Q’anil. I begin to write this with a hard thunderstorm of late May fulminating above me. Bursts of light make the hail as bright as mercury in the dark afternoon. There is a tornado warning in effect. Dennis would have liked this—the sound of thunder is Toj in the language of the Mayan K’iche’ who are also called Tohohil, “thunderers” or the people of the pulsation of thunder, whose character is as that of clouds massing together and the deep coughs of a radiant jaguar. I return to Dennis’s stunning immersion in the Mayan myth world, Breath on the Mirror, and learn again that thunder is a hungry god. He presses his wooden foot of fire only on those nations that adopt, embrace, and feed him. Dennis supposes that the price was blood and hearts—that, like the ceremony of new fire in Mexico, every so often the ancient people of the Guatemalan highlands would extinguish every fire in the land, open a man’s chest with a chert knife, and in a feast for the god rekindle the spark of fire down in that empty cavity of socket and ribs. I wonder if maybe words would also break open the chest, rekindle the fires of the thunder god, and fill our empty cavities with life and pulsation. As I finish this paragraph the clouds have moved through, the golden sky is splitting open again, and a feast of birdsong has returned to the green boughs.
A day passes, the day now is Toj—a day of paying debts and making good on contracts. In the afternoon, I teach the poetry of Cecilia Vicuña’s khipu and watch my students wrap a classroom in thread. The room is decorated with one of those fake trees you find in just about any office building. I quote anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena—“things (mountains, soil, water, and rocks) are not only things; they are earth-beings, and their names speak what they are”—to teach the idea of the sign whose representability is intimately entwined with the materiality of the sign, a natural sign whose nature is its own, rather than that natural sign given to us by the ecclesiastical philosophers of the seventeenth century, whose nature is always only a system of signals from a Christian God through his works. That natural sign whose iterability is infinite but whose reference is singular, that is, as Foucault put it, “everywhere the same: coeval with the institution of God.” In Vicuña’s threads, the sign is asked to stand for itself, to bear authority in the living materials of its signaling. I wonder which is more alive, though—the thread or the never anything but abstract tree in the room, the thread which carries the memories of every touch and unwinding, or that tree in permanently suspended symbolic virtuality, caught in a kind of perpetual imagining. Tedlock often writes about feeding the signs, making sure that those hungry for memory get what they need, and that those hungry for imagination also get what they need. Thunder again that evening; heavy rain; lightning bursting across the eastern sky.
My debts to Dennis. The first bit of critical writing I published was a review of Tedlock’s 2000 Years of Mayan Literature for Jacket2. The day after it was posted online he wrote me in alacrity because someone had considered his book so seriously. As a child of Central America working out how the racial idioms of my being related to an antiquity in the Americas, I took it very seriously. It was a beam of light to guide me into a course of study, a kind of critical and situated philology that embraced its object of inquiry. It was a real gift to the world, whose fractures and contradictions took on a new shape in the light of Mayan poetry and art. This dissatisfaction of paying debts to the dead lingers.
Tz’i’. The dog who guides the night sun through the underworld. In Tedlock’s last book, The Olson Codex: Projective Verse and the Problem of Mayan Glyphs (UNM, 2017), he uses the dog glyph to explain how Mayan writers constantly manipulate the elision of sign, figure, and object in Mayan logographs. Signs can become images with the same fluidity in which objects in the world become signs. In one glyph a dog turns its head so you see only its ear, an “apparent abstraction [that] is the result of a scribe’s decision to use a detail from a larger life form.” It is a life form in semiotic silhouette, at once object, image, and sign. The larger life form in silhouette in this book is Charles Olson. It is concerned with Olson’s relationship to the Mayan worlds of Yucatán in which he researched glyphs and where he wrote his epistolary ethnography with Robert Creeley, Mayan Letters. Tedlock’s question is: What did Olson understand of these worlds? And, most pressingly, did Olson read the glyphs?
Tedlock’s book emerged from the kerfuffle around the published translation of Heriberto Yépez’s Empire of Neomemory in 2013. People were angry about this book. Surprisingly, I got tangled in these fights because I had published a celebratory review of Yépez’s writings for the Los Angeles Review of Books. I got nasty emails about this—emails with the rant and rancor of a missive from Ezra Pound but with none of the intellectual content. Dennis and I talked about Yépez’s book and he thought Yépez had got it wrong. As you might remember, that book is a theorization of the imperial mnemotechnics at play in Olson’s engagement with Mexican antiquity. Some people took it as an attack on Olson and the legacies of projectivism in which many poets identify themselves. They felt called out. And they called out Yépez. And there was a lot of signing of statements of denunciation. (The Obama years!) I wasn’t as bothered by Yépez’s book. I think the story he tells is an important one, but it is only part of the story, the part in which Olson is a metonym for imperial subsumptions. The other part, the part that Dennis felt needed telling, was the story of how the Mesoamerican worlds of Mexican antiquity also subsume and absorb, how they metonymize themselves in contemporary poetry through Olson. That is the story of The Olson Codex.
In the early drafts that I saw of this book Dennis was experimenting with its format. He wanted it to work like a Mesoamerican codex—an accordion screenfold, which readers could spread as one long sheet on the floor or fold into itself as they read, creating that textual layering that gives Mesoamerican codices their sense of temporal implication. The idea behind such Mayan time is that history is not an accumulation of foregone events; rather, it is a constant interaction between present and past, involving human times in the times of gods and animals also. These layers are like the intersecting threads in a weaving, whereon activity on a human plane of being affects the intersecting plane of myth and animals, while the actions in the myth and animal worlds also affect the stability of human existence. In the introduction to his translation of the Popol Vuh—the K’iche’ Mayan story of creation, literally “the Book of the Mat” (i.e., seat of intersecting threads)—Tedlock called this sense of temporal implication “mythistory.” Stealing the word from Thucydides’s lopsided critique of Herodotus, he explains that in Mayan philosophy “instead of being in logical opposition to one another, the realms of divine and human actions are joined by a mutual attraction”; they are “interpenetrating rather than mutually exclusive.” He goes on: “At one end of the Popol Vuh the gods are preoccupied with the difficult task of making humans, and at the other end humans are preoccupied with the equally difficult task of finding traces of divine movement in their own deeds.” In folding Olson into such an accordion of time, Tedlock wished to express how Olson was already implicated in a more layered sense of time than standard rectilinear conceptions of history allow. In Yucatán Olson was moving through layers of Mayan mythistory that pressed on him and pulled him along.
But the question remains: Did Olson understand these worlds? And did he read the glyphs? As Tedlock explains it, the answer is complicated. Structured as a kind of almanac—situating the day-to-day chronology of Olson’s Mayan Letters in Mayan ritual calendars, astronomical calculations, glyph decipherment, landscape morphology, dream interpretation, divinatory 184 readings, and indigenous history—Tedlock’s copiously illustrated book reveals how much of the strangeness of Olson’s little book emerges from raw ethnographic information. Olson’s idea was that, as a poet who had begun to exploit the visual field of the page in his writing, he would be able to understand the Mayan writing system that combines image and sign to make its meanings. This led to some wacky speculations. But, as Tedlock shows, it also gave Olson a certain grasp of how glyphs worked, allowed him to work at the translation of some, and indeed let him see the Mayan visual and poetic aesthetics of parallelism. This is Tedlock’s basic evidentiary claim. But his philosophical claim is perhaps more interesting.
That is, in the panoramic view of the Mayan mythworld that he gives in The Olson Codex—in which he “reconstructed the corresponding stars, planetary positions, lunations, birds, beasts, deities, and divinatory readings” that surrounded Olson in the year that he spent in Yucatán—Tedlock suggests that perhaps it doesn’t matter what Olson understood of his object of inquiry. Perhaps, if we recognize the pulsing and encompassing life of this object, we can see how it implicates Olson without much troubling over Olson. Dennis and his wife, the anthropologist Barbara Tedlock, apprenticed in the art of K’iche’ Mayan daykeeping (ajk’in or ajq’ij), which is a kind of readership of mythistory: “daykeepers measure the rhythms of time, watch the skies, pay attention to dreams, and listen to the stories people tell about themselves, seeking clues to events that are hidden in the past or have yet to happen.” He brings this reading strategy to bear on Olson’s writing, finding in Olson’s descriptions of dreams and animals mirrors that reflect the Mayan gods ambling in the background, hearing in Olson’s words the echoes of divine movements. To bring this world to the fore, at one point Dennis considered not naming Olson at all in the text. I think he realized quickly the indexical monstrosity that such an effort would make. But in several instances his figure is still referred to only as “the poet from Gloucester.”
In like manner, I learned more about Dennis’s background after his disappearance from the stormy world of the living. He grew up in Albuquerque and Taos, surrounded by that famous community of modernist artists and writers that had gathered around Mabel Dodge Luhan and Tony Luhan. As a teenager, he studied with the Cochiti artist Joe Herrera and did some archaeological work in the New Mexico Pueblos and in Mexico. He majored in art history and anthropology at the University of New Mexico, where his father was a scholar of D. H. Lawrence and, it turns out, MA advisor to Robert Creeley. His doctoral work at Tulane was on the verbal artistry of Zuni storytelling, which he published in an experimental “projectivist” form to convey the vocalization of the stories. With his wife, Barbara, he immersed himself in the Mayan worlds of Central America. In four decades of research and engagement there, especially in the communities of the Momostenango municipality of the Guatemalan highlands (where they were initiated as daykeepers), he published many books and articles. For most of his career he was associated with the important poetics program at SUNY Buffalo. And I think that he was at his best when his sensibility as poet and artist could animate his analytical objects, when the work of verbal artistry could inflect an understanding and experience of worlds past, present, and future.
Further consideration of days—skies clear, crisp air, expecting night rain—tomorrow there will be more thunderstorms. Tomorrow is B’atz’ in K’iche’ Mayan, which means monkey; and it is Chuen in Yucatec Mayan, which means artisan. Tedlock explains in The Olson Codex: “together, these are divine names, belonging to twin monkeys who spend all their time writing books and carving masks.” Patrons of the arts, these monkeys are also a warning to artists. Tedlock gives the warning in his Popol Vuh: “in theory, if we who presently claim to be human were to forget our efforts to find the traces of divine movements in our own actions, our fate should be something like that of the wooden people in the Popol Vuh. For them, the forgotten force of divinity reasserted itself by inhabiting their own tools and utensils, which rose up against them and drove them from their homes. Today they are swinging through the trees.” In this Olson implicates himself again, as he writes in his Mayan Letters:
The trouble is,
it is very difficult,
to be both a poet
and an historian.