During the early to mid 1960s, I saw
reproductions of sculptures and murals, and a
few hints at indigenous manuscripts from pre-
Colombian Meso-America. In the late 60s, my
interest, based in part on exploring forms of
visual poetry outside the shallow and narrow
Simias of Rhodes to Mallarmé paradigm,
began to cohere. I'm not sure of the order of
revelations that followed, but the gists of
some of the most important centered on the
following:
The peoples of Meso-America had created
a broad spectrum of writing systems, some
including phonetic elements, some remaining
purely visual, including the most highly
developed iconographic system I've found.
The Valley of Mexico acted as a bottle neck
for the migrating peoples of the Americas.
Many cultures and languages, some belonging
to different families, jostled together in
this place. Modern commentators on writing
systems generally exclude or patronize the
iconographic writing system of the area as
a crude and childish form of picture writing.
Yet by the 1960s - long before the advent of
the World Wide Web - it became apparent to me
that such a system may have been
considerably more sophisticated than
scholars and savants realized. In a multi-
cultural and multi- linguistic environment,
a writing system based on something other
than speech made more sense than a phonetic
system. Perhaps we were catching up to it
in a globally expanding culture where
insularity no longer worked.
Unlike the cosmopolitan peoples of central
Mexico, the Mayans had evolved a syncretic
system which included stronger phonetic
elements. Their writing system not only
integrated complex and extensive mathematics,
but it kept time and linguistic dichotomies
firmly wedded to their writing. Distich structure
in Mayan glyphs and poems sharpened my sense
of the potential of pairs and couplets. This
worked out through all sorts of pairings,
ranging from the nature of facing pages to the
parallelism in classic Chinese poetry. In the
1960s and 70s, this system was not as well
understood as it has became later, when
linguists and anthropologists have gone to
contemporary Mayans for additional guidance.
Both central Mexican and Mayan systems worked
out simplification not altogether dissimilar
to the refinement of phonetic scripts such
as those that lead to the Roman alphabet.
Central Mexican iconography, when used as the
basis for a writing system placed strong
emphasis on legibility, and possessed a haunting
quality that made them difficult to forget once
you'd gotten past initial impressions and
confusions. The strong black frame lines,
simple and brilliant colors, crystalline
clarity of images, and vibrant parataxis
of composition seemed unique among writing
and iconographic systems throughout the world.
This seemed admirable for bureaucratic documents
such as the Matriculo de tributos. Not
only did it make information less tedious to
read, but the icons seemed to make such data
easier to remember. As I worked with the
preconquest books, I came to the tentative
conclusion that the religious and historical books
didn't tell readers things they didn't know, but
deepened their sense of the material covered.
You could see this as an emphasis on wisdom rather
than data. The nature of the books seemed to lend
themselves to numerous forms of participation and
performance, at once related to ceremony and
personal introspection. Exploring this attitude
toward writing became an essential part of my
initial interest and my continued fascination
with the books. The late iconography
suggested continuity and growth from the
era of Teotihuacan to the conquest, and that
elements of it survived in Mexico and its
northern diaspora.
Human sacrifice troubled virtually all
writers on the subject, and accounts of such
practices troubled me, as did their association
with art forms that seemed unrelated to things
so monstrous. The real catch, however, came
from the way this meshed with the world in
which I found myself. The contemporary
world practiced more grisly sacrifices on a
larger scale without seeing them as such. From
Auschwitz to Vietnam, Hiroshima to the
Cuban Missile Crisis, Dresden to Nanking, the
Moscow Show trials to the trial of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg, the liquidation of Max Jacob,
Osip Mandelstam, d.a.levy, and Victor Jarra,
the endless lynchings, bombings, burnings and
other atrocities committed against
black people in this country just like racism
throughout the world - even the endless bodies
piled up on the great altar of automobile and the
misery inflicted on the world in the name of
Capitalism, Nationalism, Leninism, and other
ideologies, human sacrifice still framed the
world. At the time I began Middle American
Dialogues, the Vietnam war was roaring
ahead full tilt, a focal point in a world
in the midst of an orgy of human sacrifice.
That I took part in the anti-war movement
didn't put me in a position where I could
hold myself aloof, pretending that I was
part of a different order of being from those
who prosecuted the wars of the time. In this
context, who were we to flinch at people who
sacrificed a few warriors who believed in
the sacrality of such a death?
This, like other aspects of Meso-American
thought, explored the deepest of question: Who
are we? What does it mean to be human?
Psychologists in vogue at the time often
answered the question in variations
on Freudianism. Meso-American mythology
uncannily took a number of Freudian
concepts much further, particularly in the
Quetzalcoatl-Tezcatlipoca cycles. According to
Freud, the Id, the endless source of creation
and destruction, raged on in a subconscious
and unknowable torrent. What Freud may have been
looking for was Tezcatlipoca, whom the
peoples of Native America brought forward
into full consciousness, a figure who could be
known, delineated, understood and lived with.
At the same time, the Ego and Super-Ego only
hinted at the clarifying and regulating
character of Quetzalcoatl. Although dressed in
the trappings of science, Freudianism seemed
an inferior mythology, based primarily on
interviews with groggy neurotics from the elite
of a bloated and repressive society. Meso-
American mythology had evolved over
centuries of careful observation of fully-
functioning communities. Not the product of
a single man or clique, these beliefs depended
on something closer to scientific method:
empirical testing and correction by a broad
group of observers over a long period of
time. In the late 60s, studies of
evolution and animal behavior engaged much
of the intelligentsia. Native American
mythology saw life as forming a continuum
through all species, with humans playing a
perpetually interactive role with their relatives
in the natural world. Seeing Tezcatlipoca or
Quetzalcoatl's innate, inalienable, profound
animal characteristics made more sense to me
than seeing people as "naked apes."
From these rudimentary observations, I
wrote some wretched lexical poetry, but began
moving toward the next stage of development.
I began putting large sheets of paper on my
walls and painting reconstructions of the
murals at Teotihuacan. This came from a
closer look at good source material, which
brought large and rapid bursts of revelation.
The source material could be divided into
two types, though they didn't come to me in
separate divisions. Facsimiles of complete
manuscripts, not just single pages, opened up
worlds within worlds within worlds. Of the
dozen surviving manuscripts from the Aztec
and Mixtec cultures, many represented unique
schools, genres, and types of books. The soul-
wrenching force of Codex Borgia seemed to
come from a different world than the delicate
simplicity of Codex Laud, as did the colorful,
ceremonial grandeur of Codex Borbonicus, or
the crudely painted but intellectually complex
Codex Vaticanus 3773, even though all four
contained some of the same material. These
stood in distinct contrast to the serene
mastery of the mytho-historical Codex
Vindobonensis and its more highly focused
cousins, Codex Colombino.
Some works, such as the Lienzo de Zacatepec
represented the sole examples of book forms
found nowhere else in the world. Each of the
manuscripts presented unique approaches to
page layout, iconography, and logopoea.
I began painting facsimiles of these books as a
way of getting closer to them, understanding
them better, and searching out possibilities for
transposition into new contexts. Facsimile painting
became a discipline something like translation had
become earlier. Both acted as a means of study, of
getting closer to the text, and, at times, a form
of solace. Systematically reading and, if possible,
photocopying books and manuscripts in libraries
wherever I went took on something of the character
of pilgrimage. This could become comic when I tried
to make facsimiles of books in special collections.
On one occasion, I managed to persuade a librarian
to let me bring paints into a library that normally
allowed no more than a pencil and notebook. Bless
her for all eternity. Other librarians simply saw
me as an amusing or annoying eccentric. Whenever
possible, my parephrenalia included a Methuen or PMS
color guide, and necessitated working out a system of
notation for indicating color. Essays grew
naturally out of work on the manuscripts and their
background.
Another type of manuscript not only aided
in interpreting the indigenous books, they also
opened new worlds of their own. These are
books written in Nahuatl and several Mayan
dialects transcribed in the Roman alphabet
after the conquest. The first to grab me were from
the largely Nahuatl Florentine Codex compiled
by Fray Bernardino de Sahagun and the
Mayan books of Chilam Balam. Codex
Florentino presented the fully functioning and
integrated culture of the mythology; the
poetry, particularly the Hymns, seemed
unparalleled elsewhere in the world, and
hence a starting point for a re-visioned poetry.
One group of Nahuatl oral poems transcribed in
the Roman alphabet, and referred to as the
Cantares, particularly moved me.
Translations available at the time were
inadequate. I began translating these poems
from Angel Garibay K.'s Spanish translations.
These were working drafts for my own use,
not for publication. Since then, John
Bierhorst's excellent English translations have
become available. Combined with the other
Meso-American works, the Cantares seemed
to form a largely untapped water table for
New World poetry.
The books of Chilam Balam presented
something altogether different: not only did
they suggest transcription or recension of the
as yet indecipherable Mayan glyphs, they also
presented a form of Surrealism that made its
modern counterpart seem pale.
In 1974, I started sketching out a series of
books based on these sources, and in the
autumn of 1975 I started work on an introductory
book based on a collection of omens in
Codex Florentino. During a period of
overwork the following June, First Book of
Omens cohered and insisted that I print it
immediately. An essential part of the imaging
of this book came from the work of d.a.levy,
for me, the central figure of the mimeo
movement of the 1960s. He also acted as a
modern victim of human sacrifice, not sacrificed
by friends or directly assassinated by the
police as some conspiracy theorists claim, but
pushed into suicide by a year and a half of
ritual torture by factions throughout society.
In several works, particularly The
Tibetan Stroboscope, levy worked with texts
obliterated in various fashions, including the
heavy inking of mimeo stencils that ate the
texts. I had seen these as calls for a new,
reemergent text. I had developed what I came
to call "nimbus type" - clearly delineated
Roman letters with blurred areas surrounding
and joining them. My first impulses in
developing this kind of lettering was to
combine characteristics of calligraphy and
type. In the context of Omens, they suggested
imperial Roman letters cutting their way
through a fluid background; at the same time,
they seemed both an answer to and an
extension of levy's smeared texts - new
possibilities coming out of a return to the
undivided ground of being. They bore a
hallucinatory character which could be seen as
a reading of messages coming from this
ground. I printed the book in brown ink, not
only enhancing the hallucinatory quality, but
also suggesting the colors of skin, of dried
blood, of the ever renewed and renewing
earth. Each page bore ten lines, suggesting
ribs radiating out from the book's spine, as
well as the number of fingers and toes on each
half of the body. Unfortunately, I did this
book too quickly. The text simply wasn't
rigorous enough. I had wanted a different
type of binding, one that would allow the
front and back cover to snap together so the
book would form a radiant cylinder, and
reiterate the cyclical character of the Aztec
conception of history, which gives omens a
greater reality. I rewrote the text, but have not
imaged it, and probably won't do so. For
presentation here, I have placed the last page
of the book first, facing the opening page,
something I wanted to do with the original
book, and have only done in print here.
Click here to go to an opening
from First Book of Omens
I began A Book of Questions and Goddesses
at the same time, but worked it out more
slowly and carefully. The first movement of this
book, based on the Chilam Balam of
Chumayel, took another approach to omens
and Native American Surrealism. The example
shown here could be considered visual poetry,
or a score, or simply a schematic - it
represents one area of confluence between
visual and lexical poetry. As I note in the
book, the texts in the columns of these poems
should be read twice, first down each column,
then across the columns. This picks up on
Mayan dual linguistic structures and extends
them. Thus the first reading would begin like
this: "The sun / lances, lofty crosses in its
heart / green jaguars /heaven's brains..." The
second would begin "The sun / a fried egg / lances,
lofty crosses in its heart / words and gestures
of benediction / green jaguars / green chili
peppers..." This acted as a score for reading,
accompanied by tight dance steps and gestures.
D. Clinton published the book through Salt House in
1977.
Click here to go to the first
page of A Book of Questions and Goddesses
The last of the Middle American Dialogues
books to see print, A book of Openings and
Closings, I published myself in 1984. In this
book, I printed some mistranslations of some
of the Cantares in brown nimbus type, with
European and Mayan texts printed over it in
plain black Roman characters. This carried
forward my attempts at presenting multiple
texts simultaneously without resorting to such
cop-outs as interlinears. The sections from the
Cantares act, as usual, as lyrics and
celebrations. The texts printed in Roman letters
explore the intimate interrelation and dependency of
creation and destruction. The book works in
multiple pairings: facing pages, the interaction
of the two layers of texts, lines in Roman
letters based in Old Norse verse forms dependent
on caesurae in mid line, etc., all in some sense
echoing the creation/destruction pairing. The
texts in Roman letters follow this pattern:
First opening: workings from the Icelandic
Elder Edda dealing with Oden's discovery
of runes and his visit to hell. Second opening:
from Bernal Diaz's account of the conquest of
Mexico. Story of Gonzalo Guerrero, who had been
shipwrecked in Mexico before Cortez's voyage,
had become completely integrated into
indigenous culture, refused to join Cortez's
ranks, and died fighting them. This faces Diaz's
description of his amazement at the first entry
into Tenochtitlan, and his meditation on its
destruction. Third opening: From the Mayan
Popul Vuh. The first page chronicles the
destruction of the "dolls," beings who could act
like humans, but couldn't think. The facing page
tells the story of how Hunter and Jaguar Deer
tricked the lords of death and destroyed them.
Fourth opening: From Beowulf. The hero
killing the dragon facing the account of his
funeral. In the first version, I had the dragon
episode facing the fight with Grendel's mother.
In this work, the layers of text work with
degrees of identity and distance from my
European heritages.
Though I had written the book earlier, I first
printed it at a time of confusion and personal
difficulty, and managed to botch it thoroughly. I
sent some copies to friends and a distributor, then,
on further consideration, destroyed the rest of
the edition, not even keeping a copy for myself.
In 2000, I had to buy a copy of the book as a base
for trying to redo it. I did a rendition using
computer imaging techniques. I've passed copies
of this version around to friends, but I'm still
not satisfied with it. Among the odd comedies of
literary ventures, trying to deal with the
interrelation of creation and destruction seems
to run into something like one of Murphy's laws.
A number of other books in the series remain
unpublished. I reworked passages of the
Cantares into the texts Tlalocan,
a book that would have come at the end of the
series. Tlalocan is the paradise of Tlaloc, the
rain god. The imaging of the book would cost
too much to produce without hefty financial
backing, and will probably never come to pass.
The frame images of this book come from
hands in the murals at Teotihuacan. The basic
physical unit of the book is, as usual, the two-
page spread or opening. In openings where
the fingers of both hands point toward or
away from each other, the hands would be
surrounded by (or dropped out of)
photographs of crowds printed in the color
sequence blue, red, green, brown. In openings
where the fingers of both hands point in the
same direction, the outlines of the hands and
the texts would be blind-stamped, without
ink, just embossed into the page. The
embossing of hands would push through the
other side of the page, further defining the
color-surrounded hands on the other sides
with raised outlines. The embossed texts
would leave their impression on the texts on
the colored sides, suggesting a ghostly text
behind the text printed in black ink. Brightly
colored openings would alternate with stark
white openings, which would enhance the
sense of dialectical progression in the work
(white openings are more speculative; colored
openings are celebrations). The hands in
individual openings would suggest the basic
human gestures of giving, gathering, and
pointing. In the book as a whole, the
progression of hands would suggest the
mudra-like hand positions of indigenous
dance. I include here sketches of several
openings. Please bear in mind that the pages
without faces would be stark white, the other
pages would be brightly colored, the faces
would be photographs, and the blind
stamping would produce more of a bas-relief
than a flat page.
Click here to go to a
sketch of openingf from Tlalocan
Towards the end of the book the lyrics of
"De colores," appear. This is the anthem of the
United Farm Workers' Union, whose
membership is largely Chicano. These lyrics
retain characteristics of the Cantares, in tone,
in imagery, and in the use of abstract syllables.
Although I often work with historical
material, the poems are not antiquarian
speculations or reconstructions. Their only
significance acts in the present - no more remote
or exotic than the Mexican-American woman with whom
I lived while writing Tlalocan, nor the
Aztecs del Norte among her friends who helped me
with obscure references in the Cantares, nor
the Chicanos who live in my neighborhood now. I
grew up with Italians who were proud to be the heirs
of Roman culture. Greeks still welcome the return of
Persephone in the spring, just as surely as Jews
observe Passover and some of my oriental friends
take part in Buddhist celebrations as a birthright,
and some of my occidental friends practice Asiatic
religions by convincement. Paradoxically, to look
no farther than your walled-in back yard is to
live in a world gone by. We now live in a global
culture where all places come together, and the
heritages of all times come to us through every
means they can. We may become as sophisticated in
dealing with diversity as the peoples of
pre-Columbian Central Mexico, who used a form of
visual poetry to share their lives among peoples
who had no common spoken language.