“The Voladores came from over there,” she said, looking off to the east, where the gulf was faintly visible in the far distance, a wire-thin glint of the horizon. (Pg. 246 Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Philip Santos) 1a
Where is the “east” referred to in this extract? Is this “east” from which they came in the Gulf of Mexico? Could it be Europe?
The world that belongs to Hispanic culture is one filled with spirituality. The literature of Latin culture contains many references to folktales, apparitions of holy virgins, dreams, witch doctors and magical realism. Readers of Hispanic literature who are unfamiliar with Hispanic culture might get the impression that their way of life is marked by superstition and incongruity. People need to view these things in their correct cultural context. Mysticism plays a big part in Latin American culture. But it’s existence is certainly not limited to Latin America. It exists in all cultures. Indeed, when talking about mysticism, we find remarkable similarities to other cultures in this field. The whereabouts of this mystical east in Santos’s book can only be found in the light of examining those other traditions. We want to analyze the mystical experiences that are found in Hispanic literature and show some similarities that exist between mysticism found in both the Hispanic and non-Hispanic world. Themes to be explored here include the conception of time and space, initiation, and the mysteries of the self. The primary focus will be on Rivera’s book entitled ..y no se lo trago la tierra and Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos.
Before moving on it would be appropriate to say a few brief words on mysticism in general. Mysticism comes from a Greek word meaning mystery. A mystical experience is an incident in which a person experiences something that is beyond what is defined as the unordinary. In some cultures there is no word for what we call mysticism because it is a common experience in that culture. Some cultures find mystical experiences so weird that people have to hide their practices from the public eye. 2a
Tomas Rivera’s ..y no se lo trago la tierra can be called the vanguard of Hispanic mystical literature. That is because the book is so deep in structure and detail. Rivera’s book is about a boy who lives among migrant workers. They live a harsh life where they have to travel all their lives to find work. They have no place to call there home. Furthermore the characters in the story seem to have no memory of their selves. The book would mention a story of a family tragedy and then move on to another tragic story of another family. Rivera called the time when all this took place “the lost year.” Has their constant migration caused them to forget their past? No one significant in the book even has a name as if they are unimportant. That includes the main character. Anyways, the main character of the book is a boy who gets into trouble and alienates himself from his community (if only for a short period of time.) At one point he hides under the house where he makes a self-discovery and becomes enlightened. The outward meaning of this enlightenment consists of his remembrance of the “lost year.” The esoteric meaning is more mysterious: it is a realization of himself and his place in society. The boy reminds one of the Buddha’s life stories in that both encountered suffering and then went on a spiritual quest in which they became enlightened about their true selves. For the boy, it was an initiation into gnosis.
Remembrance as a means for mystical voyage is also found in the Islamic world in the practice of Sufism. In Islam the fall of man is considered to be his forgetfulness. Muslims and especially the Sufis do practices called dhirk in which they invoke God to try to close the barrier separating man from God. The more one remembers God is the one considered to be closest to him. The Sufis use the dhikr to obtain mystical union with God. We will talk more about Sufism later.
More must be said about the boy hiding underneath the house. The darkness underneath reflects eternity. It is under the house where the boy finds comfort. The dirt the boy is emerged in symbolizes primordiality and the mortality of man. The enlightenment that the boy received in this event represents is very significant because it reflects a spiritual initiation known to many cultures. It was an initiation into higher levels of being through the use of darkness. Contrary to much misunderstanding, darkness is not always a symbol of ignorance or evil. Darkness has been understood by many spiritual traditions as marking an important change that takes place in a person.1 It is said that every change of state from one cycle to another can take place only though darkness. The Eleusinian mysteries represented darkness as a symbol of grain. Alchemists represented darkness by the color black, which they said, marked the beginning of the “great work.” Also the Christian mystics called it the “dark night of the soul”- the being in its ascent to higher spiritual states. In Rivera’s book, the hiding underneath the house represents that same initiation seen in those other traditions. Only by being submerged in the darkness was the boy able to make the ascent into gnosis.
There was something else significant about this event. The characters in the story reflect all people who encounter those individuals who have become enlightened through mystical experience. They are not seen by the unenlightened as sane people. On the contrary, they are seen as lunatics and demons. They say things and act in ways no one can understand. One recalls the reaction of the Muslim community to Al Halaaj when he uttered the words “ana al haqq”(I am God) He was killed by the people and his body mutilated. Everyone already knows the story of Jesus by heart. When the people found out something unusual was under the house children started throwing rocks at it. When the boy decided to emerge from the house everyone was surprised. One lady ironically said, “That Poor family. First the mother and now him. He must be loosing his mind. He has lost track of the years.”2 However as we seen it was under the house that the boy finally “remembered.” He became enlightened. It was everyone else who was unenlightened.
The concept of time and space is a very distinguishing element in Rivera’s book. Each chapter of the book has one story side by side with another story. Events that take place in the book are cut up and mashed together with other events that have no relation. There isn’t a straight line that connects every thing in chorological order. We also cannot tell exactly where the events are. The characters in the book are migrant workers who don’t have a place to call their own. They make their living by traveling and looking for the next field to cultivate. In one part of the book two characters talk about the state of Utah. One of them tells his disinterest in going there because,” because we don’t believe there is such a state.” When asked where it is the other character replies, “Well, there are so many states….Well, we’ve never been there before but I hear that it is somewhere near Japan.” 3 Rivera puts a bolder in front of you and forces you to think out side the three-dimensional world of space-time continuum.
Rivera’s aesthetical treatment of time makes sense only when it is realized that all the different events mentioned in the book are, to use Rivera’s term, part of the boy’s “ritual of remembrance.” It is the boy’s version of gnosis. For the Gnostic, time is understood and suffered as a fatality for all the unenlightened beings. People feel the crushing weight of its destiny. Liberation from time is the only way towards salvation, which can only take place beyond all power of time. Therefore, time needs to be broken up through revelation or gnosis. It is by this that man “recovers and ontological state given once and for all.. his true being which time has not effected.” 4
We see that process of gnosis happen all throughout the book. All the events happen as if they are happening at once. The reason why all the events don’t flow in chronological order is because for the boy, who is under the house receiving revelation, they are not! He is standing outside of time. The gnosis he received broke up his normal sense of understanding time.
It would be inappropriate not to mention Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation when talking about concepts of time and space in Hispanic literature. The author, John Phillip Santos, does not take the reader through a gnostic journey like that of the boy in Rivera’s book. However it takes you on a similar journey into the world of Hispanic culture with all its oddities that can be appreciated by students of religion and spirituality. Also we see similar aesthetics like that of Rivera’s ritual of remembrance.
Places Left Unfinished is about a man (same name as the author’s) who makes an investigation into the mysterious suicide of his grandfather. He does so starting from the notion that history can be known by searching through historical records in a context of cause-effect relationship paradigm of time. He does so in vane for the families he investigates seem to forget real easily. John Santos gives the impression that Hispanics are forgetful by temperament when he asks, “How is it that Jews who lived in diaspora for so long were able to keep a strong history alive but we are unable to?” The question Santos raised turns the investigation into something deeper; an inquiry into his identity as a Hispanic. Santos mentions all the people who built up the Hispanic heritage from the Spaniards, Indians, and people seemingly far out there like the Jews and Muslims. However those people are just part of the physical make up of the Hispanic race. We shall see later according to Santos, their heritage goes even beyond this. The identity as a Hispanic is indeed a great mystery. “To be Mexican American, Chicano, is to be further removed from those origins. As a raza, a ‘nation,’ we are a Diaspora within a Diapora.”5
To sum things up, Santos learns that Hispanic, unlike the Jews and other peoples, don’t need a historical paradigm of time to understand their identities as Hispanic people. Those things miss the fine point. Santos mentions the circular paradigm of time that the first inhabitants of Mexico had. Things have happened, happen, and will happen again. Likewise in Rivera’s book, people will work, travel, and so on infinity. Their identity as Hispanics does not lie in such foolishness. It lies in the very world they live in with all it’s mystery and grandeur.
It is imperative to talk about the self when talking about the subject of mysticism. Indeed, the self is a great mystery that few people are able to understand. Understanding the self is considered the main aspect of all mystical traditions. We cannot do justice to Rivera without reading the first and last chapter of his book. The mystery of the self that Rivera wants to reveal to us is the notion that we have two selves. Rivera tells us that this was apart of the Boy’s initiation. “He realized that he had called himself. And thus the lost year began.”6 Then at the very end of the book when the boy leaves from under the house he climbs a tree. When he gets to the top he, “raised one arm and waved it back and forth so that the other could see he knew he was there.”7
Again, we have something to relate to other traditions. The Sufi mystic Suhawardi explained that every person has a guardian angel in the angelic world. According to him, before he was born, man had an existence in this angelic world but his existence there was cut in half. The other half got transported to the Earth where we live now. The reason why the soul is unhappy on earth is because it wants this “alter ego.” People can only obtain happiness by becoming again unified with their angelic prototypes in the other world.
This original homeland from which we came from has been referred to in Sufi literature as Yemen. The country of Yemen is believed to be where God gave Moses the 10 commandments. Hence, Muslim authors identified it with revelation and wisdom. Yemen literally means “right hand.” When one faces north, Yemen is on your right. The country is the symbol of the “ orient of the lights”, that place in the “east” where all true knowledge comes from. 8
We have now identified the mystical east that was referred to in Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. It is the same east that the Sufis call Yemen. It is also called the Inframundo by the Aztecs. This is not an actual place on earth, but another world where all spiritual knowledge comes from. It would not make any sense for the east identified by the spiritual teacher in Santos book to be a physical east. Nor have the Sufis called it to be a physical place. It is the place from which we come from and which we want to return to.
Santos gave us an important clue to unlock the mystery. In his book he made constant reference to his aunt Uela. She was identified in the book as belonging to the Rosicrucians (The order of the Rosy Cross), a mystical tradition where people seek for esoteric knowledge. Aunt Uela was the most mysterious character in the book because she possessed things that her own family was not aloud to know. The founder of the order, Christian Rosenkreutz was said to have directed his adepts to “go to Yemen” in order to achieve knowledge. There are some traditions that said he went to the actual country of Yemen at the end of his life. 9
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End Notes
1. Guenon, Rene. The Crisis of the Modern World. New York:
Sohpia Perennis, 2001. Pg.18.
2. Rivera, Tomas. ..y no se lo trago la tierra. Texas:
Arte Publico Press, 1992. Pg.152
3. ibid. Pg.91
4. Campbell Joseph. Gnosis and time. Chicago
Pantheon books, 1957.
See essay in book entitled “Being and Time” by Henri-Charles Puech.
Pg. 66
5. Santos, John Philips. Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. New York:
Viking Press, 1999. Pg. 25
6. Rivera, Tomas. ..y no se lo trago la tierra. Texas:
Arte Publico Press, 1992. Pg. 83
7. ibid Pg. 152
8. Nasr, Sayeed Hussain. Three Muslim Sages. New York:
Caravan Books,1963 Pg. 74
9. ibid Pg. 74
1a. The Valadores are mythical figures in Aztec belief. They were Indians who flew around freely in the sky.
2a. In some cultures, what is called ‘mysticism’ is considered a science like Sufism for example. While that notion is questionable, there still are some similarities between Sufism specifically and science defined in the west. For example, the experiences in Sufism are repeatable and thus higher learned people can test others on how far they have come. Sufism also has its novices and experts like any other discipline.