Mornings in Mexico quotes

and of this house, one spot on the deep, shady verandah facing inwards to the trees, where there are an onyx table and three rocking-chairs and one little wooden chair, a pot with carnations, and a person with a pen.

We talk so grandly, in capital letters, about Morning in Mexico.

All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book.

There is a little smell of carnations, because they are the nearest thing. And there is a resinous smell of ocote wood, and a smell of coffee, and a faint smell of leaves, and of Morning, and even of Mexico.

Because when all is said and done, Mexico has a faint, physical scent of her own, as each human being has.

And this is a curious, inexplicable scent, in which there are resin and perspiration and sunburned earth and urine among other things.

and yet it is so unlike him, to be whistling full vent, when any of us is around, that one looks at him to see. And the moment one sees him, with his black head bent rather drooping and hidden as he sweeps, one laughs.

The parrots whistle exactly like Rosalino, only a little more so.

And this little-more-so is extremely, sardonically funny. With their sad old long-jowled faces and their flat disillusioned eyes, they reproduce Rosalino and a little-more-so without moving a muscle.

Invictus! The still-unconquered Corasmin!

The sad little white curly pendulum oscillating ever slower between the shadow and the sun.

But that is human bombast, and a little too ridiculous even for Corasmin. Poor old Corasmin’s clear yellow eyes! He is going to be master of his own soul, under all the vitriol those parrots pour over him.

Myself, I don’t believe in evolution, like a long string hooked on to a First Cause, and being slowly twisted in unbroken continuity through the ages. I prefer to believe in what the Aztecs called Suns: that is, Worlds successively created and destroyed.

The sun itself convulses, and the worlds go out like so many candles when somebody coughs in the middle of them.

Then subtly, mysteriously, the sun convulses again, and a new set of worlds begins to flicker alight.

This pleases my fancy better than the long and weary twisting of the rope of Time and Evolution, hitched on to the revolving hook of a First Cause.

I like to think of the whole show going bust, bang!—and nothing but bits of chaos flying about.

Then out of the dark, new little twinklings reviving from nowhere, nohow.

I like to think of the whole show going bust, bang!—and nothing but bits of chaos flying about.

Then out of the dark, new little twinklings reviving from nowhere, nohow.

I like to think of the world going pop! when the lizards had grown too unwieldy, and it was time they were taken down a peg or two.

Curious is the psychology of Sunday. Humanity enjoying itself is on the whole a dreary spectacle, and holidays are more disheartening than drudgery.

One makes up one’s mind: On Sundays and on fiestas I will stay at home, in the hermitage of the patio, with the parrots and Corasmin and the reddening coffee-berries. I will avoid the sight of people “enjoying themselves”—or try to, without much success.

If there were no churches to mark a point in these villages, there would be nowhere at all to make for.

The sense of nowhere is intense, between the dumb and repellent living fence of cactus.

But the Spaniards, in the midst of these black, mud-brick huts, have inevitably reared the white twin-towered magnificence of a big and lonely, hopeless church; and where there is a church there will be a plaza. And a plaza is a zocalo, a hub.

In front of the church is a rocky plaza leaking with grass, with water rushing into two big, oblong stone basins.

The great church stands rather ragged, in a dense forlornness, for all the world like some big white human being, in rags, held captive in a world of ants.

On the uphill side of the plaza, a long low white building with a shed in front, and under the shed, crowding, all the short-statured men of the pueblo, in their white cotton clothes and big hats. They are listening to something:

Rosalino replies, sotto voce, that they are making asuntos. But what business? we insist. The dark faces of the little men under the big hats look round at us suspiciously, like dark gaps in the atmosphere.

Our alien presence, in this vacuous village, is like the sound of a drum in a churchyard.

Rosalino mumbles unintelligibly. We stray across the forlorn yard into the church.

We lay still for a time, looking at the tiny guavas and the perfect, soft, high blue sky overhead, where the hawks and the ragged-winged zopilotes sway and diminish. A long, hot way home. But mañana es otro dia.

To-morrow is another day. And even the next five minutes are far enough away, in Mexico, on a Sunday afternoon.

But to the white monkey, horrible to relate, there are exact spots of time, such as five o’clock, half-past nine.

The day is a horrible puzzle of exact spots of time.

The same with distance: horrible invisible distances called two miles, ten miles. To the Indians, there is near and far, and very near and very far. There is two days or one day.

Oh, no, it is just a little distance. And he will let you set off in the evening, for night to overtake you in the wilderness, without a qualm. It is not far.

But the white man has a horrible, truly horrible, monkey-like passion for invisible exactitudes.

Mañana, to the native, may mean to-morrow, three days hence, six months hence, and never. There are no fixed points in life, save birth, and death, and the fiestas. The fixed points of birth and death evaporate spontaneously into vagueness.

He doesn’t care. He doesn’t even like keeping money. His deep instinct is to spend it at once, so that he needn’t have it. He doesn’t really want to keep anything, not even his wife and children. Nothing that he has to be responsible for.

Strip, strip, strip away the past and the future, leave the naked moment of the present disentangled.

Strip away memory, strip away forethought and care; leave the moment, stark and sharp and without consciousness, like the obsidian knife. The before and the after are the stuff of consciousness.

Strip, strip, strip away the past and the future, leave the naked moment of the present disentangled. Strip away memory, strip away forethought and care; leave the moment, stark and sharp and without consciousness, like the obsidian knife.

The before and the after are the stuff of consciousness.

The instant moment is forever keen with a razor-edge of oblivion, like the knife of sacrifice.

Strip away memory, strip away forethought and care; leave the moment, stark and sharp and without consciousness, like the obsidian knife. The before and the after are the stuff of consciousness.

The instant moment is forever keen with a razor-edge of oblivion, like the knife of sacrifice.

But the great white monkey has got hold of the keys of the world, and the black-eyed Mexican has to serve the great white monkey, in order to live. He has to learn the tricks of the white monkey-show:

If not, you may thunder at the big doors. It is hard to wake Rosalino. You have to go close to him, and call. That will wake him. But don’t touch him. That would startle him terribly.

No one is touched unawares, except to be robbed or murdered.

“Rosalino! estan tocando!”—“Rosalino! they are knocking!”

They call them Noche Buenas, flowers of Christmas Eve. These tufts throw out their scarlet sharply, like red birds ruffling in the wind of dawn as if going to bathe, all their feathers alert. This for Christmas, instead of holly-berries.

Christmas seems to need a red herald.

The yucca is tall, higher than the house. It is, too, in flower, hanging an arm’s-length of soft creamy bells, like a yard-long grape-cluster of foam.

Even the organ cactus, rising in stock-straight clumps, and the candelabrum cactus, seem to be slowly wheeling and pivoting upon a centre, close upon it.

Strange that we should think in straight lines, when there are none, and talk of straight courses, when every course, sooner or later, is seen to be making the sweep round, swooping upon the centre.

When space is curved, and the cosmos is sphere within sphere, and the way from any one point to any other point is round the bend of the inevitable, that turns as the tips of the broad wings of the hawk turn upwards, leaning upon …

If I have a way to go, it will be round the swoop of a bend impinging centripetal towards the centre.

The straight course is hacked out in wounds, against the will of the world.

Yet the dust advances like a ghost along the road, down the valley plain.

The dry turf of the valley-bed gleams like soft skin, sunlit and pinkish ochre, spreading wide between the mountains that seem to emit their own darkness, a dark-blue vapor translucent, sombring them from the humped crests downwards.

The many-pleated, noiseless mountains of Mexico.

And away on the footslope lie the white specks of Huayapa, among its lake of trees.

Market and religion. These alone bring men, unarmed, together since time began. A little load of firewood, a woven blanket, a few eggs and tomatoes are excuse enough for men, women, and children to cross the foot-weary miles of valley and mountain.

To buy, to sell, to barter, to exchange. To exchange, above all things, human contact.

That is why they like you to bargain, even if it’s only the difference of a centavo. Round the centre of the covered market, where there is a basin of water, are the flowers:

It is a bargain. Off you go with multicoloured pinks, and the woman has had one more moment of contact, with a stranger, a perfect stranger.

An intermingling of voices, a threading together of different wills. It is life.

The centavos are an excuse.

It is a bargain. Off you go with multicoloured pinks, and the woman has had one more moment of contact, with a stranger, a perfect stranger. An intermingling of voices, a threading together of different wills. It is life.

The centavos are an excuse.

The stalls go off in straight lines, to the right, brilliant vegetables, to the left, bread and sweet buns. Away at the one end, cheese, butter, eggs, chickens, turkeys, meat. At the other, the native-woven blankets and rebozos, skirts, shirts, handkerchiefs.

It staggered even a fifteenth-century Spaniard. Yet my leather man and his wife think it screamingly funny that I smell the huaraches before buying them. Everything has its own smell, and the natural smell of huaraches is what it is.

You might as well quarrel with an onion for smelling like an onion.

The great press of the quiet natives, some of them bright and clean, many in old rags, the brown flesh showing through the rents in the dirty cotton. Many wild hillmen, in their little hats of conical black felt, with their wild, staring eyes.

And here they have felt life concentrate upon them, they have been jammed between the soft hot bodies of strange men come from afar, they have had the sound of stranger’s voices in their ears, they have asked and been answered in unaccustomed ways.

There is no goal, and no abiding-place, and nothing is fixed, not even the cathedral towers.

The cathedral towers are slowly leaning, seeking the curve of return. As the natives curved in a strong swirl, towards the vortex of the market. Then on a strong swerve of repulsion, curved out and away again, into space.

Everything is meant to disappear. Every curve plunges into the vortex and is lost, re-emerges with a certain relief and takes to the open, and there is lost again.

Only that which is utterly intangible, matters. The contact, the spark of exchange.

That which can never be fastened upon, forever gone, forever coming, never to be detained: the spark of contact.

When you begin to have misgivings, you sit rather uneasily on your plush seat.

Nobody really believes that destiny is an accident.

The very fact that day keeps on following night, and summer winter, establishes the belief in universal law, and from this to a belief in some great hidden mind in the universe is an inevitable step for us.

This may mean nothing to you. To the ordinary white ear, the Indian’s singing is a rather disagreeable howling of dogs to a tom-tom. But if it rouses no other sensation, it rouses a touch of fear amid hostility.

Whatever the spirit of man may be, the blood is basic.

Or take the song to make the corn grow. The dark faces stoop forward, in a strange race darkness. The eyelashes droop a little in the dark, ageless, vulnerable faces. The drum is a heart beating with insistent thuds.

With the Indians it is different. There is strictly no god. The Indian does not consider himself as created, and therefore external to God, or the creature of God. To the Indian there is no conception of a defined God.

Creation is a great flood, forever flowing, in lovely and terrible waves.

In everything, the shimmer of creation, and never the finality of the created. Never the distinction between God and God’s creation, or between Spirit and Matter.

There is, in our sense of the word, no God. But all is godly. There is no Great Mind directing the universe.

Yet the mystery of creation, the wonder and fascination of creation shimmers in every leaf and stone, in every thorn and bud, in the fangs of the rattlesnake, and in the soft eyes of a fawn.

Things utterly opposite are still pure wonder of creation, the yell of the mountain-lion, and the breeze in the aspen leaves.

The presence of Jesus on the Cross, or the pitiful Mary Mother, does not in the least prevent the strange intensity of the war-dance. The brave comes home with a scalp. In the morning he goes to Mass. Two mysteries!

The soul of man is the theatre in which every mystery is enacted.

Jesus, Mary, the snake-dance, red blood on the knife: it is all the rippling of this untellable flood of creation, which, in a narrow sense, we call Nature.

Positively, his one commandment is:

Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder.

Evil lies in lying and in cowardice. Wickedness lies in witchcraft; that is, in seeking to prostitute the creative wonder to the individual mind and will, the individual conceit.

From these great interrelated potencies of rain and heat and thunder emerge the seeds of life itself, corn, and creatures like snakes. And beyond these, men, persons. But all emerge separately. There is no oneness, no sympathetic identifying oneself with the rest.

The law of isolation is heavy on every creature.

Now the Sun, the rain, the shine, the thunder, they are alive. But they are not persons or people. They are alive. They are manifestations of living activity. But they are not personal Gods.

The American-Indian sees no division into Spirit and Matter, God and not-God. Everything is alive, though not personally so. Thunder is neither Thor nor Zeus. Thunder is the vast living thunder asserting itself like some incomprehensible monster, or some huge reptile-bird of the pristine cosmos.

How to conquer the dragon-mouthed thunder! How to capture the feathered rain!

We make reservoirs, and irrigation ditches and artesian wells. We make lightning conductors, and build vast electric plants. We say it is a matter of science, energy, force.

They are the highest thing created, smelted between the furnace of the Life-Sun, and beaten on the anvil of the rain, with hammers or thunder and bellows of rushing wind.

The cosmos is a great furnace, a dragon’s den, where the heroes and demi-gods, men, forge themselves into being.

It is a vast and violent matrix, where souls form like diamonds in earth, under extreme pressure.

The cosmos is a great furnace, a dragon’s den, where the heroes and demi-gods, men, forge themselves into being.

It is a vast and violent matrix, where souls form like diamonds in earth, under extreme pressure.

So that gods are the outcome, not the origin. And the best gods that have resulted, so far, are men. But gods frail as flowers; which have also the godliness of things that have won perfection out of the terrific dragon-clutch of the cosmos.

So that gods are the outcome, not the origin. And the best gods that have resulted, so far, are men. But gods frail as flowers; which have also the godliness of things that have won perfection out of the terrific dragon-clutch of the cosmos.

Men are frail as flowers.

Man is as a flower, rain can kill him or succour him, heat can flick him with a bright tail, and destroy him: or, on the other hand, it can softly call him into existence, out of the egg of chaos.

the pellucid monster of the rain never shows us his stripes. To us, heaven switches on daylight, or turns on the shower-bath. We little gods are gods of the machine only. It is our highest.

Our cosmos is a great engine. And we die of ennui.

A subtle dragon stings us in the midst of plenty. Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius.