selections
of Octavio Paz's El laberinto de la soledad"... festivals that our country and church give us aren’t enough."
selections
of Octavio Paz's El laberinto de la soledad
Society (communes with itself / or becomes one with) is
itself in the fiesta. All of its members return to the primitive confusion and
liberty. The social structure is broken apart and new forms of relationships,
unexpected rules, and fickle hierarchies. The boundaries between spectators
and actors, between celebrants and servants, are blurred. All are part of the
fiesta, all dissolve in confusion. Whatever your type, your character, your
significance, the fiesta is participation. This characteristic distinguishes
it from other phenomena and ceremonies: faithless or religious, the fiesta is
a social fact based on the active participation of those attending.
Paz, p. 52.
Commentary:
We are myth makers, story tellers, carriers of the spirits who haunt us with unspeakably ancient traditions, neither authentic or Spanish -- neither white nor black-- neither male nor female-- neither right handed or left handed-- but ambidextrous and hermaphroditic, that is to say: ambiguously human.
"Our calendar is full of fiestas. Certain days (this is true even in small, more remote towns, as well as in the large cities) the whole country prays, yells, eats, gets drunk, and kills in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe1 or of General Zaragoza.2 Each year, the 15th of September, at 11 at night, in all of the plazas of Mexico, we celebrate the Fiesta of the Grito;3 and an enthusiastic crowd actually yells for one hour. During the days that precede and follow the 12 of December, the season gives us a perfect today: dancing, partying, communion, and eating a lot."
In short, every one of us‚ ‘atheists, Catholics, or (merely indifferent) fence-sitters‚’ have our own saint, which we honor each year. The festivals we celebrate are numberless; as are the resources and the time we spend on them.
Paz, p. 48.
1 The patron saint of Mexico.
2 Mexican general who defeated the French at the Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862.
3 Short for Grito de Dolores, "Cry of Dolores." A commemoration of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla's call for rebellion against the Spanish in a church in the town of Dolores.dolores, as in the sorrow, sorrowful,
"In every human there is the possibility of her and his being -- or, to be more exact, of them becoming once again -- another person."
Paz, p. 28
Aztec -- Mixtec -- Toltec -- Olmec -- Mayan -- Yaqui -- indigenous diversity
celebrate life and
death as a continuous infusion
"Our indigenous ancestors did not believe that their deaths belonged to them, just as they never thought their lives were really theirs in the Christian sense."
"Since their lives did not belong to them, their deaths lacked any personal meaning. The dead--including warriors killed in battle and women women dying in childbirth, companions of Huitzilopochtli the sun god-- disappeared at the end of a certain period, to return to the undifferentiated (amorphous) country of the shadows, to be melted into the air. the earth, the fire, the animating substance of the universe."
"Space and time where bound together and formed an inseparable whole....And this complex of space-time possessed its own virtues and powers, which profoundly influenced and determined human life."
Paz, p. 55.
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