How many jokes/invocations/questionably ironic references/panicked remonstrances will I hear this year about the coming end of the world? When they’re talking about it on The View and the Nightly News with Brian Williams, it’s time to give up counting. How much more mainstream can a nutso newage conspiracy theory get? Consider Y2K. That apocalypse was about Jesus and Revelations; its poor conclusions and minimal research were drawn from the mythology of (one of) the world’s most popular religion(s). This apocalypse is about obscure blood-drinking deities last best personified by Hernán Cortés and a religion legitimately practiced by far less than 0.01% of humanity. Yet already the 2012 hype seems to have far outstripped the 2000 hype. Blame the internet, I guess. It was a far tamer place 12 years ago than it is now, that’s for sure. For the title of last bastion for shamanistic folkloric mythmaking on earth, the competition is hot between the internet and one tiny uncontacted village in the Amazon.

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.

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My story “The Eater”, about the guy at the beginning of time whose job it is to taste everything and decide what will kill us and what will keep us alive, (which originally appeared in Apex back in July), is live today at Pseudopod!

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.)

Conifer mulch under hemlocks, Hemlock Hill, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, MA. I’m not going to be able to positively identify the species… best guess is the deadly Galerina marginata.

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.

Pardon a short hiatus from the Guatemalan ramblings while I dig myself out from under this pile of work. In the meantime….

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.

veiled lady stinkhorn, Dictyophora indusiata

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.

Dancing rain god figure, Altar O, Quiriguá, Izabal, Guatemala

The first days of my second trip to Guatemala, everything felt weirdly comfortable, familiar. The sight of the one-legged guy nimbly navigating the steep steps of a chicken bus to ply his scarred palm and sad story no longer blows my mind. Likewise the spiderweb cracks cris-crossing the impenetrable blackness of every car windshield in the city. I have learned the appropriate words to apologize politely for being two feet taller than everybody else on the bus and my backpack clumsily wonking them all in the face. The dudes with tin shotguns on street corners and in tienda doorways no longer fill me with fear. In fact they almost make me feel safer—which may even be their actual purpose.

All of which was satisfying in a way. I felt less helpless, better able to actively participate in my surroundings. But I started to worry I was just on vacation here—that if I wanted the intensity and awe and revelation of my previous experience, I should have traveled someplace else.

I’m always looking for new setting details—unique tidbits of color or scent, idiosyncracies of human interaction that will make an otherwise mundane story leap off the page. I’m also looking for entirely new settings into which I can expand my spotty experience, the range of subjects and places about which I can “write what I know”. This isn’t the only reason I travel, but when I do travel, there’s a strong chance it’s what I’m doing at any given moment: soaking it all up like a sponge. I talked about this once before, including some caveats, in Expatriates and Homebodies.

There’s a danger, though, that I’ve run into repeatedly: falling too hard for a particular setting, loving it so much that it starts to feel wrong, disrespectful, to try to assimilate it into my fiction. I’m afraid to take liberties for fear of screwing up the truth that made me love it so much in the first place. This has happened to me most often and most painfully with respect to precolombian cultures. The Anasazi (more accurately the ancestral Hopi) have had a strong influence on my wild west centaurs setting, but all the stuff that actually includes them is in a trunk never to see the light of day. The Aztecs (more accurately the Mixtecs) I am afraid to even touch. With the Maya, it’s even worse. In the past I have been unable to stop myself writing slavish, Castaneda-influenced historical fiction about how the Mayans possess the spiritual Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything and we white people with all our rationalism don’t have the ghost of a hope. Which I loved, and even managed to sell, but which now fills me with uncomfortable embarrassment. I have endlessly blogged about them. And very recently, tenatively, I’ve been thinking about how I might dip my toe back into writing about them—though in a very different way than before.

I owe this new approach to this second visit to Guatemala.

That initial, superficial sense of familiarity never went away. But it was very quickly superseded by a whole new set of questions. I saw gradations, depth, in what had seemed uniform, and when I looked a little closer, I saw even more. I found myself thinking more and more about individuals—about character. What’s the difference, in terms of circumstance, upbringing, past experience, between the tuktuk operator who drives the white folks in circles to confuse them then tries to charge triple, the tuktuk operator who drives the white folks past his mom’s house to show them off to his nieces and nephews, asks the minimum fare without even haggling, and comes back to get them at a scheduled time at no extra charge, and the tuktuk driver who butters them up with disingenuous chatter, then veers into a blind alley and pulls a gun? (A tuktuk is a three-wheeled golf cart shaped like a giant red egg, powered by a lawnmower engine and blazoned with Jesus slogans, used as a car-for-hire for local transportation.) How do the Catholics and the Protestants get along with the Mayan traditionalists? How do the Mayan traditionalists get along with a more secular, idealistic younger generation? How does Guatemala look to somebody who moves to South Dakota to start a family, then has to come back and spend years away from them trying to secure a visa? And how does any of it develop into an integrated, educated, well-informed indigenous population, still in possession of its cultural identity, yet capable of joining forces to foster positive change, say, to effect a representative government under an indigenous president, like in Bolivia, or take advantage of digital media to foster political change, like in Egypt and Morocco?

The picture I have isn’t full enough, not nearly. I need to go back again, and again after that.

And the answer I have come upon for how to write fiction about a place and a culture I love too much to disrespect? Complexity.

Writing fiction about anything is an exercise in simplification. Words are never enough to encompass anything, the confines of narrative, of storytelling, even less so. The only way to honest about it, with yourself and with your readers, is to admit you don’t have the answers, and to try, to the best of your ability, to demonstrate why. I think the fiction that best succeeds at this (no coincidence, the kind of fiction I love most), is the kind that leaves things open. Borges, Asturias.

A king in the jaws of a jaguar-crocodile, North face of Zoomorph P, Quiriguá, Izabal, Guatemala

Monument 68 at Tak’alik Ab’aj, Retalhuleu, Guatemala, Middle Preclassic

Starting things off slowly here for Guatemala Travelogue Part II… The Olmec Toad, yet another alternate title for this blog. Who knows but someday the Skull will go away and the Toad will take its place.

The Olmec were the original advanced civilization of the Americas, formerly considered semi-mythic, identified with Atlantis, the Easter Island civilization and the like. Many wonderful art works and sacred offerings survive, but no written language, so the question of how this particular toad figures in their mythology is up for debate.

Tak’alik Ab’aj is K’iche for “standing stones”; it’s a sprawling archaeological site occupied continuously from 1000 BCE or so through 1000 AD, first by Olmecs, then Maya, situated on a set of ridges between two rivers on Guatemala’s Pacific slope. It’s only partly excavated; half the ruins have coffee and rubber trees planted on top of them. The site is relatively little-known and hard to get to, the monuments much-worn and less epic in stature than places like Tikal and Palenque, so I guess the land turns more profit more used for farming than trying to lure money from archaeologists and archaeo-nerd-tourists (me). Nobody on staff spoke English, and the day I visited I was the only white guy there.

The cicadas were deafening.

Yesterday a guy showed up on Hyde Park Ave with a jackhammer to smash up the two-plus inches of solid ice on the sidewalk.

Boskone this coming weekend. I’ll be at a Beneath Ceaseless Skies reading at 8:30 PM on Friday 12:00 PM on Sunday to read from my forthcoming (non-centaur) story, “The Nine-Tailed Cat”. And who knows what else through the weekend. Pretty likely the Harpoon Brewery tour on Sat. afternoon…. then before dawn Monday morning I’m off for Guatemala again. Lots to do until then. Little time for blog lately, I fear. No doubt there will be insane travel ranting and photography when I get back. See you then. Unless I see you at the con!

Sitta canadensis, Arnold Arboretum conifers section

This guy is a bit north of his range for the season.

Happy new year.