after surrealism in 2012: toward the rise of the fifth sun in the new winter solstice, and beyond - reading pennsylvania - usa.joseph jablonski (org.)
WHY 2012? A MYTH IN SEARCH OF A MOVEMENT
there is not great knowledge in them. the heaven and earth are quite lost for them. they have no shame.
… … ...
on the magnificent day of power and beauty, on the day in which the wisdom of the gods is understood, the harvest will be raised and it will be time for gathering. and the “evil animal” will disappear.
--the books of chilam balam of chumayel
we are not alone in holding in bored disregard the simplistic “new age” gibberish that often gets attached to the discussion of the year 2012. such feel good spirituality as we see nowadays is even more useless than the various doomsday rabbits that are being pulled out of the hat of the monotonous spectacle that constitutes the non-stop freak show of these times. the relentless juggernaut of 2012 ideology that one finds on the internet and in segments of pop culture, reprising the quite recent year 2000 millennium hubbub and the Y2K computer frenzy, owe more to the enduring virus of “end times fever” ingrained in the christian west than to any maya prophecies.
yes, the world is tilting on the verge of several disasters. facing us are economic chaos, global climatic and ecological disasters, impending famines, escalating war and terrorism, essential resource scarcities. banks and stock exchanges respond by turning themselves into fortified casinos protected by politicians and armies. the utopia of middle-class consumerism is sent along to the scrap heap with socialism and the welfare state, because even it subtracts too much from the share that the wealthy have allotted to themselves. not surprisingly, in north america and europe the tired old bloodhounds of xenophobia are brought out of retirement to divert angry populations . . . .
in short, as a species contemporary man does nothing good for himself or his habitat. his systemic failure is almost certain, even deserved. but there is no built-in, just-in-time cosmic readjustment of consciousness coming in a year or two to cure him despite himself. any new consciousness will have to be created afresh in the ruins of, and with the materials left from, the past two and a half centuries.
that sentiment does not obviate the fact that there is a rare chronological event afoot. a once despised and recently decimated people created in aeons past a mathematical and astronomical marvel. the famed calendar of the maya enabled them to predict, with scientific certainty, the celestial configuration of our near universe, as it will align its parts at the winter solstice of year 2012. this event will mark the death and rebirth of the sun for the fifth time, according to the cosmological mythology of the maya.
MYTH: the world will come to an end and be recreated afresh at the close of a great cycle of thirteen baktuns, at the winter solstice, december 21, 2012. this will be the fifth time, since the first creation, that the rebirth of the world under a new sun takes place; hence “the world of the fifth sun.” writes john major jenkins: “(terence) mckenna demonstrates that on winter solstice of 2012, the galactic center will be rising heliacally just before dawn, in a way reminiscent of how the maya observed venus’s last morning star appearance.” jenkins: “the crossing point of the ecliptic and the milky way was understood as the sacred tree.”
disputes over details daunt this versatile meme. fifth sun, or sixth? actually, it is the fifth in the maya tradition, the sixth in the aztec. is it the world that comes to an end, or just the old, expiring sun? the mind oscillates between awe and derision in this paradoxical minefield of claims, which mixes myth with late-twentieth century archeological evidence derived from the “cracking of the maya code.” one must be prepared to interpret out the jutting fragments of pseudo-myth when dealing with oracular statements about the looming maya calendar event. (the return of the crystal skulls from the pleiades?) that can be done well enough. but what no one, mayanist scholar or scientific astronomer, has done or claimed to have done is provide insight into the essential esoteric foundation.
there is always a “dream gate” through which an indigenous people passes into a discrete “culture”. (or so says geza roheim.) only beyond that could we expect to approach, if not comprehend, a maya vision of the world, very little of which is not strange or shocking to us. what can one make of a major god so often portrayed in reliefs or carvings, somewhat anachronistically wearing goggles like those of a 1920s aviator? what sense is there in naming a great warrior king “18-rabbit”, or in averring to see a rabbit in the face of the moon? what sensibility lies behind the hallucinatory beauty of the names of so many real maya personages; lady evening-star; great-jaguar-paw; smoking-frog; lady beastie; stormy-sky; lady water-lily; one-fish-in-hand-flint, and so on? no relentless digging and decoding by archaeologists can wholly illuminate the haunting enigma of the ballgame, interwoven as it is with the ritual of sacrifice to the point where some unfortunate captive is bound into the shape of a ball to be kept ready for the knife at the time of blood-letting. the blood-letting? can these things be?
david friedel, who collaborated with linda schele on some of the most accessible and empathetic writing on the classic maya world, comes down finally to the view that we fail at clear understanding because we are not meant to understand—they were not speaking to us, but to their own in their own way. translation is not the same as initiation. for a maya “secret doctrine” we do have the translated words of the popul vuh, which (pardon me) reads like a wondrous tale by benjamin peret. (popul vuh: “the griddles and pots attacked them.” peret: “clay pipe had always believed that virgins lived in the shards of bottles.”) we should surely be more than satisfied, even delighted, with it, animate pottery and all. the maya lived their culture through it for millennia. their deeds and creations are now being portrayed in words and images throughout the present world, as the 2012 furor ebbs and flows in the popular imagination
yes, the world is tilting on the verge of several disasters. facing us are economic chaos, global climatic and ecological disasters, impending famines, escalating war and terrorism, essential resource scarcities. banks and stock exchanges respond by turning themselves into fortified casinos protected by politicians and armies. the utopia of middle-class consumerism is sent along to the scrap heap with socialism and the welfare state, because even it subtracts too much from the share that the wealthy have allotted to themselves. not surprisingly, in north america and europe the tired old bloodhounds of xenophobia are brought out of retirement to divert angry populations . . . .
in short, as a species contemporary man does nothing good for himself or his habitat. his systemic failure is almost certain, even deserved. but there is no built-in, just-in-time cosmic readjustment of consciousness coming in a year or two to cure him despite himself. any new consciousness will have to be created afresh in the ruins of, and with the materials left from, the past two and a half centuries.
that sentiment does not obviate the fact that there is a rare chronological event afoot. a once despised and recently decimated people created in aeons past a mathematical and astronomical marvel. the famed calendar of the maya enabled them to predict, with scientific certainty, the celestial configuration of our near universe, as it will align its parts at the winter solstice of year 2012. this event will mark the death and rebirth of the sun for the fifth time, according to the cosmological mythology of the maya.
MYTH: the world will come to an end and be recreated afresh at the close of a great cycle of thirteen baktuns, at the winter solstice, december 21, 2012. this will be the fifth time, since the first creation, that the rebirth of the world under a new sun takes place; hence “the world of the fifth sun.” writes john major jenkins: “(terence) mckenna demonstrates that on winter solstice of 2012, the galactic center will be rising heliacally just before dawn, in a way reminiscent of how the maya observed venus’s last morning star appearance.” jenkins: “the crossing point of the ecliptic and the milky way was understood as the sacred tree.”
disputes over details daunt this versatile meme. fifth sun, or sixth? actually, it is the fifth in the maya tradition, the sixth in the aztec. is it the world that comes to an end, or just the old, expiring sun? the mind oscillates between awe and derision in this paradoxical minefield of claims, which mixes myth with late-twentieth century archeological evidence derived from the “cracking of the maya code.” one must be prepared to interpret out the jutting fragments of pseudo-myth when dealing with oracular statements about the looming maya calendar event. (the return of the crystal skulls from the pleiades?) that can be done well enough. but what no one, mayanist scholar or scientific astronomer, has done or claimed to have done is provide insight into the essential esoteric foundation.
there is always a “dream gate” through which an indigenous people passes into a discrete “culture”. (or so says geza roheim.) only beyond that could we expect to approach, if not comprehend, a maya vision of the world, very little of which is not strange or shocking to us. what can one make of a major god so often portrayed in reliefs or carvings, somewhat anachronistically wearing goggles like those of a 1920s aviator? what sense is there in naming a great warrior king “18-rabbit”, or in averring to see a rabbit in the face of the moon? what sensibility lies behind the hallucinatory beauty of the names of so many real maya personages; lady evening-star; great-jaguar-paw; smoking-frog; lady beastie; stormy-sky; lady water-lily; one-fish-in-hand-flint, and so on? no relentless digging and decoding by archaeologists can wholly illuminate the haunting enigma of the ballgame, interwoven as it is with the ritual of sacrifice to the point where some unfortunate captive is bound into the shape of a ball to be kept ready for the knife at the time of blood-letting. the blood-letting? can these things be?
david friedel, who collaborated with linda schele on some of the most accessible and empathetic writing on the classic maya world, comes down finally to the view that we fail at clear understanding because we are not meant to understand—they were not speaking to us, but to their own in their own way. translation is not the same as initiation. for a maya “secret doctrine” we do have the translated words of the popul vuh, which (pardon me) reads like a wondrous tale by benjamin peret. (popul vuh: “the griddles and pots attacked them.” peret: “clay pipe had always believed that virgins lived in the shards of bottles.”) we should surely be more than satisfied, even delighted, with it, animate pottery and all. the maya lived their culture through it for millennia. their deeds and creations are now being portrayed in words and images throughout the present world, as the 2012 furor ebbs and flows in the popular imagination
WHY SURREALISM?
poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.
--aimé césaire
poetry is the only way to achieve the kinds of knowledge we need to
move beyond the world’s crisis.
-- robin d. g. kelly (citing césaire)
surrealism: hope’s tightrope walker.
-- suzanne césaire
it was andre breton, in arcane 17, who underscored the mythic-moral value for surrealism of venus, the morning star, an unexcelled guide that once led the maya to the zenith of their culture. arcanun 17 is “the star” card, seventeenth in the tarot deck, of which he averred, “the star found here is the early morning star, which tends to eclipse the other heavenly bodies.” just recently, in his book morning star, michael lowy revives this symbol in terms of emphatic valorization, and in the context of a review of surrealism’s more profound resources in the lengthy period after breton’s essay was written. here surrealism meets on the field of today with ernst bloch’s courageous philosophy of hope and Lowy’s appeal for a deeper grounding in the meaning of the past.
the postwar era, whose prospects challenged but did not discourage breton, is replicated today in the post-cold war, post-industrial, post-literate era. it is again a time of great and terrifying transitions, when many people are both challenged and discouraged. as crises of all kinds deepen, it would almost seem that the appropriate prophetic text for our time must be h. g. wells’ seminal foray into the ecology of man’s looming extinction, “mind at the end of its tether.” therein, after surveying the hidden flaws in humankind’s evolutionary success, wells describes his ”hard harsh conviction of the conclusive end of all life.” his verdict could not have been more stark: “there is no way out or round or through.” This from a paragon of scientific rationalism!
but twenty years before, in the tract “surrealism now and forever”, the one-year-old surrealist movement had already declared, “time is up for the contemporary world.” commenting on camus’ myth of sisyphus in a 1946 interview, breton reiterated “they (surrealists) are very far from admitting that nature is hostile to man; but they suppose that man, originally in possession of certain keys that kept him in close communion with nature, has lost them and has more and more feverishly persisted in trying others that do not turn.” benjamin peret had likewise never ceased insisting that poetry as practiced in surrealism, not the reigning mechanistic science, was humankind’s best mediator in relation to nature. his focus turned toward an ancient myth-inspired culture, the same one that preoccupies so many today, the maya, as he translated into french their uncanny and prophetic book of chilam balam. vincent bounoure, surrealist theorist of the savage heart, brought forth similar affinities in his work on the art of the americas, in which he which lauded the visionary expressions of the native american peoples, north, south and central. He was soon joined by leading french and czech surrealists in launching the provocative phrase “surrealist civilization”, in a book of that name. the importance of indigenous cultures for surrealist perspectives is again strikingly explored in chicago-based franklin rosemont’s 1986 essay “karl marx and the iroquois” (arsenal: surrealist subversion 4), which brings to light the affinities of the late marx with societies rooted in nature-consciousness.
taking up the apocalyptic tone directly is pierre mabille: “the collapse of europe is foreseen by no one but ourselves because it is we who have experienced within ourselves the essence of a change that is even now taking place … if europe wishes simply to survive, it will continue to belittle surrealism. if europe wishes to undergo a fiery death and thereby experience a renaissance in the literal sense of that word, it will embrace surrealism, for only in this way can it utilize the permanent values of the past, those that will serve as the future basis of a new civilization.”
how many statements of alarm and warning from surrealists and others would be needed to convince us that the old fever is back, as dire as ever it was since rome succumbed? serious western thought is awash with versions of catastrophic peaks and endings, while the mega-nations of the east, newly embarked on ruinous consumer utopias, prepare to drive the global locomotive over the ecological precipice. in the minds of many, the oft-told story of the “mayan collapse” has become the prime symbol of the fate of our own world. in this atmosphere, those who believe in the possibility of a way out can no longer speak familiarly in terms of simple revolution. the nascent operative dynamic now comes to involve something like a potent “phase transition” or “change of state”, one in which a new planetary consciousness emerges directly out of the universal abandonment of the old. as the old social spectacle, the illusion of limitless global abundance, ends in economic and ecological despair, the mind is cast out of that ideological fantasy into its own instinctual freedom, where genuine imagination and genuine desire once again emerge from the darkness. then at last it becomes possible for this globally mobilized species to feel the latent need that c. l. r. james once found among black workers in post-depression, post-war america, “a need for human relations of a size and scope which will in the end triumph over all deficiencies.” thus freed from the futile “war of all against all”, the species becomes free to return to a fruitful partnership with nature, just as the maya rejected the oppressive institution of kingship and returned to the life of the forests and villages. this is the challenging but necessary precondition for the longed for “world of the fifth sun”. this is also the social matrix needed for the surrealist exorcism by poetry—plunging the warm heart of humanity back into the torn-open body of this world.
-- joseph jablonski
