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I didn't have an image in mind. So this is one of those
examples of the piece directing me as much as I was designing it. jeanne
University of Wisconsin, Parkside (UWP)
California State University, Dominguez Hills(CSUDH)
Created: July 15, 2011
Latest update: July 15, 2011
E-Mail to Jeanne in L.A.
E-Mail to Susan at UWP.
How does history matter?
We see how much we are like
all the Others who have been
and will someday be.
* * * * * I have always been profoundly impressed by the art of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. I have collected and perused many times books on the various peoples, and sometimes even visited the sites themselves. But I've always had a day job. There was little time to study the art closely.
And so I was startled when I saw the upper half of my Mayan God appear. I had started, as I almost always do with my iconic circle of twelve double crochets. You can see it in his face. It wasn't until his torso had taken shape that I recognized what he was becoming. I made a conscious decision to finish him with standing legs. I had already used that kind of stitching in the upper torso, so it seemed to fit.
I guess Mel Gibson has painfully reminded us all since Apocalyto of the violence that was an integral part of many of these very early aborigines. My Mayan God reminds me, however, of the remarkable abilities humans developed to put together entire cities well before modern times. Sure, there was violence fo various kinds in some of their beliefs, especially their religious rites, that could hardly have been more ghastly than many of our religious wars. It even took modern times to perfect the practice of genocide and torture, and to determine legally that it was within the realm of human practice.
In this Mayan God I see pride, physical strength, and, hopefully, the better part of being human. Of course, I made him. So there is a part of my wish for him crocheted right in, genetically, as it were. Wish I could do that for more of humanity.
Perhaps, as the Huna Aloha practice, and I'm not at all sure I'm saying this correctly, but no time to go hunt for it tonight. At any rate, because of my attraction to the spiritual and the historical development of religion in society, my recent discovery of a Hawaiian version of Zen, and their practice of making the world a little better by assuming forgiveness and welcoming those we should prefer to reject. Maybe this is why President Barack Obama seems to choose that path so often. He was born and grew up in Hawaii.
The assumption of that Zen practice is that if you are more accepting of the Other who has offended you, and if you welcome them back to try illocutionary discourse again, you thereby shape to some extent their response. Bakhtin might have said that the more often you attempt to consider the Other before you speak, and take into account what the Other might answer, the more the Other may see that quality in you, and come slowly closer to you, as th Fox advised the Little Prince in St.Exupery's delightful story.
I choose to see the world through eyes that wonder what one person loving would sound, feel, and look like.
That's what my Mayan God means to me, and why I hope I never forget the making of him.
* * * * *
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