kagablog

There was once a fabulous city called Cuzco. Certainly if you search any atlas and peruse the eastern rim of Peru you will find it marked beside the mystic cosm of Lake Titicaca. But what you will not find will be the Cuzco of the Incas. Cuzco, the capital city of that lost race, was torn like skin from its native memory and written into the furious history of the 15oo’s. And it has lain there since, stripped of its magic and bloodied by the blades of conquistadors. It is difficult for us, the fragmented many of a world of strangers, to understand this ancient place as it existed then. Fantastical, oneiric and homogenous it thrived beneath the eye of the Sun God like a galaxy unto itself. The name Cuzco translates as ‘navel’ from the Quechua language. And like a navel, the city of Cuzco radiated outward from a central point; that point being the mark where the first King of the Incas set his staff into the bosom of Mamapocha, the earth. This radiated citadel was then quartered to embody the energies of the four cardinal points in seasonal rotation. These quarters were further subdivided into sacred geometries, and then orchestrated to portray in miniature the entirety of the Incan race. A single body comprised of many bodies, existing in a state of hive-like unity. This way the Sun King could treat the maladies of his far flung peoples without ever having to leave the city. The effects of said treatment relaying out to the entirety of his nation like medicine through a body. Indeed Don Juan, that mercurial sorcerer of the Castaneda books describes those civilizations of antiquity as living dreams. Here were actual ‘dream states’. Dream workings made flesh, rendered material and invoked en masse. Don Juan hinted that the lords of these civilizations spirited away entire cities into the dream realms, as a magician might dissolve a rabbit into the alleyways of his sleeve. Certainly there have always been whispers and rumours of lost Incan cities. Vast, mysterious structures cloaked forever in the depthless cradle of the forest; once great plazas and fallen pyramids, now the haunt of monkeys, shades and undiscovered spiders. Of these places there have always been whispers. And perhaps it was one of these whispers which led Hiram Bingham to discover, as late as 1911, what all those conquistadors had missed in their bloody junkets. For it was Mister Bingham who accidentally uncovered that long lost mountain complex known as Machu Picchu. And it was in Machu Picchu that modern eyes first beheld the Intihuatana of the Incas; the solar observatory stones which each city venerated as their nucleus of worship. The same stones which the Spanish soldiers so senselessly shattered in brutal efforts to crush the Indian’s spirit against their marching spurs. But Machu Picchu, built so in tandem with the lie of the land, escaped this deluge of beards and steel. The lianas of the jungle multiplied like cobwebs, the trees fanned their majestic wings, and like a dream the city dissolved behind a veil of nature for centuries.

It was fearful Pizarro who first sank his sword hilt deep into the legend of El Dorado. Pizarro, the Gorbenador of Quito who led four thousand three hundred and fifty souls into the Andean altiplano toward the condor haunted peaks of the Cordillera in search of cinnamon. Pizarro who fed his Indian guides to dogs and waterfalls, whose actions led to the Spaniard’s discovery of the mighty Amazon. Pizarro who emerged from the jungle with only eighty of those four thousand three hundred and fifty, infused with the legends of a fabled city of gold. And it was bearded Pizarro who dragged the Incan king Atahualpa from his palace in chains, announcing that he would have him sacrificed like a lamb unless his subjects brought to him all the gold in Peru. When the stunned king asked Pizarro how much gold he demanded Pizarro answered:

‘Lift your hand as high as you can and draw a line as blue as your blood around this chamber. Then order your vassals to fill the chamber with gold up to the line your hand has drawn.’

Like a broken hive of anxious bees, the king’s subjects scurried to and fro across the lands bearing great sacks of gold, the blood of Punchao, the blood of the sun. But Atahualpa was garroted before the room was even half filled. And the murder of the Sun King spread like poison through the body of the Incan empire. Weeping subjects fell by the wayside, haphazardly burying loads of religious gold, dying or dissolving back into the forests to take refuge in those disappearing dream cities. And like a broken hive the empire fell, spilling its honey back into the earth, much in the same way as the night steals the blood of the sun with the onset of dusk. And in the dream of the forest, the lost cities slept.

It was in the shadow of Mount Huayna Picchu, in the terraced avenues of Machu Picchu that the great poet Pablo Neruda found solace during his war torn years. Indeed he wrote of the Incas: ‘The conquistadors received a vast, resonant world in full creative fever; they left nothing but a planet strewn with ashes.’ For in the solemn twilights of Machu Picchu it is easy to understand how it is against the grim backdrops of great suffering that the legacy of the Incas begins to glow. Their majestic architectures which defy the onslaught of time like the bones of some great dream, the many faces of their Earth Mother whose likenesses align so sympathetically beneath the cowl of Nuestra Senora; the Virgin Mary. The transmogrification of the Catholic Christ into an incarnation of Punchao, Lord of the Day, and the maddening carnivals which spin so giddily into joyous orgies of ritual resurrected. For even the Inquisition was powerless to stifle the spirit of the Incan carnival. And in a dream of fireworks and masked, dancing devils are the passion plays of Catholicism so gleefully deconstructed. These Inca, whose religious beliefs stated that the past, present and future exist simultaneously, gather still in their forest gorged lands to watch over the wall of time. Their recurring pattern of splendour and tragedy embossed upon the fabric of the land like the portrait of some unspeakable divinity.

Sometimes ships which have not yet sighted land find themselves in the presence of a huge plume of muddy freshwater which knifes like a serpent into the blue of the ocean. This is the mighty Amazon River. A current which finds its source high in the Andes, yet cuts over a hundred and fifty kilometers out to sea before dispersing. The river dies magnificently in the depth of the ocean, and yet is at the same time born from its spring in the mountains. And like the flow of this river is the dream of the Inca perpetuated. Constantly living and constantly dying, remembered little upon waking. Intoxicating and gargantuan in dream.