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Since I am writing here in part about writing, it is worth adding that Hunahpu and Xbalanque had two older half brothers, Hunbatz and Hunchouen, who were born before their ball-playing father took his unfortunate trip to Xibalba, from which he did not return. Those other sons are regarded as the patrons of artists and writers. They were jealous of their younger half brothers, the twins, and neglected and abused them, so the twins turned them both into monkeys.
A few days ago, scrolling down my Instagram feed, I paused on a post from the NASA account. The image was a computer simulation of two black holes colliding in space. In September, astronomers were able for the first time to record the shape of gravitational waves rippling through space-time. They arrived as an almost undetectable wobble in an otherwise unremarkable transmission, the quivering, 1.8-billion-year-old remnant of two black holes colliding. Someone had animated a video depicting two black holes circling one another like boxers looking for a gap in each other’s defenses, dragging the stars around them into furious orbit until they eventually and very suddenly combined into a single black hole the size of fifty-three suns. The Instagram post was a still from that video. It looked like the face of an owl.
When L. and I first moved to the desert, we set ourselves the task of learning the stars. Except for a few periods of a month or two in a rented cabin here, I had lived in cities all my life and never managed to learn anything beyond the most easily identifiable constellations: Orion, the Big Dipper, the Pleiades.
L. is more disciplined about these things than I am, so every night we bundled up—it was early winter then—stood outside the house, and studied a new sector of the sky. We extended the diagonal line formed by Orion’s belt down to Sirius, in Canis Major, and up to Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus. (John Berger: “One can lie on the ground and look up at the almost infinite number of stars in the night sky, but in order to tell stories about those stars they need to be seen as constellations, the invisible lines which can connect them need to be assumed.”) We learned to imagine a line between Orion’s right foot, Rigel, and his left shoulder, Betelgeuse, and to follow it out to Gemini, the twins—not Hunahpu and Xbalanque but Castor and Pollux, both hatched from the same shiny egg after Zeus, taking the form of a swan, raped their mother Leda.
The weeks passed and the winter progressed. We traced a new line between the two stars on the inside of the Big Dipper’s bowl and followed it to a great backward question mark that had not been visible a month before and that formed the mane and shoulder of Leo. Later, in the spring, we watched Scorpius and Sagittarius rise and set and saw how the constellations of the zodiac—and the planets and the moon—travel along an established path, a sort of highway across the sky, the ecliptic, which sways a little as the year progresses, and then sways back again. We read what we could and watched videos on YouTube so that we could better visualize and understand what these movements meant, how they reflected the shifting position of the Earth in the universe, its tilted orbit around the star we call the sun.
I remember standing in front of the house and almost falling down in a moment of dizzying comprehension, staring at the Milky Way or the polestar and understanding with my body as much as my mind where we were in the universe and how and where we were moving. I felt like I’d been punched. More than with any political or philosophical revelation, the entirety of my perspective on existence—which, despite all my convictions and everything I understood in the abstract, was nonetheless centered on the earth, and for the most part on this particular North American landmass, and on this minuscule body and the tiny and petty radius that extends from my eyes and thoughts and emotions—all of it shattered. I am only exaggerating slightly. I had my passport number memorized, my Social Security number and my street address, my PO box and zip code, but I had never known where I lived. Or where we are going. Whenever I arrive in a strange city I learn the basic layout of the streets as quickly as I can so that I don’t do something stupid or get lost, but for my entire life I had somehow neglected to take this most fundamental step, one that humans had been taking for millennia.
I began to understand, as the Maya did, and the Greeks and Egyptians and Somalis and Indians and Sumerians and Chinese did, that time and space are inseparable. The sky is a clock, and a calendar is also a map. To know a date and a time is to know the positions of the planets and the stars, their relation to one another and to us. To know where the stars are is to know what time it is, what day and what year. Time is not an independent vector that pushes on, stubborn and cocksure, taking us to a place called the future. It lives in our bodies and in the stars, in the mountains that rise up from the sea floors, in the wind and rain that wash the mountains back into the sea. Everything moves. Mountains and oceans as well as stars. Orion disappears beneath the horizon in the spring and rises again in autumn, though I learned sleeping outside in the hammock on hot nights that even in August, he appears before dawn. If you stay up late enough, you’ll see the next season’s stars cycling past.
Every method I can think of that human beings have devised for representing time depends on displacements in space. The hands of a clock, the swing of a pendulum, the shifting shadow of a sundial, the vibrations of the electrons in a cesium atom. Time is motion. It favors circles, spirals, and ellipses, but it also does not mind explosions, supernovas, catastrophic disruptions that appear to halt the rhythmic flow. It is worth considering too, though, that those disruptions and all their violence are part of some larger cycle, one so immense that we are not equipped to trace the path of its orbit.
If only we could stay up late enough and see what rises next.
I read in the paper this morning that the Rhino, in the middle of a ceremony to honor two Navajo veterans of the Second World War, could not resist a jibe at a senator who had claimed native ancestry, calling her Pocahontas, as he has on several occasions before. This time no one laughed. At least some of the people gathered in the Oval Office likely knew that the historical Pocahontas was the daughter of the Mattaponi chief Wahunsenaca, whose people had the misfortune of living a few miles from the site chosen by the English for the settlement of Jamestown. When she was about fifteen, Pocahontas was kidnapped by a man named Samuel Argall, who later claimed that he did not abduct her but traded her fair and square for a small copper kettle. According to Mattaponi oral history, if not the English texts, she was raped while in the custody of the English and gave birth to a son. He would be named Thomas. Later she was married to one John Rolfe and given the Christian name Rebecca. Rolfe brought his young wife to England. She sailed on the same ship that two years later would carry the first enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony. Rebecca Rolfe, born Pocahontas, died at the age of twenty, far from home, in the English town of Gravesend.
Except for its extensive use in myth and marketing, there is little that is unique about Pocahontas’s story. She was far from the only indigenous woman to be so abused. But alongside the many efforts preserved in print and on celluloid to twist the tragedies that befell her into the honeyed pap required for exonerative nation-building, another history survived. Without books and without paper, in the long shadow of a genocide, another narrative persisted, from mouth to ear: they took her and they raped her; she did not love him or any of them.
It’s nothing to be smug about, but it is possible that we are no worse than the rest. And by “we” this time I mean modern-day Americans with our SUVs and our HDTVs, our outlet malls and our prison archipelago, our active shooter alerts and fracking-induced earthquakes, our escape rooms and tent cities, our forward operating bases and our concentration camps for the immigrant poor. We are not that much worse anyway, perhaps. The Maya did not shy away from human sacrifice either, and the Aztecs made an industry of it. People fought