See the Castillo over there on the horizon above the Nazca monkey?

The other week I was back in Yucatan. It’s been six years. Not much has changed. A lone wind turbine has sprouted over Quintana Roo Highway 308 south of Cancún, and a dozen new all-inclusive resorts have elbowed out another few hundred thousand acres of coastal swamp, though you’d hardly know it from the road except for the twenty-foot white concrete faux-Mayan monoliths marking the entrances surrounded by landscaped agave and coconut palm. The real ruins are all still there, the big ones a little more harried maybe what with the approaching end of the world, the less impressive sharing the sun-baked empty stretches between hotels with more recent ruins, failed tourist traps abandoned a year or a decade ago, their pale dirt parking lots filling with trash like alluvial silt from the underground rivers.

The coastal reef, second largest in the world after the Great Barrier Reef, hasn’t recovered–it’s still all bleached and apocalyptic, like the ash-caked girders of a collapsed skyscraper a hundred miles long, an aqua-tinted desert broken only by occasional tiny, mind-blowingly colorful fish flitting in and out of gray-blue darknesses. If anything, it’s getting worse.

Still, the apocalypse feels just as far away (and just as close) as anywhere else I’ve been. Even Detroit. Even though the entire Yucatan Peninsula is so low-lying and flat it will likely be underwater as soon as Micronesia and Manhattan, and it’ll look even more like the Yes cover than it already does.

By the way, for those of you who haven’t seen it, a recently discovered Mayan mural at the Xultún site in northern Guatemala includes explicit references to dates after December 21, 2012. So the world isn’t ending. Which means we’re going to have to live with what we do to it.

But I’m not here to preach about the end. I’ve done that enough. I’m here to share a bit of the beauty before it’s gone.

These are not the pictures I would have taken of Tulum in 2006. Maybe the difference says something about the person I’ve become in the years between. Because the place hasn’t changed. Salt wind and time have done what they can, at least for now. And all of Antarctica would have to melt before the Gulf will make it up those cliffs. Who knows, maybe that’s part of why they built it here.

One of three offeratory altars on the cliff below the Templo del Viento–not unlike another shrine I found years ago, ten miles to the north. The coastal Maya had a lot to thank the sea god for, not least the reef, which made a natural breakwater for hundreds of miles along the shore, allowing easy trade between cities.

Masked face, Templo de las Pinturas, southwest corner. One of the last Mayan structures built before the conquest and the best preserved at Tulum. This is the building with the seven-fingered red handprints I so lamented not having photographed last time. But you’ve seen those.

I’d love to know who this mask depicts—Itzamna? Don’t have the research at hand, unfortunately.

East face of the Castillo, the large central pyramid, the side that faces the cliffs. The architectural style at Tulum is unique…of course that’s true of every Maya site, and Tulum benefited from trade with both the Mexica (the Aztecs) and the Toltec-influenced Maya of Chíchen Itzá…but the skewed lines of the temples here are different from either. There are no right angles anywhere, hardly even any straight lines. It’s like something out of…Dr. Seuss, crossed with Lovecraft. It’s awesome. The first time I was here I didn’t appreciate it—after the mathematical, acoustical perfection of the Castillo at Chíchen Itzá, it seemed sloppy, a sign of a civilization in decline. This time, after gawking at those beautiful masks for awhile, then at the Templo del Dios Descendente,
I realized it could be something else: a sign of a civilization passing its peak, developing into decadence, developing a higher (wierder) aesthetics. This curve…it echoes the sea, obviously. All of Tulum is about the sea, really: the location atop the cliffs like a lighthouse, the protected beach below, the temples to the morning star. The sea was their livelihood, their garden, their connection to the outside world.

The curve of the Castillo wall distills that to one calligraphic gesture, a sweep of a brush.

Rue Anemone, Thalictrum Thalictroides, moist oak ridge, Ortonville, MI

Some variety of flowering sedge I am unlikely to ever identify. Sandy trailside, mixed deciduous woods, Ortonville, MI

Donwy Serviceberry, Amelanchier arborea, mixed deciduous woods, Ortonville, MI

American Fly Honeysuckle, Lonicera canadensis, oak and pine ridge, Ortonville, MI

After all these years of photo blogging I finally caved and started using the convenient “web 2.0″ image upload features of WordPress. So much easier! Why am I so stubborn.

Satan’s Kingdom (recently rechristened “Sen Ki”, I wonder why), Westwood, MA

A riddle: Why does one drill a six-inch hole into a granite ledge?

Answer: To drop in a stick of dynamite.

Whenever anybody wants to build a McMansion around my childhood home, or to transform a formerly reasonably-sized, non-ugly house into a FrankenMansion, they first must blow up some beautiful granite ledges. It’s been going on since I was a kid. I have not yet cried about it for the last time.

This one, thank god, seems to have been forgotten about for long enough that I can now thank the Westwood Land Trust and Hale Reservation that I’ll never have to worry about it again.

The original inkwell

“King Pine”, Pinus strobus

Wintergreen, Gaultheria procumbens. Smells delicious when you crinkle it up. Indians dried it for tea. They use it in scented candles. Someday I’ll use it in mead.

I’ve already done all the debunking of the Mayan apocalypse I’m going to do on this blog, at great length and with much windbaggery, in posts such as Circular Time and No Apocalypse. I also have a little sidebar essay about it (as applied fancifully to the plight of the working writer) in A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2012, available from Small Beer Press in print-on-demand and ebook form.

Instead I want to talk about how great it would be if there actually was an apocalypse.

The world is f’ed. Global warming is happening and nobody cares because they’re all too worried about how their stock portfolios will look and the declining abstract value of all those shiny things they don’t need and which posturing reactionary a-hole we decide to run against the quiet, uselessly liberal totalitarian we’ve already got in office and who none of them can possibly expect to beat. The only place I can look to for hope are a bunch of petulant teenage hackers with a woeful lack of understanding about how the world really works and another bunch of best-intentioned, beatific idealists who, depending on the government they’ve pitted themselves against, either will achieve nothing because they aren’t rich and don’t represent corporations or will achieve their immediate goals of government overthrow only to have it replaced with something exactly as bad if not worse. We’re bogged down by possessions, infrastructure and fear of change. God forbid we make any real effort to improve anything because what if it has some miniscule, short-term negative effect on our already utterly shitty economy? Let’s spend all our money on campaign ads and vast, faceless organizations entirely devoted to preventing other vast, faceless organizations from accomplishing an iota of meaningful action. I don’t have statistics on this (and I’m glad I don’t because they would just depress me further), but the state of everything I look at leaves me with the strong impression that the majority of humanity’s collective intellectual, economic and energetic capacity is focused on preventing anything from getting any better.

So sue me if I’m starting to think a fiery wave of destruction that came along on December 21st, 2012, obliterated 90% of our infrastructure and hell, even our population, might not turn out to be not such a bad thing once the dust had settled and we’d all gotten over our grief and our attachment to sparkly things that make cute sounds and distract us from the awfulness with which we would otherwise be forced to engage. No, on second thought, don’t sue me. Don’t sue anyone. That would just be tacking on another enormous waste of everyone’s time and money.

Thought experiments and hypothetical emergency planning for the zombie apocalypse have become a popular thing. Which weapon would you prefer to use to lop off the frontal lobes of your neighbors, co-workers and family? Or would you rather just curl up into a ball and die to avoid having to make any effort on your own behalf against the mindless, ravening horde? Me, I’d go with a katana: quiet, doesn’t run out of ammo, easily maintained, builds upper body strength. First I’d use it to mercy-kill any of my immediate dependents who’d rather not try. Then I’d pack up and head for some warm, fertile country with no people in it, to live out a life of sublime simple pleasures: fulfilling physical work and never having to look at reality tv or youtube again.

Sadly, the apocalypse will not be a zombie apocalypse. Zombies don’t exist. Maybe it’ll be Kurzweil’s technological/psychic transcendence. Maybe it’ll be global class war. Or global water war. These things are not nearly so easy to plan for, not nearly as likely to lead to me living out my ideal existence. Frankly, I don’t care what kind of apocalypse it is as long as it results in a significant reduction in the human population and a serious shaking-loose of lazy, stupid, arrogant, previously held convictions about what is and is not required to make life fulfilling.

And I hope it kills off as few trees as possible.

Rather than leave you on that unhappy note, here are some fun infographics and insane opinions I have come across on the glorious internet pertaining (vaguely) to the irrational fears concerning 2012:

• 2012: The End of the World? – Information is Beautiful infographic exhaustively comparing the opinions of the sanguine and the skeptical.
• Map of travel distances for religious dance performance costume rentals in Guatemala – found somewhere on Harvard.edu. As good a map as any of the real area of influence of legitimate indigenous Mayan beliefs.
• Mayans practiced Islam – Allah knows best – An elaborately mis-researched theological discussion board treatise struggling valiantly to involve innocent Mayans in the war between Islam and Judaism.
• Ruins in Georgia mountains show evidence of Maya connection – Some dubiously-reasoned amateur archaeological speculation that Mayans crossed the Gulf of Mexico in force in the 9th century to found an El Dorado in the Georgia hills.
• Cahokia – A real, actual precolombian city in North America, founded on the Mississippi River in the 8th century near present-day St. Louis.

Happy 2012, everybody.

Some underworld deities cavorting on the south face of Stela D at Quiriguá, 766 AD.

Pseudopod, should you have been unaware, is a weekly horror fiction podcast, sister to Escape Pod and Podcastle, a triumvirate I have been struggling to break my way into for quite some time. I love reading fiction aloud, and hearing fiction read aloud, and “the Pods”, as they are affectionately known, are some of the best places to do that. For a reader, I am lucky enough to have netted Laurice White. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet—will do so on my ride home—but I expect it will be great.

Pink Lady’s Slipper orchid, Cypripedium acaule, mixed deciduous woods, Bull Hill, Sunderland, MA
(AKA/e.g., the replenishing pitcher flower of legend.)

O I am so neglectful of posting…these are from the end of May, nearly a month ago. I’d say I promise to get better, but it’s busy times. No dancing in fairy rings for me, not these days. Not that I’d do that. It would hurt the mushrooms.

Someone has drained the colour from my wings
Broken my fairy circle ring
And shamed the king in all his pride
Changed the winds and wronged the tides
Mother mercury
Look what they’ve done to me
I cannot run I cannot hide

—Freddie Mercury, “My Fairy King”

Sitting through my semi-annual Catholic mass the other Easter Sunday, I thought about ritual. In some ways, it seems a silly thing to do–the same thing, over and over. But we all do it. We all have rituals: religious or not, spiritual or not, whether it’s watching The Princess Bride for the umpteen thousandth time and struggling not to say every line along with the actors or lurching out of bed and blearily assembling the material components for a cup of tea. A ritual is a benchmark, a means for acknowledging and measuring change by observing something that doesn’t change. A ritual is also something you gain some emotional benefit from–otherwise you wouldn’t keep doing it.

I have climbed a lot of mountains. Not as many as some, not enough. But I’ve climbed my share. And there is absolutely a ritual to it, though I’m only really becoming conscious of it now. It goes like this.

Get up early, full of mixed dread and anticipation. Assemble what you think you’ll need to carry with you, then cull it down. The more you carry, the slower you’ll go, the harder it will be. Bring what’s essential, leave everything else. On the way to the trail, be aware of the ease of your conveyance. Shortly, by choice, you won’t be able to rely on it. At the beginning, move too quickly, tire yourself out prematurely. Rest. Tire yourself out again. Repeat until you settle into a rhythm. Time your breaths, count your heartbeats. Sing songs in your head–only the ones with repetitive riffs, those to which you remember almost all the words, and preferably those with relevant lyrics. Knocking on Heaven’s Door has always been a favorite of mine. Remember to look up from the trail from time to time–but not for too long. The higher you climb, the more careful of your footing you must be. Rationalize the exertion required. Are you a third of the way? Halfway? Three quarters of the way? At the peak, drop everything you brought with you and stare empty-minded into space for as long as it takes for your pulse to subside. Close your eyes and point yourself at the sun. Eat any food you carried with you. It will stick in your throat, but taste different from all other food you’ve eaten since the last time you stood on a peak. Drink water. Relive the ascent in your head in preparation for the return. Resist the urge to fall asleep. Think how far away the world is, how here you are, without all of it, still alive. All that stuff you left behind–you didn’t need it, even though you’re already missing it, already anticipating the moment when it will be returned to you. As you begin to descend, favor your ankles and knees. They’ll turn rubbery soon, you’ll risk falling. You’ll fall. By the time you get down, you’ll be sticky, dirty, so tired you’ll be barely in control of your extremities. The view from the summit will flash before your eyes when you blink. Stumble back to your conveyance. If you’re not driving, it’s okay to sleep. Stop somewhere along the way to eat a ridiculous meal, more copious and more rich than anything you’re used to. Consider it the first step in piling back on all that stuff you left behind. When you get home, shower. The dust and sweat and bits of stick and pine needle and sap and dead bugs that slough off down the drain–that’s your old self. Step out from under the stream. You’re renewed.

This is the tallest mountain I’ve ever climbed: Volcán Santa María, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 12,375 feet. Santa Maria has been dormant since 1902. The smoldering protrusion on its left flank is Santiaguito, 8,500 feet, which began forming in 1922 and has erupted every few years or so since. The rocky cut in the foreground is the path of the pyroclastic mudflow from an eruption in 2008.

Variations on the ritual:

I got up at 4:15 AM. Venus and Orion were in the sky as we started hiking. I could barely see my feet. Our guide was Edgar, a 21-year-old, four-foot-tall Mayan cabbage farmer who does this once a week. There were hummingbirds everywhere, hundreds of them, sucking nectar from trumpetlike clusters of red flowers, shooting up into the heavens above the slopes and then diving madly, according to Edgar, for the pure joy of it. The locals, of the Mayan and Christian religions alike, consider this mountain sacred. We didn’t see practically anyone on the way up–it was too early–but at the peak, panting for breath and incoherent with altitude giddiness, we found altars of calla lilies and an old, old man with his wife and daughter singing laments, burning incense, importuning the saints. On the way down, there were scores of them, carrying offerings of flowers, food, huge jugs of orange soda. The boys stopped to congratulate us and shake hands. The adults looked suspicious. All of them indiscriminately tossed away their trash on the slopes of the mountain–water bottles, plastic packages of toasted corn nuts, chips, gummy candies, tissues. This saddened Edgar to no end–that people who purportedly love this mountain so much, even to the point of considering it holy, don’t have enough respect for it not to cover it with trash. For years he’s been trying to convince them to stop, organizing teams of foreigners to pick up trash thrown by his own people. But he’s young and idealistic, and his elders don’t seem much inclined to listen. So my sisters and I collected trash, filling up about a dozen plastic grocery bags in the course of our descent. We tried to help brainstorm solutions, but it’s a hard thing–there’s no way to get the word out. They speak lots of different dialects. Many don’t know a common tongue. Most don’t know how to read. My sister El Nubo, who works with community radio stations (about the only form of mass communication that works out here), said she’d try to help him get out some PSAs over the airwaves. I hope it works.

The Central American volcanic arc, looking east from Santa Maria.

The word “soma” came into Sanskrit from some even more ancient Indo-European root tongue. I’ve seen it translated as “flesh of the gods”; it referred to a sacred ritual drink of the Vedic culture in the third millennium B.C. Little is known about it except that it was made from an eponymous and equally unknown plant, but I think it can safely be assumed to have been a psychotic doom hallucinogen of some sort. Occasionally I’ve come across the titillating but unsupported speculation that soma might have been Amanita muscaria. The Olmecs held a certain mushroom sacred too. These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night. Or at least give me interesting dreams.

And sometimes they work their way into my fiction. This month’s Apex Magazine #23, edited by the fabulous Catherynne Valente, features a rather dark story of mine about the beginning of time, “The Eater”, in which soma plays a passing role. Should you care to try it out, there’s a teaser here on the Apex site. Get the whole thing in print through the Apex store or in ebook form from none other than Weightless Books.

In a clearing among thick brush under ceiba and palm trees, Quiriguá archaeological site, oh about 25 metres west of the ballcourt plaza. This may be the nicest mushroom picture I have taken. Look at the texture in the full size image. D. indusiata appears in tropical regions all around the world. In China it’s cultivated for cooking. I did not eat this one because I had no idea what it was at the time, and even if I had, they were blanket-gassing banana fields with pesticides on the other side of the forest.

But of course I’ll eat those bananas later.

Happy equinox.