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Ocracoke
Lookout
141 Posts |
 Posted - Feb 21 2010 : 11:52:18 PM
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Jaded Mask
By Greg Patrick
© 2010 Eire
Subtitled: Fahrenheit 1492
Revolutions of the Sun
"Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I'm not saying it in a moral sense. I'm just saying it in the sense of what is it that's really going to bring change."
-Jared Diamond Author of "Collapse" and "Guns,Germs,and Steel"
“Man is a creature second cousin to the phoenix”
-Ray Bradbury
The coweled Inquisitor presided over the burning of the Mayan scrolls.
Silhouetted against the flames while the writhing tendrils cast it's wavering crimson glow
on the defaced countenances of Mayan idols like deformed faces.
Surrounded by darkrobed monks chanting in grim solemnity and guarded
by baleful conquistadores keeping the crowd at bay.
It was comparable in scale and damage to that of the Alexandrian library.
Zealotry would again obscure enlightenment with fire.
A linguistic imperialism intent on destroying a civilsation’s heritage and
knowledge. The better to isolate a people from their identity.
Like gilded tears the ornate illuminated glyphs melted in rivulets as the books were tossed into the flames.
A collective cry arose as the smoke rose like a ghost conjured.
The facade of the Grand Inquisitor was lit crimson in intervals by the fire as his
agents seemed like moths circling a flame as they cast Codices into it's inferno.
Any ancestral epic by which a subjugated people could rally were consigned to burn.
Yet what was not salvaged would be chanted by starlight and rebel campfire.
The pen is mightier than the sword. It's words can rally a thousand swords to
it's cause.
Once more history was to be rewritten by the winners.
The ac***ulation of the wisdom of millennia was reduced to ash.
The human spirit is not so easily.
As if taking the fire of the gods one of the Spanish soldiers on impulse took a manuscript that had fallen from the pyre and placed it under his cloak. Later he unfurled it by and by torchlight marveled at it’s characters strange to his eyes and their significance.
His gaze danced over the cryptic inscriptions and he sighed in wonder.
The Jaded Mask
"Then he dreams of another benefice.
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep, and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again"
-William Shakespeare "Romeo and Juliet"
Like a marooned corsair stranded upon a barren atoll overlooking an emerald sea, an isolated Spanish knight of the House of Castille.
The flanks of his horse heaved from the night ride. It seemed another age when he vaulted astride the garrison’s swiftest horse to bring word to Tenochtitlan that their garrison was besieged and that the Maya marched on their presidios.
The canopy of steaming forest cast a dark spell of perpetual night upon
the sylvan realm as he had rode into it’s depths greeted by the ominous
drums like the throbbing of a primal heart.
A "heart of darkness" awaited in the catacombal arboreal majesty, to one who knew
himself not save by banner alone not by individualism or conscious.
Impenetrable jungle confronted him at every turn even as he forded the caiman-infested rivers. It seemed a malarian dream to him.
Like a jaguar prowling the equatorial dark yet so too was the huntsman pursued,flitting shadows
and the serpentine whisper of arrows missing their mark in his flight.
Under cover of darkness and mangroves he macheted his way through.
Wading then as he was unhorsed by unseen warriors.
Submerged yet he pulled himself hand over hand from the onyx waters.
Retrieving his sword and with Toledo-forged blade brandished at mere shadow
roared in more primal fury than battle cry.
The darkness laughed in reply
Like an apparitional echo.
His machete severed an arachnid-like labyrinth of vines only to have
seen at dawn how little he had progressed in his flight.
His horse's flanks heaved from exertion of the harrowing night ride.
as now flanked like a huntsman by two mastiffs, when dawn witnessed him silhouetted against a pastel sky, solar photons smoldering upon his varnished armour like a human ember.
He had less the imperious air of a feudal lord surveying his domains than an abandoned king awaiting assassins in his dark throneroom. He had become quarry in turn.
In nigh breathless anticipation he observed the incessant shrill of cries of bird and beast grow silent as his hounds began to growl and bare their teeth.
“The enemy approaches.”
At the sonorous bray of conch horns with a fierce heraldry, sounding at different widths of the vale.
Scarlet macaws arose like a plume of flame from the treeline and the hoarse shouts of primates in a primal duet chilled him with it's eerie forestsong.So different from the courts of Aragon, from all that he knew.
From his vantage point aloft a towering rock formation, fissured contours deepening among brooding clouds borne by the sea winds that undulated the treetops leaves as if caressed by a deity’s hand and billowed his crimson riding cape. He seemed upon his Andalusian warhorse like an equestrian enthronement affecting a languid poise of a lion surveying
the movements of a herd. Though now the perspiration that blinded him eyes glaring beneath the rim of a Morion helm, was not of the trail or elements.
Not galloping in the company of a hundred knights abreast in equestrian blitzkrieg but one solitary form
under glowering skies that made the heavens mere space to imploring eyes.
With a precision worthy of any army of it’s age the Mayans drew into formation.
Arrayed before him in riotous display, their warriors adorned with jaguar pelts in the fashion of the Toltecs and brandishing obsidian swords. Like cavaliers of the “Olde World” they bore feathered plumes and heraldric insignias of their warrior orders.
For if the Mayans were the Athenians of the Yucatan the Toltecs were the Spartans.
and around that banner a fatally belated pantribal alliance was mustered.
What was more true of what histrorians traditionally refer to as the New World is that here were two old worlds and cultures clashing and vying for supremacy.
A war of two old worlds
Rather than new for the Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations were already ancient.
Their city states had flourished and achieved great architectural and scientific feats so
as to inspire conjecture of a Pre-Atlantean race among impressionable explorers
who had never beheld anything comparable.
Yet so too was their an ironic blend of "carnage and culture".
This was no utopian vision. These lands were no strangers to war.
And here Imperial Spain faced it's Vietnam.
Armour proved an en***brance, gunpowder was negated by monsoon rain,
and the war of attrition would perpetuate as each bereaved youth was honourbound
to avenge his tribe and family.
To the despairing eyes of the solitary Conquistador: in reply to his brandished arms, like a Roman legion’s Aquila their white crane banner was uplifted to a chanting like the seething murmur of the sea before the imminent tempest.
To the Athenians of Mesoamerica what confronted them was a barbarian horde from across the sea much as the monastics of Christendom viewed the Norse raiders and horseborne Vandals who put their scholars to the sword and burnt their intricate manuscripts. Enslaving a war-ravaged world awaiting a second coming. It was their dark age.
As inadvertent biological warfare of small pox afflicted once great armies
battle cries grew fewer to contest the warriors from the red horizon.
Drawn by avarice and blind then to the jewel of sea and lands molten topaz and
emerald.
The armour-clad warriors crossed sapphiric depths only to shed oceans of blood
and tears shed would mingle with rain’s deluge, battle cries in many tongues merge with thunder.
Stones that ran with the blood sacrificial rites would do so again with wars
to no end as hate begets hate exponentially.
They had found “ a brave new world” in the armies confronting them
Yet so too would pan-tribal alliance be offset by divide and conquer
By tacticians that envisioned their castles rising over forests casting their towering shadows long and cold over the land.
Like chesspiece movements on a Granadan board they seemed to his appraising and calculating eyes as they besieged him encircling like a serpent’s coils.
Like sand dwindling through a sieve..
"Time to make my move."
Yet he still pondered, brooded in indecision,
like a mariner in the eye of the imminent storm.
No “savage horde” was this but a ranked army that moved in step
and who would not merely scatter at his advance.
He reminisced then of his adventuring. From warding off obsidian war clubs
To crossing blades sparkingly with corsairs preying upon their gold-laden galleons.
No sooner did they gaze covetously at the golden Mayan and Aztec skull
motifs than they were confronted by leering skulls and crossbones. Cross-emblazoned Spanish sails whose appearance on the horizon were harbringers of doom were confronted by red crosses
flown by English pirates in turn.
Fortune was as fickle a mistress as the seas themselves. Balance of power shifted with the tides.
How long was it since he gazed at the spires of Spain from the wake of the
Caravel? Through a voyage beset by maelstroms and corsairs and battles as epic as ever the Reconquista witnessed.
Absent-mindedly he crooned to his horse in his Castilian tongue.
He held gently the talisman of his betrothed and sighed by the dawn of
their dreams under bright skies of him having a Hacienda for them to have a new life
together. Him a Don and she the Donna of a new kingdom overlooking the sapphiric seas and sighing waves.
As he had stood on the night shore before disembarking in introspective solitude it
Seemed his dreams were like two galleons passing over the midnight sea, one homeward
Bound and the other to the horizon. Two dreamers upon the forecastles averting their gaze from the stars only to behold for the duration of a stargazer’s sigh.
Though beautiful beyond words their was an undercurrent of tragedy to the land
That haunted the eyes of those who dwelt in their ancestral lands and whispered to
those who visited. Not death in that sylvan necropolis but a fitful dormancy stirring.
The arcane sea-whisper lulled his restless heart to repose like a tempest subsided, yet wavering between maelstrom and calm.
The clouds obscured the moon like a Moorish veil and so too did his
eyes and sleep-deprived conscious open from dreams to nightmare.
From his hand the winds took a lock of raven hair he had held ever close to his heart
He watched it blown from his hands to the forest and armies below.
Neither expanse of sea or voids between stars will divide us again he vowed.
He drew his Toledo-forged sword.
Love like war has a window of opportunity and then he leveled his Trabuco.
readying his horse to charge through the slenderest link as they began to close ranks.
Yet he was thrown by his horse and as ever a knight of his blood confronted scimitars so too did he parry obsidian blades until they seemed to pause as if by incantation.
From the parted ranks of warriors silently emerged a shaman.
Though he was unarmed the otherwise fearless and nightmarishly attired braves
recoiled from his presence and averted their gaze.
He regarded the fallen warrior who met his eyes unyieldingly.
The shaman gazed delvingly and appraisingly, then nodded.
"My God Diego! You went native".
"Gold is your god Spaniard!"
"We thought the forest claimed you.
Come back with me."
"The forest reclaims everything. Restores it. There is no returning back again.
Now go."
The conquistador mounted his horse once more and spurred it forth
riding away quietly.
He spoke to them and they staid their arms.
The Spaniard mounted his horse once more and spurred it forth.
riding away quietly.
“Who goes there!”
“Sentry open the gate!”
The haggard apparition that appeared before Cortes seemed a harbinger of doom.
That he was and miraculously unscathed as if he bore some charmed life.
He closed and then opened his eyes..This is heaven then?
For as he slept in a soldier’s cot he dreamt again in Catalonia and a princess by the sea.
The sun felt warm upon his cheek. The peels of steeple bells sounded
Over the vale and he bowed before a Lady in a festive blue gown and dark cascade
of raven tresses coronated her.
My Lady.
I’m home.
Centuries later by the Roman calendar the unusually heavy monsoon unearthed the remains of a horse and armour-clad warrior and in it's skeletal hand a scroll bound and sealed was found.
The archaeologist that would translate and decipher the two scripts that were salvaged as if from flames, from their seared binding,
and more easily Castilian letters in a flourishing hand unfurled the scrolls contemplating their significance.
His thwarted comprehension of the text paced like a jaguar at bay or an unhallowed thing
before a sacred threshold.
How elusive the past..
No..
He spilled his coffee on a newspaper.
He cursed as he lifted the manuscript away from the spreading liquid only to stare bleakly at the
the headlines:
The Juarez Mexico murders. Human sacrifice committed in the professed modern era.
"Madre Dios." He had not crossed himself in years...a man of science who served humanity
not humanity to his discipline.
Why can't I watch "the world wake up from history"rather than it's cyclical perpetuation?
Have they truly learned nothing then..?
Would the future's young gawk at their ancestor's shadowed legacy just as he
had at the museum visit that inspired him to his field?
From Aztec Tzompantli or skull rack to Inquisition to this..
Came full circle through darkness. Nothing more. No progress...no future.
Feeling a sudden affinity with a Mayan scribe..He shook his head
as if to banish the doubts and the encroachment of the fanciful..
He had fallen asleep at the desk, head sunk upon his chest.
The candle had dwindeled, flickered falteringly and
extinguished trailingly like a ghost's sigh, as the shutters were cast aside
and his eyes opened to the sight of the moon above the waves.
"A nightmare" he muttered.
What was I reaching for at my side..?
A.. sword?..Me?
What's going on?
Then he started for he beheld a figure framed against the doorway.
It didn't answer to Spanish.
The form beckoned beseechingly.
"No. Stop! Thief!"
Like a somnambulist he rose and cast the doors opened.
Standing on a precipe overlooking the shore and sea the archaeologist had strode
away from trying to translate the text by lantern light in his own tongue.
As a man of science he all but laughed in derision for as the clouds had dispersed and as a solitary moonbeam lit the waves he started for he thought he beheld an apparitional galleon sailing to the West and a lone figure gazing at the wake and green shore,
raising his hand in salutation from which gleamed like a candular beacon by moonfire a sword.
In farewell or thanks he knew not.
Transparent sails billowing like membraned wings against the wind.Against the mainstream.
Trailing dreams in it's silvered wake over a swathe of moonlight upon the sea like a ghostroad
strode by Atlantean kings the caravel seemed to dematerialize into the horizon's sighing seas diminishing like a wraith banished before the new dawn, trailing dreams in it's wake and ushering in the rise of the sun.
"Wake up" he admonished as if to the audience of shadows but more rhetorically than to himself.
Learn what it is to dream again rather than be haunted by nightmares.
Alright, he said to the dormant ghosts in the written words before him,
what stories do you have to teach me?
Afterword:
The story of redemption and cultural self-determination is inspired by the story of the Soviet officer who by chance salvaged a book of Mayan Glyphs from the burning National Library Berlin during the second world war. This action is credited with initiating the decipherment of the Mayan script by linguists and archaeologists. The greatest feat of it's kind since the utilizing of the Rosetta stone to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into French. History is not one story. |
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The Jaded Mask
