Prose Ode on the Holy Spirit
Reading for passages and prayers
The following essay originally appeared in The Lune in 2017. It has been lightly revised and approved for republication here. — Joe
The Mayan shaman Martín Prechtel writes that in the Tz’utujil language there is no word for door: “All Mayan houses are only one room. Their entrance is their mouth.” The doorway—chijay, “mouth of the house”—is integral to the ancient Mayan etiquette of hospitality, while a door is the picture of an impediment. “The concept of a door,” Prechtel concludes, “is outside of [the Tz’utijil] paradigm.”1
Why does it matter that there is a word for doorway but not for door? The word paradigm, itself, suggests an answer. It comes from the Greek elements para- “beside” + deiknynai “to show,” thus the sense of a pattern or example: “to show side by side.” When shown side by side, the body and the house do not evince barriers but passages; the Tz’utujil language reflects a certain fidelity to the body as the permeable center of human experience and, concurrently, knowledge.
The Mayan source-body of the Tz’utujil paradigm has been deeply damaged by the agents and forces of colonialism, a fact that led Prechtel to record his experience as shaman in writing. His decision to do so went against century upon century of precedent: a tradition of outright awe for the power of language. As Timothy Mitchell explains, through an indigenous Islamic lens:
“The directness of the relationship with Allah through the Word and its intensely abstract, intensely concrete force is extremely difficult to evoke, let alone analyze for members of societies dominated by print and the notion of words standing for things.”2
Today, given prodigious technological advancements, it would seem that we have great opportunities to effect changes in perception. But these great opportunities belie great fears that challenge everything we know from within.
One of my great fears is exposure. Publishing begins to look like an attempt at indulging or delimiting this fear. On one hand, the word is a stark and obvious thing, its meaning plain as day, and publication resembles a form of confession: “I did it—forgive me, forgive me”; on the other hand, the word barely exists, being no more than brief sound or tic marks against a void, and publication is misdirection: “See if you can make sense of this.”
Reading Prechtel, I began to understand that my fear is analogous with the awesome contingency of the self; the space between my two aforementioned hands—and lips—is awe, the gasp or grip that precipitates Aum, a fearsome topology.
One’s very person is inherently public, a fundamentally common constitution. So, is there really any privacy to be had in personhood? Silence and solitude undo all reassurance; the more silent one becomes, the louder the signification of one’s surroundings. Prayer becomes performance of the highest order: performance before the gods: for one another.
“Our family is looking / for someone who knows how to pray,” Dillard writes in the final, titular poem of Tickets for a Prayer Wheel.3 I hear “our family” in the largest sense—larger, even, than the human species. And I think that we are basically surrounded by this someone: she is the person with whom we are fortunate enough to interact as we wake to the duties of the day.
From Secrets of the Talking Jaguar (TarcherPerigree, 1999)
From Colonizing Egypt (University of California Press, 1988)
Wesleyan University Press, 1974