The only criticism that sticks is self-criticism. Not that criticism from others does not
matter; it often does. Nevertheless, one
has to open himself to at least the possibility of that external criticism’s
validity. At that point, the mere
‘mulling over’ of the criticism, if short of outright admission, appropriates
it into one’s conscience. Then the
salutary effect of self-criticism begins its drill. A colleague of mine chastised me recently for
having no sense of Mexican culture.
Now, my personality is one sensitive to slights with a
propensity to fights. That leaves little
room for an open mind, unless that person who makes that criticism does something
to prove his character (i.e., something beneficial to me that shows the ability
of the other to rise above a contest of wills).
No need for details here as it became clear, on even cursory
examination, that my colleague was on-the-mark.
Her good-will not only displayed her enlightenment, it inspired a little
more in me.
Hopefully, and God-willing (given my lazy ass), I will take
better advantage of what Mexico has to offer in the time remaining to me
here. This week-end, I got off to a
marvelous start. There are seven
volunteers in my class whom I have admired greatly. They really are worth my emulation, not of
behavior (for that is Emersonian suicide), but of refinement, conscience and
vision. I had wanted to visit all
seven.
This week-end, I visited numbers four and five in
Puebla. The two out west I will never
get to, and what regret I have for rationalizing my leaden posterior. To be sure, they were quite open and even
suggestive of a week-end visit. Simply
said, I lost an opportunity of a life-time; perhaps not a critical opportunity,
but one that shall not come my way again.
The bus ride from Puebla is four hours long, often a deterrent in
itself. The week-end was charmed right
from the bus ride.
It is two weeks since Día de Muertos here in México. It is, as I wrote recently, a holy day not to
be summarily dismissed as a pleasant uniqueness worth chatting about when
discussing Frida Kahlo or the symbology of the Grateful Dead to prove my
sophistication (even though I am thirty years late in these inferences). It goes far deeper than my worldly images within, and
the other-worldly images around, me that are made all the more so by a profusion of
colors lighting up scattered skulls.
Well, that haunting image of the verdancy and verity of death in our
everyday life did not happen on the bus ride.
What did happen is that the sun set, not in the opalescent
sky of Fitzgerald (which I have yet to see on any of the five continents in
which I have travelled). The sky was
cloudy, hinting of a rain yet but never to come. It was melancholy, to which I am more
accustomed as it splits the middle of the Mexican life-and-death paradox. The colors blended various shades of sulfur
and grey into a sublime, subdued majesty.
I was listening to music that was heavy 'moog' but not heavy 'boge' (for
once); it, too, had a certain sweet sadness.
The skyline, sinking into night and losing itself on the
high peaks of the central highlands, swished by, displaying the silhouettes of
the squat trees of Mexico atop some hill, with slopes of nopales (cactuses that
look like a Kalderesque agglomeration of green, prickly basset hound ears),
emptying into harvested fields, that looked wasted by drought, with the refuse
swept into witches’ broom bottoms. It
was not hard to get that there was something silently extraordinary about this
random collision of sight and sound. I
had last seen it more than thirty years before driving in the early winter back
to Washington after a week-end in Pittsburgh with parents who loved me so.
The trees, in the grey, almost nocturnal, February sky,
bereft of life as they had been for months, still reached into high, whispering
something I could not quite hear. In
truth, I felt it first shortly after arriving to high school, when I crept
desperately alone into the least popular place on campus (i.e., the chapel) to
read and later sing privately, hymn 507 (1940 Hymnal). Ten years later – after the death of my
erstwhile sweet-heart, the suicide of two close friends and many opportunities
already forfeited – I had decided that life goes on and it was time to fill in
and pave over the piss-puddle and move on.
That felt like the right thing to do.
Only now, thirty years after making that decision, on a bus
in the middle of Mexico, was I willing to open that door again; or, more
properly said, was I given the chance to open that door again. This time, I had some reference of time and a
preference of place. Mexico’s forever
mystical culture girded me on that bus.
Beyond, the simple matter of my own mortality, I began to feel a deeper
presence of God, one that I had not felt for thirty years, save for the death
of my parents, my uncle and my brother-in-law’s father. Those came out of necessity of blood-ties
severed and the departure of a great man whom I’d like to be.
It was also fitting because I was on that bus out of a
choice to visit two of the best Peace Corps volunteers, both bird watchers
(explanation forthcoming in the next essay).
As I listened to that synthetic melancholy paired with the sublime
sadness of the dying horizon, I realized that paving over the cesspool perhaps
had not been meet and right so to do.
Nonetheless, I could not – and still can not – imagine what would happen
were I surrender my life to wandering between slices of the past ricocheting
through my future while standing arrested in the present, undoing, enveloped by the chaos so
truly at the core of our universe. Life
is better left to others to figure out.
That Mexican culture of death in life brings to focus the
strength of her mysticism: the necessity of focusing on fun today, on children
today, on celebrating the quiet ascendancy of indigenous beliefs to bring
Catholicism back to life. There is a
humility in this alien culture that may defeat its becoming another Silicon
Valley of innovation, as I so often argue, as this country's destiny.
Yet that grand vision, as well and intellectually argued it may or may
not be, implies that Silicon Valley is something to which all BRICS and TMIMBIs
alike ought properly to aspire to.
Mexican culture, often so backward to my untrained and culturally
vacuous eye, offers so much more.
In actuality, I still do not know what that 'more' is, but I keep
trying to find out, one day at a time. Truth is, I
will know that gold standard when first I see its gleam. Hopefully, I will get more into the
deep-water swing of things Mexican to pass along better information.
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