Yucatan - A Visit, An Exploration
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.
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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.
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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.
***
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.