Among the Mazatecs

Among the Mazatecs

     I would see him inside the American Library in Oaxaca, within the folds of the cool tomes hidden from the brash light. Here the aquamarine courtyards invite fervent Mediterranean dreams---but echo with the trivia of bird-like expatriates. Why do they ever leave Ohio or California if that is all they can talk about? Answer: They can talk about a few other things but not while they're abroad; while abroad they must pledge continual allegiance to their country, whatever that is...This they do obligingly, as a song bird replies to a mating call even in winter. No need to ask, yes, yes, this politician said this or that…all morning long they chatter…and all the parroting clatter simply to avoid that other language, that other mode of being and thought. You might love these people, these Mexicans, they seem to say, but no civilized person wants to actually feel and speak that stuff: I mean it’s so hot, or ominously cool; and as far as the Indians go---well, you buy the pots and tip generously---

     I skirt around the edges, an actor without a role...

   Conferences are held here, self-important, somewhat obtuse. Their subject is how to adapt to the strange culture of Mexico, an exile as far from the United States as was Cappadocia from Ancient Rome; but a place very pleased to have your money. (Special Seminars on DYING IN MEXICO offered by Consul Firmin and the dead-dogs’ brigade…) We can do it, the Expats enthuse. We can make it here; and they all agree: it really is the place to die, for we are partly at home and partly absent where the ancient mores of the Catholic Church have made everyone well…so folkloric…It’s a real bargain too--- this last corner left of the real world…

      The world is what you interpret it to be.

    A few descendants of the builders of the great city of Monte Alban, a thriving center of astronomy and commerce when Europe had forgotten the achievements of Greeks, like timid shrews, hang on every silly word the Americans utter. They are studying English so they have an excuse, but one of these young Zapotecos tells me of his great ambition: to speak and write faultless French and German! According his own culture, he should aspire to speak to faultless Tont'zil or Miztec, but no, it must be French and German! How long-lived are the lies and delusions of priests and  conquistadors. For those men Europe was the divine city---while the actual paradise of the new world merited only the degradations of gold and slavery; and thus the world these men manifested. Even today the young Zapoteco discounts the rich cultures of his native land, but validates those of fallen Europe.         

     The Doctor was a large man with a massive head, a heraldic chunk of Michelangelo’s marble behind owlish eyes. His teeth were bad; so bad that I had to lean back from the odor. His entire mouth, he said, was being reconstructed and he apologized for his foul breath. When you spoke to him he was garrulous, but if you did begin a conversation there was no stop button in sight and your inquiry about Spanish Grammar would likely wind up in a discussion of bovine encephalitis or the proto-European genitive. 

       In Mexico there are quite a few foreigners whose status is that of dental-mental refugees. They come for relief, and pass months or years obtaining it, sometimes successfully, sometimes with a compromise. You see them eating cheaply at the Loncherias or at Taquerias, hobbling along until the next appointment with El Doctor. It feels as if a long time must pass, and will always pass, until the patient is cured.

        “I’m working on a PHD,” he tells me. The subject, I learn, is language acquisition. But his University is one I have never heard of: “The University of Florida in Pennsylvania", he says. I don’t pursue the anomaly.

          “So what’s the delay with your thesis?” 

       “There are certain regulations. The thesis needs editing. Maybe a writer like you could edit it for me---”  

     “I suppose I could have a look,” I say warily, thinking of money.

     I do have a look, but return his thesis the next time I see him. “I don’t understand such verbosity when simple phrases and sentences are always the best.” I tell him.

    “But that’s what they want,” he replies, darkly complicitous. 

   “I'm headed to the border anyway and don’t have the time to help you. I want to visit the Indians in the mountains on the way home.”

   “Ah!” His large eyes open, then droop. "I’ve been up there myself, with the Mazatecs, with a Curandera. You need to stop by my place before you go. I will give you something.”

           When I arrive at the Doctor’s he proudly shows me his windowless room perched on a rooftop, all for the glorious price of one-hundred dollars a month. The bed, his food and books--- are all crammed in a space that leaves him no room to turn around. I stand as his huge frame slopes on the bed. 

          He holds up a jar filled with what looks like the dried tentacles of a jellyfish. “They’re mushrooms from my Curandera. Here, take her address,” now enlivened, he hands me a card. 

            “Then you’ve attended a mushroom ceremony?”

            “Yeah”

            “How was it?”

            He pauses. "Well…it made me a better person.”

           I am intrigued with his response, but since I have never been interested in psychedelics and have never used them, I ask:   

          “Don’t the Indians keep these things, their traditions, their religion, to themselves?”

        “I suppose some do... at least in part...but if you handle it right…and are serious…” 

          How serious, I wonder, can a tourist be? I somehow doubt that it matters how serious I can be. I can already see long-haired backpackers lined up at the Curandera’s door. But what harm is an adventure? It will be no trouble to pass through Huautla on my way north at Easter, and though I may have to play the part of “hippie backpacker”, perhaps I will learn something. And why, after all, am I not a "hippie backpacker"? 

            The world is how you interpret it.

       “Anyway, why forfeit a chance to learn something if the chance comes along” the Doctor smiles, seeming to read my mind. 

           I nod, but my thoughts are already in the mountains. I can already see the high village, the wooden door, the lady, the impenetrable otherness, perhaps a certain kind of cultural decadence---one well-trampled by those who find an easy conscience or lazy religion in the ingestion of any drug. Even the brilliant Aldous Huxley mistook the potential liberation he experienced for one that could transform the mass the men. If he had lived longer he would have learned that the mass of men are too self-indulgent to be changed by drugs, except for the worse. So why am I even interested in these well-worn paths? There is a reason. The reason is this: following the archetype will rarely satisfy the archetype, but it can sometimes liberate the archetype from itself… 

           I do not express this sentiment to the Doctor. I see myself as along for the ride. I give him fifty pesos for a few mushroom spores, which I will later lose, and thank him for his guidance. I can tell that this large man is always hungry. We shake hands and part.

         “You should come to see me sometime. My family is wealthy. They have a place on Cape Cod, Hyannis.” he says, in an afterthought, from his door. I am not surprised to learn of the wealth. Every intelligent rich person flees their wealth. What better place to come to but Mexico, where the poor are as eternal as the sands of the desert. 

         “I’ve certainly heard of Hyannis.” I say in parting.

         A few days later I see the Doctor in a Loncheria, bent intently over his plate, eating his Comida Corrida with my six-dollar fortune. "Could you stake a fellow American to a meal?" Humphrey Bogart famously intones in the opening scene of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The reprise is here equally charming: adobe pastels frame the Doctor's solitude at his meal under the ample southern sky. If only I were a painter…

          I pass on, toward the bus station. 

        A plastic banner painted with a mushroom is strung above the small station; but it is not necessary for me to hurry, the bus for Huaulta de Jimenez will not leave until the afternoon. 

     The late summer day in Oaxaca is pleasant. I wander aimlessly through the market. Instead of a bus it turns out a van will carry us on the hot, five-hour drive through the mountains. I recall my first trip to Mexico in 1976 when all the major cities were linked by trains. The advantage of trains was the fresh air--even at night---as well as the view over the Sonora Desert---a wild-west-set where men on burros jolted by--- keeping a brief pace with the locomotive. Alas, progress---the regress of man---is now as recursive and infinite as money, therefore there is now talk of bringing back the trains…(as if someone knew why they ever left). Perhaps when we have finished with them for a second time it will be roller-skates, as long as roller-skates make more money than trains...

           We leave Oaxaca on the four-lane highway then bear northeast---climbing through forests of Ocote Pine and giant Sanguaro. Some of these Cactuses are as large as oak trees, their thorny pipes solemn and forbidding as they march up the crests. There are no roads and no villages in this wilderness, and I look in vain for even a Campesino on a burro's back. We are crossing the spine of Sierra Madre del Sur, a needle-thronged emptiness; now we switch back to north along a valley floor. But there is no river---only a stone-strewn wash a half-mile wide. Water, when it does run here--- must flee as quickly as it falls. Only a few white blossoms on a lone Morning Glory Tree relieve the stern march of scorpion and maguey. A terrible beauty is born...

            The city of Techucan in the State of Peubla lies just to our north, but after we pass through groves of Mangoes so near the road that my mouth waters-- we throttle beneath the pink wash of a Cathedral. The town is called Teotitlan de Flores Magon. The van rattles over the cobblestone and begins to ascend a mountain so steep that one has the impression that we have just taken off in an airplane. The effect is multiplied by the fact that each curve in the road has partially collapsed, so that even a minor serve would send us plummeting down a ninety-degree slope. The danger increases as we rise, mile upon mile, then sweep around a hairpin. Here the road is half-collapsed, and even the Indian walkers draped in their loaded blankets stare at us in wonder. We are three miles straight up and perched over a canyon that pitches down a bluff. No one so much as whispers, for this is Mexico, where it is thought unmanly---and even unfeminine---to fear death. The Indians stand in the stoic distances, a baby or their goods hidden within their red ponchos. From their vantage our van is a tilted hulk of frozen faces crunching the few stones between us and eternity. When we tumble to our deaths they will go on walking, and even be able to relish their mute witness. For there is no unacceptable risk in a land where great poverty endures. The people have yet to discover that they are only consumers and not the pawns of Gods. In this world death is not an insurance policy, but a potential relief from the trials of life.

         But we are over...now uselessly safe again...

       Great tablets of upland inscribed with the fine lettering of delicate villages, as if strewn by an author in some primeval rage, rise scattered on the furrowed heights. Between these massifs the land sweeps down in barrancas worthy of Dante. We jolt upwards, finally obtaining the forest along the crest. Now we are above the cracked tableland, where cones of long-extinct volcanoes are made distinct by greenish or magenta shrouds. A moist forest of cedar, juniper and pine wraps the roof-trees, penciling the bulbs of peaks with an obscure light. One mountain is shaped a like a toadstool, others like chips of fallen flint. The light is indistinct, the air cool, the forest waving and moist. My eyes are taunted. The Gods seem not far. 

       As we loop along the ridges Indians appear on foot here or there, some with bent-backs, others bearing fardels of wood; some merely walking. We are in the quiet of the Indian country. The van slows for children herding sheep. They look up at us as from a very great distance and hold us in that great distance. Wooden chapelets enclosing statuettes of the Virgin appear at the curves in the road, guarding the purity of each dripping spring. At dusk, we arrive at Huaulta, a town spread along a ridge up which we lumber. The mountain village is nearly shuddered, only one or two fruit-sellers are still open. 

        I am aware of being high in the mountains in a remote village in a vast landscape and unknown landscape. Yet something feels familiar. There are few pedestrians on the streets at this hour. I decide to seek out at once the house of the Curandera.

      While looking for the right street a woman carrying a platter of donuts on her head and followed by some children approaches me. "Hongos, Queire Hongos?" she asks. I nod my head, not because I want her mushrooms but because I am here to learn all that I can about this myth. It is the myth is what interests me, not the truth; but to understand the myth you must first penetrate the truth. So I nod my head and smile.

     "But I am looking for this Curandera", I say, showing her the card. 

      "Pero jo soy una Curandera" she entreats. 

      "Ah si?" I play dumb.

      "Come to our house, it is just up the street," 

     Amused by her smile and by the smiles of the thrilled children I accompany them. By way of steep-steps we arrive at her home of plain concrete blocks and tin roof. The entire family greets me with lavish formality and the eldest son as well as the Grandfather insist I sit down. Through the window the lights of the village twinkle over the hills. A girl with a baby in her arms offers me coffee, which I refuse, but which is brought anyway. Now we are all seated and comfortable. There is only one problem: We have no common tongue! A form of interesting mind-reading must suffice. Eyes glance at glancing eyes; laughter answers, and thoughts grow pensive. The theme of the encounter is already becoming clear: money. This family believes that they have caught a live fish, and that this fish does, or ought to 'queire hongos'. The Grandfather gets up from his seat and reaches a jelly-jar of mushrooms from the shelf. He places it firmly on the table and says earnestly: "Viente Mil Pesos." Now we are down to business. I can tell that he wishes me to know has performed hard work to obtain these specimens and that they are well worth my money. This business-like dealing seems to represent to what extent a once religious ceremony has been debased. But perhaps it has not been debased...

      "But I have the address of a Curandera", I say, "One to whom I have been referred," Silence. Uncomfortable stares. A brooding resentment gathering in the room.

    "Viente Mil Pesos" the grandfather affirms, holding up the jar. 

    "But I am a Curandera" the woman repeats with a wounded look. 

   "We have a place for you Mr., very nice, in the basement," the son is as earnest as a car-salesman. Now he tries his English: "Mushrooms Mr., for you a very good price." His words are clear enough, but his tone verges on threat. I feel cornered by a lawyer who insists that I sign a paper. The terrible and false gravitas of profit-making has always made me mad. It is this I have come to Latin America to escape...There is an unnatural silence. I wonder if the son, with those ominous dips of his head, may try to prevent me from leaving. That would be a great matter over so little money, but I know how quickly storms come up in the desert and how all the water falls into deep wells or runs away to the sea.

      “The spiritual cannot be sold like an aspirin” I suddenly say. They all look startled. I use the moment of their surprise to rise; I thank my hosts but go quickly out the door. The fact that they have not understood my last remark seems to me to a strange sort of justice, but one without closure…

    "I had a friend once like you, a fellow Priest, who didn't think the church was real enough. He intended to move among the people themselves and to share their suffering. He put on his cassock and marched among the poor throughout Latin America. He was murdered down there, moving among the poorest of the poor, we never could find out how or why...probably for nothing...down in Brazil," said Father Robert.

    “Was his name Jesus?”

   “Come to the Church. I have a room where you can stay for the night. You can make Oaxaca in the morning---"

   “Alright"

   Beyond Tenhautepec, only one-hundred kilometers from Oaxaca, the locales ran out. There were no more buses. Frustrated, I marched the foot-deep dust and even stuck out my thumb, determined to coax a ride rather than waste another night on the road. An American priest, the father of the local Parish, picked me up. This was Father Robert--- who had for served for many years in this isolated part of the State of Oaxaca.

     Father Robert brought me to his Parish in the middle of the village of Tequistilan, just off the main road to Oaxaca. As he prepared a meal for me I told him about the poor I had seen in Guatemala.

     "Surely there can be no claim that life is sacred, as the Church teaches, if----just because of the lack of contraception, children are born ---on purpose by their parents--- only to spend their childhood, and possibly their whole lives, as beggars. The shoe-shine boys, four and five years old--- in the market at Chechenastenago begged me all day to buy them shoes...all day. It was profoundly disturbing..."

     Father Robert looks at me severely. "Life is sacred," he says.

    "Life may be sacred, but such lives are degraded, therefore they do not achieve their sacredness, their sacred potential." I answer.

    "All life is sacred," Father Robert repeats.

   “No, you only mean that life is sacred which is created by random sex for the purpose of economic utility…”

    Father Robert shakes his head. He tells me how the drug-runners tried to murder his Father Superior at another parish deep in the mountains because that priest had damned the druggistas from the pulpit. (Anathema pronounced from the pulpit still has power in Mexico.) I know where this is leading, which is nowhere. But my heart bitterly reproves the idea that the mere use of contraceptive is somehow an enemy of the sacred…as if God were too dumb to manage human freedom… I think of the words of Flores Magon: Authority and Clergy are forces which both need and oppress the poor…

    The Father looks vexed but again asserts that 'life' (I do not know how he defines the term) is always "sacred", just as the church insists. He then departs to hold afternoon Mass. When he returns he makes the two of us dinner. When we are seated he seems to take his revenge. He looks up at me and says:

       "Why don't you offer the prayer?"

       Being an uncultured person, in other words a Protestant, and unfamiliar with the formal rituals of the Roman Church, I am now in the position of my Zapotec friend who feels he must learn German because he believes he lacks the sacramental power of European words. This inculcated sense of being a parochial (what irony!) is the key to all conquests, material and spiritual, for natural man must be made to believe himself inferior. So I bend my head and say:

    "Thank you Lord for this food and present company...for the fellowship and free exchange of different views. Amen."

      What is there about the act of praying in public that to my mind is so unnatural? Prayer purports to be a manifestation of inner life, but exhibits itself as an outer act. This I find false and repellant, since at it is at such variance with nature and the heart. Here what is purest and most private is turned into collective affectation for social reward. Power, sexual drama, money, these too are quite often the confusions of outer things with inner things, a hideous confusion, sometimes poison.

         The next morning the Reverend drops me on the highway by a bus stop. Father Robert is a 'good' man, but his goodness is an act of will, not the spontaneous promptings of a free heart. Is the heart of man by nature deformed, or does it become so only in society? For me the latter, for him the former.

            Having been delivered, only hours before, from the dangers of the highway by religion and generosity, I am now, perhaps not incidentally, delivered to two murderers who causally approach me on the deserted highway. The short man is pushing a wheelbarrow of melons, the other, a lanky man, has a machete in his belt.

           The fruit-seller first offers me a slice of melon for which I thank him. After a few minutes he says, "I think you carry the Mastercard, no?" From this point forward I can read his mind. In his dull eyes I can see my own shallow grave in the surrounding desert. I know this instantly and clearly. Yet he is still thinking..."His wife," I hear him think "...his wife...she will pursue...she will pursue..." His thoughts are more easily read than those of a hungry dog...

       We make small talk. Using a sharp knife the thick-set man cuts and offers me more melon, which I refuse. He then asks me if he can "try on" my backpack. Before I can answer he has swung it onto his shoulders. This leaves my other bag vulnerable to the tall man who is standing just next to me, his hand resting on his machete.

       When the fat man speaks of the humiliation of Mexico by the United States in 1847 I am aware that have received the final warning. I will bolt from them toward the town in the next few seconds and thus escape their blows. But before this can occur I think a thought that I make freely available to both of them: "Yes, my body you can easily enough conceal in the rocky desert...but my wife..."

    The tall man's hand clasps his machete...but there is an explosion of dust as the locale for Oaxaca barrels around the bend and comes to a halt. I use the moment of surprise to pry my bag from the short man's back and to grab the other bag from the off the ground--- then dash into the shelter of the many-eyed windows.

      Shoes, Senor, por favor, para Zapatos, para l'Escuela, por favor Senor por Favor!" begged the Mayan shoe-shine boy. All morning the he trails me through the market in Chechenastenago, Guatemala. He is relentless, and even works up tears. Finally I take him to the shoe-stand and address the vendor. "This boy needs shoes. Please give him a free pair so that he can go to school. This is your country and your community and you are responsible for your children, not visitors from other countries."

    The vendor seems to understand my words and gives me a satiric, dumbfounded leer; one which says that he understands that I have seen through the ruse. But have I? I can nevertheless tell that the day he will give away a pair of shoes to an Indian scamp will be The Day of the Dead, even if giving them away costs him nothing.

     "Tell me, is the poverty here real?" I ask my Danish friend as we sit drinking hot Atole de Elote a corn beverage served by the smiling Indians in the marketplace. It is a chilly night in the Mayan highlands but the hot corn produces a contented kick.

     "I've been coming here since the nineteen-seventies and it hasn't changed much. We've tried so many times to do things for the Indians, build schools and homes and all the rest---but the government always stands in the way...then you also have to deal too with the Indian elders, it's complex mix of indigenous pride, government patronizing...local politics...but plenty of missionaries still come, so the work goes on..."

      I note that the evangelical churches like as The Assembly of God have made deep in-roads among the Maya. Never expect to obtain God or money without paying for the ride with your native culture... I think, but say nothing...

        "What about the children?" 

        "It's their parents who send them to work---" he says.

      "But it is sheer cruelty. It is unnatural to think of one's children as mere means from which to squeeze a few centavos..."

         For this my friend has no answer. The Samaritans I ask also stare into space. They tell me they are trying to install efficient wood-stoves in the Indian houses but that the Indians are attached to open fires. They cannot speak for the Indians because no one can speak for the Indian except the Indian herself, and she is not very inclined to words...

        So here they are again, los Indigenas, in the high Sierra of Guatemala, still resisting, not money, but rather a certain kind of thinking which the white man always brings in his wake, a regime of the efficacious which may not be the regime of the significant. It is not that they despise washing machines or radios but that they sometimes want to trudge against the wind as they bear their embroidery to market. They simply wish to remain nature's intermediary, not its conqueror. And who can blame them? Only a fool tries to try to improve on nature. Had I bought the boy shoes "for school" he would simply have sold them and given the money to his parents, his task-masters, then returned to the market the next day with his shoe-shine box...Here the poverty is generated by context and history not merely by an arbitrary lack of money...

         In other words: we have entered Indian Time...which is not our own.

           I knock on the Curandera's door. 

        A pleasant, formal gentlemen answers. He is the husband of the Senora Curandera. He asks me to be seated. Would I like to spend the night?

          "No, I do not wish to trouble you."

          "We receive many guests."

         "No, it will not be necessary. I have come with a reference from Senor ------ the Doctor of Linguistics."

         "Ah yes" he looks down at the card that I hand him. "You have come to the right place..."

        With these words I sense that he is a businessman, for my poor Spanish seems to vex him. He swallows hard each time I speak.

     At last the Senora appears. She is dressed in a black embroidered hupile, a shift worn by the Mazateca, and over this she wears a shaw. Her long black hair is tied in a bun. She escorts me to a room full of statuettes, religious post-cards, rosary-beads, icons of all descriptions, crosses, painted angels, and jewelry, all tainted by the wax drippings of candles. I am horrified by the place and by the senseless clutter. This is clearly the Salle de Experience. I am repelled to even imagine what sort of visions go on in this bus-stop.

           "Or...if you prefer, for seventy pesos, I have a small cabin up the mountain for an overnight stay..."

             "No, no, I don't need anything."

         She looks at me as if to ascertain. When she has settled her mind she looks away. She busies herself in the kitchen while I return to my seat.

            “You must address my wife with "Por Favor Senora C” and “Thank-you Senora C,” says her husband severely. 

            I bring out the jar of jelly that I have purchased and set it on the table. La Senora Cuandera brings out a cloth bundle and carefully un-wraps it. She takes the mushrooms out of the cloth and lays them on a piece of brown paper.

             "These are fresh" she says.

           When she has set eight raveled mushrooms before me she briefly bows her head over the mass as her hands form a crucifix. After a moment she turns away. 

          Slowly, I begin to place the mushrooms in the jar of jelly.  

       Informed in advance I place two hundred pesos on the table. She takes the money as her husband watches. Our business is done.

                "Would you like coffee and a tortilla?" she asks.

                "That would be fine."

           We eat mostly in awkward silence, broken only by my faltering Spanish and English, for the words of either language seem to cut at her glowering husband.

            I rise in silence and thank the Senora Cuandera. The Senor accompanies  me to the door.

           The terror over, I walk up the street, turn the corner and climb the hill. It is not late but I am relieved to be away from all humanity. Dogs bark at me, a strange figure skirting in the dark, but I am pleased, terribly pleased to be alone. Once out of Haualta I follow a trail along the mountain, discovering my true height, for a series of villages twinkle beneath me from the valley floor. 

      A grove of pines here faces the valley. Beneath the trees is a bed of soft needles on which I rest. I hold up the jar of jelly and think what a silly purchase I have made. I have only made it because of my ostensible purpose, which is not my real purpose, for I have never been interested in hallucinogenic drugs, natural or refined. But what is my real purpose? It must be this calm night...this grove of pines so quiet and sweet...this infinitesimally fine breeze just stirring over my face...just enough to rake the coals in one's mind, but not enough to disturb the soul...

             Below me, to the left, is a chapel, hidden by pines. I slip my curled sleeping bag behind my back. There are stars in the sky; it will not rain. I feel no loneliness in this spot. I am perfectly content, perfectly secure.

              For a while I rest, staring into the velvet night. The radiance behind the mountain tells me that the moon lies just behind, and is rising. I doze for a time, then wake.

                  The suave night is illumined.

               A large moon stands above the peaks. Our satellite is an immense plate gliding over the cliff, throwing beams onto the forest floor, peeling away the darkness of the coves.

        "Yes, my body you can easily enough conceal in the desert...but my wife, my wife...will pursue you across the earth, even into the very depths of darkness."

       And so she rises, looking down with Olympian indifference.

        For a while I stand to watch her aureole flood the enfolded valleys, the hidden heights revealing spur on spur, clef on clef. The aromatic air is subtle to the tongue; it excites memory and the complexities of time-lost. I stand long, marking the moment. My way is this way, and this time and place are mine; and best, they appear to be mine alone, for no one passes on the road below as the benign lunar face delicately pricked by meteorites overrides me.

         Does man require the help of a drug to know this, to see this moon; to exist so fatally bound to nature as I at this moment feel? Surely not. What is necessary is only that Zarathustra step out of his cave and abandon, for a time, the sound of human voices; that he draw a single breath as I now do, of the keen-tanged wind...that breeze, not yours, not mine, but the color of fate...

         So I sit on the bed of soft needles, as content as Jack Burns in Edward Abbey's The Brave Cowboy--- had he and his horse Whiskey found that bed of pine-needles and followed them all the way to Mexico.

           The sliding moon pushes me to earth.

      Chapter the last: the mystery of now: I sleep and am reborn.

       The Massif of San Antonio from Hualta, the village of Santa Cruz on the far upper right

!URLICHT!

(PRIMAL LIGHT)

      'Urlicht' is one of the songs in the Des Knabenwunderhorn, the collection of the poems of wayfarers set to music by Gustav Mahler. The lyrics of one this poem underwrite the fourth movement of Mahler's Second Symphony. Here  the mood is mystic, awestruck, full of longing. The wanderer looks beyond the woes of the world to assert a claim on some portion of heaven. The lyrics sing:

Then I came upon a broad way

But an angel wished to send me away

I did not let him send me away,

For I am from God and to God will return

Believe what you have done,

 (O Believe that you were not born in vain.

For you have been sown to bloom again.)

     The moon is gone. The clean crowns of firs toss on the crests. A massif stands between me and the Atlantic Ocean. Snow-capped Orizaba (memorable to me from thirty years ago is hidden behind Patalpa Gorge). The fabulous megalith of the Gods, St Antonio, like an abandoned book, or the runway of a giants, the bridge to a lost world, the mystery of earth's open door---stands in the light. Where does this doorway lead?

      (Post-horns summoning)

     Come to know the vast world, so that you may discard illusion; so  that, like my Zapoteco, you may learn to tremble before Europe, the grand tableau buried in yourself. These alp-like mountains entice me as once did the Alps. But this is Mexico, not Europe. Yet are not the two lands are forever linked by forced their marriage?

    (The fateful summons of the horns)

        Yes I will go. I will walk down this canyon to the sea, hold my hand aloft to Cortez and turn back his fleet...For I am in a spell for that single tree standing on the mountain's peak; a fervor only some rash undertaking or ordered madness can answer. I want to stand under that tree. I want to stand over the risen wilderness and peer into the depths.

       I loiter and reconnoiter. Yes, I will go. I will walk on foot down this valley to the sea. The deep colors, shapes, the villages spread along the valley or perched on the crests, the distances, all these enchant me. I am in the spell of the Wunderhorn. My path must first strike, yes, though that Italian-like pueblo whose orange church I can clearly see the morning light. From there I must follow the ridge, and there, bending flush over the valley, even if only a cow-path or rocky marge. I prepare my pack yet I loiter, relishing the moment of vision, this sudden adhesion to a place, towards a goal.

                Moving slowly, I walk down the slope. I proceed through the pines and stand near the chapel. I feel a strange link to this spot, as if I knew it in some other life. After a moment of reflection I am empowered to go.  I march down the slope and onto the narrow road. At the bottom of the slope is a well in the shade of great trees where the Indians are gathering water. I pause, aware that for the natives this is a private ritual and that I am an outsider. I avert my eyes from them as I fill my container; then move on into the day...

           There is school up ahead. I can see a crowd of young people approaching. Having left what appears to be a basketball court they are streaming up the hill jeering, but I can't see, until I get nearer, what the commotion is all about. It seems that a team must have won a round of basketball, but no, now I can see the passing parade. Young boys and men are jeering a man dragging a cross made of saplings up the road.

             I stand reverently aside as the pageant passes, receiving knowing glances especially from the older men. Perhaps they understand that Protestant culture cannot comprehend these spectacles of visceral faith. I remember the Easter I was in Guanajuato, in 1989, when the flagellants flailing their own backs passed down main street…on a float above rode Jesus on the cross and Mary at his feet. The entire procession lumbered like a medieval sinkhole suddenly thrown-open to modernity. In Spain the Middle Ages never died, and in Mexico the Enlightenment never happened in spite of Inez de la Cruz. The cobwebs of the church remain. Now Christ passes me again, mocked by the crowd, who harass him up the road. I am left in silence wondering not what it means, but what it means to them. I do not think that I can know...to me nature appears vibrant and green, and the green never jeers...I think that it would sooner die...

      A boy on a bicycle appears and accompanies me, smiling. I  ask him where the road goes and he points, grinning, to the blue distances of the sky.

        "Santa Cruz" he says at last. For a long while he rides with me in happy silence. I pat his shoulder, thank him, and say good-bye.

      The Lacandon Indians of Chiapas refer to all people with words that translate: "I am another like you". Perhaps we could all use more of that word.

       The road to Santa Cruz passes among dry hills, rough with dust and rock. The sole of one of my tennis shoes has had enough: it flaps like the useless tongue of a dying snake. After a while I can bear no more. I take sandals out of my pack and put them on. My tennis shoes I wedge into the crevice of the cliff, where I imagine some poor Campescino will find and repair them, forever recalling the spot by erecting there a statue to: The Virgin of the Shoes.

      It is just past midday when I climb the final hill to the village of Santa Cruz. There is scarce shade and it is hot as I pause beneath a tree. Up the road comes a Campescino walking slowly, for he has a single massive slab of wood across his shoulders and is dressed in a smock. At first I have the impression that his is necessary labor, but as he passes me, eyes averted, I become aware of another dimension to his exertions. Yet I am not sure. It is four days until Easter and in the wilderness of Mexico time and Christian suffering are one. This is perhaps a ritual hierophany, a recreation and bonding with the sacred. At the same time even necessary labor during this week could take on this quality, as it frequently does throughout Mexico. I wonder about this as I reach the tiny village of Santa Cruz, tucked in the forest high over the Patalpa Gorge.

              Here there is a single store where I buy some fruit, a clinic, and a shaded well. With my fruit I sit down under the tree above the well-pump. In this place I can feel the out-lying and yet remoter life of these inaccessible mountains. This life is confirmed for me as I watch a man and his son approach the well leading two burros burdened by empty water barrels. The sun splays on their tan faces as the father and the boy go about the slow work of filling six of these containers from the well-head. One by one they then sling them onto the donkeys' unresisting backs. The sun is blinding me as it glances off a halo formed where the white splurge of water enters the world. I sit joyous and content, watching the ritual. Sun and water, son and father, and now the boy looking up at me, cheered by the stranger, though his father knows better, and pays me no mind...the boy is bright-toothed and tan, thankful like me, for life, for simple life and water in this remote land. They both work swiftly, the son nearly as strong as his father but in no way daunted. I imagine their tidy home not too far away. I see it as simple but solid. They have chores to do, and they will slowly drink this cool, clean water in their house.

     I wish I could see their high home...but still I watch the new strength in the boy's arms, proud of his youth as he lifts the barrels high onto the steady beasts. So much wealth is held in these acts, the smile of water and sun, and we forget what life be without these gifts.

     So much slow beauty on earth, but so little time to savor it. The father and son are loaded, their burros need no word and move without complaint out of the rainbow and the shade, clopping up the slope.

    I wrangle my back onto my shoulders just as a young lady crosses my path on the cobblestones. She is the nurse who runs the government clinic and she speaks to me in English, asking me where I am going. When I tell her she asks me to come across the street with her to the Clinic. We enter the building and sit down in her office. I tell her some of my story.

    “So you're doing the mushroom experience” she levels her eyes at me.

    “Not really, I just like hiking.”

  “Here take these,” she hands me some packets. "They're electrolyte and mineral packets. You risk dehydration in the mountains." I thank her and later find that the minerals help.

    "You know that the hongos, they require abstention from all sex for a least four days before injestion," she raises her dark lashes, evidently proud of being a scientist among the Indians.

                "Yes, I know."

                 I tell her the direction of my walk.

            "You can't get there from here, she says, "You can't get there from here."

               I am sure, however, that I can get there from here. We shake hands and she walks me to the door. It has been a Mexico-City appointment in the lost land of the Mazatecs.

    I stride around the hill and continue my journey, toward that place unobtainable from where I am. Soon I am following a rocky path. The way passes through pastures then descends. In the distance, San Antonio, my mystic goal, looms, its single tree still fixed on my gaze. 

     Beneath me, on the valley floor, is the village of San Antonio Eloxochitlan de Flores Magon. Yes, once again we meet the name: Flores Magon; so many schools, streets and villages across Mexico are named after this mysterious Flores Magon...But who was he, this Flores Magon? Simply put, he was the man who wrote these words:

    "Not a prison, not a courthouse, not a capitol building will offend the sweet and tranquil beauty of the city of peace. Its wondrous vernacular is full of words capable of expressing the subtlest and most elusive emotions: here there are no words for master, slave, charity, pity, authority or obedience. Here the people have found the way to take pleasure in work by suppressing the parasites and by being the owners and workers at the same time. Some of them are going to work, some to merry-making; but all of their faces beam with the same radiant confidence; for since the end of the reign of Authority, Capital and Clergy, work and play are synonymous."

     In other words Flores Magon was Anarchist and an enemy of the state. But is an enemy of the state an enemy of the people? Not to the people of Mexico, who still  honor his name. The words quoted above were written in 1915. By 1920 Flores Magon was in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas for thought crime. It was there in 1922, he died, strangled by a guard. Thought crime, in those days, as in ours, is covered under various laws. In Magon's time it was upheld by something called the “Neutrality Law”; a law written by the U.S.government, but never enforced or obeyed by that government against itself,  only drawn out on occasions in order to quash dissent.  

           As you might expect Flores Magon was an Indian. His father was a full-blood Zapotec, and his mother part Mazatec. So I am also walking by the birthplace and village of the one of the great anarchists of the world...

           The road descends. The country grows stony, not good for for much but grazing goats, or small plots of coffee or corn. I pass through a tiny village and the doorways greet me with smiles. Though Chitcholta is still many kilometers ahead, I can see it, set like an Italian hill-town on the horizon.

          It is growing dark. The stark ridges either side of the canyon shift to purple, the thalo and blue mien of the San Antonio's slab and the tree at its summit are no longer ahead but parallel with me. I am walking at a stroll when I pass an Indian sitting on the stone wall before his house. He greets me with a hardy ‘Buenas Noches’. I answer, and stop to talk.

            I feel immediately at ease in the company of this Indian, whose smile and ready laughter would disarm the devil. We talk of something, of nothing, mangling any language within our reach. Yet we understand. Hongos, hongos, this word generates much laughter. Adolfo tells me about a Swiss lady who came to the Mazatecs to learn the wisdom of the mushrooms. “She ran up and down the road when she took one,” he says, laughing heartily. I see the scene so clearly through Adolfo’s description, and its absurdity is so clear that I am beaming.

           “So this is your land?” I ask.

           “Yes, yes” Adolfo smiles without pride.

           I look around and see only a one room concrete block house and outcrops of white rock. I can’t imagine if he farms, but it could hardly be here. Perhaps he does not farm but rather tells stories to foreigners…

           It is dark. I lift my bag to go.

          “But you must stay here” he says.

          “But it is too rocky, there is no place for a tent.”

        “You must stay inside my house with my family. Come meet my wife and children.”

        We walk toward the house but then take a path downward where there is large hut of sticks. Entering the hut I shake hands with Adolfo’s father, a lean elderly man, who greets me formally. His mother is standing by an open fire-stove that licks upwards from beneath a metal slab. She too smiles warmly. I am offered a chair like a formal guest. It is smoky here but comfortable. Adolfo’s wife, Marta, comes in, a broad cheerful face bearing in her wake the glowing faces of the children---Eric and Mara. Everyone smiles and then smiles some more. Well now…everyone thinks, here we all are and no real language but gentle laughter…but it turns out that the world could use more of the language of gentle laughter: for without words we are better attuned to psychological nuance, not confined by abstractions.

         Everyone smiles again, lowly murmuring. Adolfo speaks for me--- at least as far as he has anything to say---while I sit reflecting.

         It has been a long day’s journey and I prepare my sleeping bag on the floor of Adolfo’s house. Before we all go to bed (the children have no beds but sleep with their parents) I show the children my paintings by the light of a dim bulb connected to battery. They are mightily moved, seeing a world entirely new to them.

         In the morning, as I am walking up the road, a young man approaches me and asks me would I like to see some ‘plants’? I follow him off the road and up a hill. Here he shows me plants several feet tall, with square stems and white or purple flowers. These, I think, are Maria Pastora, also supposed to be a hallucinogen. 
     After buying Mangoes at a window just up the road I return to talk with Adolfo. After coffee he has begun his day’s work: striking a large stone with a small hammer, a stone that is but the tip of a massive boulder under the ground.  I tell him what he already knows, that it is futile, and that he will not have arable land on this plot even with dynamite.

         “We considered dynamite” he says stoically, “but it would probably destroy my house.”

         Adolfo seems to accept things as they are. He shows me where I can bathe so that I can accompany the family to an Easter gathering. We walk down the road to a neighbor’s where a table is spread with chips and homemade Salsa.

        Here the gathered women busy themselves with communal glances. The little girls trail the trellises of their Cinderella-dresses through the mud, while the little boys chase one another around the yard. The old men sit on hard chairs senselessly smiling. Here too is a sprinkle of people from Mexico City, for the Mazatec wilderness is near enough the city to attract weekend refugees from the urban madness.

       Benjamin Feinberg, the anthropologist who has lived most recently among the Mazatecs, writes of a certain “hillbilly” quality to the outside of their culture. This is an interesting choice of words for we know that “hillbillies” can, in reality, be very subtle and profound thinkers. The hillbilly of yesteryear was mocked by the Cartoon figure of Lil’Abner, but today the hillbilly is a worldly artist like the late Doc Watson. “Most of contemporary life”, Feinberg writes in The Devil’s Book of Culture,“is presented as a-cultural; for the 'real' culture must be represented as belonging to the past, something which isn’t quite dead but exists in scraps and traces.”

     I don't know about the “scraps and traces” for I would be unable to distinguish these from something “meaningful”, but perhaps for the Mazatecs, as for me---the world is simply how you see it.

        Back at Aldofo’s, at dusk, we swing in hammocks and relax. Adolfo brings me a tea made from Semilla de Flores, Morning Glory seeds, which he says is a hallucinogen. As the moon rises I slowly drink the tea. I experience no effect whatsoever.

         In the moonlight I study the ridge of the mountain I want to climb. From here we are too low and the summit is not visible, but I am determined to make the climb.

        “Tomorrow is Good Friday. I think that I will climb Mt. San Antonio,” I tell Adolfo.

        “It is good that you go tomorrow. There is a festival in San Antonio village tomorrow,” he says.

        “That’s lucky.”

        “You know, when I was a boy there used to be snow on these mountains in the dry season. I remember seeing ice on their tops…now there is nothing…” he says. There is a hint of downcast and foreboding in his voice as he swings his hammock. I believe that he knows the reason there is no more ice, but I am not sure…perhaps it would cause him pain to know the truth, so I say nothing.

        The next day, after saying goodbye to the family, who wave from the doorway, I walk back up the valley, for there is only one bridge over the deep canyon that separates me from the uplands.

          The forest is full on the higher slopes and down near the river it is lush, but between them, in the middle-ground, are bare stems of cactus and splays of maguey. At the bridge is an idyllic waterfall, one said to have been the haunt of the los jipitecs, the hippies. In the Sixties this was the supposed hang-out of John Lennon and Bob Dylan---both devotees of the famous Curandera Maria Sabina. For her crime of welcoming these outsiders Maria Sabina was ostracized, her home burnt, and her son killed. I cannot attest to the accuracy of these stories; but if they are true then this doubles the irony that in the Sierra Mazateca today anyone will offer to sell you mushrooms and be your healer. Can any culture really be “sold out” if it is still alive in the first place? And if that culture is not robust, then how could it be defensive? Cannot strangers, at least in theory, sometimes become conduits for it? Here we trapped by Feinberg’s dilemma. Is any culture ever static?

       I hike up and down, passing small plots, and am soon in sight of the village of San Antonio. A man on horseback with the impervious look of a Spanish Overlord prances by, his horse’s hooves clattering with machismo…On a farm to my right two young men in white shirts and loose pantaloons are breaking ground using a wooden plow tied to a cow. The soil does not yield easily to their efforts. As I pass them I can see that the youngest of the two is doing this work perfectly barefooted…I am certain that in work like this no one who owned a pair of shoes would fail to use them if they had them…my mind wanders back to the Mayan boy in the market. Did I wrong him? I do not know. I only know that as I watch these young plowmen the centuries fall away…

       The village of San Antonio is dominated by its church. The market is set beneath. Here the Indians have laid out their fruit and wares.

         I approach a woman who is selling what looks like white rocks.

        “What do you have here?”

        She tells me that it is called…Gell---- something, but I can’t make out the other syllable. “It is added to flour---” she says. Can this be true? Do the Indians in Sierra Mazateca add rock to their bread? I do not learn.

          I turn from the market and gaze up at the mountain. I still have quite a climb ahead.

          Crossing a mountain stream I strike upward. After three hours’ climb I am nearing the summit. Instead of the runway which it appeared to be from Huaulta, it is here two ridges, the farthest being the highest. Both slopes are sheep or cattle pastures. Approaching the summit the forest is broken into wet glades where water has scoured stony dells full of ferns and flowers. I pause at one of these to marvel at all the species. It is clear that water passes through this green rock; for there are no streams flowing down except those which seem to rise at the village. Here is a veritable water factory. Skipping around the culverts I finally spot my tree, now only a few hundred feet ahead. The walk takes me around a cliff from where I can see Adolfo’s house and the whole of the country. The view reminds me of the Swiss Alps. Now I can see Chichotla, and fifteen miles back to Huaulta, where my hike began. As I approach the summit I pass a man using a machete on small trees. He never looks up at me. This is the way it is in the Indian Country.

          The Indians just sat there before the plate-glass windows, with beautifully woven baskets for sale, but without buyers, in front of a gas-station convenience store by the highway. The store was brand new and the young clerk had on a uniform and a badge you might have found on a gas-pumper in North America in the year 1950. Here was every kind of candy bar sold in the United States, with coffee, specialty teas and double Cappuccinos on sale from bright and silver machines. Inside this gas station the year was 2012; but as you passed out the glass door the year became 1212 or even 2012 BC. The faces of Indians were averted masks. They did not move. They slept and lived on the spot where they sold, if they sold at all…for the police did not remove them, nor did the modern gas station. They looked like space-aliens caught in a strange symbiosis, their faces mirrored by the reflecting glass through which they peered, mesmerized by the corporate aura of the fast money within; while remaining in  the world of their slow money (by artistry and craft) without; yet withering under the neon glare. The scene burned itself onto my eyes: one world defiant and enduring, proud but beleaguered; the other alien, imposed, ephemeral; but just because all powerful---willing to accommodate the natives in order to avoid the overt statement of removing them; while ‘removing’ them nonetheless. So here the two contestants rest in their standoff, neither willing to concede their identity in the ancient duel…both actors guiltily frozen in statuesque and mutual amaze…

           I stand on the summit. My tree is just a few steps beneath me. The cliffs below me plunge perhaps half-mile down, then another mile and a half through forest down to the River. I think mountain-climbers sometimes ask: “Did you summit?” or “How many have you summited?” The words ring with the detachment of a score-keeper or the bravado of sexual innuendo.

            Here the view is superb. All the Sierra Mazateca is before me. I stand long and look in all directions. I am satisfied to sit at the base of the lone tree that I have spied from such a great distance.

             The sun begins to set. The Campescino disappears. I set up my tent for the night, but do not break my fast. At dusk, this Good Friday, a cloud enshrouds me. Now I am alone and hungry, having fasted four days.

             When it is dark I lift the jar of mushrooms. Briefly, I consider throwing them over the cliff. I have never been interested in hallucinogens.

         There will be no stars tonight. I take up the jar and slowly swallow all the mushrooms.

      I do not have visions. I do not see mankind on the rack of Samsara. I do not ascend the heavenly mountain, nor hear the mystic chorus. I do not believe in drugs so drugs contrive not to believe in me. I am tired and fall asleep. My diary entry for Good Friday is only five words: “It all comes to nothing.”

Scherzo

HEREAUSFAHREN

WILD, DRIVEN

       Here, after the yearning prayer of Urlicht, the Orchestra attacks with a furious crescendo and an apocalyptic fury, scaling upwards from hell to life’s middle-ground…the telos  exorcizing the word… destiny now has the upper hand…In Mahler's words "The earth quakes but there is no judgement, no sinners and no just. None is great, none is small. There is no punishment and no reward". In a late letter to his wife he writes: “Caught up in barren stretches of existence and unfulfilled longing, a ceaseless struggle defines the life of the few; and the works of such lives are ephemeral and mortal; but what an individual makes of himself, what through striving and longing he becomes, this is what lasts.”

       In the morning I leap up, gather my belongings, and quickly start down the mountain. On a new path I take a wrong turn that brings me to the wattle huts of Indians whose dogs go wild. I correct my course and in two hours I am in San Antonio. In three more I am at the bridge; an hour after that I am at Adolfo’s house.

       Our leave-taking is formal. I shake hands with his parents, briefly laugh, and pat the children’s heads.

      “Do you have anything to leave with me?” he asks. 

      “What would you like me to leave” 

      “Perhaps you could leave your tent?”

    “But then I would suffer from mosquitoes on the way home.”

      “Yes, that is true. Is there nothing else? I was thinking that if you plan to return someday you could give me something.”

      I look into his dark face. I do not think it likely that I will return.

      “I will send you something from the USA” I say. I write out my address and give it to him. I ask for his own. He writes it down but gives no street or number, only his name and village.

         “But this will not reach you” I say.

         Adolfo offers nothing more. He appears resigned.

         I wave goodbye, and wave again as they all stand in the road to see me off. I go round the bend and see them no more. I feel sorry but also determined to fly. Why? Propelled by what? I feel driven by some punishing fury.

         At Chichotla I pause for some food, then continue the climb. The road levels at last. Blue cumulus rise in the distance. I cannot know where I am. The end of the mountains is in sight, but I might yet face days hiking out of them. When the road forks, I go fatally left, taking the northeast path, which is my direction, but the harder trail, for it will force me down the canyon and up the other side, though I do not know this at the time. All I know is that I am walking east, toward the Atlantic Ocean, through the last of the Mazatec heights…

           Only after I have descended too far down the canyon to return do I realize my mistake. I have unwittingly committed myself to traversing the canyon. Yet parts of the forest are spectacular. Here are two-hundred feet Ceiba trees garlanded with vines towering above Bromeleids and Cerimans. Lost in this primeval wood I feel one with those explorers who have over-reached and paid for their enthusiasm with doom; yet I find myself, as darkness falls, standing in the wilderness near a tin-shed used by a farmer to dry wood. A steady rain begins to fall. The open wood-shed will provide me a dry spot for the night. Exhausted by the day’s exertions I climb into my sleeping bag, adjust my pack for a pillow, and fall fast asleep. 

Auferstehen (Resurrection)

             I knew, many years ago, a Dutch boy who died at twenty-five of a rare cancer. He had completed his education and was engaged to be married when I last heard from him. The next thing I heard, from a friend of his, was that he was on his death-bed. A promising life was ending just as it began…

             While sleeping, I sense his presence and his blessing. It is not here or there, in that thing or this, or in me. It simply is.

              Perhaps humans conceive of ‘spirits’ and experience them because they need to believe in them. Emanations are the guarantors of continuity in a mad and transient world. Whether spirits are imaginary or live in our imagination---does not make them one whit less real. Whether I construct the presence of my friend from the forest shadows, or whether such shades are real, matters less than that they are real to me. I do not think I have constructed him.      

         I wake slowly, feeling honored and blessed by the visitation, which still seems to vibrate around me, imparting peace, strength, and good grace. It is as if body and emanation, normally sundered, have been rejoined. Now I understand why so many of folktales speak of “sleeping for a hundred for years” In matters of the psyche is not time’s duration one is aware of, but the enveloping of personal temporality into an undivided whole. 

            It is Easter morning.

       In a providential trance I continue my descent to the Patalpa River.

          It is noon when I arrive at the tiny village just above the river. The entire populace of the place, perhaps fifteen people, is just coming out of a small adobe chapel, merely a building with a cross on top. Every face, including the children, freezes on the stranger. Given how deep in the wild I am, and out of respect for the holy day, I avert my eyes; walking silently on, as unobtrusively as possible. 

     Just down the hill, at mid-day, I reach the river soaked by sweat. I go upstream and there strip and plunge into the cold water; for here, at this depth, the climate is tropical. The  stream is invigorating. An iguana scurries for the shade on the far bank. I do not tarry for I still have far to go.

            A half-rotted swinging footbridge, with many missing slats is the only way over the river. My watercolor paintings are my concern, for they will be ruined if I fall. I slowly work my way over. The heat is terrific. On the far side are palm trees and thick jungle. After an hour’s climb the heat overcomes me. While resting a young Indian, dressed in beautiful whites with embroidered red trim, and doubtless on his way to visit relatives for the holiday, passes by. He gives the collapsed, over-loaded gringo, a casual grin. The Indians have the view that the pale-skin is a bit of a fool, and though mostly human, is too wealthy to have a real spirit. This I learned, to my chagrin, from a young Guatemalan girl whom I asked to sit briefly for her portrait. She used the occasion to pickpocket me, probably because my drawing of her (for which I paid her) was also, to her, a sort of theft. Since the Indian has been forced into poverty by theft, the philosopher Proudhon justifies them in returning the favor. That day I lost the price of buying the Mayan boy many pairs of shoes...

              I climb higher on the stony trace. Vultures are gliding down the canyon walls. There is no respite, on this southern face, from the sun. When trail levels I slip into a leafy glen to cool. At last I arrive at the remotest village of all, one called Matzozongo, at the far end of canyon, two days hike from Chichotla. Here the Mazatec spoken is as different from other villages as is Portuguese from Spanish. The place looks like Tahiti, with houses made from the beams of trees and thatched with palm. I walk guiltily through silent, ethereal village, where families are gathered outside to celebrate the holiday. Here I rest a while, enjoying the peace of the most remote spot I ever visited in Mexico.

            Climbing out of the village the road becomes nothing but a cow-path of cluttered stone. Now I can see that this old road will not proceed beside the river, but re-ascend the mountains. The knowledge of this fact sobers me. I slow down.

             After a time a truck approaches. It is a police-car but full of young-people headed over the mountain. It appears this vehicle acts as a sort conduit between the State of Oaxaca and the State of Puebla, otherwise separated by the mountain. They take me on board at no charge. We scrap the underbelly up  hair-pins and wash-outs at seventy degrees for forty minutes, spewing much of the road behind us. At the summit stands a small farm. How on earth, I wonder, could anyone but a bruja, a witch, live in such fastness? There is no one in sight. When we top the crest the rain begins. A few hours ago I was boiled, now I am freezing…Soon a torrent of water is pouring from the sky. I insist that the driver take my water-colors into his cab, which he does, as we slump downwards through a pine forest.

              I am lucky, for without this excursion from a village to slightly larger town, my paintings would have been ruined in the storm. After two hours we arrive a town called Talcatopec de Diaz. It turns out that is civilization again, but it is nothing to look at. Its main street is part soil, part broken pavement. It resembles a bad-movie set, neither Mexican nor Indian, a place  trapped between and dubious of both worlds.

             The police-cruiser drops the gringo, (where else?) at the police station; perhaps thinking, that given where they found me, I need to check in with the authorities; and now that I am soaking wet I look like a beaten dog.

              Eight or ten swarthy police officers are sitting inside the open vestibule of the station lounging on the holiday. When they discover that I am a painter they ask to see my work. I show them my paintings. They are duly impressed. The tell me that they need the official seal of the Republica Mexicana painted on their wall. Their manner is macho, jocular, distract, half-serious, or if furtively serious---buffoonish with the hurt reserve of those who feel themselves constrained by time and place. They are kind but vaguely ominous…They tell me to recover for the night in the station, offering me a place to sleep on the floor. Would the Senor consider, as a favor to them, painting the great seal of La Republica Mexicana on the wall? I say that I will try. I ask them to bring me a picture of the seal and a ruler, which they do.

     For an hour or two I labor at a pencil sketch of a perfect circle. The policemen pass and pass again, admiring my circle. I am a real artist they say. Outside a band is playing Marachi music, ugly and over-loud, on the town square. It grows late. The rain falls and falls…At last I collapse in my corner, exhausted, The Great Seal of Mexico incomplete…Some day, perhaps, I will labor back to the hills of the Mazatecs to see if some other itinerant artist has finished the great seal of the Mexican Republic on the wall of the police station at Tacaltopec, Mexico…but for now the rain, the brash music and my trek have finished me…

     In the morning puddles lie in the dirt lanes. Stray dogs look, like me, for breakfast. A rooster crows. One or two people carry consumer bags looking for groceries…A drunk follows me, his eyes rheumy. The sparse hairs of his mustache hang like wires over his open mouth. He tries to grab my paintings…but I turn away. He stumbles aimlessly on, down death’s road.

     After a long wait, at 2pm in the afternoon, a bus from civilization appears at Talcatopec. I joyously board and buy the ticket for Cordoba on the plains of Vera Cruz.

      We descend through the last of the jungle and the hills and emerge onto the plains of Vera Cruz. Big trucks piled with sugar-cane lumber toward a factory. Their dangerous loads rock as they pass us and challenge every car on the road.

      I think about how Adolfo lent me a sliver of a mirror when I needed to shave. I dropped it and thus gave him, guiltily, two slivers back. Besides those two slivers of mirror I believe that I saw most everything that Adolfo and his family own: 1. The clothes they have on. 2. Perhaps another change of these. 3. A one room concrete brick house. 3. A hut of sticks. 4. A hammer. 4 A bulb and a battery. 5. Some ribbons hanging on the wall. 6. Their plot of rock. 5. A coffee pot and plastic coffee drip. 7. Firewood 8. A bar of soap. 

      I regret the sliver of glass I broke. I believe that the broken sliver was much-used.

      If you imagine the world as a nice big apple, then what the poor have of it is a one mouth-size bite, and the rest belongs to the rich. If you and I were lost in the wilderness and all we had between us was one apple, would I give you only one bite and eat the rest myself? The news is this: We are lost in the wilderness. What we need and what we crave are not the same. Hunger is satiable, but not so the mind's insatiable soul. What should the poor do but rise up and make their own nation from the wealth of every government who panders to them? The poor do not want charity; their demand is dignity.Yet I cannot think of a civilization which made its first goal the dignity of all its citizens; neither did the Mayan.

           For the Mayan boy in the market at Chechenastenago, already prematurely aged and well-practiced at deceit, is the heir of a once great civilization, one which at its height in 800 AD, was possibly more advanced than medieval Europe. "Their commanding architecture, their astronomy mathematics and literature would have humbled their contemporaries in Europe" writes Alan Weisman.  

      So what happened? 

    Chiefly two things: 1. Too much wealth in too few hands.  2. Environmental stress.

      Sound familiar?  

     As I stood at Copan I could visualize the great city now in ruins. But here as elsewhere too many people were crowded into too little space. After a time the soils leeched. Aurthur Demarest the Anthropologist who has recently studied the Mayan collapse says: "Mayan Society had evolved too many elites all demanding exotic baubles. There was an excess of nobles, all needing Quetzal feathers, jade, obsidian, fine chert, custom polychrome, fancy cor-belled roofs, animal furs. Nobility is expensive, non-productive and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society's energies to satisfy its frivolous cravings. Too many heirs wanted thrones, or needed some ritual bloodletting to confirm their stature. Dynastic warfare heightened. Stakes rose, trade was disrupted, and the population concentrated---which is lethal in a rain forest. Their confidence in leaders who once seemed all-knowing but were actually obsessed with selfish short-term goals declined along with the quality of their life. People lost faith. Ritual activity ceased. They abandoned their temples or turned them into military fortresses. When you examine societies just as confident as ours that unraveled, and were eventually swallowed by the jungle, you see that the balance between ecology and society is exquisitely delicate. If something throws that off, it can all end." (quoted in The World Without Us, Alan Weisman, 2007)

     Mr. Thomas Jefferson to Mr. John Adams, January 1814:

   "I have ever been the enemy of Banks, not of those discounting for cash, but of those foisting their own paper into circulation, and thus banishing our cash.  My zeal against those institutions was so warm and open at the establishment of the Bank of the United States that I was derided as a maniac by the tribe of bank-mongers, who were seeking to filch from the public their swindling and barren gains.  But the errors of that day cannot be recalled.  The evils they have engendered are now upon us, and the question is how we are to get out of them?  Shall we build an altar to the old paper money of the Revolution, which ruined individuals but saved the Republic, and burn on that all the bank charters, present and future, and their notes with them? For these are ruin to both Republic and individuals. This cannot be done.  The mania is too strong. It has seized, by its delusions and corruptions, all the members of our governments, general, special and individual."

       Cordoba is a crowded though not unpleasant city. Colonial bastions, pillared and arched, surround an ancient square. For days I search for a bank that will cash a humble traveler’s check. No one wants them, but I cannot continue to the border without money. At one bank a stout lady keeps me waiting all day---then asks me to return the next day for more waiting. I am hungry and have had nothing but scraps of bread for days; but I have no choice. I return the next day. Late in the day the stiff-backed lady briefly exits her shrine. I have been waiting all day on the floor, for there are no chairs. She talks a lot of wind and all I can see is the ridiculous loops of her large ear-rings, her pudgy self-contented smirk. She says that she will “try something else.” I leave the bank while she is “trying something else” and call the American Consulate, who unluckily, is as passive as Geoffrey Firmin.“There is nothing we can do says the government, the bankers run us, it is not we who run them.”

       My head is spinning. I drop into the public library on the Zocalo and pull a random book from the shelf. It is a book on the Second World War. Here Marshall Goering is pictured raising his baton to direct European culture. I suddenly become my Zapotec friend, the one’s whose chief desire is to speak with those Germans and French whose words run the world. The German pictured before me was famous for his own clear words: “It’s a simple matter to drag people into war. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

        My Zapotec friend seems to be whispering in my ear: Here is your civilization. Take a good look at it and see as it is. All over Mexico the peons stand for hours to be served by the minions of Montezuma, thankful if they are given, for an afternoon of waiting, a few crumbs of wet bread. The Bank does not exist to serve the people, it exists to serve itself. Not only need it not have in its vaults the money it lends, it is allowed to create money by loaning out what it does not have. Is such money really earned wealth? No Banker earns any wealth. But this is not enough. The Bank alone must be able to invest and speculate on money which it does not have in order to enrich itself…But no, neither is this enough, the corrupt gambling of the Bank must be underwritten by you, the peon, through your acquiescent governments…The banks must be able, therefore, to be the actual governments, and quite destroy any power in the people. But no again; this too is not enough! When the people’s work has been destroyed they must hoist their oppressor from the ground and set the High-Priest back on the top of the temple…willingly placing their necks on the sacrificial stone…

   Europe: land of holy Kings and noble Friars, just another catastrophe, and yet it produced Gustav Mahler, just as the poverty of Mexico produced the half-delerious courage of Flores Magon.

      But could mankind really live stateless and without a leader? It all turns on how you conceive of a leader.

      In his famous novel Looking Backward (1887) Edward Bellamy tells the story of a man who falls asleep in 1888 and wakes up in the social perfection of  the year 2000.

       Here the sleeper learns that "All who do their best are equally deserving, whether the best be great or small. We encourage the weaker as well as the stronger. In our society emulation is given free-play, though our leaders are chosen from the best. These always find their motives within, not without, and so long as they measure their duty by their own endowments, and not those of others, they remain leaders. They would consider it preposterous to expect praise or blame because their contribution chanced to be great or small. To all such natures emulation appears philosophically absurd, and in its moral aspect also defective, for it only substitutes envy for admiration, exultation for regret in regard to the successes or failures of other men."     

        I gaze toward the Gulf of Mexico, and expect to see the boats of Cortez. I am now among those natives and ‘terrorists’ who hope to prevent his landing on this shore…

        I go to the Mexican Office of Tourism. They have a “special arrangement” with Senor Cortez. My check will be negotiated by executive fiat. A personal emissary of El Presidente de la Republica Mexicana accompanies me to the Bank, unlocking, with official nods and whispers, the Chief-Priest’s mystic vault; but not, of course, without waiting in line for hours, with all the other slaves of Montezuma. (A functionary may approach a priest but only with fear and trembling) But these pains must be counted little for one whose has attempted to address The Great and Terrible Oz. Innumerable forms must be signed and counter-signed…I am taken to the stone and bound. At last the Chief-priest approaches, his flint-knife drawn…my heart is ripped from by body which rolls down the pyramid, traversing the final border. It is just another day at The Bank...

         In my dream Cortez and Montezuma collaborate, the one keeping the High-Priests solvent, the other looking for ways to make war with the created cash while preaching religion to the stunned masses. It is a cozy arrangement.

          The Chief Priest ruffles his feathers and says that there is no more gold in Mexico, that no more may be found. He says that the value of gold surpasses the worth of the people, the sun, the soil, the rain and the very sky; all these are cheap compared to the gold within his temple. Even coins, before the symbols of work, duty and honor, have been recalled. The people look up astonished, confounded. Have all their skills suddenly disappeared? Is there no more work required on earth? The Chief-Priest sees their distress and cries: “But the Gods will favor you if you destroy what yet remains that is not gold: the earth and the air; for as long as these superfluities exist, my gold cannot obtain its final measure by extinguishing creation!”

        There is stunned silence. The mass slumps to the ground. Only one peon, one curious man remains standing, his eyes squinting at the daunting pyramid, and at the Quetzal plumes blooming from the Priest’s headdress. Slowly he reaches to the ground, picks up a stone and conceals it in his palm. After a moment he speaks:

       “Sisters: has not nature always rewarded us and repaid her shaping? Brothers; slavery proceeds by inches, but conquers in miles…Let us not choose to be slaves. Let us not be led like mice, but instead lead ourselves.”

          “But how, brother, how?” another man jumps to his feet.

       Looking with loving kindness at his brother, and smiling at his courage, it is a long moment before the first peon replies.

       “With this one rule brother:“Para todos toda, para nosotros nada.” 
          But even that is not enough:
         The son and father, the sun and the water. The halo where the bright splurge enters the world.
            

                                              Will Morgan. February 23, 2013