Desert Notebooks. Ben Ehrenreich
Grief froze the grandmother’s heart. The last time she had received such a message—an identical message—she had lost her sons forever. She promised to pass the message along and closed the door. She sat there by herself in her home and wept in silence. She mourned her sons, gone all these years, and the grandsons who would soon be lost to her as well. A louse fell from the ceiling and into her lap. She picked it up. She let it crawl in her palm. She watched it for a while, and then she got an idea. She spoke to the louse. She called it “my child” and asked it to pass a message to the twins. She told it what the messenger from Xibalba had said, and the louse hurried off, pleased to have a purpose. But the louse was soon swallowed by a toad, and the toad by a snake, and the snake by a hawk. The grandmother almost got her way.
Not all messages reach their intended audience. Sometimes the messenger is killed, sometimes the audience. Writing in the mid-sixteenth century, the Dominican cleric Bartolomé de las Casas confided that Maya texts were crafted “with such keen and subtle skill that we might say our writings were not an improvement over theirs.” I will be bolder and say that no people anywhere have devised a more beautiful system of writing. Nearly all of their texts are lost.
In 1549 the Franciscan monk Diego de Landa first traveled to Mexico. He was a young man of twenty-five. What he saw disturbed him. In his Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, de Landa wrote of Spanish soldiers burning men alive, of seeing women’s bodies hanging from trees, their children tied dangling to their feet. De Landa witnessed, he wrote, “unheard-of cruelties, cutting off noses, arms and legs, and women’s breasts, and they threw [the Maya] in deep lagoons with gourds bound to their feet; they stabbed infants because they could not march like their mothers, and if they shackled them with collars and they fell ill, they would cut off their heads so as not to have to stop to free them.” The Spanish justified these infamies, de Landa wrote, by insisting that they could only hope to dominate such a vast population by inspiring fear incommensurate with their numbers. Perhaps they were right.
About a decade after his arrival in what was then called New Spain, de Landa was charged with bringing the word of God to the Maya of the Yucatán. He had acclimated by then. Or perhaps he had learned to make a distinction between gratuitous slaughter and slaughter for Christ. For the Spanish the Americas were, in Eduardo Galeano’s words, “the vast kingdom of the devil.” De Landa declared himself grand inquisitor and did his best to stamp out the idolatrous practices of the natives. Francisco de Toral, the first bishop of the Yucatán, would recount that de Landa and the three monks accompanying him bound and whipped the Maya they encountered in order to force them to confess to worshipping idols. If their victims endured one hundred lashes, “they would hang them publicly from the beams of the church by their wrists and attach a great deal of weight to their feet, and they would burn their backs and their bellies . . . until they confessed.” Many did not survive this procedure.
De Landa imported to the Yucatán another key institution of the Inquisition, the auto-da-fé. He wrote: “These people also used certain characters or letters with which they wrote in their books their ancient affairs and their sciences, and with them . . . they understood their affairs and gave them to be taught and understood. We found a great number of books containing these letters, and as there was nothing in them but superstition and the falsehoods of the devil, we burned them all, which they regarded as a wonder and which caused them much affliction.” On a single day in July of 1562, de Landa is said to have burned at least twenty-seven codices, the elaborately inscribed fanlike texts that the Maya used as books.
In all of the lands inhabited by the Maya, which stretched from what is now southern Mexico through Guatemala and Belize into the western regions of El Salvador and Honduras, a total of four codices survived this and other conflagrations. An entire literature reduced to four crumbling volumes. In many places more than 90 percent of the population disappeared within a few years of the conquest, annihilated by a combination of depredation and disease. With the destruction of the codices and temples—the painted and sculpted walls of which were also vivid texts—and the decimation of such a vast portion of the populace, literacy reached its horizon. Within a few generations, the Maya who survived could no longer read the texts written with such care by their ancestors. Or if they could, they weren’t saying. The “characters or letters” that Diego de Landa imagined functioned as an alphabet—they are in fact logo-syllabic glyphs: each symbol can at once represent either a word or a syllable—would not be legible again until they were decoded by the Soviet linguist Yuri Knorozov, four centuries after de Landa’s reign of fire.
The grandmother failed, by the way. Hunahpu and Xbalanque heard a hawk shrieking above them and shot it in the eye with their blowguns. When it fell from the sky, they asked it what it wanted.
“I bring a message in my stomach,” the hawk replied. If the twins would repair its eye, it promised, it would deliver the message.
The twins agreed. They replaced its eye with a bit of rubber, healing it instantly. “Speak,” they told the hawk.
The hawk vomited up the snake.
“Speak,” said the twins to the snake.
The snake vomited up the toad.
“Speak,” said the twins to the toad.
The toad tried to vomit. Nothing came out. The twins kicked the toad, but still it could not vomit. They pried open its jaws and saw there, hanging from the roof of its mouth, the louse, which had not wanted to be swallowed.
“Speak,” said the twins to the louse. And it delivered its message at last.
There was good news too this weekend. Or what these days counts as good news. A former lieutenant general who had briefly served as the Rhino’s national security advisor pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and agreed, as part of his plea bargain, to cooperate with the special prosecutor’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The investigation, in other words, of the Rhino. He is the second and by far the most senior of the Rhino’s former advisers to take such a deal. The hounds are getting closer.
This is not quite a comfort. Distraction is the Rhino’s preferred tactic. Even without a crisis, it is the only trick he knows: to provoke some fresh outrage and profit from the confusion that he sows. He has surely figured out that there is no better distraction than war. Perhaps the timing was coincidental, but on Saturday, one day after the plea deal hit the papers, his current national security advisor told Fox News that the possibility of war with North Korea is “increasing every day.” Military action might still be avoided, he added, but “there’s not much time left.”
How can we understand these metaphors? Not much time left, time is running out, as if time were a ribbon and we’re getting close to the end of the spool. What black hole awaits us when the last of it unravels?
It turns out that jumping into a black hole is a difficult proposition. Black holes cannot be seen or directly observed, their gravitational pull being so strong that it sucks in even light. Their presence, though, and a fair amount of information about them, can be inferred from the behavior of the gases that surround them, and by their effect on the movements of other bodies, such as stars. From which we can gather that, if you were serious about this, and really jumped, as you approached the event horizon—the one-way boundary that defines the black hole, through which you can enter but never leave—you would undergo a process that physicists have dubbed spaghettification. (Poets do not often become physicists.) The gravity pulling on one end of your body—say, your feet—would be stronger than the gravity tugging at the other end, so you would be stretched like a nice, fresh hand-pulled noodle. If it wasn’t too uncomfortable, and didn’t immediately kill you, your head could watch your feet recede. Eventually, though, you would reach the infinitely dense one-dimensional point at the black hole’s center, the singularity, where you, and time and space, would cease to exist in any way that we