The wind is still on top of Machu Picchu today. I look down at this strange mix of wonders of both men and god(s), where stones are set upon rocks which build up to homes, together making a place for the movements of men, women and children now long gone
I walk from terrace to temple to terrace as guides rattle on like broken records about major battles and archeological discoveries– the capital H History lying within the ruins in the sky.
But I feel that the stories which truly give this place depth are left untold, palpable but hidden. These are the tales of men and women falling in love, of jealousy between friends, of families formed, flourishing and dissolved. If you listen closely enough, you can hear the true heartbeat of Machu Picchu.
* * *
Fall back to the summer of 1943 to hear the words of the poet Pablo Neruda anew, penned from this same mountaintop. Listen to his moment of transformation in “La Altura de Machu Picchu” (XII):
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays–
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
Is it not the echoes of everyday from these men and everyday that frame our own stories—be they of love, ambition, hopes, and fears– into some larger (insignificant?) context?
* * *
My friend Max and I shelve ourselves onto an agricultural terrace overlooking the ruins with some bread and water, and I pull out Annie Dillard’s book “For the time being.” Dillard’s writing contains power in the way it holds in tension the seeming insignificance and prominence of the experience of being human. She notes the irony in which lives can be abstracted into statistics (230,000 dead in a Haitian earthquake) while still holding such singular importance to our experience (like the love-stricken Romeo and his inability to see life beyond Juliet). So which is it? Is Juliet one, or is she one of two-hundred thirty thousand?
Dillard writes:
Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold, as one creature– but us? When we people differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we like it this way, at least in the West; we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract ‘humanity’ whose fate we should hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died, but that’s all right: Mankind as a whole has abundant children?
The words ring poignant on this mountain. The similarity of my stories with those long gone make me wonder whether this resonance makes my world important or insignificant. I see the stories of men long-gone stand together with those of my present—my own feelings of love tenuously held and lost, of evolving hopes and fears, of the ambiguity of my story mid-writing. Similarly, I sense the resonance of my present with those lives of future others who will till the land on this side of Eden. I strain to hear their wisdom, cringe to hear their critique.
How terrifying, this similarity, as though we are but a pixel on a painting, a spec of sand in a desert! “What meaning does anything have” we protest in the trek towards nihilism, “if my (love/life/journey) is not in some fashion different, if I am not in some fashion different?”
Or is it perhaps freeing, this notion of you and me as a hive of bees? For can I really handle the pressure that comes with an over-prominent story? Poet and essayist Christian Wiman recently writes, “Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitably, it breaks.”
Time is strangely held together in these moments, on these mountains. It is as if the past, present and future cannot be authentically separated. It is almost as if they move together by way of dance in the air– memory’s melody allowing the past to inform the present, the harmony of dreaming as the sound of the future calling the present into action.
* * *
I hear the echoes of Machu Picchu, for to be conscious of these stories is to see my own stories, in both triviality and beauty, in a different light. Maybe to feel my own anxieties in context is to know, but for a moment, the way we are all a part of this harmonious time. It is to know that we are bit players nestled among larger stories, which will be told again and again, around fires, and in novels and on stages. Perhaps this is what it is to feel as a flock of humanity.
In writing on our modern state of anxiety, Wiman points to James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” suggesting its greatness, “is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know.”
Likewise, on this particular day, in this particular moment, the whisper of Machu Picchu is that while we are all containers of the same stories, they are still worth telling, that they are all worth living. Perhaps our moments are meaningful, despite their triviality, in that we are all children of god. Or, if you must, consider this same sentiment with less conventionally religious language… a necessity if our language must sometimes be, “stripped of (its) religious meaning… (in the same way that) faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical incrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart” (Wiman).
The wind is still today on Machu Pichhu. It is as though the trees were asked to remain motionless while they receive a painting from the rising sun. We should be grateful for this silence. For it is in here, among these ‘ancient buried sorrows,’ and amidst the tales of “blood and… furrow,” that Machu Picchu truly begins to speak in its pregnant silence.
