The beginning

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going.
No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousnes.
Give me your hand.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

Lines of clouds like tattered ribbons stretch away over the Atlantic, casting roaming shadows over the roiling plane of deep blue, creeping like levitating ancients through the silence. I make my eyes lose focus and see the mass of the ocean itself as it shifts ever so slightly.
Curling water stormy with silt snakes toward that depth of color. The waters meet and mingle like cream in coffee, the swirl-dance of a liquid rendezvous. People crowd close around me in the small seats of the airplane, loud with breath. The dry air blowing out of the mini-engine above me smells of sterility and namelessness. I plunge through the air in a pressurized cylinder and I love it.
Behind, the life I’ve lived this past year falls away, leaving the traces it was meant to and nothing more. The beloved stand like giants over the shrinking mountains in my mind, waving with smiles amongst the changing leaves of the trees. I see my friends, family, lovers, teachers, and students casting shadows on the landscape of my youth. The kind of shadows God could play in, which Rilke knew.
I’ll hold them in my heart.
Ahead is the path I’ve been pointed towards. Around is elevator jazz and tanned faces drawn into frowns. My mind is tumbling with the objectives of my journey as the digitized clock dongs from all directions and the fullness of life within me stirs once again.
The languages of the indigenous peoples of the world are dying. With them goes millennia of human consciousness’ comprehension of the environments that saw this linguistic nascence. Thus the entirety of human knowledge about the ecology of these places, often the least understood places on earth, is lost as these ways of life are lost. What is so antithetical about these ways of life and the globalization processes forcing them into extinction? Why has so little been done to preserve these alternative modes of human understanding, when half of the world’s languages will be gone in the next fifty years? How much insight into the nature of consciousness and human experience, and the natural world, will be lost with them? The example of the Piraha language alone, which some believe is the only known language that could disprove Chomsky’s linguistic theory, comes to mind. Such uniqueness manifests itself in all aspects of a culture, and even if this was not the case the singular incidence would be worth fighting for. Right?
For these and other reasons, I’m traveling to the Amazon to find the last Taushiro and Muniche speakers on earth.
But first, I pass through Lima, full of the flaking facades of a colonial stillbirth, dust whipped and mixed, brought to a boil only slightly leavened by Humboldt’s cold current flowing in off of the Pacific. The resemblances to China, from the sparkling new constructions and leaning shanties to the harsh juxtaposition of the two, streets filled with the sounds of brass traffic and the hawking of innumerable wares, are only reinforced by the large populations of Chinese and Japanese. “Claridad!“ The cab driver shouted joyously at five in the morning, gesturing to the sky and indicating that the smog was at lower levels than normal. I smiled, nodded, and failed to reply.
Like China, Peru seems to be caught in the middle of a transition that was unstoppable and ill-advised. The wealthy live within carefully tended preserves of an idea, while the poor work to insure that illusion is only occasionally interrupted. I take this phenomenon to be an example of the misapplication of a culture-specific definition of progress into an unsuitable cultural context. But the split within the country doesn’t stop there. As poignant is the racial divide between those of European descent and those of indigenous descent. There are many cultures within Peru, some of which rarely mix.
Stemming from this social stratification is a cultural assignation of higher value to the European culture that invaded Peru and destroyed much of the complexity and beauty of the Inca and other cultures that had existed here for millennia. This is turn created a segment of population which essentially suffers from a sort of identity crisis. Driven towards materialism and the easy seduction of capitalism, more and more of those still holding the traditions alive are forgetting the old ways and moving to the cities. For centuries the Europeans in charge told those beneath them that their version of truth and beauty, their picture of reality, was false. Centuries of cultural foundation was demolished. Much was lost, perhaps even some of the indigenous faith in the validity of their own worldviews.
That many who come to Peru come to see the remnants of that destroyed civilization stands as testament to the wrongness of this valuation. As the world becomes increasingly fascinated by the complexity of indigenous knowledge systems in South America, from religion to medicine to calendrics to construction and agriculture, the sin of our late self-righteousness becomes all the more profound. The onus of preservation of such pricelessness falls to us by default.
Pizzaro and his men brought with them guns, germs, steel, and something far more important: a belief in the truth of their views as underscored by a God who would have his subjects kill or convert non-believers. The shamanistic practices handed down for thousands of years by the peoples of this continent were viewed as the work of the devil. The same went for the Mayan codices, indigenous art, and even cultural traditions of non-religious nature. In short, the fear of such visceral alternatives to the conquistadores’ perception of reality, with not a little greed added in and religion there to erase moral concerns, led them to erase much of the cultures that were here before they could be fully understood. The Inca quippu is an excellent example of this fact. The quippu is a series of ropes knotted in different places and of different lengths, and they stand as the only recording devices known to have been used by the Inca. And no one knows how to interpret them.
The Convento de San Francisco has a sixteenth century core surrounded by yellow plaster added after various earthquakes in the city’s past destroyed the original stone. One room has a series of Rubens. Another holds a last supper in which the main course is guinea pig. Images of the seven hundred martyrs of the Franciscan order peer down with cedar eyes at the lolling tourists beneath a Moorish roof of the same wood honeycombed into a brown firmament of stars. The monks leave the bats in the roof be. Beneath the convent lie the catacombs, where the rich were buried beneath the altar and the poor were buried beneath the chapel itself. Fresco’s uncovered by accident reveal effaced saints replaced with the vainglorious visages of generations of patrons who wanted their faces to smile upon the faithful, and paid heavily into the collection plate to have it that way. At least until the next noble desired such an indulgence. ` ``
The mixed emotions of Peruvians over the fate of former president Fujimori can be seen written on the walls of the capital city. While he has been lauded for ending the Shining Path’s rebellion, he is currently in prison for corruption. I passed numerous examples of graffiti sparring between the two factions on my way to Huaca Pucllana. This pre-Incan site, first inhabited by a mysterious culture known only as the ‘Lima culture,’ has been excavated constantly since 1981 and still there remains a literal mountain of the site to investigate. The Lima culture is thought to have been ruled by women and devoted to a god of the sea. The surviving examples of the textiles and pottery give hints of a society intentionally celebrating beauty. While they sacrificed young women to the god of the ocean, it is thought that this was considered a high honor. The fact that temple construction was done not by slaves but as a kind of tax payment lends credence to this hypothetical willingness to be sacrificed. This Lima culture existed at the site from 400-700 A.D., until the militaristic Wari culture wiped them out and turned their temple into a cemetery. It is interesting to ponder what course South American history would have taken had this Lima culture continued to flourish as it did for those three centuries by the sea.
While I’m not sure, I think the Huaca Pucllana is one of the widest pyramids in the world, based on what I saw. Every archaeological site in Peru houses a few of the endangered Peruvian dogs that are hairless and have orange mohawks. They are truly cool little guys.
After leaving the site, which once offered uninterrupted views of the Pacific Ocean but now is surrounded by high rises, my friends and I headed to the Lima office of the South American explorers’ club. Here, in a very short span of time, I leafed through a comprehensive department of defense map of the Amazon Basin, locating the Paranapura River. I cross-referenced this with some antique images of maps and found the town of Munichas, where the last speakers of the Muniche language reside. I also scored a list of reputable guides based in Iquitos and the contact info of a dude making a documentary about the tribes of the Amazon, who could be helpful in my mission. I photographed the pertinent documents and glanced through the trip reports of members who had completed their researches in years past. After a small pizza and a pisco sour, I walked to the Pacific and let the air wash over me. The next step will be heading to the Instituto Nacional del Cultura and attempting to find out about the tribes from the Peruvian government’s accumulated data. Luckily, it is right next to the archaeology museum. Two birds, one Ramz.