Launched on December
21, 2012, the last day of the Mayan long count, Edgar Garcia's Boundary Loot, published by Richard
Owens's Punch Press with a prefatory note by Dennis Tedlock, situates itself
along a cultural faultline where another conception of time might fruitfully be
set against our own. The chapbook is "split in two," as Garcia notes
in his postface, by a poem that seems of central importance, "Apocalypse
And/Or Apocalypse," which appeared first in the "Crisis Inquiry"
issue of Owens's Damn the Caesars, a
lengthy volume of material gathered largely under the sign of the 2011 Occupy
Protests.
While the Occupy
Movement and the end of the Mayan long-count cycle received a great deal of
attention at the time of their occurrence, efforts to reflect on and develop
implications from the two events have been few and scattered. The material that
Garcia is working with, Mayan culture and its forms of art, exists in the
present only precariously. Its earliest glyphs and scripts seem on the verge of
disappearance, or fragmentation so complete as to render decipherment an effort
of the future. Part of Garcia's work here, then, is a matter of recovery,
gathering remnants, or, as he discusses in a review of Tedlock's recent 2000 Years of Mayan Literature,
harvesting mist, a figure apparently for the Mayan poet herself. Garcia, in the
fourth poem of the chapbook, "Obsidian Membrane," writes:
I read across
an erasure a dream
that is not a dream or hallucinated
but collected from elsewhere
like a glow
trhough a moonless night
what didn't discontinue with a life's passing
certain violence
a terrible emotion
The typo in the fourth
line is not my own but Garcia's, an error he includes and develops, opening a
space for possible reflection on the shifting constitution of language, and, I
would say, the possibilities that lie outside the enforcement of present
linguistic boundaries. It's curious that in such a context Garcia doesn't move
into the Mayan language itself. Instead, he follows back through historical
layers of English, as though testing, at this conjuncture of capitalism, the
continued vitality of such linguistic sediment, much as the earlier forms of
Mayan script had to be assessed by Mayan writers after the Conquista.
The poem continues:
Running a cord through her pierced tongue
Running a cord through her pierced tongue
a Palenque writer draped it
splotching and shedding an asemic aperture
onto a cloth upon which her ancestors
had done the same
by this way
speaking with them
as through a phone
The Palenque writer,
as Tedlock explains in his anthology, is Ix K'ab'al Xook, or Lady Shark Fin, one
of the wives of the king who ruled the city of Yaxchilán from 681 to 742. The
scene is depicted on a lintel over the door of a palace dedicated to her.
Tedlock elaborates on the bloodletting ritual:
The cord, studded with thorns, is draped over the open
book, creating a direct physical link between the organs of speech and a
surface prepared for writing. The bloodstains made by the cord are left to
chance, suggesting that Lady Shark Fin is creating a text whose reading will
require an art of divination. (105)
Asemic aperture,
indeed. An open gap across which Garcia here seems to be attempting some
subsequent form of communication, the mystery now as much the previous attempt and
its representation in limestone as whatever content may have been harvested
from the ritual itself at the time of its occurrence.
