Josh Feola

I was thinking about the past, as I'm prone to do, and reading last February's reflections on leaving for San Bartolo from Antigua, an action I'm due to repeat tomorrow. That was effectively my last update from Guatemala in 2008, and for good reason because the ensuing months were dense and difficult to decipher, much less write about, but it occurs to me that I owe some words about Copan and Tikal. So to employ a tricky timescale appropriate to an (amateur) archaeologist, I'll go back before moving forward. That is, I'll pay it forward with an overly packed entry because this time around I know enough to say I can't say when I'll have the opportunity to write again.



Copan is a Maya site in western Honduras, and one of that country's main generators of GDP. There are many things about Copan that I could write on at length, but, as my archaeological perspective is compromised by my art historical sensibility, I'll limit myself to the coolest-looking.



Copan's unique (among the Maya) artistic heritage is due in largest part to this man (above, in the bkg; and abover, in the foreground): Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil, sometimes referred to as "18 Rabbit" thanks to an early mistaken decipherment. UUK lived in the shadow of his father, which was considerable both because of the considerable territorial expansion accomplished by UUK's predecessor and the literal shadow cast by a monument his dad had symbolically erected on the top of large hill miles away from the site center. What UUK lacked in military prowess he more than made up for in aesthetic innovation, ushering in a completely new idiom of nearly 3-dimensional sculpture in the decades between his accession to the throne and his execution at the hands of neighboring rival site, Quirigua (see below), a glyphically-known act that effectively ended Copan's hegemonic control of the region.



Some glyphs on a weird monument



A two-headed turtle, half-living and half-dead, and appropriately enough bathed in light and shrouded in dark, respectively.



Copan's hieroglyphic stairway: the longest continual (albeit poorly preserved) Maya text that has yet been discovered







Some abstract gems from the Copan sculpture museum.



This building, called Rosalila, is another oddity in Maya archaeology: it was, like most Maya architecture, built over with successive phases of new temple construction, but was first covered with a comprehensive coating of plaster and then left entirely intact, ritually entombed within a new structure. Upon discovering it, archaeologists used razor blades to expose the vibrant colors beneath the plaster, then created a scale model in the Copan sculpture museum.





Some more strange sculptures, these from Quirigua, Copan's vassal turned conqueror. The last picture is K'ak Tiliw Chan Yopaat, the man who did UUK in and commemorated the deed by building the largest stela in the Maya area, complete with a text dipping into the deepest regions of mythic time (it records events said to have occurred billions of years ago).



A psychedelic view from the top of Tikal's Temple IV that my camera accidentally took back in 2007.

Tikal's history is too vast and hyped to do any justice to, and I'm already boring myself and probably you too, so here's some quick highlights:



Temple I



A long and particularly informative text



Worked bone



And the thing about time is it always terminates in today. So now after dipping into my and others' pasts I'll turn to the future. The future holds for me, as it did around this time last year, a trip into dense forest, but one I now at least partially know. If this meandering entry signifies anything, it's the fact that my conception of time is very cyclical, circular, though punctuated by linear leaps, tangential reasoning, a jumbled, semi-coherent geometry. Honestly I don't know why I think so much about the past, except that I like to recycle it into the future, which everyone does I guess but I attempt to do with a bit more self-consciousness. Maybe it's because I'm a reflective Cancer (though on the schizoid cusp with forward-thinking Leo). Nor can I explain my penchant for return, my seemingly infinite regress. My decision-making process is opaque to me, a palimpsest where will, coincidence, serendipity, fate, self-fulfilling prophecy, and a simultaneous desire for novelty and familiarity all coexist, coevolve, cancel each other out.

To avoid wasting many more words on the untranslatable (for me, at least) topic of my own cognitive functioning - and to beat one of my favorite tropes even deeper into the ground - I'll leave off with a contemporary and two ancient quotations that satisfactorily explain, in the way only oblique explanations can, why I'm doing what I'm doing at this moment in time:

2009 for the Cancer:

"You could be involved in some heavy research and digging on the job. Deep personal changes are ahead...Your attitude towards close relationships and partnering undergoes transformations. Depth of experience will be sought... Over the next few years, you will be ridding your life of superficiality in your close relationships. Lessons learned may not always be easy, but empowering in the end...Your biggest enemy now is resentment, which can act to eat away your confidence and healthy state of mind. In 2009, your eyes are opened to new experiences and belief systems...If you do get a chance to travel, which could come up quite unexpectedly, unusual, eye-opening experiences may be in store for you."


Dharmakīrti:

No one behind, no one ahead.
The path the ancients cleared has closed.
And the other path, everyone's path,
easy and wide, goes nowhere.
I am alone and find my way.


Bhartṛhari :

Why all these words and empty prattle?
Two worlds alone are worth a man's devotion.
The youth of beautiful women wearied by heavy breasts
And full of fresh wine's heady ardor for sport,
Or the forest...

Slow few days. In my life stasis never lasts too long so it's a nice change.



Fried eggplant at Rum Bar, kind of an ex-pat spot opened by a Louisiana transplant who also makes good jambalaya and grows his own mint (hence the Mojito, a rare excursion into the mixed drink world for me). Also pictured: Paz's prose, my pale imitation



Went back to the Casa Herrera to link up with master cipher David Stuart and my friend/current housemate/El Zotz co-director Edwin Roman, who gave a talk on San Bartolo to a group of potential Casa donors.


My current digs:














-Josh

My blog wouldn't be my blog nor Jay Bil-approved if I didn't talk about STREET FOOD.



Which I haven't been hitting up too much. On Sunday I indulged in the tipico breakfast buffet, which included beans, fried plantains, fruit, crepeish things, and this weird concoction with a fried egg baked into bread, all of which constituted both breakfast and lunch and a great (full disclosure:) hangover cure.







After which I did peruse the bustling SF scene outside La Merced. I was too full to partake and it was mostly meat stalls anyway, but I did hit up this mango stand.



Got this pupusa for lunch today, a corn tortilla filled with cheese, covered with avocado (peeled and pitted without any utensils, impressive), cabbage and hot sauce, + d. coke for


On Saturday, though, I hit what will probably be the highest note of Street Food '09: Hugo's Ceviches. This is bizarre. It's a pickup truck that drives fresh seafood up from the Pacific coast, only two days a week, only for a few hours on each of these days, which, along with the location of the truck, remain undisclosed until the day of. It's mostly local patronage. If you're hesitant to eat raw seafood from the back of a pickup truck, chances are you won't plumb the local rumor mills to go out of your way to find it.

And the fact of eating raw street fish isn't even the weirdest part about Hugo's. That honor goes to the "cerveza preparada."



1. Get a beer, take a few sips, return for salt and lime. So far so good.



2. Things start getting weird when they add the "salsa secreta," a brown sauce with a secret recipe that tastes to include fish oil, worcestershire and sugar.



3. Add green salsa and onions, why not? You already lost me with the brown stuff.



4. Equals this. Discretely brown-bagged to circumvent open container laws.



The sketchy meal in total. The sauce in the ceviche is the same as in the beer, so it works together with this completely mind-bending complementarity. And the cerveza preparada is great. I went back for another on Sunday.


Some things:





Antique scale and book press from Casa Herrera.





Some rather "modern" assemblages from the Hotel del Carmen.



Icon



Bonus round: projector from the planetarium at the Boston Museum of Science. I just found these pictures from my trip there last Fall, which somehow eluded upload until now.





Well, 4 more days in Antigua. What to do?

Busy few days in Antigua.







Soon after arriving I met Carolyn Porter of the Art History department at UT Austin. Carolyn led me and some other San Bartolo affiliates on a tour of Casa Herrera, an interdisciplinary research center for Mesoamerican art and culture. The Casa is relatively new, and will serve as a base for academic residencies, graduate projects, and lectures from visiting scholars across the disciplinary board. It happens to be an elegant space as well, a former hacienda and sugar refinery that is one of the few remaining establishments in Antigua to retain its colonial apportionment of a quarter of a city block.







What appeals to me about the Casa is its mixture of a rich and layered architectural heritage with a dedication to still emerging ideals of interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and social and environmental responsibility. Walking through a back courtyard you encounter a pre-Columbian metate (grinding stone; above, above) that was found and left in situ; a rare and rather suggestive fountain sculpture of a merman conquistador (above, middle); a baby ceiba (above, below), which was regarded as the "world tree" by the ancient Maya and retains great cultural significance among contemporary Maya people; and a water collection tank that catches the rain and converts it to greywater suitable for washing clothes and dishes.

Plus: killer roof views.




Saturday saw a mini-market mission to check out wares for sale by Ruth (above with the ceiba), a Kaqchikel Maya weaver from the village San Antonio Aguas Calientes. The Kaqchikel have a vibrant but endangered tradition of colorful hand-crafted textiles, which take anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months to make on cumbersome backstrap looms. I'm not much of an aesthete when it comes to such things, but I have to admit the resulting designs are amazing:






This guy rolled through, seems like a good Proyecto. I guess Central American countries are pretty fuel efficient, we could take a lesson from them up north.






Caught this Lent procession through the Parque Central on my meandering way home.



I was gonna write about STREET FOOD but I'll leave that for tomorrow. For now I'll leave you with some night shots of the parque central.





Buenas
Josh

Spanish classes are wrapped up and I'm leaving tomorrow for the densely forested unknown. Here's what I've been doing for the last two weeks, the last month, the last few days, from my last day in Antigua.



Last weekend we went to Lago de Atitlan, a 1,000'-deep freshwater lake in the mountainous/volcanic Guatemalan highlands. The lake abides in a caldera formed by an ancient eruption, and has since human time observable been a site of great significance to the Maya who populated the region in the pre-Columbian era. There are actually archaeological sites beneath the water, but to observe these you must be high-altitude deep-water dive certified, a task for which I am doubly unqualified.

The purpose of the trip was to relax for the weekend, but I was keen to imbibe the distinct local Maya culture. There are over 20 Mayan groups living in Central America today, with distinct languages and cultural traditions. The villages around Atitlan are comprised of predominately Kaqchikel and Tzutujil Mayans. In a neat bit of colonial treachery, the Kaqchikels were enlisted by conquistadores at the dawn of Spanish conquest to defeat their then neighboring faction, the K'iche Mayans, before themselves falling victim to subjugation. Now the Kaqchikeles and Tzutujiles enjoy relative cultural autonomy, maintaining a more or less traditional way of life in the villages around the Lake, such as the one I visited, Santiago de Atitlan.



During my one full day in Santiago I took the opportunity to visit a Cofradía, a meeting hall where an interesting amalgamation of Catholicism and the shamanic Tzutujil religion is practiced. A few other students and I witnessed the blessing of an American philanthropist (and funder of excavations at San Bartolo). Two Tzutujil nahuals, or shamans, presided over the ceremony, one swinging incense around those to be blessed and the other (pictured above) playing guitar. In this picture the elder nahual has just inundated his guitar with incense from the Copal tree, floating a generous amount of the fragrant smoke into the cavity of his instrument. He played with his guitar nearly vertical and as he did a stream of smoke slowly trailed out around his hands and engulfed him in a pale, sun-inflected cloud. Cool image.



After the Cofradía we visited this guy, Maximon, a rather enigmatic Tzutujil god. Maximon is a local legend, and spends each year at a different house, making his annual trip during Semana Santa (the week at the end of Lent). On his way to his new home Maximon spends a few days at a Tzutujil temple adjacent to the Catholic church in the center of Santiago. The Tzutujil equate Maximon with Judas Iscariot, and when he is placed in his temple he is simultaneously viewed as hanging on his suicidal tree and jeering at the imposed religion of European others. Local legend has it that Maximon fights Jesus on Easter. When I saw him he was accompanied by a lit sculpture of Jesus in his sepulcher and two attendant nahuals. Maximon gets by on donations (such as those I paid just to visit him for a few minutes), and he puts the money to good use, "consuming" 40-60 eighths of liquor and a few packs of cigarettes a day (he smoked two cigarettes while I was there). I was told by our translator that while he's drunk he is taken advantage of by witches, who take away his curing power. However, when he wakes up to the holy nahuals he sobers up to his mistakes and regains his supernatural efficacy. Interesting guy.

To conclude our day we visited a Franciscan church where the Catholicism was a bit more clear cut. The main claim to fame of the church, however, was a fantastically intricate carved wooden altar, a towering masterpiece that took its craftsman eight years to complete. The iconography of the altar complicated a completely Catholic reading of its symbolism, as it featured such undeniably Maya adornments as the maize god and nahuals dressed as Maximon surrounding and ascending such expected imagery as Christ crucified and the mournful Mother.



My weekend concluded back in the unambiguously Catholic Antigua. There is an elaborate church procession every Sunday during Lent through the streets of town, featuring two marching bands, giant lit floats, and innumerable purple-robed Padres and altar boys. I managed to catch a lull in the motion long enough to capture this image of Jesus. He is attended on this float by lilacs, a tree, Greek columns and very Western angels, perhaps a no less conspicuous admixture of divergent cultural elements than what I saw in Santiago.



Now that I'm leaving Antigua, a quick word as to what exactly I've been doing in between all these disturbingly vacation-like side trips. Besides Spanish class, I've also been working in the laboratory that houses all of the artifacts unearthed from San Bartolo for two hours a day. As I've mentioned, San Bartolo possesses now-famous spectacularly preserved Maya murals dating to around 100 BC. Over half of the murals, however, exist in the state visible here, that is, in the form of over 9,000 (and counting) fragments of destroyed stucco wall. One of the main objectives of the archaeologists working here is to piece together, literally, the amazing imagery of the murals, using as a rough guide the art of both Preclassic maya predecessors and San Bartolo's iconographic descendants, notably illustrated manuscripts of the 16th century K'iche Mayan creation myth the Popol Vuh and the numerous lived Mayan religious and artistic traditions practiced today, one small part of which you have glimpsed here. In fact, the nahual guitarist pictured above has been to San Bartolo, making the 8-hour trip with full religious paraphernalia and a small orchestra of traditional instruments after hearing about the murals in 2004. My professor, William Saturno, described the ritual to me, which involved the burning of Copal and playing of guitar and drum. It moved him deeply, he says: "this is the first time these walls have heard this music in 2,000 years."


I know this is terribly long, but it's two weeks and many introspective days-worth of images and observations. The next week might slow my roll a bit, as I'll be on the road. Three nights in Copan Ruínas, Honduras, where I'll visit the country for the first time and see the artistically sophisticated Maya site of Copán. Then three days in Flores, Guatemala, where I'll revisit the most monumental Maya site, Tikal. After that, it's off to San Bartolo for two and a half months of mural-gazing, hard-digging, hammock-sleeping, no-running-water-but-somehow-constantly-internet-connected tent living. There will be much more to write.


-Josue

Another week deep in Antigua. Here´s some background on the ground around me.

This is Antigua as seen from Cerro del Cruz ("Hill of the Cross"), a small park on a hill to the north overlooking the city and the monster Volcàn de Agua to the south, which has come out from hiding behind its clouds. Agua is inactive except as a navigational beacon and subject of innumerable street artists´painted views of the town.




This area´s main claims to fame are volcanoes and churches, old colonial missions such as this one, La Merced. This one is particularly lovely and yellow, part of the same complex as the previously mentioned arco amarillo. La Merced is located a block away from my Spanish school so I have the privilege of viewing it in the early morning and afternoon every day on my way to and from class.




And here is Pacaya, another volcano near Antigua/Guatemala City, but one that is quite active (view here its steaming top). I hiked up here yesterday with a small group of new friends, wasn´t too arduous and definitely worth it when we got to the bank of the lava river. I poked the beast with my walking stick, which became instantly aflame, I was expecting something viscous but it actually feels quite solid, being liquid rock. It didn´t get too mad and wasn´t moving nearly fast enough to overtake my escape on the sharp pumice rockscape but even getting near enough to shake a stick at the flow nearly singed the hair off my face. Pacaya´s revenge.

This week in my Spanish class I talked about human evolution, extraterrestrials, Maya archaeology and seismic activity with my teacher. In the future I will discuss some of these things with you (specifically the Maya and what I´ll be doing in relation to them in the coming months), but for now my life is sun and lava so that´s what´s hot at the moment. I plan to dedicate myself to Spanish for the proceeding week, taking a personal "language pledge" that will preclude me from speaking any English in an effort to dial in my reacquired skills. So until then,

Hasta domingo pròximo
-Josh

Been in Guatemala, Central America for the last week, after a lazily productive and ideally snow-filled week-and-a-half-long Cantabrigian vacation. Still have a foot in both worlds mentally but I'm adjusting to the cloudless 70-degree days and it's not so hard. So here's some background on my situation. WITH PICTURES.

I arrived in Guatemala City last Saturday and took a bus with the other students in my program to Antigua, a UNESCO World Heritage spot and site of over 20 Spanish schools.

We checked into our hotel, which happened to be right inside Antigua's famous "arco amarillo" (yellow arc). Not pictured due to clouds is the monstrous Volcan de Agua which looms large to the south and has already proven a navigational beacon during early lost walks through town. I'll post up a flick of him later. Not pictured due to not being visible are the church bells that are ringing at this very moment near the hotel, one of the many reminders of Guatemala's pervasive Catholic culture and the small size of the town.




I myself started Spanish classes last Monday, which will last for a month. I'm living with a host family, but with two other Americans and three Dutch so it's more like a host hostel. I have a lot of free time during which I've been roaming around the city. On the weekends wealthy domestic Guatemalan tourists come to Antigua because of its high elevation and subsequent coolness, and general charm. Last Sunday there was a small band of Mayan musicians playing a traditional marimba and turtle shell drum, recordings forthcoming.




On Thursday we had our first "field trip," which wasn't as much educational as sea-soaked. We headed to the Pacific coast of southern Guatemala to a resort area called Monterrico. Since the region is volcanic the sand is black, I'd never seen anything like it. The beach had pretty fierce waves, which crested in thin sheets of curling clear water that resembled obsidian blades as they pulled the arena negra from the sand floor.

So I got beat up by the 5-foot waves, napped in hammocks, read with my feet buried in the burning sand, burned in the sun but not too badly, just enough to coax some complexion to the fore of my pollution- and winter-paled skin. Now I'm ready to go back to class?

More about Spanish and Maya murals later, signing off, just saying