Exhausted from war and nearly ready to quit their revolt, the Mayan rebels of the 1850s in what is today the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, were inspired to continue their uprising by the strange instruction of an alien voice. Crossing Yucatan in an eastward retreat from Merida they were led to a Cenote through the thick Rainforest by rebel Jose Maria Barrera. Here amid the roots of a Ceiba tree (sacred to the Maya as the tree of life, connecting the underworld, the terrestrial world and the world of the skies) he discovered a speaking cross which would henceforth direct the military campaign.
Chicxulub Crater Gravity Map with Cenotes Shown as White Dots with the Yucatan Coastline Being the White Line (image courtesy of Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, NASA)
Through a medium named Huaan de la Cruz, the instructions of the speaking cross were transcribed and delivered to the rebel base in the Cruzob village of X-Cacal, just north of the sacred Cenote. The Cenotes, which cluster into a ring shape across northern Yucatan, form a subterranean, freshwater trench that was gouged out with the impact of the 6-mile long, mass-extinction bolide that hit the planet 65.5 million years ago. The Chicxulub crater is the largest impact depression on this planet, nearly 180 miles long from one end to the other. And the tremendous nuclear energy generated in the impact created a basin of disturbed gravity, which could not until recently be captured in radar imagery of the area and which, in the early days of radio, created time-warp for radio signals that delayed while dipping into the anomalous gravitational basin as they traveled across the peninsula. The Cenotes therefore form a peripheral dip in space and time around the impact center. And they were revered by the Maya as portals to an otherworld, where sky gods dwelt and communication through great stretches of space and time was possible. To find a dictating cross growing in a Ceiba tree in such a supernaturally charged portal could be nothing but divine communication.
De la Cruz’ transcriptions were copied by scribes at X-Cacal and compiled into a Holy Book open to emendation and addition, changing as the military campaign became a civic project. This spiritual constitution continued to expand in the 20c, often as the result of an ongoing local practice of reading the text in public every year, with two scribes improvising upon it as they respond to each others’ reading (source: Dennis Tedlock’s 2000 Years of Mayan Literature). In addition to this yearly celebration of the speaking cross’ instructions, numerous altars commemorate the divine revelation, although the cross itself is kept from view in an inner sanctum which is guarded by armed Maya day and night. The thick veil of mystery around the object is the equivalent and opposite of the relationship of its followers to its revelations, which are altered and expanded as the dialogical push and pull accords.
In many ways, the dialogical elasticity of the Holy Text of the devout Cruzob (followers of the speaking cross) reflects the (long misunderstood) techniques of Mesoamerican poetics. Where European modes of rendering a poetic statement valued the crystallizing perfection of singling out the exact phrase for an event described, description in Mesoamerican poetics was prized for its capacity to demonstrate recurrence in aggregation, or meaning as it might multiply and transform with redoubled sounds and increasingly complex sentence patterns. The openness of a poetic system that begins as a conversation is conversationally fluent without any need to create fluidity by dialectical synthesis. Numerous threads of sight, sound and sense immediately speak to, over and with each other. Dennis Tedlock translates a passage of Mayan poetry inscribed at the Cenote of Chichen Itza while reiterating Octavio Paz’s dictum that poetry is translation:
And the Lords over the Earth
As they are called, standing there:The Sun Priest who hastens death,
Who cuts with an ax,A Lord of Fire,
In the company of the Master of Great Fear,Lord of the Blade,
Also a Lord of Fire,Who has his own
Ax, as a Lord over the Earth.
What we have suggested as an interweaving of semantic threads across sound, sight and sense, has been called parallel verse in the context of intralingual poetic systems in an excellent study by Tedlock on Mayan poetics (“Towards a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed World, ed. Charles Bernstein). But the intrasemantic conversation need not occur strictly across linguistic barriers. There is such multiplicity of ways to generate meaning within a single language as to conclude that parallel verse can (and does) happen in monolingual poetry. It is now proper to amend Paz’s dictum to include his own poetic amendment, and say that poetry is the chatter that permits translation. With ears and hearts cautiously listening for the next whispered edit to the Holy Book, the Cruzob scribes of X-Cacal already concur.
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