The Resurrection of Hunahpu and Xbalanque

On the fifth day they appeared again. People saw them in the river, for the two of them appeared like people-fish. Now when their faces were seen by the Xibalbans, they made a search for them in the rivers.

And on the very next day, they appeared again as two poor orphans. They wore rags in front and rags on their backs. Rags were thus all they had to cover themselves. But they did not act according to their appearance when they were seen by the Xibalbans. For they did the Dance of the Whippoorwill and the Dance of the Weasel. They danced the Armadillo and the Centipede. They danced the Injury, for many marvels they did then. They set fire to a house as if it were truly burning, then immediately recreated it again as the Xibalbans watched with admiration.

— Popol Vuh

The Head of Hunahpu is Restored

So the ball was again dropped into play. The head of Hunahpu was first placed atop the ballcourt.

“We have already triumphed. You are finished. You gave in, so give it up,” they were told.

But Hunahpu just called out: “Strike the head as if it were a rubber ball,” they were told. “No harm will come to us now, for we are holding our own.”

Thus the lords of Xibalba threw down the ball where it was met by Xbalanque. The ball landed before his yoke and bounced away. It sailed clear over the ballcourt. It just bounced once, then twice, landing in the tomatoes. Then the rabbit came out, hopping along. All the Xibalbans thus went after him. The Xibalbans all went after the rabbit, shouting and rushing about.

Thus the twins were able to retrieve the head of Hunahpu, replacing it where the chilacayote squash had been. They then placed the chilacayote squash on the ballcourt, while the true head of Hunahpu was his once more. Therefore they both rejoiced again. While the Xibalbans were out searching for their rubber ball, the twins retrieved it from the tomato patch.

And when they had done so, they called out: “Come on! We found our rubber ball!” they said. Thus they were carrying the round ball when the Xibalbans returned.

“What was it that we saw?” they asked.

And so they began again to play ball, both teams making equal plays until at last Xbalanque struck the chilacayote squash, strewing it all over the ballcourt. Thus its seeds were scattered before them.

“What is this that has been brought here? Where is he that brought it?” asked the Xibalbans.

Thus the lords of Xibalba were defeated by Hunahpu and Xbalanque. They had passed through great affliction, but despite everything that had been done to them, they did not die.

— Popol Vuh

march madness

The Deeds of One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu above Xibalba

… As for One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, they would merely play dice and ball every day. The four of them would pair off to oppose each other.

When they gathered together to play in the ballcourt, the Falcon would arrive to watch over them. …

Now it was on the path leading to Xibalba where they played ball. Thus the lords of Xibalba, One Death and Seven Death, heard them:

“What is happening on the surface of the earth? They are just stomping about and shouting. May they be summoned here therefore. They shall come to play ball, and we shall defeat them. They have simply failed to honor us. They have neither honor nor respect. Certainly they act arrogantly here over our heads,” said therefore all those of Xibalba....

Now we shall tell of their journey to Xibalba. …

The Summons of One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu to Xibalba

Then was the arrival of the messengers of One Death and Seven Death:

“Go you war councilors to summon One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu. Tell them when you arrive, ‘Thus say the lords: They must come, say the lords to you. They must come here to play ball with us that we may be invigorated by them. Truly we are amazed greatly at them. Thus they must come, say the lords. May they bring hither their implements—their yokes, their arm protectors, and their rubber ball as well. Thus say the lords,’ tell them when you arrive there,” the messengers were told.

These messengers were the owls—Arrow Owl, One Leg Owl, Macaw Owl, and Skull Owl—for so the messengers of Xibalba were called.

This Arrow Owl was like the arrow, piercing.

This One Leg Owl merely had one leg, but there were his wings.

This Macaw Owl had a red back, and there were also his wings.

Now this Skull Owl only had a skull with no legs; there were merely wings.

The burden of these four messengers was to be the war councilors. Thus they arrived there from Xibalba. They arrived suddenly, perching atop the ballcourt....

The owls, therefore, alighted atop the ballcourt, where they delivered in order the words of One Death and Seven Death, Pus Demon and Jaundice Demon, Bone Staff and Skull Staff, Flying Scab and Gathered Blood, Sweepings Demon and Stabbings Demon, Wing, and Packstrap. For these are the names of all the lords. Thus the owls repeated their words.

“Are these not the words of the lords One Death and Seven Death?”

“Those are the words that they said,” replied the owls. “We shall surely be your companions. ‘You shall bring all the gaming things,’ say the lords.”…

— Popol Vuh

Reclaiming Reclamation

I

The Alternator:

Is about the size of a large fist

and so, as we’re told, is also the size of the human heart.

Is a tight case of coiled wire, of rolling magnets.

Is a translation from kinetic quickness to alternating currents.

Is where the serpentine belt spins out golden strands of voltage.

This is what the alternator is. This is what it does.

This is what it stopped doing one October evening on Highway 191.

Waiting for a tow in the fading light, we collected seeds from the hesperaloe,

from the dried, brittle head of what had been a brilliant red flower.

The seeds, small black wedges, like slices of carbon

or misshapen tokens for some infernal ferryman.

II

Parts and Labor

The following evening, having reached the place,

We walked out the length of an old road cut,

Which led from the highway to a water tank and some microwave towers.

The roadbed eroded, unmade, its reclamation reclaimed

Littered with rabbit droppings, deer bones, and snake skins

grown over in dry, golden grasses, in juniper and yucca.

Scraping through the fallen leaves and standing tangles of scrub oak

Tom asks, “Dad, what comes after people?”

Tom, who four years ago was, himself, not yet the size of my fist,

Who was barely his own heartbeat, who was, himself, before people.

“What comes after people?”

“I think worms! Mom, I think beetles! I think—look! A potsherd!”

He reaches, and from amid the clumps of tar-fixed gravel and road base,

Plucks it up, a grey one, corrugated on one side, about the size of a sunglass lens.

He holds it in the air, then sets it down, finding others,

Left by the ones whose lives passed between the plateau and cliffside,

The ones who dressed themselves in black, iridescent wool spun from turkey feathers.

The ones who had left the valley now named for dead warrior kings. Montezuma. Cortez.

III

Home

A few days stalking their quiet memory. A few nights of fires,

And we trace our way back,

Stopping to take on a sack of dried beans from the red fields.

Some melons from the Green River.

And, at the pullout with the cinderblock toilets, piñon nuts,

Where millions litter the ground amid the spat gum and idling semis.

adobe photo shop

adobe photo shop from g e brooks on Vimeo.

lions in winter

Earlier this week Kelly noticed the mountain lion tracks through our back yard. Large, clawless paws with long, bounding spaces between prints. He had probably been chasing the deer, whose tracks also crossed the two-foot deep snow through the yard. It must have been a couple nights before, but not too long, because the lion’s path crossed over the top of the tracks I’d made out to the shed and back around the first of the year.

I say “he” mainly because, as some friends here have told us, it’s often the young male lions, recently separated from their mothers, still without a territory of their own, who sometimes end up wandering hungry into and around town. Especially when the temperature drops below zero and just sits there for week after week, as it is now.

This is what happened last month, when Charlie Stevens was shoveling snow out of his driveway and accidentally scared a young lion out of his front window well. (We used to live right across the street from Charlie, when we first moved to town years ago.) Anyway, that lion climbed a tree on the other side of the block and spent most of the day up there, drawing a big crowd of dogs, neighborhood kids, police and DNR trucks, and a TV crew, until someone came and shot him down.

related: lion hunt, school lions, tracks

Costa Rica bird list: Dec 10-23, 2012

Costa Rica relief map (shells, nuts, megalodon shark tooth fossil, palm leaf quetzal)

Laughing Falcon

Crested Caracara

Osprey

Black Vulture

Turkey Vulture

Groove-billed Ani

Great-tailed Grackle

Baltimore Oriole

Melodious Blackbird

Montezuma Oropendola

Brown Jay

Blue Jay*

Loggerhead Shrike*

Common Bush Tanager

Blue-gray Tanager

Passerinni’s Tanager

Bay-headed Tanager

Clay-colored Robin (yigüirro)

Sooty Robin

Buff-throated Saltator

Blue Black Swallow

Black Swift

Kiskadee

Blue-black Grassquit

Yellow-faced Grassquit

Bananaquit

White-collared Seedeater

Buff-rumped Warbler

Golden-Browed Chlorophonia

Rufous-collared Sparrow

Black-striped Sparrow

Carolina Chickadee*

Masked Tityra

Pale-billed Woodpecker

Back-cheeked Woodpecker

Hoffman’s Woodpecker

Red-crowned Woodpecker (Hoffman’s hybrid)

Keel-billed Toucan

Chestnut-mandibled Toucan

Emerald Toucanet

Collared Araçari

Fiery-billed Araçari

Squirrel Cuckoo

Mangrove Cuckoo

Rufous Motmot

Blue-crowned Motmot

Mocking Bird*

Green Hermit

Violet Sabrewing

Coppery-headed Emerald

Purple-throated Mountain-gem
Green-crowned Brilliant

Green Thorntail

Muscovy Duck

Wood Duck*

Great Currasow

Black Guan

Crimson-fronted Parakeet

White-crowned Parrot

Resplendant QUETZAL!

Slate Throated Redstart

Cardinal*

Magnificent Frigatebird

Brown Pelican

Ringed Kingfisher

Green Kingfisher

House Wren

Rufous-naped Wren

Gray-breasted Wood Wren

Inca Dove

Ruddy Ground Dove

White-winged Dove

Rock Pigeon

White Ibis

Tricolored Heron

Little Blue Heron

Green Heron

Yellow-crowned Night Heron

Great Blue Heron

Bare-throated Tiger Heron

Spotted Sandpiper

Wilson’s Plover

Semipalmated Plover

Killdeer*

Whimbrel

Willet

Ruddy Turnstone

Sanderling

Red Knot

Cattle Egret

Snowy Egret

Great Egret

Neotropic Cormorant

Anhinga

*actually, a few of these seen between the forests and the sprawl surrounding the George Bush International Airport in Houston (layover)

related: 2008 list 

people like these. places like this.

Skulls. Unlimited. International.

Maybe you’ve seen these guys on TV. They’re based out in the middle of Oklahoma and their catalogue reads like the opening scene of Macbeth.

Puppy skulls and stingray barbs

Wing of parakeet and feather of macaw

Fossil hominids and fetus skull

An alphabet of skulls!

Skull of shrew and python ribs

A “bago-armadillo helmets”…

There are economy skeletons for the cheapskate bone articulator in your life. Custom skull cleaning. Mice and mice. Bigfoot footprints. An emu.

Also, raccoon bacula! (Curious? Yes, definitely check out the raccoon bacula.)

For more details, here's a good article Outside Magazine ran a few years ago.

And for more skeleton collections, here's a nice one on pinterest. (And no hot glue!)

related: endless pools, pompions past, calaveras, muertos, plein air taxidermy, of ranids  

"faceless" fish

"faceless fish discovered"
the amphioxus song
lancet, 1911

things fall apART; the CENTER cannot hold

CUAC evicted -- Salt Lake Tribune
HuffPo

Washoe to Sanpete

Oh, right. I still have this blog. Also, we moved.
Here’s a little update.

Seeing all our stuff boxed up, carried across the front yard, and packed into a 9'x8'x12' space reminded me of this photo series by Peter Menzel: MaterialWorld: A Global Family Portrait. 

I think we first came across these a few years ago when they were showing at an airport somewhere (Chicago? Atlanta?). Then, a couple years ago, I saw his Hungry Planet: What the World Eats series when it was making the rounds as an email forward. They're photos of families with their typical weekly groceries, details here.

I guess these aren’t new. Maybe you’ve seen them. Whatever. I’m all like “I saw this way back when it was at the airport. You should have been there. What a layover. Such a layover!” 

Anyway, speaking of hipsters, Sannah Kvist’s project is worth a look too.


Also, we live in Utah now.

Reno, farewell

3 summers in reno from g e brooks on Vimeo.

4 sierra panoramas

more

face without fishes

hanging valley at the top of Buckeye Canyon, Eastern Sierra

(cold) fish without faces

I guess this has been out for over a year now, but just the other day my mom hipped me to this study about botox, empathy, and "embodied cognition".

"people who have had Botox injections are physically unable to mimic emotions of others. This failure to mirror the faces of those they are watching or talking to robs them of the ability to understand what people are feeling, the study says.

The toxin might interfere with 'embodied cognition,' the way in which facial feedback helps people perceive emotion. According to the theory in the study, a listener unconsciously imitates another person’s expression. This mimicry then generates a signal from the person’s face to his or her brain. Finally, the signal enables the listener to understand the other person’s meaning or intention."

Here's a link to a pdf of the study itself.

this. is. summer.

about tire sandals

The hardest thing about making your own sandals is having to look at all of those people’s feet. There are so many DIY videos on youtube, some way more helpful than others, each with its own pair of feet. Weird bony ones, chubby pale ones, knobby, hairy, bent and bandy, scaly, hammer-toed, fungoid, etc.

OK, let me back up. Six or seven years ago, Runners World ran an article about Tarahumara / Rarámuri runners in the Copper Canyon region of northern Mexico, including how they did everything in huarache sandals made out of old tires. This also intrigued me because of some conversations I’d had with my first mission companion in Mexico (nearly 15 years ago) about sandal making. He was a Zapotec guy from a pretty remote area of Oaxaca, nowhere near Tarahumara country, but his dad was a sandal maker.

Since then, my favorite sandals of 12 summers, after many repairs and a resoling, have finally come to the end of their days. These are the sandals Kelly got me before we married, the ones that broke a strap once in Pariah Canyon, and I miraculously found an ancient pair of sand-filled canvas shoes (perfect fit!) sitting on the bank within the hour. So if I’m going to try making a new pair, this would be the time, right?

It turns out the internets have a lot to say about making their own sandals, what kind of cordage or webbing to use, what material makes a good sole—shoe insoles (gross), car mats (seriously?), crushed water bottles (for real), and then there are kits.

After sifting through a lot of this, and some experimenting, I settled on tire sidewalls as soles, and nylon paracord (left over from our laundry line). Everyone out there advises you against using steel belted tread for a sole because it’s pretty impossible to work with for this kind of thing. I even went out and bought an angle/disc grinder to see if that would git ‘er done, as it were. I can’t recommend this either. I did end up with a ragged, sole-shaped mass, but it’s nasty, unpleasant work. The other problem with using the tread is that very few tires, at least from what I could find in several trips to Ray’s Tires, are simply bias-ply (without radial steel belting).

Now, you might expect, as I did, that the sidewall wouldn’t provide enough traction, or that the shape would be too deeply contoured to fit well. But the traction’s fine, they’re actually thinner , lighter material than the tread, they’re still plenty reinforced by the nylon plies/cords, and, if you position the cuts right around the tire bead, the contours actually fit the arch of your foot surprisingly well.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with. I’ve taken them out running a few times now—the longest one so far was 10 miles—and I have to say I’m pleased.





If you’re interested in giving something like this a try, here are a couple of the videos I found helpful. This guy (in Israel, I think?) demonstrates how to do the sidewall thing. It’s also got a nice sort of campy Survivorman/Bear Grylls quality to it, like he’s sneaking up on a dead tire and field butchering it for the camera.

And this Steven Sashen guy pretty much walks you through the whole process, whether you’re buying one of his “Invisible Shoe” kits or not. (And I have to say, of all the youtubes I waded through for this, his were easily the nicest feet of the whole mess.) If you like his "sh*t barefoot runners say," you might also enjoy this little xtranormal video too.

If you see yourself getting interested in this—human evolution, distance running, biomechanics, and alternatives to running shoes—check out Harvard’s barefoot running page.

Finally, aside from all of this, one of my favorite things about cutting footwear out of old spent tires is the arc of human transportation it implies. Like, “Alright folks, end of the road / oil / free ride, etc. Here’s where we start walking.” On that note, here’s one final video that seems appropriate here, about where all our tires go to die.

related: losing contact, barefoot?, jaywalking bigfoot, beating the vultures, tires, turkey timers, edward burtynsky

civil dusk

A couple years ago we were out visiting my dad in Bakersfield over the July 4th weekend. Around dusk, just as people were starting to light off their fireworks, I went out for a run. After a few blocks of gated neighborhoods and a big church barbeque, the asphalt ran out and I was on a dry dirt road, surrounded by oil well pumpjacks as far as I could see in the fading light.



I went another mile or so and then turned around to look back toward the city. The long, flat line of glowing red, fading, and broken here and there by the mechanical rise and fall of pumpjack silhouettes. Just above that, the distant silent explosions of fireworks.

This is the kind of industrial-sublime terror that came back when I saw Edward Burtynsky’s Oil photos, here at the Nevada Museum of Art through September. Last month, when he was in town talking about his photography, Burtynsky said that when he sees skyscrapers (for example) and other vast human-made structures and systems, he is interested in seeing and showing “the hole that skyscraper [/tanker ship / suburban neighborhood / supply chain / auto fleet, &c.] came from.”



He did a lot of this pretty directly with his earlier mines and quarries projects. But how do you show the “holes” where petroleum comes from? Or the ones it leaves in people and places as it makes its way through a global economy?





Like, for example, oil sands extraction in Canada’s boreal forest, which involves, first, clear-cutting and then the stripping and removal of topsoil and earth to a depth of around 20 feet, over hundreds of square miles. Or a massive tire dump in California that catches fire and burns for two years, with flames reaching a half-mile into the air.





How can we hope to represent the tremendous scale, speed, and meaning of these transformations and phenomena? Burtynsky’s Oil series goes about this by dividing things up as Extraction, Detroit, Transportation, and The End of Oil.









Also, if you’re interested, The Atlantic ran a fine interview a couple weeks ago that gets into a lot of this, and there’s a great little article over on this design magazine/blog too.

related: Edward Burtynsky, Chris Jordan, Shopping for Independence Day, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, archived americana, roadside explosives