In 2004, I traveled along the Ruta Maya in Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize. This is an essay and a poem about the trip to the dead cities, the temples and pyramids in the rain forests of these countries. To be more precise, the essay talks about the ruins, the poem tells about the trip. In particular, the ruins of the old culture of the Maya Indians fascinated me and are the main subject of my meditations. We took the bus and stayed in hostels. The people we met were very kind and honest. Dangers and criminality remained rumors. We had a fortunate trip.
Wherever they are in the world, ruins are an intriguing and enigmatic phenomenon that haunts the imagination and memory. They are materialized stories about the past of buildings and their chaotic remnants. Man-made constructions they are, gradually grown into isolated and stand alone buildings and monuments. of the past .Together on one site, they constitute an impressive human theater of stone and silence in which Nature is the slow, invisible invader. Ruins show the vanity of the human effort to immortalize the mind and soul as far as they exist. They offer a cultural ambiance and an object for reflection on a lost civilization.
Here in Yucatan, the northern peninsula of Mexico, I follow the forest trails along the dead Maya cities and tell the story of my observations, writing the experiences as a poem which sounds like silence in the loud and crazy world of today. As an introductory to what ruins basically are, three literary quotes from famous authors and a citation from the Lonely Planet.
‘Yet travel has always had something mysterious in it, because it is an expectation of the not-yet-known.’ in A book of Luminous Things, p. 107. Czeslaw Milosz
'And since poetry is an expression of wondering at things, landscapes, people, their habits and mores, poetry and travel are allied.’ in A book of Luminous Things p. 75. Czeslaw Milosz
'At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.’ in Austerlitz p. 19 (translation from Dutch by W.G. Sebald)
Tikal, el Mundo Perdido
‘About 400 m southwest of the Great Plaza is el Mundo Perdido, a large complex of 38 structures with a huge pyramid in its midst. The pyramid, 32 m high and 80 m along its base, has a stairway on each side. It had huge masks flanking each stairway but no temple structure on the top... The central pyramid’s flat top offers beautiful views and makes a great place for a picnic, weather permitting.’ in Lonely Planet page 368
When I was young, I wanted to travel along the Ruta Maya and to visit the survivals of the Mayan civilization hidden in the tropical forests, far away from daily life in the Indian towns of the Mexican people today. This longing, however, was pushed away by a mysterious, instinctive force in my soul that rejected this brutal culture of human sacrifices and horrible murders. It disappeared behind a closed door of my soul. I began this journey more or less by chance, thanks to the suggestion of a close friend. We traveled together.Actually, it was a homage to my own youth, a period of my life when the Maya culture evoked secret images of a civilization that vanished before the Spaniards arrived on the continent.
Now after the journey to Yucatan, I try to come to terms with my travel memories. Whimsical figures and vanishing footsteps. Pyramids, temples, ruins. Dust and fragrances. Stones and grass. I should be careful not to stumble over the steep stairs of the ruins, the loose gravel of trails between the old buildings, over the dream of a lost civilization. Ogre is the overwhelming color of the Maya temples and stairs, bright the sunlight reflected on the dead cities. Impressions and emotions struggle to appear and to disappear. The terrifying is abandoned and coming back. The architect and the constructors quit without a trace in the grasses. The ball court seems sunny and empty. The prisoners are beheaded. The king is as dead as a crumbled statue, cruelty carved in stone. Is this the memory of the melancholic mind? The Lonely Planet invites the reader to have a picnic on top of a pyramid. For sure, you 'll have a majestic view. The catastrophe is everywhere and visibly around. Read the hieroglyphs on the stèles, look at the stucco walls, trace the animals, descend into Xibalba, the underworld and recognize this world in its eternal combat between good and evil. This struggle is stil going on.From far, we hear the rolling of modern tanks across the war fields and the droning bombers above the cities of our own murderous century - as if the old things come back in a new dress. No new spring or sound, but dead cities all over the world. More and more dead cities on earth. Sunlight and radiance. Bombing and destruction and suicidal terrorists. Derailing of the senses. The old Mayan mood is not over. We are still in the grip of the same old order of blood, terror, ever raging war.
All of a sudden, my train of thought changes. I walk through picturesque streets of poor villages of the Maya Indians, the traditional little towns of Spanish origin. From there, I go to the ruins and their reconstructions in the woods. The long hike is a loop of imagination and reality, a silken, bloody thread from which life and man are dangling.
This is a strange story, this travel of barely 3 weeks in the late spring of 2004 along La Ruta Maya across the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan, the plains and mountains of Central American Guatemala, Honduras and Belize. It ought to rain incessantly in these green forests but it didn’t. I had a dream but I didn’t dream. Ruins hided ruins. My footsteps lost their echo in the magical theater of those magnificent and sad ruins. At times, I lost my sense of orientation; under the trees of the rain forest the vertigo came over me. It was a dazzling experience. I wrote notes about the site and the height of pyramids and temples, the high stone obelisks and the wide open plaza’s, the square masks of the rain god Chac, the wall sculptures in relief and the zoomorphs, about the ritual cities and the cenotes, the tropical rainforest, the mountains. I made an inventory of the hostels and the little restaurants we visited. The noisy street life of the villages, the over sized bus stations and the ‘musical’ bus trips formed a dissonant in the silence of the buried civilization. Daily life of the Indians in the towns and our visits to the ruins stood in strong contrast. I got a sense of alienation as if looking at a person who is permanently grinning. A surrealistic feeling, a vague surmise why the journey, being so long in my mind and so many times delayed and almost forgotten, finally was undertaken.
Back home, I read again about the frightening pantheon of the Mayan gods and kings with their unpronounceable names, smartly translated as Thunder Sky, King 18 Rabbit and King Smoke Shell, Jaguar Penis i.e. Often, the ingenious moon and sun calendar and the Popol Vuh have taken me back to the life of the Indians in these cities.
‘Are ruins merely ruins?’ I often reflected on this question during and after the trip. A simple question in the sweating heat of the tropical rain forest. In the nineteenth century, ruins symbolized romanticism, maybe they still do. Numerous classical European paintings still bear witness to it. In those days, poets, dreamers and lovers took refuge to ruins, probably feeling more connected to the past than to the industrializing world. A romanticism as flight from reality, a sort of nostalgia to a world that had gone by. It was an insatiable longing for what had ever existed, but had withdrawn from the physical surroundings, where the genius of the past still roamed around. Basically , it was a romantic dream to visit the ruins of the Maya empire, a longing for the past lost in the oblivion?
Ruins, however, are more than a blunt romanticism. They possess a vulnerable robustness and a silent intrepidity. Ruins are irresistible but frail. They are the final product of a slow natural process of which the logic is not simply to discover. Ruins are part of the labyrinth laid out by nature and time, by the relentless gods responsible for their origin and life cycle.
Will ruins ever be understood? What kind of knowledge do we need to answer this question? Archaeologists and art historians often are absorbed by problems of the original construction and design they try to re-construct.They make progress on the basis of their scientific expertise. Many books with magnificent pictures of the Maya temples and buildings have been published during the last decades. Gradually, however, the ruins are replaced by reconstructions, restorations, even replicas on the spot or in anthropological museums. They lost their authentic and enigmatic character and became merely restorations. Shape, scents and color disappear. A ruin is what remains as the outcome of an alchemist process in nature – wind and rain, sunshine and construction material interact and interfere according to an unknown procedure. This is a powerful process of decay and slow erosion, of endurance and loss of substance and material. What remains is the ruin here and now that one carefully enters. For the visitor, ruins are a challenging exercise in Gestalt Psychology. A wall, a window, a terrace end up as a house, a temple or pyramid. What the eye doesn’t see, the mind accomplishes. Again and again, ruins are a sheer momentous thing. There is room for reconstruction but also for melancholy about decay, destruction, slow degeneration and final loss. Whatever it may be, time or chemistry, nature or chance, this here in front of us is the ruin. A deserted theater illuminated by the sun or the moon, the gods who the Maya people honored with heart and soul.
Paradoxically, a ruin is difficult to understand from close by, distance is needed to get an overview and a better understanding of the very nature of a ruin. The human eye unites the heaps of stones, the terraces and platforms, the stairs and the foundations and reconstruct them into a Gestalt. When we enter a ruin, its authenticity is impaired and a taboo is trespassed. This is the paradox one experiences when one enters the buildings and the stairs of Chichén Itzá, Palénque, Uxmál, Toniná, Tikál or other Mayan buildings and lost cities. Ruins lose their resistance and capacity of self-defense - more or less like prehistoric paintings in caves lose their color and brightness by the breath of hundreds of visitors. Do we enter the past or do we leave it untouched. This dilemma comes back when we visit the area of these historical ruins of the cities, its temples and pyramids. Our curiosity is unstoppable and overrules gloriously our timidity, affecting our idea of the ruins even more. Watching the stairs and the platforms, the sculptures and paintings, all of a sudden the destructive character of the Mayan culture becomes clear and gets in a turmoil of terrible images. We watch a movie of old cities in a terrible stream of decay and destruction, that deletes the last traces of the Mayan identity. The gods of the Maya turn out to be immortal and merciless in their drive to devastation. We try to remain upright and keep to the original idea of temples and pyramids, trying to visualize the original appearance of the buildings in daily life of the Maya people.The process of demolition and decline is a story of loss and getting lost, of return of the buildings to the basic and original construction material. The melody of melancholy pops up in the ear of the visitor. Ruins being open and accessible to the great public, become part of the our actual world. We appropriate the ruins and declare them to be our own property. In a way, we detach these places from their historical identity and function, from their ritual background and authenticity. We do not know if we live in the past or the present. The alternation of rain forests and dead cities awakens a strange feeling in the body and confuses the senses and sensations. It reminded me of a trip along the West coast of North America, the sandy ocean shores of the Western States of Washington and Oregon, southward to the golden undulating land of California. There is a highway winding high up or close to the beach. The deep ocean aired a dense and reflecting fog, that hang motionless as a package of clouds above the wide waters. Along the damp beach, Indians made a fire for a barbecue. Long, leached wood and poles of old trees lay scattered around, uprooted and washed away by the ocean along the overgrown cliffs. I still hear the seagulls, their screaming and I remember the sea anemones covered with broken small shells, which swayed in still backwaters behind massive rocks, waiting for fish to paralyze and to eat. Far away over the waters of the fading ocean nothing but dim, very dense fog, a filled out, but empty space. In this impenetrable nothing-ness, I heard softly the uninterrupted rolling of the surf breaking on the shore. On the other side of the highway, a cloud forest grew up the steep slopes of the mountains. I parked the car and went for a hike. Slowly I walked over the trail into the foggy woods, where I didn't see anything outside a circle of 7 feet. High old trees around me, under my feet a layer of rotten leaves. The canopy absorbed the watery light of the sun floating between the clouds. The bark of the high trees glowed darkly of dripping moist and silvery lichens. No more than 150 feet into the moderate rain forest, I got a strange feeling, inhaling the moist air. The nebulous forest was overwhelming and full of fading forms and fabulous beings originating from my own mind in this deforming and stifling environment of tall trees vanishing in the fog. At times I saw fallen, but still living trees right above my head. Long roots reached from these trunks to the ground as if the trees grew ut downwards to the bottom. Where the trunks were rotten, young trees grew upright. Water seeped along the bark, I did not hear it. Twigs under my foot soles creaked but did not creak. No motion of a leaf or fluttering of a bird. Here the acoustics of death reigned, the death of acoustics already spread out in the kingdom of this forest along the coast of the ocean. The realm of sounds had annihilated itself, a theater of movement and silence had captured nature. Barely a moment ago, I looked in the mirror of the invisible ocean, now I was caught in the silence of a cloud forest. That's what I remember the moment I think of the silent Maya ruins in the rain forest full of cicadas, singing birds and howling monkeys.
Every early morning of the trip in Yucatan, this basic feeling returned. Most of the time, I woke up quietly. I packed my bag, took breakfast, checked out of the hostel and bought a bus ticket already under the spell of the hike to the ruins. I got in a hurry to leave the daily things behind me and to enter the chaotic areas of the ruins. Through the leaf-still rain forest I drew near to the ruins in which life had come to a standstill. Time had lifted its hand from the things, the rain forest had isolated the ruins. All things returned inwards. The temples and pyramids, the ball courts and observatories waited at nobody. They were hiding in their own skin of stone, earth and grass. I became part of the landscape that stole my soul. My waiting was at its end as good as the longing. I dissolved in this ending world. Had I ever been nearer to reality?
Back in the village, where I passed the night, my mind was confused about the attraction of this violent, gone-by culture that had struggled vehemently, paralyzing its vitality and sacrificing so many human beings. The ritual killing of slaves or prisoners aroused a forbidden feeling of lust and blood. An unscrupulous power played poker with terror comparable to the blind slaughter of citizens in the Middle East we see on TV nowadays. This culture of ritual murders and raging war mirrors the human mind and reflects the madness of the human being. The myth of the Maya culture is ambivalent and ambiguous. The struggle to survive in this universe of blood thirsty gods by means of human sacrifices of vanquished warriors has proven to be a never ending and self-destroying prophesy. On the basis of this self inflicted concept of life, the Maya Indian has made a prisoner of himself and has produced its own definitive fall. The Maya Indians believed that his civilization and survival were subjected to the whims and caprices of the gods. According to their philosophy, we would spend our time better and have a picnic on top of a pyramid? Is this lightness of the Lonely Planet author the best defense against the cruelties of fate in the hands of humans? Or do we better listen to the German author W.G. Sebald and think that the big temples and pyramids have been planned by the Maya with an eye to their unavoidable future as ruins?
Another question comes to my mind: are the survivals of the Mayan buildings basically common ruins of war like those I had seen on my first holiday in post-war Germany? Watching the Mayan ruins, the idea of a disaster is everywhere around. The Maya civilization finally imploded by the violence of internal wars and overpopulation, unable to feed, to master and restrain its own society.
Are these cities laid out as a geometric form according to a mathematical, cosmic concept or do they bear more resemblance to an archipelago of islands originating from volcanic forces and movements of continental shelves, dispersed but simultaneously kept together in an invisible pattern. We always try to explain and rationalize our confusion. We replace the visible chaos of the cities in ruin and create order in the mind while the eye moves amazed and disoriented along the ruins, experiencing an aesthetic moment. A chaos maybe produced by a man-made catastrophe but with a force of attraction, that comes close to the bloody lust of the Mayan culture. If a chaos like this can awaken a feeling of disputed joy, the Maya Indians, indeed, might have enjoyed the chaos with heart and soul. Is it the never lost instinct of man to defy his own fate by sheer lust and to call for the end of himself? Remember how in the book ‘The Pyramid’ (Kadare) the Pharaoh of Egypt abstains from the construction of a pyramid and brings the imperial court to utter despair. The Pharaoh might have ruined his own empire, because the pyramid is the basic pillar to maintain his power. ‘If it wavers, everything collapses. He (the architect, D.C.)made a mysterious gesture with his hands and his eyes went blank as if they really looked upon a field of ruins.’ Or is it better to listen to Marco Polo in the Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino. Talking about the innumerable cities,the Kublai Kahn interrupts him suggesting that the cities are time and again a variance of the same, immortal city of Venice.What will remain of this glorious city when the San Marco is sunk into the swamp. The Chinese mitten crabs will be the only ones able to tell the story of Venice? ‘Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased, Marco Polo said. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice once, if I speak. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities I have already lost it, little by little..’
Back to the Maya cities. They are a necropolis in multitude with lifeless stone sculptures and constructions in decline. The cities hide in their changing landscape of stone, grass, earth, rubble and debris. A slow historical moraine has pushed forward all the debris and built up ruins. The force of gravity has created buildings of fanciful shapes without architectural rules. New figures of rubble appear, dream figures of the unknown future. Will they succumb and be dismantled,? Or will these ruins lose their original shape and design overlapping their own shadows and becoming facades without face? Visitors will try to reconstruct the city plans and use drawings based on stories and pictures of other ruins. They will hunt for ruins as if they are hunters of living animals. However, they will get lost in the surrounding forests as in a labyrinth. Wandering through the dead city, we seek the heart or the exit of the urban labyrinth, still confused by the similarity of the sculptured stones, stairs and entrances of the temples. Looking from the top of the pyramids, we see an unorganized urban space where nature invades from all sides. One runs against terraces and stairs, that lead to nowhere. Stairs, terraces and basements look alike. Stepping across stones and grass, we enter open squares bordered by broken walls that have no doors or exits. Are these cities the last witnesses in disguise behind stiff, expressionless masks of stones of old age. Are we suddenly aware why the Mayan people left their cities on time? Do we understand why in these stony ghost towns our smile died and our laughter silenced? This isn't the place for humor or to have a picnic on top of a pyramid. We need fresh air to breath and to free ourselves from the terrifying images which haunt us in these lost cities. Our voices tumble across the walls and fade away. Originally, these cities were distinct in origin, history , wealth, vigor and fate. No dead city resembles another city as a ruin: Uxmal, Tonina, Tikal deep into the jungle. Different they are as result of the day and the hour I visited the ruins. Different as concrete structures by the light of the sun and the shadows, the rain and the wind, the heat, by the scent and smell and the sounds of the birds, the lizards and the insects.
When a city has got into a state of progressive decline, its structure begins to deteriorate, its distinctive nature and character will get lost. In a landscape of urban ruins, we still recognize the concrete elements, streets ,walls, buildings, door openings and windows. When , however, the urban structure is destroyed, it is difficult to recognize the separate functions. A street could be a floor of a house, a corridor might have been a porch or a platform, an opening in a wall could be a hole or might have been an entrance. These urban elements have become part of a process of transformation, decline and decay. They have become pieces of an urban puzzle. Light and darkness, shadow and silhouette, fragrances and smell, breath and wind, echos and sounds, voices of men and singing of birds. Our basic instinct moves to the front and replaces our reason. Our feeling of beauty takes the place of our urge to understand the urban disorder. Like a somnambulist we walk in this new landscape of ruins, this urban land of the past. It reminds me of a haiku of the Japanese poet Joso:
The Autumn cicada
Dies by the side
Of its empty shell
Coming back to reality, we walk between the ruins without orientation and passport, discovering restorations and reconstructions. Gods and kings show up on colorful wall paintings and vases, always their face en profile, akin to the noble ear of corn. Their eyes big and wild, their mouths toothed and biting. Their gestures strong, decisive and charming. Does the stylization of the head force itself upon the visitor? Anyway, it barely conceals that the look of the portrayed person turns aside as if he wants to distract himself from the world and its judgment or to withdraw from this pitiless world of combat and sacrifice. These stylized and refined images seem to say 'we are not here and perhaps even - you, visitor are not here. All the things you see do not exist and never have existed. It is a dream which reminds of a dream. Is this an artistic way to escape the idea of the catastrophe?
Finally, one remark. I didn't examine if between the herons, howling monkeys, jaguars, bats, kingfishers and hawks a feathered snake hided in the bushes to undo the god of his mythic aureole and to put him back in the fauna of Mayan kingdom. Once, I saw a motionless, undisturbed and frightening big toad on the muddy bank of the Rio Dulce without being able to tell his Latin name. At that moment, I understood why the Mayan craftsmen sculptured giant river stones into big toads as zoomorphs. Neither did I examine why the Maya Indians believed in a square world as fantastic as the people of Europe assumed in those days the earth was flat. Watching the sculptures of the gods, kings and warriors, the wall paintings and the figuration of writing, we won't deny the world is square.
I decided not to re-tell the story of the culture of the Maya. The Popol Vuh and the stèles tell this story of creation and death, of deceit and ruse in the ball games of the underworld. The story that tells how the head of one of the Twins is substituted by a pumpkin, chased by a rabbit, put back upon the body of Xbalanque, the original owner. We still do not know if a skull of a killed prisoner of war was locked up in the ball - in memory of the mythic warrior?
And see how the danger of retelling degenerates in a question of a fool out of its context. Do you see my grinning face?
_______________________________________________________________________________
Literature
Calvino, Italo Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver. Picador Books 1979
Huxley, Aldous Beyond the Mexique Bay. Triad / Paladin London 1984
Kadare, I. The Pyramid. Translation David Bellos, from French
Lonely Planet Belize Guatemala & Yucatán. 4de edition 2001
Laughton, Timothy De Maya’s, Leven, Mythe en Kunst, Librero 2004
Miller, Mary Ellen De Hofkunst van de Mayas. translated in Schatten uit de Nieuwe Wereld Brussel 1992
Miller, Mary Ellen Maya Art and Architecture. Thames and Hudson 1999
Milosz, Czeslaw A Book of Luminous Things, an International Anthology of Poetry 1996.
A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego, New York, London
Rexroth, Kenneth One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. A New Direction Book, 1964
Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. The Modern Library, New York, 2001
Sebald, W.G. On the Natural History of Destruction. Modern Library New York,2004
Back in the village, where I passed the night, my mind was confused about the attraction of this violent, gone-by culture that had struggled vehemently, paralyzing its vitality and sacrificing so many human beings. The ritual killing of slaves or prisoners aroused a forbidden feeling of lust and blood. An unscrupulous power played poker with terror comparable to the blind slaughter of citizens in the Middle East we see on TV nowadays. This culture of ritual murders and raging war mirrors the human mind and reflects the madness of the human being. The myth of the Maya culture is ambivalent and ambiguous. The struggle to survive in this universe of blood thirsty gods by means of human sacrifices of vanquished warriors has proven to be a never ending and self-destroying prophesy. On the basis of this self inflicted concept of life, the Maya Indian has made a prisoner of himself and has produced its own definitive fall. The Maya Indians believed that his civilization and survival were subjected to the whims and caprices of the gods. According to their philosophy, we would spend our time better and have a picnic on top of a pyramid? Is this lightness of the Lonely Planet author the best defense against the cruelties of fate in the hands of humans? Or do we better listen to the German author W.G. Sebald and think that the big temples and pyramids have been planned by the Maya with an eye to their unavoidable future as ruins?
Another question comes to my mind: are the survivals of the Mayan buildings basically common ruins of war like those I had seen on my first holiday in post-war Germany? Watching the Mayan ruins, the idea of a disaster is everywhere around. The Maya civilization finally imploded by the violence of internal wars and overpopulation, unable to feed, to master and restrain its own society.
Are these cities laid out as a geometric form according to a mathematical, cosmic concept or do they bear more resemblance to an archipelago of islands originating from volcanic forces and movements of continental shelves, dispersed but simultaneously kept together in an invisible pattern. We always try to explain and rationalize our confusion. We replace the visible chaos of the cities in ruin and create order in the mind while the eye moves amazed and disoriented along the ruins, experiencing an aesthetic moment. A chaos maybe produced by a man-made catastrophe but with a force of attraction, that comes close to the bloody lust of the Mayan culture. If a chaos like this can awaken a feeling of disputed joy, the Maya Indians, indeed, might have enjoyed the chaos with heart and soul. Is it the never lost instinct of man to defy his own fate by sheer lust and to call for the end of himself? Remember how in the book ‘The Pyramid’ (Kadare) the Pharaoh of Egypt abstains from the construction of a pyramid and brings the imperial court to utter despair. The Pharaoh might have ruined his own empire, because the pyramid is the basic pillar to maintain his power. ‘If it wavers, everything collapses. He (the architect, D.C.)made a mysterious gesture with his hands and his eyes went blank as if they really looked upon a field of ruins.’ Or is it better to listen to Marco Polo in the Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino. Talking about the innumerable cities,the Kublai Kahn interrupts him suggesting that the cities are time and again a variance of the same, immortal city of Venice.What will remain of this glorious city when the San Marco is sunk into the swamp. The Chinese mitten crabs will be the only ones able to tell the story of Venice? ‘Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased, Marco Polo said. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice once, if I speak. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities I have already lost it, little by little..’
Back to the Maya cities. They are a necropolis in multitude with lifeless stone sculptures and constructions in decline. The cities hide in their changing landscape of stone, grass, earth, rubble and debris. A slow historical moraine has pushed forward all the debris and built up ruins. The force of gravity has created buildings of fanciful shapes without architectural rules. New figures of rubble appear, dream figures of the unknown future. Will they succumb and be dismantled,? Or will these ruins lose their original shape and design overlapping their own shadows and becoming facades without face? Visitors will try to reconstruct the city plans and use drawings based on stories and pictures of other ruins. They will hunt for ruins as if they are hunters of living animals. However, they will get lost in the surrounding forests as in a labyrinth. Wandering through the dead city, we seek the heart or the exit of the urban labyrinth, still confused by the similarity of the sculptured stones, stairs and entrances of the temples. Looking from the top of the pyramids, we see an unorganized urban space where nature invades from all sides. One runs against terraces and stairs, that lead to nowhere. Stairs, terraces and basements look alike. Stepping across stones and grass, we enter open squares bordered by broken walls that have no doors or exits. Are these cities the last witnesses in disguise behind stiff, expressionless masks of stones of old age. Are we suddenly aware why the Mayan people left their cities on time? Do we understand why in these stony ghost towns our smile died and our laughter silenced? This isn't the place for humor or to have a picnic on top of a pyramid. We need fresh air to breath and to free ourselves from the terrifying images which haunt us in these lost cities. Our voices tumble across the walls and fade away. Originally, these cities were distinct in origin, history , wealth, vigor and fate. No dead city resembles another city as a ruin: Uxmal, Tonina, Tikal deep into the jungle. Different they are as result of the day and the hour I visited the ruins. Different as concrete structures by the light of the sun and the shadows, the rain and the wind, the heat, by the scent and smell and the sounds of the birds, the lizards and the insects.
When a city has got into a state of progressive decline, its structure begins to deteriorate, its distinctive nature and character will get lost. In a landscape of urban ruins, we still recognize the concrete elements, streets ,walls, buildings, door openings and windows. When , however, the urban structure is destroyed, it is difficult to recognize the separate functions. A street could be a floor of a house, a corridor might have been a porch or a platform, an opening in a wall could be a hole or might have been an entrance. These urban elements have become part of a process of transformation, decline and decay. They have become pieces of an urban puzzle. Light and darkness, shadow and silhouette, fragrances and smell, breath and wind, echos and sounds, voices of men and singing of birds. Our basic instinct moves to the front and replaces our reason. Our feeling of beauty takes the place of our urge to understand the urban disorder. Like a somnambulist we walk in this new landscape of ruins, this urban land of the past. It reminds me of a haiku of the Japanese poet Joso:
The Autumn cicada
Dies by the side
Of its empty shell
Coming back to reality, we walk between the ruins without orientation and passport, discovering restorations and reconstructions. Gods and kings show up on colorful wall paintings and vases, always their face en profile, akin to the noble ear of corn. Their eyes big and wild, their mouths toothed and biting. Their gestures strong, decisive and charming. Does the stylization of the head force itself upon the visitor? Anyway, it barely conceals that the look of the portrayed person turns aside as if he wants to distract himself from the world and its judgment or to withdraw from this pitiless world of combat and sacrifice. These stylized and refined images seem to say 'we are not here and perhaps even - you, visitor are not here. All the things you see do not exist and never have existed. It is a dream which reminds of a dream. Is this an artistic way to escape the idea of the catastrophe?
Finally, one remark. I didn't examine if between the herons, howling monkeys, jaguars, bats, kingfishers and hawks a feathered snake hided in the bushes to undo the god of his mythic aureole and to put him back in the fauna of Mayan kingdom. Once, I saw a motionless, undisturbed and frightening big toad on the muddy bank of the Rio Dulce without being able to tell his Latin name. At that moment, I understood why the Mayan craftsmen sculptured giant river stones into big toads as zoomorphs. Neither did I examine why the Maya Indians believed in a square world as fantastic as the people of Europe assumed in those days the earth was flat. Watching the sculptures of the gods, kings and warriors, the wall paintings and the figuration of writing, we won't deny the world is square.
I decided not to re-tell the story of the culture of the Maya. The Popol Vuh and the stèles tell this story of creation and death, of deceit and ruse in the ball games of the underworld. The story that tells how the head of one of the Twins is substituted by a pumpkin, chased by a rabbit, put back upon the body of Xbalanque, the original owner. We still do not know if a skull of a killed prisoner of war was locked up in the ball - in memory of the mythic warrior?
And see how the danger of retelling degenerates in a question of a fool out of its context. Do you see my grinning face?
_______________________________________________________________________________
Literature
Calvino, Italo Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver. Picador Books 1979
Huxley, Aldous Beyond the Mexique Bay. Triad / Paladin London 1984
Kadare, I. The Pyramid. Translation David Bellos, from French
Lonely Planet Belize Guatemala & Yucatán. 4de edition 2001
Laughton, Timothy De Maya’s, Leven, Mythe en Kunst, Librero 2004
Miller, Mary Ellen De Hofkunst van de Mayas. translated in Schatten uit de Nieuwe Wereld Brussel 1992
Miller, Mary Ellen Maya Art and Architecture. Thames and Hudson 1999
Milosz, Czeslaw A Book of Luminous Things, an International Anthology of Poetry 1996.
A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego, New York, London
Rexroth, Kenneth One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. A New Direction Book, 1964
Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. The Modern Library, New York, 2001
Sebald, W.G. On the Natural History of Destruction. Modern Library New York,2004
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