ritual

¨My senses were taking in nothing but a deep-night, unmeditatable consciousness of a world which was newly touched and beautiful to me, and I must admit that even in the vermin there was a cerain amount of pleasure: and that, exhausted though I now was, it was the eagerness of my senses quite as fully as the bugs and the itching which made it impossible for me to sleep.¨
--James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

No bedbugs in Mexico City, but not much sleep either, with the predictable result that I´m a little sick, trying to hold it together so we can go out tonight to see the mariachi bands play for German tourists. And anything I want to write sounds like a junior-high school diary: today we ate grasshoppers and saw the Candy Market (a half-mile stretch of vendors with bright-colored stacks of industrial soap-bar-sized candy; what I thought were flies surrounding each booth were in fact swarms of honeybees and wasps).

It´s killing me that I can´t post more often (or speak more than jokey Spanish). Yesterday I rushed through the National Museum of Anthropology in about an hour and a half. There have always been entire wings of most big museums that I didn´t care about--Art of Ancient Greece, Art of Mesoamerica, etc. but yesterday I couldn´t get enough. I think it´s because the museum allows you to take photos. Suddenly, intsead of just viewing/learning etc, you´re deciding which images to select, keep, possess, take home to your living room. Sadly, I think my newfound interest in, say, Aztec statues and pottery, is really triggered by a consumer reflex.













A few wall captions are all I know about Aztec history, but how we respond to the story of human sacrifice rituals seems like the perfect way to distinguish between cultural conservatives (who silently congratulate themselves about the triumph of civilization over savagery) and liberal relativists like myself (who think, ¨Man, I wish I had some more ritual in my life.¨