7 Color Lagoon

In March, 2005 Freddy Cuevas, writing for the AP, noted the results of on-going explorations in the ancient Mayan city of Copan which is in modern day Honduras.

Copan is 200 miles west of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Copan is a large and important site in the Mayan world of Mexico and Central America. Copan was important between 250 and 900 A.D..

The recent discovery was of the bodies of 69 people who died about 1450 years ago. They also discovered the remains of 30 more edifices in the site. Looking at many ancient sites in meso America; the realization of the nature of architectural archaeology is a surprise. All of a sudden one realizes the puzzles that they uncover and try to put together of stones and ruined building bases, sculptures, bas reliefs and stelae (hieroglyphic columns often with histories chiseled into the stone).

The writer has opened a photoblog at Mayan World Photoblog that has a collection of pictures from Mayan ruins in the Mexican Yucatan.

The metropolis of Copan was probably abandoned due to cyclical population pressures think many archaeologists. Seiichi Nakamura, a Japanese scientist working with a team at the site thinks these bodies were buried about 550 years ago. This part of the site is planned to be opened to tourists in 2007 although the sense of time in the tropics might make that more of a hope than a plan.

Copan was first “discovered” in 1576 by Diego Garcia de Palacios who represented Spain’s King Felipe II. In the 1840’s the team of John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood (see Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan which is a wonderful adventure story of their travels and travails) made Copan a famous place name.

UNESCO made Copan a World Heritage Site in 1981. Sadly, the Honduran mainland is presently noted for its violence. Still, as a world site, it would be one of the safest places in the country.

In October of this year NASA Science News reported on a new High Tech, space age “situation room” that has been located in Panama. This communication and observation center is trying to help Central Americans avoid some of the fates of the ancient Maya.

Although CA has 0.5% of the land mass of the earth; it has 7-8% of its plants and animal species, many little known and some possibly of great potential use. However, the region is constantly under attack by earthquakes, illegal logging, ranching and hurricanes (more and more of them, it would seem).

NASA is using its high tech wonders in the SERVIR system to try to stop the loss of biological species and to stop environmental crimes. SERVIR, in Spanish, would translate to “Mesoamerican Regional Visualization and Monitoring System”.

NASA scientists at SERVIR have developed satellite tracking of forest fire “hot spots pixels” acquired from images from orbit. Teams can then be dispatched to control the outbreaks. Many or most of these fires begin when sugar cane fields are set on fire to burn off the sharp, cutting leaves so that the harvesters can work by hand in the fields. Others come from “slash and burn” clearing of the remaining rainforest.

According to Dan Irwin, the project manager,

“This kind of environmental monitoring is important to a region that has seen the collapse of at least one grand civilization, that of the Maya. There’s mounting archeological evidence that the once proud Mayan civilization, with 10 million citizens throughout Mesoamerica a thousand years ago, may have been due to colossal environmental foolishness.

“The Maya had totally destroyed their forests,” Irwin explains. “That deforestation and local climatic conditions, we believe, led to such a severe drought that … the entire Maya culture disappeared in just a few years.”

The new program of cooperation among Central American governments and the SERVIR program began in 1988 when pictures from the Landstat satellite were examined by NASA’s only archaeologist, Tom Sever, used an image to look for ruins in the area of the Guatemala-Mexico border (at the top of the Peten region). He saw more. He saw the razor sharp delineation between as yet undeveloped Guatemala and the slashed and burned development in Mexico. The picture was picked up the “The National Geographic”.

“(The picture)… became a catalyst for the president and congress of Guatemala to set up what they call the Mayan Biosphere Reserve—Guatemala’s largest protected area.

The Mayan Biosphere Reserve led, in turn, to the creation of something even bigger: the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, an environmental greenway the length of Central America, connecting parks and preserves among all Central American nations. NASA has helped monitor this so-called “biocorridor” from space…”

Discoveries, changes, and new knowledge continue to uncover more and more of the great Mayan civilization of southern Mexico and Central America. In The Maya by James D. Coe (get a later edition than my old standby; the recounting of history in this area is faster and faster) the Maya are described as

“The Maya are hardly a vanished people, for they number an estimated two million souls, the largest single block of American Indians north of Peru. Most of them have resisted with remarkable tenacity the encroachments of Spanish American civilization. Besides their numbers and cultural integrity, they are remarkable for an extraordinary cohesion…

All of the Mesoamerican Indians shared a number of traits which were more or less peculiar to them and absent elsewhere in the New World: hieroglyphic writing, books of bark paper or deerskin which were folded like screens, a complex permutation calendar, a games… with a rubber ball in a special court,… specialized markets… and emphasis upon self-sacrifice and mutilation…”

This is one of what will probably continue as an occasional these since we live surrounded by ancient sites and present day Mayans. Theirs is a fascinating and too long ignored history only recently being seriously and successfully unearthed. It lasted from its Archaic period (1500 B.C.+) to the Late Post Classic (1530 A.D. with the invasions of the Spaniards).

Visit the sites for further study and wander through my photoblog where I am putting our explorations of ancient Mayan sites. These aren’t, as we have heard from some American tourists, “just another pile of rocks.” They are interesting and sometimes blow you away with the deep realization and vision of these cities as bright, bustling, peopled metropoli with houses and gardens, markets and the all-important temples to pantheons of gods.

Here is a summary of links:

There is, of course, mine: The Mayan World Photoblog

An interesting Mexican site is: The Mayan Culture which starts with a quotation from the Popul Vuh a sacred book of Mayan cosmology.

There are more paths to follow backwards in time into this mesmerizing civilization and, obviously, new and high tech ways to follow them.

The Mayan gods brought the sun, mathematics, and architecture to mesoamerica. We are starting to understand & protect it.

The rumor (chisme)along the Costera is that the landmark hotel shown here in a photo from our dock; has finally been sold by the owner, Don Carlos. I hear that he is to continue running it for a year and then is to be replaced by the new owner from New York.

The land for the Laguna was given to Don Carlos by the first governor of the state of Quinatana Roo in 1975 partially to open up the area to tourist by beginning to tame the jungle that surrounded the Laguna outside of time. He made a totally unique hotel with a bar studded with sea shells as is the dining room which finally sports glass doors and an air conditioner. The food is clean but boring usually. The rooms vary widely. Numbers 3 and 4 are quite beautiful and romantic.

The violent and antiAmerican tough, Jaime Gonzalez, continues to live in the village after assault, battery and now; a murder attempt. Swimming in the Laguna is now far more dangerous due to lines of speedboats. The level of contamination also puts some dampler on one of the most beaugiful swimming holes in the Americas.

This is a lost book review (one of my first) from Blogcritics. There is a new one that is far more complete but amazingly incendiary. When I could not access my review in the BC archives; I decided to post it again here.

Here at Blogcritics our grammar and spelling and writing cannot be anything but correct. I, for instance, have found that my spelling and punctuation have deteriorated with the ease of spell checking and changing type with a computer. Where I once waited five days for the use of an electric typewriter in order to finish my bachelor’s thesis; now I can bang out lines of copy, paste, change fonts and formats and then, finally, push a button to effortlessly print the entire composition. With all the modern and marvelous assistance of the digital world, the use of “it, it’s and its’”, can still be a mystery. A mystery this marvelous book has solved for me. I write that it is marvelous not because it became a bestseller; but, because it is incredible to find a book on punctuation that is both informative and entertaining. Even the author was surprised by the reception.

The title of Lynne Truss’ (or Truss’s, a personal choice) dedicates “Eats, Shoots & Leaves, “To the memory of the striking printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution.”

The title is taken from a story of a panda bear who enters a restaurant, pulls a gun and fires it, then leaves the restaurant. The story comes from the incorrect punctuation. Of course, the panda could have been said to “eat shoots and leaves and then we would know about its diet but not had as good a story. Do I remember Russian typesetters as an origin of the revolution of 1905 or 1917? Not really, but who am I; a person who used to use its’. All this is to say that she has a wry (British) sense of humor (humour in England) and a militant notion of the importance and place of punctuation in the song of writing and reading.

Ms. Russ writes that “The earliest known punctuation - credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium around 200 BC - was a…system of dramatic notation… advising actors when to breathe in preparation for a long bit…or a relatively short bit…”

“So what happened to the comma in this process? Well, between the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog…(that) tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organizing words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing, circling and dividing: circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory “woof” to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom…”

That is the tone of this remarkable book. It makes lessons about punctuation fun. What is the future? Ms. Truss worries that “…while massive change from the printed word to the bloody electronic signal is inevitably upon us.” What, she wonders, should we call the language generated by the digital age? “Netspeak? Weblish?” Either way, she tells us, “linguists are generally excited by it.” In spite of all the problems for the written language as seen by a writer and punctuation activist; she writes that, at least, the written word is not going to die and the future is not to be made of people who cannot even read.

It is a work for the pickers of nits. Someone must maintain nit-picking as a mark of civilization. It is, however, best done with humor. Also, the word “read” was mentioned and that is exactly what you should do with this book.

The biggest question is if a guide to fascinating grammar and verb conjugations be far behind.

There is a lot to write of the bad times and the violence and anti-Americanism of a village that was, quite recently, a gentle place. This is the symbol of the changes at Laguna Bacalar, Mexico.

St John’s Episcopal Church and Rectory, Barrytown, NY.

I am finishing a review of the Mary McCarthy memoir, How I Grew “A Memoir Of The Early Years”. It is a fine book by the author of The Group who taught at Bard briefly and was a student and professor down the road a piece at Vassar. It reminds me of home for 35 years and brings on nostalgia. The post on Blogcritics.org is found HERE.

St. John’s was the parish church for many of the estate owners in Barrytown along River Road. There was the Delano Estate, Italianate, dark and gloomy pile of red brick; Rokeby, the strange home of the Rockefeller related, land-poor Aldrich’s where we once went to a schizoid party. One half of the beautiful manor house had a party by one of the brothers who played farmer. There was a country music band who borrowed from a friend of ours (a classical musician of great beauty well into her 80’s) a Stradivarius to fiddle on. A plane landed in the “front yard”. At some point I went around the corner to the other side of the house and sat comfortably at a silver tea service with some proper looking people. I was curtly told that I belonged at the “other” party to which I fled. This had been a stuffy, high level New York bureaucrat brother and Mother. It was a trip as the two parties slowly merged and farmers and musicians and the passing hip wandered through those great rooms filled with centuries of treasures, many molding, more exquisite.

Today take time, if you happen to be driving through the Hudson Valley to visit Scenic Hudson’s sliver of land between Rokeby and the old Chanler estate and visit what is called “Poets’ Walk” which we photographed for the architect who added gazebos and paths and left the seclusion and beauty of an avenue to the Hudson and an overlook of the River, the Amtrak (Old New York Central) train and the Kingston bridge.

Reading the memoir also reminds me of the Steely Dan song My Old School where he vows never to return to “my old school” which is Bard (our alma mater) and is about a girl from Barrytown who spurns him. Many years later we shot him on assignment at Bard to accept an honorary degree. We all change. Memories and perceptions are one thing at 20 and another at 50.

More reminiscences after I re read Henderson The Rain King and old friend and Saul Bellow masterpiece which, since we lived for a time in the same terrible apartment on the same estate of Chanler Chapman (more later) where Saul Bellow had also unhappily lived and decided to use Chanler as his model for the unforgettable character, “Henderson”.

“Clermont”, the Robert R. Livingston house and estate north of Barrytown but once the seat of a 160,000 acre fiefdom that was only brought down in the 1840’s during the “Anti-Rent Wars” of New York.

I am finishing a fine memoir — whether or not I am a great fan of McCarthy’s. I plan a short piece for it on Blogcritics later this week. Today I scanned a photo of her taken at Vassar in the 1920’s. Plus ça change; plus ça meme chose. The more things change; the more they remain the same. It is more than 70 years ago but she looks so modern and, obviously, did not suffer from a lack of attractiveness. There is also a bit of rebelliousness (but only a bit) in the look and an amazing amount of intelligence.

The book is How I Grew “A Memoir Of The Early Years” ©Mary McCarthy, 1986 from Harcourt Books. See harcourtbooks.com.

More later when I have digested it better.

A number of posts went missing from what appears to be a hacking job with some malicious code. Nothing, however, of any import and it was nice to change from the black template which I did find a bit intimidating. I preferred iBlog on .Mac and may return but the $100 a year is an annoyance.

something happened at Bloggers: maliciousness, glitch, accident… I don’t know. So I am rebuilding this one as I can. Come again. The URL is the same. Visit the photoblog at http://www.expatriatephotos.blogspot.com and www.blogcritics.org.