Damn it,
Me and my big mouth, I always get more than I bargain for and this time was no exception.
Last nite I wrote something out of tiredness, frustration and disappointment; driven by fear, loneliness and jadedness. I was bitching and moaning, things that usually get me in these situations.
Proud Crane after all...
But things turned out differently, I made some choices (for me life is all about that anyway) and laid down a plan, which strangely turned out better than I hopped.
It's Friday night and I'm sitting in a King-sized bed in one of Mexico City's fanciest hotels, is late at night and I'm busted from a week of long discussions.
I'm miles away from home but I still feel like I'm chained to this laptop and my desk is just a couple of steps away. I feel like in a desert, where I keep saying "over the next dune I'll find water", but work keeps coming, and emergencies keep flaring, and deadlines and promises keep being broken, and apologies are made only to be broken again when laughable demands come my way, but I'm unable to turn them down. Then the cynic takes over and, jaded, I comply.
I'm really tired, and although I'm sitting in one of the most marvelous cities in the world, were its native culture enriches its modern world, were the jaguar pounds over gangs in the Zócalo and the masked fighter defends his honor and his mask from the evil Rudos, I'm sitting here tired, frustrated and alone.
I'm in no mood of traveling, although I already flew the miles. I don't want to smear the memories of such great works as the Zócalo or the Museo Antropológico with Business Reviews and Moderation Guides, and then there's the wish (the need really), to construct these memoirs with some meaning, not just a escape from the corporate cultural bubble into the wilds, outside the wall of the 5 stars hotels, the 25$ cab rides, the coca-cola and the air conditioning.
I'll travel back home, where I'll have the space to travel and see new things I can't see here, miles away from home. I'll be able to retake my journey and advance new steps away from this foreign land.
…….
I waked up as late as I could, played couch potato for the rest of the morning and watched all what Televisa could throw at me: Soap Operas, bad jokes, busty singers and cumbia masters, you name it. When check time came I was ready and promptly resolved my Corporate issues, escaped the banality mausoleum and went the next door Sanburns for some cash and looking for some late time purchases.
After that, and totally breaking the Corporate policy, I took a street taxi that lead me to the Museo Arquelógico, not without some weird discussion that included Chávez and Venezuelan Table Dancers traveling to DF. Then there were cows, in many colors and textures, with wings, maps and finally, an Angelic Cow.
Luck struck once, looking for a wrestler mask (as once a dear friend told me he bought there) I came to two men standing in front of a huge pole which end I could see right away because of the surrounding trees. I saw them drumming and chanting, until one of them started climbing the pole (the ladder, the heavens, the spheres, choose your own poison) and I could finally see other four men, standing in a square in each of the four directions (winds, realms, gods, choose your own destiny) ready to fall in a circling descent (how curious, they would "square the circle"…). Finally, the drummer reach the top and after a while the men hung themselves, and like falling from a crumbling tower, they hung upside down, arms open and right leg crossed down in a crisis, to their final death while slowly descending to the ground from the heavens. Arcana anyone?
Now I understand Campbell, is incredible how things are the same and people just see their carcass…
After a short stop at the Jaguar dance, I stepped into the Museum and began the honorable tradition of memory hunting, where one photographs anything in sight so you would not forget anything you missed because you were taking pictures of it, so after realizing the lack of meaning of the practice, I stepped into the wild world of past glories and forgotten knowledge the Museum had for their visitors (not without a picture of a feathered serpent for Ma).
I entered the back room, where the Mexica culture actually takes form and the solar disk welcomes the unfaithful. Temples without name and fellow memory hunters accompanied me along the way until I saw a man in a wheelchair. Hermaphrodites I've seen, deformed I've seen, a giant drove the taxi that took me "home" last night, but this man was different, he sat left to a stand whit no tag on it and a book that showed a grid where totems and gods determined the fate of the mundane, and this man, this hummingbird; sitting in a wheelchair, was offering answers to the uninitiated, the sleepers, and questions to the awakened.
6-Perro was the question was given on a piece of photocopied paper and scribbled with god names for day and night.
I pondered for a while I descended to the underworld and back, through Atleans and giant's heads, pondering on how Perro, Lechuza and the ability to destroy and reform had to do with me, so I went back to the crippled Colibrí and the kid who silently took the money from the tourists, but they had disappeared leaving me whit nothing but a picture of the empty stand, just a book with no tag.
Left with the feeling of wonder, where most usually take it as a nice souvenir, the numerous parallels of hanged men, hermaphrodites, gods of serpents and feathers that empower men and giants left me wondering, always a welcomed state, on what, why, and how…
Back to the real world, I left the Museum with a Mayan Mythology book and in search of some more mundane artifacts to a shopping center where I expected to obtain some books and CDs for my never-ending collection of trinkets. Needless to say, I paid my cab with a two hundred pesos bill only to find out it was really an old five hundred pesos bill. The taxi driver didn't want it, and I left him with the dollars I had with myself, oddly I missed one 10 dollar bill and had a 500 pesos one (roughly 47 dollars).
It sounds stupid, but I finally got to exchange my old 500 pesos bill and got nothing out of that place where I got self conscious of my age in a lot of time, since a girl playing what seemed an interesting fighter-adaptation of Full Metal Alchemist gave me a look when I asked if she knew the name of the title she was playing.
I left the shopping center, left he city and the country, but I kept in my mind how amazing is the fact that Symbols, Jungian or not, repeat themselves in different cultures, be it medieval Christian-based Alchemy or traditional native Mexican folklore. I'm either a fool or a madman, or both, or worse: none of them; but now what is difficult for me is NOT seeing these Symbols and understanding that humanity has lost its tools to deal with the world and with itself and gaining them back is a journey, an opus, that most certainly needs at least five years of reading and a dollar bill on the shelf case..
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