imagine the poet apply those glyphs to the hard bone grid (each unit a stanza) on the Turtle’s back.
Within that architecture, imagine the pelican who visits from the sea. Imagine the pelican’s wings spread open and wide.
Imagine - similar to the turtle’s back - looking up at a grid of glyphs under its wings. Imagine the Pelican diving into the ocean, each time emerging with a swallow of multiple fish, what the Mayans call the tongues of the sea. Imagine the speech the Pelican lifts into its body to emerge again as those glyphs now underwing. Imagine the way the Priests will also look up to read those wings. Imagine what is read from the night sky and read from the ocean as the partners of day and night. Imagine them as lovers with joys and arguments, even wars, that are legion. Imagine figuring out what to do with the arrival of the Spaniards. Imagine the poets of today as creatures formed by the Mayan loss - or any similar loss of ancient power across the world. In this great dispersal, imagine a conch shell in your hand while held to your ear. Imagine the language you hear as luminous spinning forth off the conch’s grooves, perpetually.
Imagine that you will never stop listening.
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Travel and consciousness, the combination, I find to be an intrigue. Last August - when we were in Bilbao - there was a huge Anselm Kieffer show. I swear he doubled the size of all of his works to fit into the huge galleries with enormously high ceilings, there on the first floor. (I assume this was Frank Gehry’s challenge to any artist that would occupy “his” museum). Anyway, inside one of the galleries where Kieffer had installed these large, concrete accordion-fold staircases on the floor and up the walls, I sat down to make some haptic drawings. Across the way, for a moment a guard gazed at me suspiciously as if I was being uncommon. Curiously, and wonderfully, however, many of the tourists who entered the gallery - following my example (I think) - sat down into little groups and put down their audio-tour kits on to the floor. It was as if they were releasing themselves from the bonds of somebody else’s narrative, that is, the authoritative voice of the tour guide telling them how to look at the art. I don’t know if they were then able to engage the art on an unfiltered level, or were just able to make contact with each other. I know many of them looked exhausted from having been led around while trying to concentrate devotedly to the information on their headsets!
But one of the questions for me here is - if you abandon the control of the narrative about a site - what are the contents you absorb into your consciousnes, and how and in what ways does the experience stay with you?
I sense the Yucatan trip - intense and relatively short as it was - has continued to occupy upper and lower (obscure) levels of my being.
On the conscious level, all those stones, in their various physical orchestrations, have made me ask what relationship to these stone configurations bear to the construction of language.
I cannot imagine that Charles Olson - among other poets (Octavio Paz, for example) - did not find his own imagination and writing excited by the rhythms the eye encounters and aborbs in the movement of stones throughout the various architectures, or SPACE, as he might well say it. Indeed, as I previously suggested, to Olson these Mayan sites probably appeared epic in their sense of both containment and ambition. In addition, it is also hard to imagine that the minimalists (Micheal Heizer through travels with his anthropolist father, and Carl Andre) were not totally taken by these stone formations, textures and tonalites:.
Indeed, say in the way of Robert Smithson, in contrast to the heightened, classical formality, it is equally possible to study and take pleasure in the entropic dissolution of these spaces:
And one can revel - going back to Olson’s idea of these sites as centers for the making of knowledge - in these wonderful structures that induce the idea of a class of people who are able to sit between sheltered columns and engage ideas as well as put such ideas into action
That much like Versailles for French Royalty, these Mayan architectural centers did house the counsels, academies and bureaucratic networks that defined and controlled all aspects - from agriculure to mytho-astronomy to the making of war, etc.
And, yet, much of this reflection begs the question of what will - almost in the manner of velcro, if you remain open - grabs your consciousness, particularly in ways that will come home with you where they will continue to shape the interior life of your days!
Yes, for me, I find the residual experiences, these resonances, unwilled, as it seems, popping up in my work, particulary in the making of haptics.
As say when back during the first few days:
Then, over the last couple of days, a detail from a recent work:
I cannot make judgement as to what this unfolding may or may not mean, whether or not it enriches my consciousness with a new sense of imaginative power and presence. Maybe none of that at all. Formost, however, I think it is most interesting to witness the ways in which the residues of cultures - particularly this Mayan one - have an ongoing life of their own. Like ghosts that know no death, they keep alive in ways that inform the world; nothing modern or otherwise can totally vanquish this past. What we do with this past, its interpretations, can be no doubt controlled - as with those audio-tour guides in Bilbao - by the beholder, or settler or occupier. On the other hand, if we listen closely, we permit seeds of transformation, to implant themselves , imaginative and/or otherwise, in our consciosness. And no telling - as to where those ghosts within the seeds may take us - except, say as this has been for me, on a geat adventure!
The double-headed Jaguar is - perhaps - a manifestation of the double-consciousness of being.: the one that travels, and the one that stays home. This tension, the tug-of-war between both forces, provokes the seed to pop, and. out of that violence, a new culture to grow. Without contraries, no progress. William Blake. Not an easy thing to permit, but so boring (lifeless), if not.
Well enough, this has been my Yucatan, such as it is, granted, a thin slice at that! (There are over 1,000 sites of ruins in the Yucatan alone. ) Yes, indeed, go there, and why did it take me so long! Will appreciate your feedback! email address is at top of upper left sidebar. Comment box does not work.
At least somebody has a sense of humor in the neighborhood. That kind of humor that goes way down deep into the core of the stomach. Ain’t no bad spleen inside this guy. He’s just laughing it up. I wish I knew what “it” is. I don’t know if he’s actually a Buddha. It must be, at least, an acoloyte of some deity somewhere. He is great, however, just takes me right out of my mind, and, maybe, your mind, too?
I have never seen a pink one of these. He or, (actually, is it a she?) is rumored to be transplanted from Pink, a well known City in India. This place, I hear. is surrounded by pink flamingoes on pink lakes surrounded and crossed by floating pink lillies and little pink paddle boats carrying tiny pink goddesses. There is a sign on the City entrance that says, “Tickle Your Pinky and Get Pink with Laughter & Joy All Yee Who Enter Here!” It’s outlaws are even known - when they accost citizens - to say “This is a Pink-Up! Give us your Giggles. We can’t stand living outside Pink.”
Go with this story where yee may. Tickled-Pink I am just still astonished to find him or her looking reasonably happy at home under a bush up this ordinarily very quiet street. No telling what really lurks behind the restraints of local walls!
My life - a building full of rooms - it stood for all to see -
An open book.
The way things announce themselves on the street!
The blank canvas, the white pages, irresistable!
Someone kindly suggests, these spaces would be great for the haptics,
a wheeling explosion of non-commodity Energy into the center of the City. Framed on such walls, such ‘pages’. That would be nice!
It took me a while to ferret out the echo in the opening sentence here:
My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun –
In Corners — till a Day
The Owner passed — identified –
And carried Me away –
Interesting to ever imagine Emily Dickinson on the downtown streets of any metropolis! Unlike Walt Whitman - his eyes and arms so open to the polyphonous visual character of space - I suspect Emily would totally freak. However, back to those blank pages, blog pages, what have you.
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