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My Ruta Maya
Part
I
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About
ruins and melancholy
Derk Cools,
Curaçao 2005
‘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, blz 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 blz 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 blz. 19 in de engelse vertaling. 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 blz. 368
Already early in my youth I wanted
to travel along the Ruta Maya. A wish which had gone into oblivion, was
pushed away perhaps by a mysterious force, that rejected from the depth
of my instinct this culture of sacrifices and horrible murders. That I
made this journey is more or less due to chance, thanks to the
suggestion of a friend. After all it was also a kind of homage to my
youth as a time in my life when the Maya culture evoked images of an enigmatic end
of a warlike civilization in the tropical forest.
Now
there is just the
memory of the journey. Whimsical figures and
vanishing footsteps. Pyramids,
temples, ruins. Dust and fragrances.
Stone and grasses. Do not stumble over the stairs, the loose gravel,
over the dream. Ochre is the color of the Maya world, sunlight reflected
on the dead cities in the rain forest. An open spot of light surrounded
by shadows. The terrifying abandoned. The architect and the constructors
without a trace. The ball court
empty. The prisoner
beheaded. The king
dead. Cruelty in
stone and beautifully
wrapped. The memory melancholic, the reality a ruin or even worse a
monument? The Lonely Planet incites to have a pick nick on the top of a
pyramid. A majestic view. The catastrophe is everywhere and visible
around. Read the hieroglyphs, look at the stucco walls, trace the
animals, descend into Xibalba, the underworld and recognize the world as
in combat. From far one hears perhaps also the rolling of tanks and the
droning bombers of this century. As if the old things come back in a new
shape. No new spring, but dead cities. More and more dead cities on
earth. Ochre. Sunlight. Derailing of the senses.
Writing can begin. I go trough the
Maya ruins as a recollection of what goes to wrack and ruin. I write
anecdotes in the form of verses. A backward train of thought transforms
all by itself into a winding walk through villages of Indians,
traditional little towns of Spanish origin, dead cities, reconstructions
in the dense rain forest. A wattle work of imagination and reality, a
peculiar DNA helix, from which life dangles as on a thin silken thread.
With thanks to the friend who
enabled the journey and remained always in high spirits.
Part I
Ruins and Melancholy
 This is a strange story,
this travel of no more than 3 weeks in the late spring of 2004 along La
Ruta Maya over the Mexican peninsula Yucatan and across Central American
Guatemala, Honduras and Belize. It ought to rain but it didn’t. I
dreamed and I didn’t dream. Ruins hided ruins. My footsteps lost their
echo in the magical theater of the Mayan ruins. At times my sensitivity
for space vanished, the vertigo came over me. During the fall I just
became aware of the world of the Maya’s. I made notes about the pyramids
and temples, the high steles and the wide open plaza’s, the stone masks
of the rain god Chac, the wall sculptures in relief and the enormous
zoomorphs, of the ritual cities and the cenotes, the tropical
rainforest, the mountains. I made also notes of the hostels and the
little restaurants. The noisy street life, the bus stations all too big
and the ‘musical’ bus trips, they were at odds as sometimes a baroque
ornamentation of classic frames for paintings. They had no relation with
the ruins. En route I got at times a sense of estrangement as when one
looks at a person who grins. A surrealistic feeling, perhaps a vague
surmise why the journey, being so long already in my mind and many times delayed and at the end forgotten, finally was undertaken.
Afterwards I have read quite some pages about the frightening pantheon
of the Mayan gods and kings with their unpronounceable names and
sometimes rather smartly translated as Thunder Sky, King 18 Rabbit and
King Smoke Shell, Jaguar Penis i.e. The ingenious moon and sun calendar
and the Popol Vuh have often taken me back for ages. Shortly,
intensively however straight out.
‘Are ruins no more than merely ruins?’ I often wondered during and after
the trip. No more than a unremarkable, little question in the bloody
heat of the tropical rainforest. From my time at school I remember that
in the late 19th century ruins in Europe symbolized the Romantics.
Numerous paintings still bear witness to it. Poets and dreamers and
lovers took refuge to ruins, probably to feel themselves better affined
to the long past reality, the real Past. A sort of romanticism in an
industrializing world as a way of nostalgia to what has gone by, passed
away
and was merely dreamable. An insatiable longing for what has ever
existed, but has gone by or is withdrawn from the visible, where the
genius of the past still roams or is to evoke and recall. It was a kind
of romantic dream to visit the ruins of the Maya empire, a longing for
the past lost in the oblivion? Who of us was not acquainted with all
those images and pictures of the almost hidden pyramids in the
rainforest, the temples and steles, or with the fabricated stories of
ritual murders of imprisoned enemies?
Ruins are more than romantics.
They possess a vulnerable robustness and a silent intrepidity. Ruins are
irresistible but frail. They are the outcome of a process of which the
logic is not effortless to discover or not all. To that extent ruins are
part of the labyrinth as laid out by nature and time, the relentless
gods responsible for their origin and life cycle.
I saw my first ruin when I was
sixteen years old. With a younger brother of mine I got on my first
holiday tour abroad - on bike. We still had bikes without gears and
carried our tent and camping set in bags at both sides of the rear
carrier. It was a heavy load and we had to pedal strongly, when it was
windy and the road winding upwards. We stayed as much as possible on
flat terrain between the meadows, the farming fields and along the broad
and slow flowing river. On a day we passed the German border to visit
family of ours in Aachen. The War was already over for about 10 years,
the Germans however were still called ‘moffen’ by the Dutch. Who that
family exactly was, I never found out. We got lemonade from auntie and
something to eat, I can't remember anymore what it was. In those days
almost
everything was scantily. I still see my uncle and auntie, old
and grey, he in shirt-sleeves and she with an apron in front, in the opening of
the door when we left after our ‘family visit of politeness’. They waved
after us. The short visit is in my mind still overshadowed by the image
of the cathedral shot to rubble. We just came from there. Holding my
bike at hand I had been looking at the high, blind shot walls without a
roof. It was a sunny day, I recall. Through the openings in the high
walls I saw the blue sky and all of a sudden a plane. Imagination or a
mixture of two images in my memory, I don’t know. The ruin was still
recognizable as a cathedral. In my recollection remained the stand alone
cracked walls of the church and in between the blue of the heaven. The
heaps of debris and the ruined cathedral have been left untouched for
years as a warning against war. Perhaps even too as a protest against a
loss of memory for evil ( the terrible bombings W.G. Sebald wrote a
booklet about, entitled in English On the Natural History of
Destruction) In my mind the first (war) ruins between rubble and debris
- Trümmern, an image that won’t leave my retina any more.
Will ruins ever be understood?
What kind of knowledge do we need to answer this question?
Archaeologists and art historians are often lifelong absorbed by
problems of the original constructions they try to re-construct. With
their scientific expertise they make really impressive progress. This
applies also for the Mayan ruins. Quite some books with magnificent
pictures have been published during the last decades. Gradually however
ruins are replaced - through these scholars - by reconstructions and
restorations outdoors or in museums. So they loose their enigmatic
character. Shape, scents and color disappear. The mysterious is filched
from the ruins.
The ruin is what remains as a rest, the outcome of an
alchemistic process in nature – wind and rain, sunshine and construction
material they interact following an untraceable procedure. The powerful
process of decay and erosion, of endurance and loss of substance. What
remains is the ruin here and now that one carefully enters and where the
smell of the purification and degeneration rises and rages by. For the visitor
ruins are an exercise in Gestalt Psychology. A wall, a window, a
terrace is in itself sufficient to complete in the mind as a house, a
temple or pyramid. What the eye doesn’t see, the mind will finish. Again
and again ruins are a sheer momentous thing. The imagination offers not
only room for reconstruction but also for melancholy about decay,
degeneration and loss. Al chemistry, the time, nature, arbitrariness or
how one may call it, this here in front of you 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, in essence the ruin
is not to penetrate in another way than to watch it from a distance. It
is distance that keeps the ruin alive. The eye unites for a while the
piles of stones, the terraces and platforms, the stairs and the
foundations into a whole, a Gestalt. By entering the ruin its
authenticity is impaired and it is felt as trespassing a taboo. This is
the paradox one experiences when - traveling along the Ruta Maya - one
enters Chichén Itzá, Palénque, Uxmál, Toniná, Tikál or other Mayan
buildings and lost cities. Already basically attacked by time the ruins
loose so to speak their with-standing and the capacity of self-defense.
They get into an speeded-up demolition by the loss of estrangement due
to which they are autonomous artifacts. It is as the breath of a visitor
works out in caves with prehistoric paintings open for the public as
for example in the French Lascaux.
One will face this dilemma every
time one turns in the area of the historical ruins of the cities. With
an unstoppable curiosity to the secretly hidden, which wins it
gloriously from one’s timidity, one affects the original of the ruins
even more. It is as if all of a sudden the destructive character of the
Mayan culture comes into acceleration, gets apparently into turbulent
rapids, in a terrible stream of mud, that almost drags away the last
recognizable traces of the Mayan identity. Suddenly the gods of the Maya
turn out to be immortal and merciless in their drive to devastation,
being relentlessly destructive. It is the stream of mud which the
visitor threatens to set free and the renovator however preemptively
wants to embank. Not the ruins are his interest but the original state
and function of the buildings in the daily life of the Maya people. Not
the way how ruins of this shape and this age originated from the
authentic temples and pyramids. How they lost their ancient structure
and architecture and why exactly merely these buildings made it to
survive.
For this is the process of
demolition and decline, of loss and getting lost, of return to the
original material. Through the stream of reason ( the restoration) the
melody of melancholy pops up in the ear of the visitor. Ruins, once
cleared from their material authenticity and magic, become ordinary
places of tourist attraction and compete with the trend in modern times,
that makes almost everywhere on earth original, primeval spaces
accessible and public for everybody. So, the ruins become an element of
our own age and are appropriated by us as our property of today and so
alienate these places from their historical identity.
Only now I do understand why
coming home from the journey I choose to write in free verses, that at
first face look arbitrary, because of a lack of rhyme or standard
rhythm. The word verse in Dutch I take more or less literally. It
touches primarily upon the form not the pretension to write a poem. For
I don’t try to approach the reality as a poem nor do I do the reverse.
With this form of verse I want to stay close to the ruin as an arbitrary
shape in the landscape. I tell a story of dead, mutilated
cities - alternate little anecdotes.
This story is not a poem
in the true sense of the word, because it does not have – as I said
previously - the pretension to be a reality in itself – being a story.
I have tried to find a style of writing appropriate to the landscape of
Mayan ruins as remnants from untraceable time. The often returning
breach at the end of every line of the verse corresponds with the
overall dominating visual image of the Mayan landscape, the built up
area, the overgrown ruins, the crumbled and subsided stairs of the
pyramids, the stairs with grasses and lichens, the stones of temple
entrances and places of sacrifices wore out by intense use from victims
or tourists. In my opinion the chosen style of writing concurs with the
often sudden appearance of Xibalba’s underworld, to the wide open
entrances in the limestone rocks filled with water, the so called
cenotes, the open mouths on the stone sculptures where the dying Mayan
king has already laid down his head, and also into the numerous pictures
and paintings of the Twin Heroes, the saviors of heavens after their
victory over the underworld. Are these all images of the Angst of
existence roaming around in the Mayan world, that reaches to one’s
throat, strangling the breath and forces to begin afresh, to start a new
line, the chosen style of writing?
During my writing I have tried to
find out what slipped from the experience I actually had between the ruins. It
was, I thought, linked to the rain forest, which I had considered up
till then merely as natural background of the dead cities. Again and
again I thought to be close and every time it escaped my mind. Once I
had traveled along the west coast of North America, the shore landscapes
of Washington and Oregon, southward to the golden undulating land of
California. There is a highway sometimes high up or close to the beach.
It was a kind of winter trip. The deep ocean aired a dense and
reflecting fog, that hang motionless as a package of clouds above the
wide water. Downward along the damp beach Indians made a fire for their
barbecue. Everywhere laid scattered around long, grey leached wood with
big knots, roots and poles of very old trees uprooted by the same ocean
from somewhere the same overgrown cliffs. I remember the seagulls, their
screaming and also the sea anemones covered with broken small shells,
which swayed unreal in still backwaters behind massive rocks, waiting
for fish to
paralyze and to eat. Far away over the dwindling waters nothing but
dim, very dense fog. In this impenetrable nothingness I heard softly the
incessant rolling on of the waves, of the surf breaking on the shore.
Along the highway on the side of the land an unexpected cloud forest grew
up the slopes. Slowly I walked over the path into the woods. High old
trees around me, under my feet a layer of rotten leaves. The canopy
absorbed the thin, watery light. The bark of the high trees glowed
darkly of dripping moist. No more than 150 feet into the forest I got a
strange feeling. The nebulous forest was overwhelming. At times I saw
fallen trees above my head, where roots reached to the ground as if the
trees did not grow upward but to the bottom - as if they wanted to
creep away without vanishing. On other spots, where the fallen trunks
were rotten away, the young trees looked like standing on stilts – a
guard of honor for the unknown visitor. Water seeped along the bark, I
did not hear it. Twigs under my foot soles, they creaked but did not
creak. No motion of a leaf or fluttering of a bird made any sound. Here
the acoustics of death reigned, the death of acoustics. Here the realm
of sounds had annihilated itself, just a theater of movement and silence
was here. Did I look a moment ago into the mirror of the grayish, invisible
ocean, that roared upon the shore, now I looked in the silence of the
living cloud forest. Illusions, the trading of vision and acoustics
within 200 meters, which I recollect now when I think back to the silent
Maya ruins deeply buried in the tropical rainforest full of cicades,
singing birds and howling monkeys. Life and silence closely roofed
over.
It is this experience which
corresponds with an indefinite, but intense feeling that came over me
every morning of the journey. Did I awake most of the time quiet and
restful exactly as I went asleep relaxed in the evening, it didn’t take
much time to feel a compelling urge to skip the daily doings. The yoga
exercises kept me still within a circle of rest. The packing of my bag,
breakfast and the checking out of the hostel, the buy of bus tickets, it
happened already under the spell of the walk to the ruins. I got wrapped
in a decisive hurry to let the daily things as they were and to enter
the miraculous areas of the ruins.
All of a sudden life switched to a
slackening pace, a slow down which helped to relax my mind and made my
awareness transparent for the things which via my senses seeped
undisturbed and direct into myself. Through the leaf-still rainforest I
drew near to the ruins in which the things had come to a standstill.
Time had lifted its hand from the things, the rainforest had isolated
the ruins. All things returned to themselves. The temples and pyramids,
the ball courts and observatories, they waited at nothing and nobody.
They were stripped from the signs and marks of history. They were hiding
in their old skin of stone, earth and grass.
Their age had reached an end,
touched for always eternity. I became part of the landscape, my soul
became the landscape. My waiting was at its end as good as the longing.
The world was finished, I dissolved in the world. Had I ever been nearer
to reality? It did not stop with this sensation of isolation and
standstill of things. Back again in the village or town, where I passed
the night, it whirled in my mind what was the sort of attraction of this
violent, gone-by culture sculptured in stone, that had combat vehemently
paralyzing itself and had blooded in sacrificing human beings. If it was
a matter of attraction then the repulse – a feeling of physical
revulsion and disgust at times – was at least not less strong. Not only
the ruinous with its taboo effect of sacralization and desecration
played a role, however much en route this had imprinted itself visually
on my mind. In addition the ritual murder or killing of a slave or
prisoner of war as a sacrifice for the gods brought alive, I think, also
forbidden feelings of lust. Still more than the cruelty itself with
which the victim was treated it was the voluptuousness of power that
showed itself shameless and undisguised in sculpture and painting as
irresistible and absolute.
A power that rivaled terror or was
not to distinguish from it as expressed in images of beheaded warriors
that equalize actual TV images of decapitated prisoners of war in the
Middle East. This culture of sacrifices was like a mirror on which from
ages back a vague light fell upon the human mind and reflected this
endlessly, glazed and blinded into a free for all madness and its own
fall.
A final word about the mythical
nature of the Mayan culture, in which the primeval story affirms itself
in a constant repetition and takes the form of an inevitable fate. The
struggle to live by means of the death of the vanquished as a sacrifice
is an adagio without perspective, never ending and self-destroying, in
which the Maya makes himself prisoner and creates its own end. So there
is the question if the decay of buildings and sculptures, that on behalf
of their beauty we consider as art and the creeping but irresistible
return of nature finally prove the Maya to be right that his
civilization was subjected to the whims and caprices of the gods, while
for us every day the sun rises and under a cloudless sky even better -
seize the day ! - we can spend time at a free and short pick nick on
the top of a pyramid? And especially the question is if this lightness
in our mood is the best means of defense against the cruelties of fate
in the hands of humans? Or does present the above mentioned citation of
Sebald from his booklet Austerlitz the best mainstay, namely that from
the beginning the big temples and pyramids have been planned by the Maya
with an eye to their unavoidable future as ruins?
However before I positively will
adhere to this position, another question comes to my mind: are the
remnants of the Mayan buildings in essence ordinary ruins of war as I
had seen for the first time in my life in Aachen? Anyhow, in the face of
the Mayan ruins the idea of a disaster is never far off. The
recollection of a destructive force and a exploding dispersal
originating not from low flying bombers but from the dark soul of this
culture of human sacrifices. Essentially an implosion of a society, that
was disrupted by the violence of war and overpopulation and turned out to
be unable to feed, to master and restrain itself. Clearly, one can try to
reconstruct and outline with a measure – for a better understanding –
the original structure of the dead cities, their material culture and
architecture. One can try to find back and redefine the internal
cohesion and basic shapes of world cities. The linear distances between
the temples and pyramids, their ground surface in relation to that of
the ball courts. The invisible lines between the tops of the pyramids,
their shadows over the temples and administrative buildings, the
imaginary arches and circles, where sun and moon move through the
silhouette of the city.
One wonders if these cities are
laid out as a geometric form according to a mathematical, cosmic idea
or that they bear more resemblance to an archipelago of islands
originating from volcanic forces and ground movement of continental
shelves, dispersed but at the same time kept together in an invisible
pattern. Questions and suggestions again and again in order to explain
and rationalize the confusion about the visible chaos of the cities in
ruin, to create order in the mind while the eye moves amazed and
disoriented along the ruins and experiences in doing so an aesthetical
moment. A chaos maybe produced by a man made catastrophe but with a
force of attraction, that wallows to an extent that comes close to the
bloody lust of the Mayan culture.
If a chaos like that without a
ground pattern can bring forward still today a feeling of maybe a
disputed or debatable joy, it is not precluded that even the Maya from
the beginning enjoyed the chaos with heart and soul? Is it the never
lost instinct of man to defy his fate by sheer lust and to call for the end
of himself. The way the Albanese author Ismaël Kadare at the beginning
of his book ‘The Pyramid’ tries to let the Pharaoh abstain himself from
the construction of a pyramid and so to bring the imperial court to
utter despair. With such a decision the Pharaoh would ruin 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 stand by the Italian author
Italo Calvino, who in his book the Invisible Cities brings Marco Polo to
tell the Kublai Khan about the almost endless number of cities and turns
his head till also the Khan perceives that it is time and again a
variance of the immortal city of Venice. What will remain to be seen of
this glorious city when past some centuries from now the San Marco is
sunk into the swamp. Will the chinese mitten crabs be the only ones that
will be able to tell about it? ‘Memory’s images, once they are fixed in
words, are erased, 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, the dead
cities, the necropolis in multitude, in which no traces of life other
than of stones and constructions in decline. The cities that hide in
their slowly changing landscape of stone, grass, earth, rubble and
debris. As if they unnoticed are shoved forward by a slow moraine and
covered with debris. That is what one can touch with the hand stones,
rubble, debris, grass and if one is agile a lizard. Where are they the
living cities hiding in their subdued walls, slided terraces, the sunk
down stairs, the overgrown slopes, the collapsed platforms, the dark
galleries and the arched openings. How long will they be kept upright.
Gravity creates new buildings of
fanciful shapes, without architectural rules. New figures appear, dream
figures of the future. When will they succumb and dismantle, loose their
form and style in order to fall together with their shadows and
silhouettes, facades without face. When will they free themselves in the
loss of their shape as a labyrinth inhabited by animals of the
rainforest and visited by strangers, who try to find their way with the
help of reconstruction drawings. There seems to be no end to the series
of questions. Nevertheless, when one wanders through the dead city, a
labyrinth it isn’t. There one seeks the heart or the exit and is
overwhelmed by confusion from the recurrence of the same, the equal
building material, the identical underwood and bush, a similar breadth
and height of the opening.
Here between the ruins one looks
upon the dead city, a plain scattered with big stones and foundations,
arbitrary it seems, in a unorganized space, where nature penetrates from
all sides. One runs against terraces and stairs, that lead to nowhere
else than stairs and terraces without view or bordering at a depth of
stones and basements of grass without exit. One walks over stepping
stones, which all of a sudden end or lead to where one has been before
behind little walls or unexcavated hills. Are these cities the
precursors of the extending space, the last witnesses in disguise behind
stiff masks without expression other than a grayish or empty old age. Do
you realize now all of a sudden why the people have left their cities in
time to prevent that they would die in a desolate space of sorrow?
Do you understand now why in this
area laughter dies down and also the sense of humor vanishes? That one
doesn’t stop to climb the pyramid and to descend and to ascend again to
get rid off the tightness and to seek room for air, breath and being
free. And that in vain the voice tumbles over the rest-city and its echo
fades away in the denser growing grasses and underwood?
Dead cities, I say, where I see
ruins of cities. Uninhabited cities which are already for centuries
uninhabitable. and all these cities different too, distinct in origin, history and fate. No dead city that resembles another
as ruin: Uxmal, Tonina, Tikal deep or further into the jungle. Different
they are also as result of the day and the hour I visited the ruins.
Different as concrete and real structures by the light and the shadow, the rain
and the wind, the heat, by the scents and smells and the sounds of the
animals. These moments will never come back and the ruins will never
hold out different than in my recollection. I know it is also depends on the
state of decline, the closer coming moment of the end, of the historical
end.
When the city has got into a
progressive state of decline, structure begins to be missing, also the
distinction will get lost, the meaning, the difference. Reason cannot
grasp anymore its surrounding. ‘One gropes in the dark’ is an expression
that reflects better the kind of situation in which one happens to be.
In a
landscape of city ruins one recognizes still the elements, a street, the
road surface sometimes although it is more the soil, pieces of walls,
buildings, door openings and windows often no more than holes in piles
of stones. When the city once has lost its structure, the functions get
lost too. Streets compete with the first floor of houses, gallery and
stairs with walls and a little elevation, doors with whatever opening to
another spot, floor or platform with a view on the environment. The
elements are interchangeable and become part of a progressive process of
transformation, decline and decay. One’s body has the more trouble to
orient, to develop a sense of direction, to constitute a world for the
senses.
Light and darkness, shadow and
silhouette, fragrances and smell, breath and wind, a grip for hand and
foot, the way of noises, echo and sound, voices of men and singing of
birds, they enforce themselves upon us. Perhaps one’s instinct gets
more room, one becomes more alert, is more pointed at danger and opens
up oneself to an indescribable feeling of beauty. One acts
instinctively, while calmness and rest come over us. One somnambulantly
walks in the landscape, sojourns in a past world. It reminds me of a
haiku of the Japanese poet Joso
The Autumn cicada
Dies by the side
Of its
empty shell
When one comes back to the reality
one finds in the chaos, in the ruins without orientation and direction,
without passport and life the pieces, ornaments, fragments of sculptures
and wall paintings. One finds, the Lord be praised, restorations and
reconstructions. Gods and kings, expressed on potsherds, manifest
themselves on colorful wall paintings and vases almost always their
faces en profile, so the resemblance with the noble ear of corn is more
or less compelling. Their eyes big and wild, their mouths toothed and
biting.
Their gestures strong, decisive
and sometimes charming. Does the mythological stylization of the head
force itself upon the visitor, it does not or barely conceal that the
look of the portrayed person turns aside as if he wants to distract
himself from the world and its judgment or wants to withdraw from this
world of pitiless combat and sacrifice. Curiously it does not make him
less unattainable than in his confronting facing en face, when the god or
king in three dimensional sculpture is set on itself as can be seen on
steles or more modest on stucco walls. However these utterly stylized
and often refined images seem to say in their distraction: we are not
here and perhaps even - you visitor are not here. This all does not
exist and has never existed at all. It is a dream which reminds of a
dream. Is this perhaps too a stylized and restraint almost artistic way
to escape the idea of the catastrophe?
 Finally still this. I did
not examine if between the herons, howling monkeys, jaguars, bats,
kingfishers and hawks a feathered snake hided in the reality to undo the
god of his mythic aureole and to put him back in the fauna of Mayan
kingdom. I saw with my own eyes a motionless, an apparent undisturbable
and somewhat frightening big toad on the black muddy bank of the Rio
Dulce without being able to tell his Latin name. Though this was
sufficient for me
to understand that the Maya, as much impressed by this animal,
sculptured out of giant river stones more than life sized toads as
silent stone zoo morphs.
Equally I have not searched for
the background of the Maya representation of a square world, which was
as dumb or fantastic as to see the world as flat the way man in Europe
did in those days. It is evidently that who watches the images of the
gods, kings and warriors and examines the wall paintings and the
figuration of writing, will not deny that the world is square. For me
this represents from my youth the sturdiness and the strength of the
Maya culture, stripped
from sensitivity and compassion, that has intrigued me always however
not charmed in the same way.
Do I stay far off from scientific pretensions, similarly I don’t dare to
re-tell the story of the culture of the Maya. For who are better at
telling the story of the creation and the history than the Maya in the
Popol Vuh or as sculptured on the steles. About deceit and ruse in the
ball games of the underworld, in which 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. Is it true that in the ball a skull of a
killed prisoner of war was locked up in memory of this mythic warrior
story? And see how the danger of retelling degenerates in a question of
a fool out of its context. Do I see for the first time my own grin?
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