playgrounds, dying, and other important things

In El Laberinto De La Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), Octavio Paz writes:

“Para el habitante de Nueva York, París, o Londres, la muerte es la palabra que jamás se pronuncia porque quema los labios. El mexicano, en cambia, la frecuenta, la burla...la festeja, es uno de sus juguetes favoritos y su amor más permanente.”

 "For the habitant of New York, Paris, or London, death is the word they never pronounce because it burns their lips. The Mexican, on the other hand, frequents it, jokes about it...celebrates it; it's one of his favorite toys and his most permanent love."

I believe Paz's assertion is proven by the playgrounds in Mexico City. Observe!

1. Climbing wall coated in [very slippery] moss and surrounded by mud
2. Treacherous, foot-trapping gaps between bricks
3. Partial railing
4. Flimsy bridge that a child's shoe can easily fit through (Selma figured that out for us)
5. Log that appears to be a stable handhold but actually ROLLS if you put pressure on it, leaving you the choice of falling in the mud or straddling the metal bridge (credit for that discovery goes to Malachi)
6. Thankfully, Malachi didn't discover the rusty iron nails sticking out of said log

But when you're not too preoccupied with safety, there are a plethora of ways to have fun! Like,


renting orange crates and sliding down steep concrete slopes,


 

climbing the trunks of colossal fallen trees,
 

 

finding creative ways to use the exercise equipment you're too short for,
 





 and sliding hand-in-hand into an enormous puddle (turning the heads of several Boy Scout troop leaders in the process).

 

Moral of the story: playgrounds that risk death are WAY more exciting than sterile plastic playscapes!

 

In all seriousness, though, the cultural acceptance and even embrace of death was one of the first things that drew my attention to Mexico. A major holiday, Día De Los Muertos (The Day of the Dead), is dedicated to remembering those who have died. My friends, both named Gabi, described the keeping of Día De Los Muertos to me as we strolled through Zona Rosa. Graves are festooned with flowers, altars with photographs of loved ones are set up in homes, and a special bread flavored with petals is baked and eaten. The holiday is not a day of mourning; it is a day of celebration.

 

Celebrating death is foreign concept to me. Ocatvio Paz was right when he said that the word “death” seems to burn lips in the west. Maybe our prosperity has given us too much to live for, and we are afraid of losing what we have. “La vida nos ha curado de espanto” (life has cured us of terror), Paz writes for the beleaguered Mexican. Then again, a worshipper of Santa Muerte (Saint Death) from the barrio of Tepito told David Lida that “to venerate death means that you adore life, because death is the only thing that can take life away from you.”

Día De Los Muertos and Santa Muerte herself come from prehispanic Mexica tradition. The Aztecs’ relationship with death was not love and not hatred; it was a dark infatuation.

La Catedral Metropolitana

 

La Catedral Metropolitana de México, consecrated in 1656, is built on top of the ruins of an Aztec temple. A week from yesterday, Naomi and I walked into La Catedral. (Every entrance but one was blocked off by security in preparation for a presidential address in the nearby old parliament building). Two windows of glass in the cathedral’s main plaza open to the subterranean remains of the temple. Seared in my memory is the image of two fossilized human skulls, embedded in the crumbling, golden-brown temple stones. Shoots of green sprout out through the skulls’ mouths, a strange mezcla (mix) of life and death. Those skulls are the remains of human sacrifice victims. For the Aztecs, death through sacrifice was necessary to appease the gods and maintain order in the universe – salud cósmica, Paz calls it.

The veneration of death has carried over into modern-day Mexico, not only in Día De Los Muertos but also in literal worship of Santa Muerte. In First Stop in the Twenty-First Century, David Lida describes a scene around the corner from the Tepito market:

“On the first day of each month the believers arrive en masse, setting plaster statues of Santa Muerte on tables or atop squares of fabric on the sidewalk. Hundreds of visitors walk around and leave treats for the saint at these makeshift altars - chocolate coins, fake currency, cigars, shots of rum, Barbie dolls. Others walk around with spray cans of cheap perfume, with which they literally douse the figurines. As the afternoon passes, the street becomes increasingly crowded. By nightfall when the prayers are chanted – ‘I come toward you prostrate, so that you will meet my needs; thank you for the favors I’ve received’ – there will be about five thousand people, blocking traffic on the surrounding streets…This hybrid of idol worship is a hybrid of Mexican popular culture with official Catholic dogma.”

Worship of a saint called Death, a grinning skeleton in a habit and a halo, strikes me as eerie. Maybe it makes you feel the same. How, then, does it make you feel to think that you might yourself be a worshipper of death?

Santa Muerte

 

“El culto a la vida, si de verdad es profundo y total, es también culto a la muerte,” writes Paz. “Es inútil excluir a la muerte de nuestras representaciones, de nuestras palabras, de nuestras ideas, porque ella acabará por suprimirnos a todos y en primer término a los que viven ignorándola o fingiendo que la ignoran.” The cult of life, if it is truly deep and complete, is also the cult of death. It’s useless to exclude death from our representations, our words, our ideas, because she will eventually remove us all, and first of all those who lived ignoring or pretending to ignore her.

When we live in denial of our own temporality, we are feeding an insatiable void. We our pouring our breath down the hollow ribcage of a cold, dry, loveless thing. Worshipping life – physical existence – for the sake of its own pleasure turns us into worshippers of Santa Muerte, even if the altar we have built to her is in front of our computers or in our hearts instead of in Tepito.

 

When I strolled through the streets of La Roma or stood on the apartment roof to watch the morning sun spread over Mexico City, I took it all in with greedy eyes. I tried to extract every last drop of beauty from the world around me and stuff it into my soul. But I was never satisfied. The streets blurred together in my memory; the sunrise was always too short. My appetite for life devoured every living thing it its pathway, including my joy.

 

The curious thing about life is that it will never be sweet until you hold it loosely and love it less than you love the One who made it beautiful.

 

Sunrise from the roof - Psalm 19