Then up the ladder of the earth I climbed/ through the barbed thickets of lost jungle/ until I reached you Machu Picchu
Then up the ladder of the earth I climbed
through the barbed thickets of lost jungle
until I reached you Machu Picchu:
High city of laddered stone,
finally resident of what is earthly
you did not hide in the dormant raiment
Canto Xll From The Heights Of Macchu Picchu - Poem by Pablo Neruda
Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.
I come to speak for your dead mouths.
Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.
And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.
Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.
Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.
Speak through my speech, and through my blood.
El Condor Pasa, Paul Simon with Urubamba (1973)
Immeasurable Eyelid
“Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above them –
Worlds scoop their Arcs –
And Firmaments – row –
Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender –
Soundless as dots – on a Disc of Snow –“
Emily Dickinson
'tis but a base ignoble mind that mounts no higher than a bird can soar.
- William Shakespeare
“...the work of high mountain archaeologist Johan Reinhard, who suggests that Machu Picchu functioned primarily as a sacred center, where huge landscape alignments of mountain deities and celestial bodies converge.
Reinhard showed how the Intihuatana, the hitching post of the sun, marks a geographic intersection, east-west and north-south, between five important mountains.
These alignments remain the stuff of Inca legend: The Sun was ritually tied to the Intihuatana — the hitching post — at the time of the solstice, when it was farthest from the earth. The legend holds that the connection to Machu Picchu acted as a kind of cosmic lasso, preventing the sun from straying any further away on the horizon, ensuring its orderly orbital return.
Looming above Machu Picchu, due North, is the ceremonial mountain peak of Huayna Picchu, while directly south lies Salcantay — one of the most sacred mountain “Apu” deities for the Inca.
In May, during the rainy season, the Chacana, or Southern Cross, rises to its highest point in the sky directly above Salcantay.
Surrounding the four Crux stars are other star groups and the Yana Phuyu (YA-na FOY-you), a river-like expanse of dark cloud constellations representing the spirits of the animals here on earth.
For the Inca, this corner of the Milky Way was integrally associated with rain and fertility.
On the December solstice, the Sun sets behind the highest snow peak of the distant Pumasillo mountain range to the West.
Twice a year, on the solar equinoxes, the Sun comes up behind the snow-covered peak of Wakay Willka (Mount Verónica) and sets behind San Miguel (Mount Vizcachani).
In 1989, Reinhard, Leoncio Vera and Fernando Astete, director of the Machu Picchu Archaeological Park, excavated a ceremonial platform atop the San Miguel summit, where the Inca had set a central rock upright to mark the precise equinox setting point.
Explorers continue to find similar, outlying astronomical markers left by the Inca.
An expedition led by American archaeologist Gary Ziegler and British explorer Hugh Thomson in 2003 located Llactapata, an Inca ritual site about 2½ miles from Machu Picchu. The site had got a passing glance 91 years earlier by Bingham, but he failed to note down proper coordinates, and its location in the dense jungle cloud forest remained a mystery for decades.
It was Reinhard who rediscovered a section of Llactapata in 1985. Building on that research, the Ziegler-Thomson expedition made some fabulous new discoveries, presenting further evidence that Machu Picchu was the hub of a geographically vast complex of astronomical observatories, integrally connected with the Inca “cosmovision.”
https://www.peruviantimes.com/17/the-inca-sacred-center-of-machu-picchu-a-love-letter/16822/
Jennifer Moss Logan, an astronomer at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, makes a great point when she sums up her planetarium presentation on Inca astronomy:
We know from science that the Yana Phuyu dark cloud constellations — to which the Inca felt themselves cosmically connected — are actually formations of gas and dust blocking starlight from the depths of the Milky Way. These dust clouds are made up of tiny hydrogen atoms and grains of graphite and of silicon oxide the size of smoke particles, she says.
“Today, astronomers tell us that our bodies — the actual carbon, oxygen, and iron atoms that are part of our bodies — are the materials forged in the exploding stars of long ago. As Carl Sagan, a famous astronomer, once said, ‘We are made of star stuff.'”
That’s what the science tells us.
So, she concludes, we’re not so far apart after all from the Inca in our cosmovision.”
But in the leaves behold the warrior.
Among the cypress trees a cry.
A jaguar’s eyes amid
the snowy heights.
Behold the spears at rest.
Listen to the whispering air
pierced by arrows.
Behold the breasts and legs,
the dark hair
shining in the moonlight.
Behold the warriors’ absence.
There’s no one. The diuca finch trills
like water in the pure night.
The condor cruises its black flight.
There’s no one. Do you hear?
It’s the puma
stepping in the air and the leaves.
Cuzco awakened like a throne
of turrets and granaries,
and the pensive flower of the world
was that race of pale shade
in whose opened hands trembled
diadems of imperial amethysts.
Highland corn
germinated on the terraces,
and over the volcanic pathways
traveled vases and gods.
Agriculture perfumed
the kingdom of kitchens
and spread over the roofs
a mantle of husked sun.
(Sweet race, daughter of the sierras,
lineage of tower and turquoise,
close my eyes now
before we return to the sea,
whence our sorrows come.)
That blue jungle was a grotto,
and in the mystery of tree and darkness
the Guaraní sang like
mist that rises in the afternoon,
water upon the foliage,
rain on a day of love,
sadness beside the rivers.
The South was a golden wonder.
The towering retreats of Macchu Picchu
in the gateway to the sky
were filled with oils and songs,
man had defied the dwelling
of the great birds in the heights,
and in the new dominion
among the peaks the tiller of the soil
touched the seed with fingers
wounded by the snow.
Pablo Neruda, from ‘Man’
VI, (A Lamp on Earth)
I: A LAMP ON EARTH I AMOR AMERICA (1400)
Before the wig and the dress coat
there were rivers, arterial rivers:
there were cordilleras, jagged waves where
the condor and the snow seemed immutable:
there was dampness and dense growth, the thunder
as yet unnamed, the planetary pampas.
Man was dust, earthen vase, an eyelid
of tremulous loam, the shape of clay—
he was Carib jug, Chibcha stone,
imperial cup of Araucanian silica.
Tender and bloody was he, but on the grip
of his weapon of moist flint,
the initials of the earth were written.
No one could
remember them afterward: the wind
forgot them, the language of water
was buried, the keys were lost
or flooded with silence or blood.
Life was not lost, pastoral brothers.
But like a wild rose
a red drop fell into the dense growth,
and a lamp of earth was extinguished.
I am here to tell the story.
From the peace of the buffalo
to the pummeled sands
of the land’s end, in the accumulated
spray of the antarctic light,
and through precipitous tunnels
of shady Venezuelan peacefulness
I searched for you, my father,
young warrior of darkness and copper,
or you, nuptial plant, indomitable hair,
mother cayman, metallic dove.
I, Incan of the loam,
touched the stone and said:
Who
awaits me? And I closed my hand
around a fistful of empty flint.
But I walked among Zapotec flowers
and the light was soft like a deer,
and the shade was a green eyelid.
My land without name, without America,
equinoctial stamen, purple lance,
your aroma climbed my roots up to the glass
raised to my lips, up to the slenderest
word as yet unborn in my mouth.
Come to my very being, to my own dawn,
into crowned solitudes.
The fallen kingdom survives us all this while.
And on this dial the condor’s shadow cruises
as ravenous as would a pirate ship.
Stone within stone, and man, where was he?
Air within air, and man, where was he?
Time within time, and man, where was he?
Were you also the shattered fragment
of indecision, of hollow eagle
which, through the streets of today, in the old tracks,
through the leaves of accumulated autumns,
goes pounding at the soul into the tomb?
Poor hand, poor foot, and poor, dear life …
The days of unraveled light
in you, familiar rain falling on feast-day banderillas,
did they grant, petal by petal, their dark nourishment
to such an empty mouth?
Famine, coral of mankind,
hunger, secret plant,
root of the woodcutters,
famine, did your jagged reef dart up
to those high, side-slipping towers?
I question you, salt of the highways,
show me the trowel; allow me, architecture,
to fret stone stamens with a little stick,
climb all the steps of air into the emptiness,
scrape the intestine until I touch mankind.
Macchu Picchu, did you lift
stone above stone on a groundwork of rags?
coal upon coal and, at the bottom, tears?
fire-crested gold, and in that gold, the bloat
dispenser of this blood?
Let me have back the slave you buried here!
Wrench from these lands the stale bread
of the poor, prove me the tatters
on the serf, point out his window.
Tell me how he slept when alive,
whether he snored,
his mouth agape like a dark scar
worn by fatigue into the wall.
That wall, that wall!
If each stone floor
weighed down his sleep, and if he fell
beneath them, as if beneath a moon, with all that
sleep!
I stare at the clothes and hands,
the carvings of water in a sonorous hollow,
the wall rubbed smooth by the touch of a face
that with my eyes gazed at the earthly lights,
that with my hands oiled the vanished planks:
because everything, clothes, skin, dishes,
words, wine, breads...
went away, fell to the earth.
Pablo Neruda
...from the jungle’s edges to the rare height of gods,
under the nuptial banners of light and reverence,
blending with thunder from the drums and lances...
.........
Interstellar eagle, vine-in-a-mist.
Forsaken bastion, blind scimitar.
Orion belt, ceremonial bread.
Torrential stairway, immeasurable eyelid.
Triangular tunic, pollen of stone.
Granite lamp, bread of stone.
Mineral snake, rose of stone.
Ship-burial, source of stone.
Horse in the moon, stone light.
Equinoctial quadrant, vapor of stone.
Ultimate geometry, book of stone.
Kiss these secret stones with me.
The torrential silver of the Urubamba
makes the pollen fly to its golden cup.
The hollow of the bindweed’s maze,
the petrified plant, the inflexible garland,
soar above the silence of these mountain coffers.
Come, diminutive life, between the wings of the earth,
while you, cold, crystal in the hammered air,
thrusting embattled emeralds apart,
O savage waters, fall from the hems of snow.
..........
Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
“I believe the original name of Machu Picchu was Patallaqta, which means ‘city of andenes,'” or “terraces,” María del Carmen Martín Rubio -
(Spanish historian who discovered the lost Betanzos chapters)
"I believe that God is absolutely, grandly beautiful, even as the highest soul of man counts beauty, but infinitely beyond that soul’s highest idea--with the beauty that creates beauty, not merely shows it, or itself exists beautiful." George MacDonald
I live my life in growing orbits,
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God,
around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years.
And I still don’t know if I am a condor,
Or a storm, or a great song.
RAINER MARIA RILKE / 1899 (falcon substitutes for condor in original)
And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.
—FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA, 1934
(Translated by Steven F. White)
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| Pablo Neruda |
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