But really, beautiful world: where are you?

Climbing pyramids, the Mayan holy book 'The Popol Vuh', and a letter about seeing beauty even in ugly times.

In December and much of January my gym was a pyramid. In the mornings I would head through the town that I was staying at in the Yucatan, and walk past the tortillerias and panaderías on my way to the base of the stone steps of the town’s Mayan ruins. The biggest of these pyramids, Kinich Kak Moo, was built roughly 1,500 years ago, around the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The pyramid has a limestone base roughly 200 meters tall, and after the first staircase is a large mesa overgrown with weeds, spindly trees, and tourists huffing and puffing in the shade. At the far end of the mesa is a final smaller pyramid that climbs steeply for 34 meters, often swarmed with Europeans slipping on the stones in their flip-flops and dutifully taking their selfies. Up and down and then back up again I would go, convincing myself that I was climbing the pyramids solely out of aesthetic appreciation, but more realistically using the steps to strengthen the muscles in my gluteus maximus — which is a fancy way of saying that the pyramids were where I was practicing my new year’s resolution of getting a bigger, stronger ass.

But whatever my bodily reasons for climbing, the pyramids are beautiful. If you look down while climbing, you can see white seashells and fossils trapped in the rock for millennia. From the crown of the pyramid, you get a phenomenal panorama of the dense tree canopies spread across the flat horizon, with the roads cut through the jungles and the smoke of bonfires trickling past the leaves. And then there are the stones, thousands of years old, trod upon by the ancient Mayans, followed by the conquistadors, and now the tourists constantly scrolling through their photos. Oh, if stones could speak! They would say lovely things, I am sure, about the Mayan love of astronomy, or tales of their incredible feasts and music and ballgames. But brutal things, too: warfare, slavery, and of course the ritual human sacrifices.

The Spanish colonists loved to highlight the terror of the Mayan sacrifices, because it was an easy target — something that nearly everyone could admit was horrifying. From the Franciscan Diego de Landa in the 16th century came tales of Mayan priests flaying the flesh of the sacrificed and wearing the skins in solemn dances. At the famed sites of Chichén Itzá and elsewhere, the Mayans would supposedly throw the condemned into wells that were hundreds of feet deep, with the expectation that the victims would somehow emerge after three days. They never seemed to climb out of the wells, surprisingly. The Catholic de Landa was of course shocked, and appalled, and strongly condemned all the violence. Surely Catholicism, Spain, nor Europe would ever do anything so brutal, so terrible.

From the top of Kinich Kak Moo however is a vista of the town, including another large structure built atop a terraced staircase. That was where I would go when I was tired, and ready to atone for the sin of my vanity. Near the market in town rises the structure, beginning with a staircase that leads up to a courtyard. Once you climb the steps you reach wide yellow porticos surrounding a large field of grass, capped at one end by the tower of a cathedral built some 500 years ago by the Spanish. On any given day there you'll see the nuns in their flowy habits, and the tourists posing for their pictures in front of the stained-glass windows and a statue of Pope John Paul II. In December long caravans of pilgrims trekked here from across Mexico. They sang, drank, danced, and then prayed in the pews under the Christmas lights and the watchful eyes of the Virgin de Guadalupe. In January I sat in the back of the church and watched the workers swaddle the plastic baby Jesus in a blanket and pull it delicately from the nativity scene. Little kids squirmed over the pews, trying to rupture the quiet. I find a church like this to be beautiful. How can one not? The music bouncing off of the cathedral roof, the burning incense, all the old ladies gripping their rosaries and muttering to themselves.

But long before this land was a convent, it was a Mayan pyramid. In the 16th century the Spanish arrived and cleaved the top of the pyramid and built a Catholic church in its place, just as they did in thousands of indigenous communities from North America to the bottom of South America. The Spanish subjugation of the Mayans was bloody and horrific. In his An Account of the Things of Yucatán, the same Diego de Landa from earlier acknowledged the brutality of Spanish colonialism, writing;

“They inflicted outrageous cruelty on the Indians, cutting off their noses, arms and legs; they cut the breasts off the women and threw them into deep lagoons with gourds tied to their feet; they wounded children with spearthrusts because they could not walk as fast as their mothers, and if they were chained together with collars and they fell sick or could not keep pace with the others, they cut off their heads instead of stopping to free them.” (52)

Yet still de Landa proselytized for a church that was aided by the violence of the Spanish conquistadors. To him the church was good and beautiful, so the brutality of the Spanish genocide could be somehow forgiven. Yet de Landa, in his complete devotion to goodness and beauty, led his own massive assault in the town of Maní against Mayans who dared reject the teachings of the church. Him and his men bound the locals in ropes, processed them through the streets, shaved their heads, and tortured them with whips. When that wasn't enough, Landa ordered the destruction of Mayan idols, vessels, artifacts, and written texts with hieroglyphics painted on deerskin. And after he was done destroying the cultural legacy that he later wrote about in his book, de Landa came to the town with the yellow convent, and prayed to Catholic gods on top of a pyramid that had once held the urns of hundreds and perhaps thousands of Mayan dead. For all of this plundering and destruction, Diego de Landa now has a statue of himself just across the street from the yellow convent. Alas.

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Birthdays, I am told, are a day for celebrations, feasts, and ball games. Today is even a significant numerical anniversary: my 31st year, on the 31st day of the month — a ‘golden birthday’, which can only happen once. But I’ve been unable to lift myself into the jolly mood that I’d like to have today. Something is deeply wrong – so wrong that I can’t even settle on a consistent metaphor. I am a flat tire. I am a pebble sinking into the deep ocean. If my ‘vibes’ were attached to the economy with a nozzle, my deflationary mood would be so severe that the global price of eggs would drastically plummet.

I have had moments recently of giddy delirium, where I’ve been seized by some sort of idea or whiff of the good life — a story idea, a stirring caused by some revelatory line in a book — only to violently snap out of the trance and remember where I am and how ridiculous this all feels, given the stark sense of sudden cultural decline. What follows is a dizzying ping-pong between anger at that realization, eventually softened and suffocated by a weighted blanket of sadness that I can never quite shake. Sure, there have been good things: people to be near to and lean against when I have felt my most apoplectic. But even when I am in these quietly healing moments, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of loss. It is like I am at a nighttime bonfire, at that point in the evening when the flames are sputtering and the embers are dying out. I am cold all over, and don’t quite know how to restart the blaze.

I met a man recently here in Seattle. He was clearly injured; he had a severe limp, and one of his legs dragged severely behind the other. Yet still he had to walk up and down a flight of stairs, carrying boxes, slowly trudging one leg up and then swinging the other over the steps. This was all a necessary side-gig, he told me. He had recently been in a massive accident that left him wounded with a bad back and constant aches, and he needed all the money he could get to pay the hospital bills. But you should have seen the other guy, he told me – no insurance, car completely decimated, forever in medical debt, fretting over a baby at home. This is such a common story if you live in the United States of America. Everywhere people are going into debt, hemorrhaging life savings, selling all of their belongings just to afford leg casts and their prescription drugs. It is maddening, and ugly, and evil. There is so much evil ugliness, especially in this country, the global superpower. Mass deportations. Prisons. The policing of people’s bodies. Endless war in the service of what, who knows. Death and destruction that serves absolutely no purpose except for the comfort of a very miniscule few.

But for all of the evil ugliness that exists, there’s a level of dull and pointless ugliness that I cannot wrap my head around. When I was in Mexico my stepbrother, who is a kind of oracle of arcane internet knowledge, told me of Mr. Beast’s plans to rent out the Great Pyramids of Giza for a YouTube video. Almost immediately afterwards, as if by fate, a tourist graffitied ‘USA’ in bright yellow spray-paint on the steps of Kinich Kak Moo, the Mayan pyramid from earlier. When I was noting all of this in my laptop, clearly pausing to swallow the depressing facts of this stupid culture, a piece of software popped up on my word processor and prompted me, without asking, if perhaps I would like an AI image of that sentence, just in case my readers couldn’t imagine three letters painted on a block of stone? Some specific part of the Amazon rainforest was probably cut down to power the LLM that asked me that idiotic question. Maybe a few branches, or half a tree. Ugliness, ugliness everywhere. And it is all so boring and bland, which somehow makes it worse.

But even now, I am falling for the trap of exclusively talking about the world of ugliness. There’s another world! A better world! I want to talk about beauty, and the good world that should be everyone’s birthright! Bold and ambitious art. Every reader and patron treated respectably as serious people. Every artist able to make not only a ‘stable’ living, but a thriving material existence. And those are just pertaining to the arts! I will stop the list there, for your sake, but I am tired of being treated like I was born yesterday, or that this world is the only one that has or will ever exist. No, there is a past, a history, and I have lived some of it! And there is a future, too, even though it is so easy to be a doomer that scrolls oneself into oblivion. But it’s getting harder for me to see the future, harder than I can ever remember. There’s a pervasive veil of ugliness that hides so much of the good and the beautiful. Maybe then the answer is history – to briefly turn backwards and learn from the ancestors. But my head is so stuck in the present that I often forget how to look back. Where oh where is that beautiful world? Where should I look? How can I become the kind of person who can see in the dark?

While I was in the Yucatán, I read a phenomenal Mayan holy text called the Popol Vuh.¹ It is an expansive epic about the birth of the world, on par with Genesis or any of the other great creation stories. In the beginning the Mayan gods created the world, and they strove to create living beings that could revere the gods and acknowledge the true beginnings of the universe. They first populated the globe with the land and sea creatures. But when the animals attempted to speak and give thanks to the gods, all of the bleating and moos were indecipherable. In one of the cruelest and most heartbreaking passages I can remember from a creation tale, the gods thunder down to the animals and say,

“…your sustenance will be grass and your resting place will be the gullies and the mountains because you did not hail us, and you did not salute us. There are still some who do not invoke us, we will make them obey us again. Take on this duty: your flesh will be chewed up and for this you will serve us… When all the small and all the large animals were told of this they wanted to have their first day over again, but they could no longer understand each other. They could not make it work, not at all…” (5)

And so the first animals were slaughtered and eaten, and the animals that make up the world today are the ancestors of those who couldn’t speak. The gods, however, kept with their mission, and created the first humans. These people were made of clay, and slightly malformed looking. They were unable to see; sluggish, fragile, and fixed with a stare that could neither turn nor look back. “He could speak, but he had no understanding at all. He dissolved in water, and was not at all strong,” the book says.

Realizing that they had failed, the gods destroyed the clay people and went back to the drafting table. They created a second people, mostly made of wood. The wood people had no sweat, no blood, no skin, and their faces were dry and pale white, but still they multiplied for generations. Yet the Gods realized that the people were not at all suitable to what they had envisioned:

“…they were simple, without heart or understanding. And they were not able to remember anything about their creator; it was worthless that they walked and wandered the earth, and they remembered nothing more of Uk’ux Kaj (Heart of the Sky)…” (7)

So the gods had the people fall face-down onto the Earth, to test them and see if they could stand back up again. But when they failed in their task, the gods punished the wood people with a great flood of tar and resin, and a bird named K’otk’owach flew down and plucked out the eyes of the wooden people. And in one of the coolest moments that I can remember from any holy book, all of the victims and instruments of the wood people’s world suddenly organized and exacted their vengeance on humanity. The grinding stones gathered up their voices and said,

“And we used to respect you, but no longer; you will now feel our strength: we will grind and crush your flesh and make bone-meal out of your bodies.” (10)

The pans and the pots from the kitchens turned to the people and replied,

“… You burned us, but yet we did not feel the pain. You shall now feel this pain, and we will burn you…”

And the cooking stones told the people, definitively,

“Fire is revenged with fury.”

And so the wood people were beaten and forced to flee to the woods, where they became the monkeys that swing from the branches and hide in the leaves. Think of that the next time you see a macaque at the zoo.

But the people – where are the beautiful people? When I first read the beginning of the Popol Vuh, I was struck with this terrible feeling that maybe the Mayan gods had never got around to making their ideal humans. Maybe I am actually made of clay, or even wood. That would explain a lot. I have that blank stare of the clay men sometimes, especially when staring at the bright screens that claim to know everything. I contain some of the hubris of the wooden men who believe that they were the center of the universe. And I even hold the desperate self-pity of the land animals who merely wanted to frolic, and make love, and revere the beauty of the gods, but were cut down harshly for never finding the right words. Oh, woe is me. Everything is the fault of the gods – never me. Sure, totally.

But finally, and mercifully, the Popol Vuh announces that the gods had found a solution. They created their perfect people, and the people were somehow able to praise the gods. How on Earth were these “good and beautiful men” able to do such a thing? The key component, according to the Popol Vuh, is that these new people could see;

“And they could see everything, their vision reached across the world, and they knew everything that was happening. And when they watched, they could see everything all over again, on earth and in the skies above. And there was nothing that could prevent them from seeing everything. And they didn’t need to run all over the world to see: they could see everything from just one place.” (64)

Over January, I have been asking myself countless variations of the eternal question – how should a person be? Nothing has stuck with me quite as much as that ancient Mayan ideal of seeing everything. A certain person might read that and think ‘oh, so I should keep scrolling and following every single news event,’ but I think that’s the wrong interpretation. Banality and ugliness are one part of the world. But they are not all of it. The world is far more complex than the ways that humans have made it appear ugly. Arguing otherwise would be an insult to the Mayan gods. According to the Mayans, the gods want people that can hold complicated truths and tensions without turning away into binaries. The gods want people that watch, and learn, and care for one another, but also people that look elsewhere, away from strictly human cultures and towards something else. What is it they’re looking at? God? The sky? The horizon, I suppose — wherever it is. Even when we can’t easily see the future, the gods want us to try.

In the story of the Popol Vuh the beautiful people spread, making their vessels, loving their people, crafting images of gods and the good life in their manuscripts and artworks. But it is dark out when they do these things;

“…they were many who multiplied and grew, although still in the shadows, before the sun came and brought the light and clarity… And they still didn’t know how to sustain themselves, but they lifted their faces to the skies without knowing how to distance themselves. And there they were, in that sweet and perfect moment, black and white men, speaking many tongues and listening acutely.” (66)

Crafting beautiful lights in the darkness. Lifting one’s eyes to the horizon. Listening acutely. Living beautifully. It is like Shakespeare writes in The Tempest, “O brave new world, that has such people in it!” Oh, what wonderful things such people could do in our world. Wonderful things.

(View from the top of Kinich Kak Moo. Picture by me).

1. (or Wuj, as my copy of the book reads. For here on, I will refer to it as the Popol Vuh)