Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

New Time for Mexico (with a New Preface)

University of California Press

CHAPTER ONE

MEXICO........The Face of Creation

To see Mexico from the air is to look upon the face of creation.Our everyday, earthbound vision takes flight and is transformedinto a vision of the elements. Mexico is a creation of water andfire, of wind and earthquake, of the moon and the sun.

Not just one sun but the five suns of ancient Mexican cosmogony.First comes the Sun of Water, which presides over the creationof the world and ends in the storms and floods that foretell thecoming eras--Sun of Earth, Sun of Wind, and Sun of Fire--eachending in catastrophe until we arrive at the fifth sun, our own,which awaits the final cataclysm.

Sun of Water

Coursing through Mexico are serpentine rivers, mere threads offertility in the midst of deserts, opulent tropical undulations pouringslow and wide into the sea Over the flowing waters of thePapaloapan, river of butterflies, over the still waters of Lake Patzcuaro,furrowed by dragonflies, flutters the goddess Itzpapalotl, astar in the Aztec pantheon. Her very name, Obsidian Butterfly,resounds with the ambiguity of all the elements, her fragile multicoloredwing at once a fearful sacrificial knife.

She is the first sign of creation, proclaimed by the fleeting liquidelement. It is not the nature of water to be always placid, and whenit lies as calm as a mirror locked in the crater of a volcano, itsimage is ominous indeed, for its supernatural tranquillity promisesan imminent commotion. What are our years when seen againstthe mountains, millennia of stone? Who can really believe thatthese rock-encircled lakes in the craters of Toluca and Puebla alwayswore, and always will, this same metallic, motionless sheen?

Now everything moves again. The Usumacinta River flows on,inseparable from the forest it waters, equally inseparable from theclouds that gather over both jungle and river, as if they, too, weredrawn along by the current. We know that all three--sky, river,and jungle--hide and protect the civilizations that slumber beneaththem, pretending to be dead, giving signs of life only in the mysteryof the figures drawn on the rocks beside the Planchon River andin the ghostly processions of the frescoes at Bonampak.

The stillness of the waters is illusory. Majestic waterfalls cascade,washing away the land and its history. Mountains collapse into thesea. Sandbars break the very waters of the sea. And the surf on thecoast of Jalisco shows the earth as a dark-clawed monster, besiegedand battered by the fury of the sea.

The land is a portrait drawn by the sea. But we have only toturn the picture around to imagine the contrary. Is this not ratherthe portrait of the sea as it is attacked by a hungry, ferocious land,an ambitious, aggressive, imprisoned land that challenges the sea,ruler of the greater part of the planet's surface, for its dominion?

Unquiet, tremulous, and insatiable, fearful and defensive, landof teeth and nails, jaws and talons--for a moment the land ofMexico shakes. The earth is about to speak. Earth will come todominate water. The second sun comes to life amid awe and terror.

Sun of Earth

From the heights, the dead volcanoes--Popocatepetl, Iztaccihuatl,the Nevado de Toluca--signal that their silence is no insuranceagainst catastrophe, but rather a portent of the next tremor. Paricutin,the youngest volcano, smiles like a mischievous child, warningus that one day. curl of smoke may appear in a Michoacanfarmer's field, spiraling up from the bowels of the furrowed earththat shakes its shoulders, vomiting flame and ash until, in a matterof hours, it reaches the sky.

And there is more: Chichon, that dark, active giant, proclaimsthat its quaking and smoking will cease only in foreboding of thenext great commotion of this restless land, where creation has notyet ended its labors. Each volcano ends only to pass the flamingbaton to the next.

Sun of Water, Sun of Earth. From the air, we can see the originsof the land and all that flows over its surface. We can take a pictureof the very point where the Sierra Madre Oriental begins, proudlyabandoning plains and deserts as it starts its climb, then shootstoward its vibrant coupling with the western chain in the NudoMixteco. Linked forever, the two chains then run on together totheir ultimate extinction at the southern extreme of the continentin Chile and Argentina, where the Andes bud off from the chainlike frigid grapes. We can also take a picture of the source of theConchos River and see the birth of its waters from the womb ofthe land.

As we see all of this, we are present at the creation of nature.Not as something that happened illo tempore, in the age of thegods, but as something that is happening to us now, in our owntime and before our very eyes.

The Nevado de Colima shows itself a mature gentleman, a bitgray around the temples, reminding us of the ambiguity of naturein Mexico. But neither he nor any of the great slumbering patriarchswatching over the earth can deny us our own time in thisland.

For it is we--you and I--who see and touch and smell and tasteand feel today, even as we witness the perpetual rebirth of the landhere and now. We are the witnesses to creation, because of themountains that watch us and in spite of their warning: "We willendure; you will not." Our response to this warning can be assinful as pride, but also as virtuous as charity. We take the earthin our hands and re-create it in our own image.

Geometry, Einstein said, is not inherent in nature. Our mindimposes it on reality. Man's geometric imagination can be marvelouslyobserved, from the air, in the incomparable clash of jungleand architecture in Palenque and Yaxchilan. It is at these sites thatthe primeval struggle between nature and civilization seems to havetaken place; indeed it is still going on. Nature embraces architecture,but the human creation suffers because, while desiring to giveitself up to nature's almost maternal tenderness, it also fears beingsuffocated by it. And as human beings, we also fear that we willbe expelled from that great, moist womb that nurtures and protectsus, cast out into the shelterless world.

The great art of ancient Mexico is born from this tension betweennature and civilization, between fear of enclosure and fearof exposure. The splendors of the great acropolis at Monte Albanand the sacred spaces of Teotihuacan are the triumphs of but aninstant of human domination over nature, yet also of human equilibriumwith it. In these places, man has met time and made theshapes of time his own.

Nevertheless, man looks around him and sees the seductivethreat of the sierras, deep gorges, the devouring tangle of the jungle,and the latent tremor of the mountains. He responds by gentlycaressing the slopes of the mountains, festooning them with terracedgardens; by stroking the plains and planting them with wheatand maize; and by building cities, shelters of his own making tosubstitute for the protection of trees, caves, and craters.

Mexico is a land of walls. Like all other peoples, we built themfirst to defend ourselves against inclement weather, marauding animals,and enemy attacks. Soon, however, architecture found othermotives. First was the need to distinguish the sacred from the profane.Then came the need to segregate the conqueror from his subjects.And finally it becomes necessary to distance the rich fromthe poor.

In spite of these divisions, our cities transcend their limits and,with the very walls that divide and separate,...