Donald Wellman

Diario mexicano
(selections)

 

Zócalo: temporal observations   In Neptunoallegorical the world is understood as a hieroglyphic representation of the Divine will. For Sor Juana, Neptune is a face of the son of Isis, a representation of wisdom. Her text stipulates proportions and design for a triumphal arch to be erected at the Catedral Metropolitana in order to celebrate the entrance into the city of the virrey, don Tomás de la Cerda, marquéz de la Laguna. My allegory includes fishing boats discovered in their aesthetic perfection when I came first upon the Gulf waters. San Miguel Arcángel, where are your santitos? Preoccupied crowds encounter the desolation of tidal scenes: themes of inundation and protection.

San Miguel Arcángel, I hear your piping rhythm, in the calls of vendors, the drumming of traffic, the shrill notes that signal permission to cross:

Rivera’s Murals in the Palacio Nacional express a brutal history, identifying hope with recovery of an indigenous humanity. México en la historia, perspectiva: el campesino oprimido, 1935. Recovered artifacts sited among the flower beds in his gardens  compose a sacred allegory: a world constructed of layered forms, blocks of indelible language, incised faces. Stamps or seals in series. The nation  and its cultures, a project, both political and aesthetic in its shaping stratagems, unresolved, incomplete. Cosmological but incomprehensible counterfoil: Xipe who wears a tunic of human skin. Decapitation when the play of the ball went counter to the direction of the sun, competing judges, enthroned each end of the court, guardian spirits. A bone xylophone, Teponaxtle, played in sacred sacrifice,  bodies of kings and offspring strewn over the grounds  at a Jonestown in Guyana,  limestone caverns in Bonampak and Laguna.

México a través de los siglos Frida stands impassive and some sing hymns. Huelga! labor actions at industrial sites: Land and Liberty! Slaughter, rape, execution of unredeemed natives. Totem animal presences resist the armored crush of horse and pike, Zapatista women with children slung on their backs. México is a mestizo nación. It is a caste conscious nation. The church on the corner of Avenida 20 de Noviembre is St. Miguel Arcángel. México, profoundly a Christian nation, more so than I had anticipated. México is an indio nation, make no mistake. A resurgence of copper bodies fills the calles of the capital. and the small pueblos  with their trash strewn margins. Three figurines on the sloping wall of the Templo mayor, attentive and within earshot of the drumming on the Zocalo.

sábado 12 febrero, ozomatli, mono Cristo and Jeanne-Claude unveil their Gates in Central Park Saffron  fantasies, Chinese kites This diary loops between notes  from among the high hills and low mountains of Weare, New Hampshire (listening to “Over the Hills and Far Away” from John Gay’s Beggars’ Opera) and solitary wanderings to pilgrimage sites in the Yucatán and Bajío, employing baroque methods to the point of approximating a redemptive confusion. Inscribed discontinuous dates,  forms eschewing form Thump, page by page, elephantine. El Neptuno alegórico es un perfecto ejemplo de la admirable y execrable prosa barroca, prosopopéyica, cruzada de ecos, laberintos, emblemas, paradojas, agudezas, antitesis, coruscante de citas latinas y nombres griegos y egipcios, que en frases interminables y sinuosas, lenta pero no agobiada por sus arreaos, avanza por la página con cierta majestad elefantina (Octavio Paz 215). In Frida’s garden, I considered the purchase of a blue cat. The Blue House has been shaped as an homage to her talent by a faithful unfaithful husband. She is present in decorative elements, patents for flatware, small bowls Café furniture: sunflower yellow chairs with tangerine and olive finials. Her beds have mirrors in the canopies A retablo: Marxism heals. A staircase of cards like prayers inscribes fond sentiments.  Get well, my angel Cats in the garden, Cat dishes behind the mock templo. Aztec and Olmec heads among the greenery Ollas gigantes for grain and olive oil Mystical gray glaze, marine forms entangled with the light. Tanguey and a Klee, paisajes with similar tonalities. Evidence of independence? Who is the woman with long lips and a wide mouth, perfect teeth? Of the two Fridas, the white one has an open heart, not like a Saint’s, but displayed with surgical precision, the one transfusing to the other, mother to herself. The Albright Knox has an autoretrato with a monkey perched on her shoulder, a sea shell collar around her neck, 1938.   585 days in the cycle of Venus Fuente de sabaduría. I sit on a blue cushion, cerulean.

miercoles 29 diciembre, malinalli, yerba torcida Remember in Cayocán! We shared Turkish coffee on a second story balcony overlooking the ornamental garden  The bandstand and eager throng. How you laughed with the children, no tiene el culpa el indio, because the Indians were not to blame; then they raffled off the tequila and you won the one-liter jug of amber gold, your gringo embarrassment, amusing and humbling. la pastorela más comíca

jueves 30 diciembre 2004 acatl, caña Among the bodies from Banda Aceh, torn and shattered boards, a mattress, weeds,  a serving platter, the sheen of drying mud, rendering naked form transparent, a cataclysm such as Agostino might have rendered it in marble for the temple at Rimini. The body startled from sleep struggles for breath,  as the tide swamps tangled forms, driving the open mouth into the gasping mud.

Tidal Forms: Can aquamarine boats or the House of the Seven Dolls speak to this? Scaling the night sky to assess observable fates, looking under the sun glare at the remorseless draw and flood of the tropical waves, seeking signs of life on the deserted Gulf coast this day before a New Year holiday.

Offrenda:  Fragments of bone, stone masks and skulls with teeth of snail and cowry shell. The guardian sleeps, in a stupor, after the bout of madness Beads of agate and jade Forms or presences from the sea and earth, now open to the sun, starkly naked offerings. The ritual blade in the open mouth.                     Retablo: Genocide  Petro de Alvarado, tasked by Antonio de Mendoza, Vice-regent of New Spain, who had mounted expeditions to find the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola (Wichita Kansas possibly included) and who had also founded the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlateloco in 1536 and the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, came upon resistance in the jungles of Guatemala and caused all inhabitants to be slaughtered. In the overlay of log and armored body, a reflection of the turning cosmological tide. In the hilltop jungle,  a swinging of machetes against the onslaught of pike and armored bodies.  Here the naked body rides above a history whose course only now begins to break on prophesized shores.                 Children from villages in the region fill the streets and plazas. The shop girl imagines  a different glamour but returns  to her parents’ house as she must. Grandmother’s has one light bulb,  a faded quilt stretched over the window against the night chill, an open fire in the yard. Television and the sewing machine draw current from one wire. To improve rural sanitation, provide additional facilities. Many simply shit in the fields. Everywhere I have been  the elderly like to rub their hands and arms and enjoy the brightness of a fire, a glow on their faces. The young  take the collectivo at dawn, at noon  under plane trees, embracing,  her lips scented vanilla and pear blossom, ignore parodic stunts, circus acts.  Silent statues, unmoved, when dancers crowd the bandstand. The brown people do not inhabit  the white mansions, many  now hotels for tourists. I do not  give to the cripple in the doorway  as freely as the poorest might. Carts and foodstands crowd the walks,  a bounty of roast meats, fruit cups, footwear,  bathing goggles, confusedly on offer.  The city, a mosaic of interpenetrating spaces,  resistant to the passage of buses and trucks,  nothing felt or seen so noxious or rancid  as to cause hesitation. Shell of baroque ruins. An impulse to rest against a sunny wall and photograph human forms: vendors and their children, close together,  boarding a bus. Mapmaker poet  swept up, inundated.                         Uxmal Two times to Uxmal, its dovecote and macaw’s roost, impossibly recursive. On the first return, unexpected confidence  in my abilities to navigate: jarring topes in the road. Identity papers, passport and the required  foleta de migración turística,  mislaid, not where I expected to find them on my return to my room,  compromised self, panic at the old year’s end. No magical purpose at work here or in the recovery. Near noon, I had been splayed on a high platform for a sun god’s inspection, exposed post-operative on offer.  On the lawn of the palace, jewel box  of ancient authority, children played at jaguar and diviner. From my perch I examined  the bedrooms where girls feted before sacrifice. Fields and shrub forests in the distance, remarkably green toward the north coast. Do they burn the earth to destroy the thorn bushes, potentilla fruticosa, morning glory, red darts from a fennel where I had wandered into uncharted ruins? Descending the ninety-nine stairs, a small incautious boy tottered on the brink of a well. I called out, “¡Cuidado!” Happily, he did not fall.  I acquired a guidebook to Mayan ruins with reprints of drawings by Catherwood  and daguerreotypes by Charnay. Also a puppet, with an arm long sleeve, wearing typical yucateca costume. And a jipi.  No great awakening in these details,  only that my tourism seemed almost joyous,  setting aside, for reasons of conscious, my status:  consumer without identity in an impoverished land. At night, on the second return, error led me into Muná,  known for workshops that specialize in reproductions.  Museum security had recovered my papers from the floor of a stall where I had urinated,  dislodging the passport from a waistband  when extracting bills. With my papers restored, I was able  to view the sound and light show, son et lumière, turning to my left (so often I take the long way around), assuming that on this night,  naturally, I might be one of only a few there,  gingerly stepping over grates that house flood lights, then turning, about face, to find myself on the opposite side of the quadrangle  from the crowded stands on the north wall, “Chac, Chac”  stereo prayers to end the drought. Quetzalcoátl, his form wound among the Puc friezes, illuminated blue, then green. How can I explain  that the serpent god has female aspects? Venus, Lucero? On this night, I had intended to meet my scorpion woman, my Shango, Santa Barbara. Endless New Year’s Eve  dawning on a desolate balconey overlooking an empty plaza, supping on cream of cilantro soup,  desiccated  poc-chuk, the white carriages waiting to transport lovers to balls in mansions on Avenida Montejo.                       Confession Here then is the truth of New Year’s dawn: Continue, you can go on! The city again alive! A crowd overflowed the portal of the basilica, San Ildefonso, vendors and beggars among believers. I sat to the back with a young family. We sang. I prayed a few words in a Spanish that seemed church Latin and wondered back to my deep resistance to the sacrilege that I might do. Communion  without confessing to thievery, falling  from sin into indiscretion, because of sexual  acts of untrammeled lust, normal to a boy my age then but weighing now all my many years  of exile from holiness. I am not making a claim of  rebirth only that I felt whole  for a fleeting moment when the brown-eyed girl  clasped my hand. I saw her pain. She wanted no more from me.  I had no more to give. Nostalgia expended.                         from Sonetos The son that the slave girl conceives, so says the law, belongs to that legal guardian who owns her of whom the child is born Inkblots, offered  Incautious deception of sentiments Inept counterfoil to fate: corpse, shadow, dust, nothing                              Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

  (c)D.Wellman 2006