Via Negativa

The period between solstice and New Year’s usually finds me thinking about time: what it is, how we experience it. Few cultures have gone as deeply into the nature of time as the Maya. But so much of their worldview is so strange to me that, no matter how lucid the explanation, I find myself at a loss to grasp what is really being said. Some of my incomprehension derives, I think, from our deeply ingrained modern tendency to view place and time as separable. But there’s more:

“Since he revealed himself only when he was born, it is only his reflection that now remains.” The scribes who transposed these words from New World characters into Old World letters felt the need to add an interpretation – or, to phrase the matter more the way it is phrased in Quiché, they felt the need to tell the reader what these words would say if we could hear what was hidden inside them, namely,

The sun that shows itself is not the real sun.

There are people down around the Great Hollow today, people reckoned in the Book as relatives of the Quiché, who at least allow us the sight of the sun for half of each day. They say that when he reached noon on the day of his first appearance, he placed a mirror at the center of the sky and then doubled back, unseen, to the east. During the second half of that day only his reflection was seen, and so it has been on every day since.

“Reflection,” these people say, and so says the Book. Lemo’ is the word, and it’s also the term for mirror. But the mirror reflects, during the second half of the day, what the Sun did during the first half. Or else it reflects, during our own times, what Sun did only once, and long ago. Coming here among these Mayan nations, we seem to have entered a world where reflections are not simultaneous with the things reflected. Reading the Book, we may guess that reflections ceased to be simultaneous the moment vigesimal beings [i.e., humans, people who keep score] lost their perfect vision:

“They were blinded as the face of a mirror is breathed upon.”

And what about the face in an ordinary mirror, seen close up? Leaving the land where they say lemo’ and coming back home won’t help. If any face is the true face of a vigesimal being it’s the one we all see in the mirror.

Dennis Tedlock, Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices & Visions of the Living Maya, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.

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See Deforming mirror and Therapy and the face in the mirror, which deal with Nahuatl conceptions of mirrors. Influence traveled in both directions between the classic Mayan and Nahuatl (Toltec, Aztec) civilizations. See also my brief meditation Consulting the mirror, from last January.

Late yesterday afternoon I typed out several dense paragraphs on – Jesus, I can’t even remember what. And then I must have inadvertently deleted them, because I can’t find a trace of any such document now. All I can think is that when I went to post about the tsunami last night, I must’ve composed directly in Blogger, but copied and saved the post in MS Word as if it were simply a second draft, putting it in the already-open document and erasing its preexisting contents without looking. Either that, or I’m losing my mind. Here I have been contentedly reading poetry and thinking about other things since I got up this morning, telling myself I already had today’s post pretty much written. Instead I find this blank space in my files, in my memory. I do recall thinking, “Hadn’t I better jot these thoughts down in my notebook?” but answering myself that no, it would be easier to put flesh on the bones now, while the ideas were still fresh. Too easy!

Ah, whither the abstract maunderings of yesterday? For that matter, whither atrophy? But I do remember the vague half-thoughts I had in the morning, walking about in the ice-cold wind with great delight at the clearness of the air. Sharp contrasts, so beloved of simplistic orators and fear-mongering politicians, also characterize the favored terrain of artists – especially photographers. Winter with its perpetually low sun and desert-like conditions appears to simplify things, but really, that’s a bit of an illusion. The reduction of complexity often makes fundamental mysteries that much harder to ignore. Picture the bent back of a light-skinned nude against a black background, head, neck, and limbs hidden: a fine ceramic vessel, you’d think. And the chilled hands long for contact – the fingertips to ghost along that flange that used to be a spine – even as the eyes strive to resolve desire’s banished shadow with this radiant perfection.

I have no trouble remembering how I sat out on my front stoop with a mug of hot tea around 2:30, the brim of my cap pulled low against the sun, watching the translucent wings of chickadees and juncos among the cattails and then the midnight black of a feral cat slinking through the weeds. The sky was as blue as it ever gets. I worried about the cat, so painfully skinny now at the start of winter. As I watched, it pounced once, twice but came up empty: no squirming furry body between its teeth, not even the shadow of a smile that might linger on when, Cheshire-like, the rest of it fades away. The tea in my mug stayed warm for a surprisingly long time.

Comprehensive, up-to-date information on the impact of the tsunami and how to help are available through a new blog. (Thanks to Watermark for the link.) The Wikipedia already has a great deal of information up as well, including an animation.

As with the big earthquake that devastated Bam, Iran exactly one year ago (to the hour, according to the USGS), I find myself reaching for Artur Lundkvist’s Agadir:

Words also crumbled, broke into pieces, scattered in shreds,
in vain I tried to find some still unharmed and usable
but found only splinters of metaphors, cracked, like a split mirror;
visions floated about, islands adrift in air as white as milk but thicker,
almost like molten, viscous marble,
trees floated about, torn up by the roots and turning slowly upside down upon themselves,
people floated like driftwood, many whole and outwardly unmarred, others cut in half or worse,
floating about in the white with eyes wide-open, hair streaming upward…

Walking up the road, I hear a soft tapping sound & wonder if something has come loose on my coat, or even inside my skull. Of course not! It’s just a downy woodpecker working over a punky snag. Stopped thus in my tracks, I take out my pocket notebook & jot down a few notes about a dream I’d just remembered from the night before. Writing this now, a week later, I think about the rusty nail heads I found clustered in the bark of the big birch, how I had so quickly rejected the first explanation that popped into my head – witchcraft – in favor of something considerably more humdrum. But nailing up a sign that says No Trespassing, Keep Out or, more reflexively as the fashion is these days, Posted – can you think of a better example of apotropaic word magic, a formal curse?

What makes dreams dreamlike is the way we inhabit them, half abstracted from our foolish bodies, which can never run or fly fast enough but which somehow always escape destruction. This morning I was walking quickly through Roman-style ruins of a city on a wild coast, past decapitated colonnades and rooms without walls or roofs, everything lit up strangely from within. Tourist hotels on a once-popular beach, devastated by some new Vesuvius. Then there were people in a classroom on the hill & I became a sudden imposter. We were somewhere waiting to be bombed, & I convinced everyone to hide under their desks so the pilots wouldn’t spot any soft targets.

That’s all I remember clearly enough to arrange in any kind of consecutive order. I wish I could remember how & why at one point I came to be kissing a beautiful woman who, I sensed, was working actively toward my destruction. I can recall everything about how that kiss felt & tasted. What I don’t remember is whether I had introduced myself as “Bond. James Bond.”

This time of year, with the nights so long, the line between dream and waking seems especially thin. On Christmas night we sat in the darkened living room of my parents’ house for an hour and a half looking at the tree full of lights & mysteries. It was a smallish tree, a Douglas fir, but the shadows of its branches on the green walls were enormous & made us imagine a spirit forest right there in the living room, as we talked in soft voices. Then around 9:30 I went for a long walk down the hollow and back along Greenbriar Trail in the light of the almost-full moon. Although there was no snow on the ground, a heavy frost sparkled in the moonlight as I walked along. This was my second walk of the day: such silence as one gets on Christmas doesn’t come but once a year. Even the trains weren’t running, and only a very occasional jet marred the stillness.

Out in the field, the moon’s reflection glimmered in every weed & blade of grass. I stood still for a while, looking at the familiar landscape turned strange & entrancing, a place I could never tire of, I thought. Perhaps this is what it’s like to be in love, to feel that one will never really get to the bottom of someone or something – but to have perfect assurance that the deeper one goes, the more beautiful she or he or it will become.

If I moved my head ever so slightly, the moon would dance from one set of crystalline mirrors into another. This prompted a brief chain of abstract, Nagarjuna-esque reasoning ending in the totally underwhelming realization that the moon’s reflection – & in some sense, the moon itself – was not actually in the field but in my eyes, in my mind. Or perhaps I could make it live a kind of half-life in a poem that I didn’t propose to write. (Because, let’s face it, the world doesn’t need another goddamn poem about the full moon!)

Yesterday, the day after Christmas, was anything but magical: a dull white sky above a brown and frozen earth. I sat inside moping & thought that, if my dad weren’t sick, we might as well have joined the throngs crowding the stores to return gifts & buy replacements at half price. The superficial excitement of all that noise & bustle seemed suddenly attractive. Instead, I spent hours inside surfing the Internet.

Dream and illusion are often treated as synonyms, but sometimes I wonder if they have anything in common at all. Say what you will about their use in psychoanalysis, the fact is that in dreams we relive or rehearse contacts made with real beings and real landscapes – that is to say, with things experienced as possessing their own will or logic apart from our own. Illusions, by contrast, arise from daydream, from the sunlit world of the conscious imagination. They are essential attributes of all games, & if we believe in them too strongly, we might come to think that the whole universe is nothing more than a vast game, a cunning contraption, the result not of time & chance (as the Bible so eloquently phrases it) but of some Intelligent Design.*

Dreams connect & reveal; illusions distract & obscure. I can think of no better illustration of the difference between the two than to quote the Biblical passage I just alluded to – preceded by George Orwell’s brilliant rendering of it into the language of the modern bureaucrat. This is language at its most ensorcelled, designed not merely to obscure but to intimidate. See if it doesn’t fill your head with a blank grayness:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
(“Politics and the English Language,” 1946)

It may not be immediately obvious that this is a translation of Ecclesiastes 9:11:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Orwell says he chose this phrase because of its familiarity & admirable concreteness. But I doubt he could have been insensitive to the fact that it expresses a common truth – common in the sense of easily available to anyone, whether through the analysis of dreams or through fully awake contact with greater-than-human realities – that architects of grand illusions everywhere have regarded as anathema.
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*Before you inundate me with comments suggesting that the Bible does, in fact, postulate such Design, let me remind you that, in Genesis 1:1, the universe was already in existence, and time and chance were already in operation in the primordial tohu-bohu. “In the beginning” is a mistranslation; what it really says is, “When God was beginning to create the heavens and the earth…” And as Stephen Jay Gould noted in one of his last essays, the subsequent Biblical creation is largely a process in which fundamental order is discovered or revealed. Yahweh, in other words, creates as an artist or a craftsman might; he is no engineer.