WHITECROW BORDERLAND
Mayan Astronomy
Note 8: Living Time. 4/19/99
Occupying a small piece of time, as Rigoberta Menchu-Tum has pointed out, and from a Maya perspective, requires that a person be actively engaged in preserving the land that he/she inhabits. Doing nothing at all, either in a positive or negative context, being passive toward the environment, in other words, is not the same thing as maintaining an actively positive engagement with the land that you inhabit in the place of your ancestors. In the previous note, without saying so explicitly, I offered a justification for preserving the land that has come down to you from those who occupied it before you were born. Spirits, in order to exist at all, require a physical space in which to live. Spirit is the force and power that animates the physical reality, even the body if you will, of any and every object and subject that can be said to exist in the universe. Without body, without physical space, spirit has no purchase in the world, has no place where it can exercise its power to animate the object/subject to which it adheres.
The idea that one must actively work to preserve the world is a symbolic or metaphoric way of stating what is only obvious; namely, that the world tree, the world river, the world mountain must have an environment in which to grow and thrive and prosper. If the world is not preserved, if the world is allowed to die, the tree, the river, and the mountain, which create a passage for the spirit in its need to get from one life to the next, will also perish and die and spirit itself will be lost forever to the world because it will no longer be possible for the transition from here to there to occur. Actively working to preserve and protect the world, therefore, is certainly an important way that individuals can connect themselves to that small piece of time that defines and contains their being in the world. As I suggested earlier, once that connection to time is established, it cannot be broken or severed by any force short of the total annihilation of every particle of matter that composed the original body to which spirit adheres.
In the pre-Columbian world of native American experience, of course, the active pursuit of environmental preservation was not perceived as being nearly as crucial as it is today. Most native Americans, most tribes and nations, were never confronted with the possibility that the very world itself could fall to a state where its actual survival as a living entity was threatened. Tribal consciousness has always recognized the necessity to walk as lightly as possible across the ground that supports and maintains all living force in the universe. True as well is the fact that native cultures resisted the impulse to exploit the land they occupied for the sake of creating a more comfortable means of subsistence. The idea of progress in the development of the means of producing more food, more shelter, more barriers, as it were, to living in a natural environment was one that never entered the consciousness of tribal people. In short, native Americans were never cursed with the dissatisfaction and alienation that characterizes so much of Eurocentric discourse and life.
Europeans, of course, perceive that fact as being evidence proving the notion that tribal people are somehow inferior to themselves, that native people are either ignorant of the necessity to accumulate more and more material property for themselves at the expense of someone else or, because they are "savage," they are simply too lazy and indolent to engage in the labor necessary to improve their material condition. The idea of improving one's estate, of rising above the station to which one was born, can, and does, exist only in the consciousness of a people who perceive of themselves as having been created by a supernatural entity or force that demands from them, His creatures, a blind and absolute obedience to this or that arbitrary divine law. Being a creature of divinity necessarily creates an hierarchical structure between the highest ranking member of the construct, God, and the lowest side of the binary opposition creationism brings into existence, sinful and disobedient (wo)man. Once that initial opposition between higher and lower is established, the idea of stratification among various members of the class called "creature" is made literally and absolutely inevitable.
The first step in that process is to identify, even to isolate, a single person in the group who has a special relationship with the voice (in the case of Western European logocentric discourse) of the creator. This person, called a prophet or priest or savior or what have you, is then perceived as having achieved, by merit or divine selection, a status clearly above the common run of the group's population. That person then establishes a mark above the herd to which all other members of the culture are encouraged to aspire and pursue for themselves. In response, of course, and because the "work" of God is always more than one individual can manage, the supreme human counterpart of God's will chooses, by merit or divine inspiration, assistants who help him administer the work he and they have been assigned by the Logos to complete. The Pope (in Roman Catholicism), and the Cardinals he appoints, then find it necessary to establish bishops to oversee the work (of God) at the parish level and the bishops in turn appoint parish priests and parsons to deal with the angry, disaffected, alienated flock of serfs and peasants who have been continually passed over in the dispersal of wealth and authority and power that rises only to the pitiful few who reside at the top of the hierarchy.
A similar development of hierarchical structures occurred simultaneously in the secular realms of European civilization running down the scale from the King, who was often anointed by the Pope, through the ranks of the aristocracy (barons, dukes, etc.), who held land by leave of their King, to come to rest finally on the heads of the serfs and peasants once again who might be said to have been doubly damned to the lowest rung of the ladder of the great chain of being since they could not actually aspire to rise above their level of lifelong servitude. To compensate for this rigidity in social station, of course, the church preached the notion that people who suffered a diminished life in the real world, remembering here that actual material life was considered to be evil in and of itself, and so what can any serf or peasant expect but to suffer for being in the grasp of the devil from birth to death, could expect to be rewarded in heaven with perfect bliss for all eternity while their social betters, both in and out of the church, would find it much more difficult to get into paradise in the afterlife.
If someone were to set out from scratch, as it were, to devise a religious and political mythology designed to create and foster as much resentment and anger among the disaffected masses as possible, to spread basic strife and hatred as widely in a culture as possible, at least from a native American point of view, there would be no way to improve on the one outlined here. Anyone who expresses surprise that another war has broken out in Europe, or in some former colony that endured Eurocentric domination, does not have the capacity, intellectually or otherwise, to comprehend how horrifying this ideology appears to those of us who can still perceive it for the first time, as it were, from the outside in to its crippled, and crippling, spirit.
The worst thing about this vision of crippled souls is the fact that it has encouraged, virtually by definition alone, since nature and the natural world are perceived as being evil, the absolute exploitation of all available resources that exist on the face of the earth. This has happened because most of the population of every nation has been reduced to one or another of the lowest levels of the hierarchy that has come to define the relative worth and worthlessness of the bourgeois individual. Since this ideology teaches that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, since there is a Garden of Eden, a perfect paradise, out there somewhere, all anyone needs to do is accumulate wealth, power, knowledge, each increment of which adds to the value each person conceives as his/her own, and eventually everyone will be able to appropriate his/her share of the promised reward. This is true because worthiness has come to be measured in capital terms by how much of it you have managed to accumulate for yourself. The problem with this vision is that the wealth was never meant to be shared equally among all the members of the society in which this ideology rules. What would be the point in hierarchy if everyone occupied the top? Read the text. What it says is that you must die before you get your share of the mother load. What this means is that the earth herself must die before this version of (wo)man gets what it deserves.
To reach [Note 1]; [Note 2]; [Note 3]; [Note 4]; [Note 5]; [Note 6]; [Note 7]]; [Note 9]; [Note 9a]; [Note 10]; [Note 11]; [Note 12]; [Note 13]; [Note 14]; [Note 15]; [Note 16]; [Note 17]; [Note 18] in this series of thoughts.
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