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October 31, 2006
Boo (!)
Posted by mjd at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2006
Kukul Can
Some carved images of the serpent god from Chichén Itzá
Tomb of the High Priest
Ballcourt railing
Posted by mjd at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2006
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan 2: Chichén Itzá
Chichén Itzá, roughly translated: City of the Water Witches.
I spent most of the two and a half hour ride from Playa del Carmen to Chichén Itzá reading the Popol Vuh--one of the few surviving written works describing the beliefs of the Maya ancients. The dense, oppressive heat of a Yucatan midday engulfed me as I stepped off the bus. Eduardo, the short, stocky Maya descendant who was leading my tour, grinned and asked if I was excited.
I was positively jittery.
I told him about my efforts to comprehend the customs and the idiom of a culture so removed from mine. He rolled his eyes with an wry expression that said "I've got one of those gringoes, have I?" But he sympathized. He told me he'd read it, as well as the Chilam Balam, the Book of the Jaguar Priest--but that they had been difficult to get through, and harder still to understand.
I was damn impressed with Eduardo. He told me later on that he was planning a five-day climbing excursion in the mountains of Tabasco, the habitat of the quetzal bird, which the Maya hold sacred. He was not only a scholar and an archaeologist, but an explorer. a giant insatiable sponge of obscure knowledge and profound experience after my own heart.
We were at Chichén Itzá for a total of three hours. I could have spent three days there--more. The ruins are immense. It took me a good 15 minutes, at the fastest pace I could muster in the heat, to make it from the Sacred Cenote, where they threw in the virgins to drown, past the Ballcourt, where they played the Game, and the Castillo, where the priests of Sovereign Feathered Serpent would greet the equinoctial dawn, to make it back to the tour bus before they left without me. All right, so the Court of the Thousand Columns doesn't actually have a thousand columns. But there are 64 stone stelae arranged outside the Temple of the Warriors, each one inscribed with the life-sized reliefs of four feather-crowned, jaguar-hooded, spear-toting, snake-spitting warriors. I could have spent a day just working my way among them.
The acoustics of the place alone are mind-blowing. Stand before the steps of the Temple of Kukul Can. Look upon the hollow-eyed, decayed face of the bird-serpent god of the Maya, staring down upon you from above the temple door. Clap your hands three times, and from the stony heights, engineered by ancient human minds and hands, will ring back the call of a bird--a bird I can turn and walk a hundred yards to the edge of the jungle and meet in the flesh, and hear its living call.
Don't believe me? I didn't either, the first time someone told me. I didn't believe it even when I read it in the books. But then I stood there, on the worn spot in the grass, in the ninety-degree heat and the ninety percent humidity, sweat rolling down my temples, and I tried it myself. And I realized I was staring at an amplifier, a PA system and a fucking vox distortion pedal made of nothing but limestone, mathematics, and the sweat off the backs of the faithful. A servant of the serpent god could stand atop the pyramid, speak without shouting, and a member of his congregation, listening from a quarter mile away, would hear the voice of Kukul Can as though the god were standing beside him.
In the Ballcourt, one could send the rubber sphere rocketing against a relief-covered wall and hear it echo back like a gunshot across a canyon--multiplied not once, but ten times.
Eduardo kept talking about the energy of the place--all the people who had lived and died, and the residue they left behind. He told us that once, he'd spent the night here--here, between the goal-rings of the Ballcourt, where the captains of the winning teams were ritually slain. He said it was something he would never attempt again.
Later on, when the tour was over, he told me there had once been a native woman on a tour he'd given, a shaman of a North American tribe, who at the foot of the Tomb of the HIgh Priest had fallen on her knees and burst out sobbing. He started towards to ask what was wrong, to try to console her--but another woman caught his arm and stopped him. "Let her be," the woman said. "This is a breakthrough for her. It's something she needs to do." He asked why. "She was sacrificed here, in a past life."
Of course, from one perspective these are just the same kind of boogety-boogety stories you hear from the whacked-out credulous all the time. Anybody can spend the night in an abandoned house and work themselves up into a white-eyed terror if they really want. If that's their idea of a good time. So why am I even bothering to record such things? Well, first, it has to do with the person telling them, and the way they're told. Eduardo preambled this stuff with a few choice disparaging remarks about the demented conspiracy theorist conflations of the Maya with extraterrestrials. He also pointed out that the modern Maya are superstitious people--himself included. What he didn't have to explain to me is that he is an educated guy, a person capable of being objective about these things--a guy who comes here every day with a crowd full of sweaty, glassy-eyed white people asking stupid questions. The fact that he manages to retain any kind of romanticism or sense of mystery about this place is more than enough for me.
The other side of it is that even though I am utterly unsuperstitious and skeptical by nature, working myself up into a white-eyed, mystical-religious rapture over ancient things of wonder and beauty just happens to be exactly my idea of a good time. I consider it an act of knowing self-deception--an effort to entertain myself with a bit of magic realist fiction on a personal scale. Much as it would chagrin certain new-agey allies of mine to hear me admit it.
At one point Eduardo noticed me making note of a couple of books he'd mentioned. I explained I was a writer, researching the Maya for something I was working on. Which was true, more or less. At least it sounded more legit than, "I'm just another Maya geek who happens to have better research skills than the rest of these schmoes."
"You know what you should really read, if you're interested in this kind of thing," Eduardo said. "Are you familiar with the writer Carlos Castaneda?"
Bwa ha.
There are pages and pages more I could say about my experience of those three hours at Chichén Itzá: my encounters with the native hagglers, human sacrifice, the sacred well, Chac Mool, the astronomers, the social order of the ancients, religion, and on and on. But this entry's getting on in wordcount as it is. Hopefully I'll cover some of that stuff with the pictures over in the Visions section, and the rest in the course of future posts.
Still to come: The modern Maya. Tulum. The red handprints. Probably some random anecdotes in between. And to wrap it all up, the bibliography.
Posted by mjd at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2006
A Keyhole in the Earth
A minor feature at Chichén Itzá, located maybe twenty feet from the southwest corner of the Observatory complex. Not included in the tour. My best guess? More practical than fantastical, I'm afraid: I think it was a well, a convenience for the astronomer-priests, too busy figuring out how many times Venus would be occluded by the moon in the next fifty-two years to consider a break for a beverage. No surprise the well filled up with debris in eight hundred years, and no surprise, what with all the other wonders just lying around in the jungle still uncovered, that something so mundane remains unexcavated.
Posted by mjd at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)
I Become a Married Man
The wedding was amazing. The hitchlessness with which it went off surpassed all expectation--ceremony short and sweet, reception long and just the right amount of rauckus. I am particularly indebted to my uncle Al for keeping the party going. I even danced quite a bit myself.
And the honeymoon...well, the honeymoon made the reception look like an evening alone in a room with a half-conscious box turtle. We went to the Yucatan, where we explored Mayan ruins like 19th century adventurers, and then went back to the hotel to be pampered like 19th century imperialists. Woo ha!
Read all about it in the Writings section. Or visit the Visions section to see the pictures.
Posted by mjd at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)
October 23, 2006
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan 1: First Impressions
My first impression of the Yucatan as it came into sight from the plane window was of a vast, featureless expanse of jungle. I sat on the left side of the plane, looking south, and as a result didn't catch a glimpse of the city of Cancún until the return flight. As we descended, the only indications of human presence were the long, straight swaths of power lines, and a few dirt roads and scattered clearings positively dwarfed by the endless forest receding westward into blue obscurity.
The Yucatan Peninsula comprises three Mexican states: Quintana Roo, which includes the eastern coast, and where I spent most of my time; Yucatan, in the northwest, which I entered only briefly, and Campeche in the southwest, which I did not have the opportunity to visit. Geologically, the peninsula is composed of an utterly flat slab of limestone, which until the most recent ice age lay at the bottom of the sea. I saw evidence of this almost everywhere, in the form of marine fossils embedded in the bedrock. Effects of this geology include thin, rocky topsoil which is very discouraging to modern farming technologies, as well as all kinds of fascinating geological figures such as caverns, underground rivers and cenotes (which I will get back to eventually, though likely in a later post).
Accorting to our Chichén Itzá tour guide (Eduardo, a Maya descendant born in Mérida), in 1970 the population of Cancún was something like 180. Now it is 200,000. As late as 1995, the 60-mile stretch of coastline south of Cancun known as the Riviera Maya, which is now wall-to-wall with all-inclusive resorts, was uninhabited, save by a very few natives, subsistence farmers living in the jungle the same way they had for a thousand years.
On the hour-and-a-half ride to our hotel from the airport along México 307, we passed long stretches of thick jungle and mangrove swamp, punctuated by the towering, monumental gates of resort hotels and condo communties. Overhead, buzzards circled. The handful of billboards we saw were in English. Once in a while, we'd glimpse a cluster of ramshackle brown huts roofed in thatch-palm, or a block of hastily-constructed concrete tenements. The vast majority of Quintana Roo's current population is employed exclusively by the tourism industry. They make an effort to conceal the class discrepancy--the resorts are all well-fortified, cordoned off from the outside world. But when you do catch a glimpse of the way most people live--as I did when I borrowed a bike from the hotel and made my way past the first couple of tourist-flooded oceanfront blocks into the city of Playa del Carmen--the difference is astonishing.
Our first act upon arriving at the hotel was to recline in the air-conditioned foyer, sipping at champagne and dabbing at our faces with cool towels moistened with rosewater. Which where presented to us on a silver platter by a brown-skinned gentleman in a black three-piece suit. That's right: we had been there five minutes, and already we were settling into the stereotypical roles of rich white gringo classist oppression. Which, I might add, was exactly what I had been afraid of ever since I learned the meaning of the phrase "all-inclusive resort". But dammit, they made it so easy! The whole time I spent there, nobody did anything without first asking my permission, then thanking me after I gave it. Somehow every time I tried to turn down some offered luxury it felt as though I were making a personal slight against the person offering it. Likewise whenever my poor knowledge of the protocols of highbrow culture caused a hitch in the smoothness of their delivery--faux pas such as getting caught in the bathroom when the maid arrived for turndown service, eating the first course with the incorrect fork, and attempting to set up my own cabana without the aid of beach security.
Not that I'm complaining. There was, after all, an endless supply of mohitos. Frickin dee-licious mohitos.
Everybody was just so darned nice. Freaked me out a little bit is all.
Still to come: Chichen Itza. The modern Maya. Tulum. The red handprints. Probably some random anecdotes in between. And to wrap it all up, the bibliography.
Posted by mjd at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2006
Sea God Shrine
Maya Shrine, Postclassic Era. Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, México
Perhaps the coolest of the many, many mindblowingly cool things I photographed during my trip to the Yucatan peninsula. I found this shrine at the edge of the jungle overlooking the beach a little over a mile south of my hotel. The jaunty hat it appears to be wearing is a cactus. And yes, leaning against the entrance is the barnacle-encrusted, sea-worn glass cathode of a 1970s-era television.
Posted by mjd at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)
October 02, 2006
"Two Hearts" by Peter S. Beagle
First printed in F&SF October 2005
Well it is pretty clear why he got the Hugo for this. How exactly did he manage to bring me so close to tears over the death of a fictional dog--and in the length of a short story? I suppose he had The Last Unicorn to lean on. I knew these characters from before. Some of them. Though not, in fact, the ones that made me cry. So no, that isn't it. I must study this. Nothing I've written has ever felt that real. Instead I do these tongue-in-cheek parables, these self-aware commentaries on real emotions, even when I set out on purpose to do no such thing.
Posted by mjd at 07:00 PM | Comments (0)
Sunwurm Studios
I just set up a new site for my freelance web design business. Check it out:
Posted by mjd at 06:58 PM | Comments (2)
