Jaime de Angulo, from Indian Tales

The next morning while they were sitting around the fire eating acorn mush and rabbit ham and little round roasted balls made from the nuts of the laurel tree pounded into paste, Antelope and Bear started to argue. Bear said, “I don’t understand how Coyote could make people as something new that had never been before, since he himself and Hawk and Flint and the Ducks and all the others were already people. That’s too much for me.”

Coyote Old Man just squinted and smiled and went on eating laurel-nut balls and rabbit ham, but Antelope said, “Aaah, you don’t understand anything. He didn’t say last night that his great-grandfather’s grandfather made people, he said that Hawk complained because there were no people.”

“Well, isn’t that just what I was saying? I said that you said that Grandfather said—”

But Fox Boy interrupted, “Why don’t you listen to the stories instead of talking like two magpies?”

“Well, what does the story say then, you smart boy?”

“How can I tell myself after you two have mixed it all up?”

At that Old Man Coyote burst out laughing and almost strangled on a rabbit bone.

“That boy is clever all right,” he said. But Bear grumbled, “You are so clever yourself, Old Man, well then, tell me why you say that you made people when there were already people.”

“Because I am Coyote Old Man. I am a very old man. I am a thousand years old. I KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENED AFTER THE BEFORE and before the after!”

Bear growled, “That doesn’t make sense what you say,” but Coyote shot back, “It doesn’t make sense to YOU because you are a young man yet, Mr. Bear. You are too young to understand.”

At that, Fox Boy started to dance. He whooped and yelled and sang, “Father is too young, Father is too young.” He took Antelope by the hand and they both danced around the fire singing, “Father is too young, Father is too young.”

Old Man Coyote got up and took the little baby Quail in his arms and he joined the dance around the fire. Bear growled, “Just a bunch of kids. I’m going to hunt rabbits. Somebody has got to do something useful in this camp.”

“Wait a minute, Father, I’m going with you.”

Antelope took up her weaving material; she had commenced a new basket. Coyote was watching her. He said, “Why don’t you weave in the Quail pattern?”

“I don’t know how it goes. Do you?”

“Yes, I’ll show you how,” and old man Coyote took the basket from her. His fingers went fast, fast, fast. Pretty soon you could see all the Quail running around and around the basket, black figures on the white background.

“That’s beautiful,” said Antelope. Coyote gave her back the basket and she continued weaving, but she had to go slowly because it was a new pattern to her and she often had to stop and ask instructions from old man Coyote. Coyote was rocking the baby Quail in her cradle board.

“I’ll sing the Quail song for you.”

                  Daaabo le eeema ma a…

*     *     *     *     *

Soon they were on the trail again, they were traveling along a valley. Fox said, “Mother, do you remember the last trip through here, and how we stopped at this same village of Hawks, and then we had an argument, Grandfather Coyote, you and I?”

“No, it wasn’t here boy. It was later on the trip. You have either forgotten or you are all mixed up. Grandfather was not with us when we visited the village of the Hawks. We did not go to his house till later in the trip. But I think I know what you mean. It was after Grandfather Coyote told us that same story about the Hawk Chief of the old days that you started the argument with him and me.”

Oriole said, “Aunt Antelope, do you mean to tell me that Fox was already in the habit of arguing when he was a little boy?”

Antelope laughed, “Yes, he was always that way.”

Kilelli asked, “What was the argument about?”

“Oh, it was about how could people be people and not be people at the same time. When Grandfather Coyote said, ‘That’s the end of the tale,’ Fox said, “Why, NO, Grandfather! the story is not finished. Your great-great-grandfather stopped the fire, and then he stopped the flood, and then he got new fire from the people in the South World, and then he got the Sun so as to have light to see by. But still there are no people in the world!’ Then I said, ‘What do you mean, there are no people in the world? Isn’t Hawk people? Isn’t Dove pople? and Rat, and Flint, and all the rest?’ But he wasn’t satisfied, he kept insisting that they were people, all right, and yet they were not people.”

Tsimmu looked at Kilelli.

“What are you laughing about, you White One?”

“Nothing, nothing. Oh, well, just that the same question has always bothered me too.”

White Bead asked, “What do YOU think, you Tsimmu?”

“I? OH, I don’t think anything. I am a WOLF!”

“That’s no answer!” said Oriole.

Fox laughed.

“You can’t trap that wild owl. Eh, you, give me that baby, she is too heavy for you.” And he swung the Quail on his shoulders, astride his pack.

They went on along the valley, tras… tras… tras. Fox said, “All right, go on laughing. We will soon arrive at the village of the Flints, and then we’ll see what you say about it. Are they people, are they not people?”

Kilelli asked, “Do you mean we are coming to a village where the people are supernatural beings?”

Oriole asked, “What do YOU know about it?”

He answered, “Not so much as you do!”

Everybody laughed. Tsimmu shouted, “He wins!! Throw the bones across…”

*     *     *     *     *

Fox Boy and Oriole were sitting by the side of the lake. Oriole said, “Fox WHAT did you DO to your tail.”

“What’s the matter with it?” asked Fox in an injured tone.

“Why, it’s so ragged—and it’s getting shorter and shorter… ever since you were initiated.”

“Oh, go on with you,” said Fox, trying to bring the end of his tail to the front to look at it. He was turning and turning around. He finally got dizzy and sat down, and Oriole burst into loud laughter.

“You had better not laugh, Miss. I didn’t want to say anything about it, but your wings have been getting shorter and kind of ragged. I have been noticing it.”

“Oh, have you, little boy? Well, let me tell you, we don’t call these wings any more. That’s just an old-fashioned word. These are arms. Arms, not wings, you understand? ARMS. Say a-r-m-s.”

“I don’t want to, I DON’T WANT TO. I don’t want to be a Man; I want to be a Fox.”

“Oh, the HA-HAS again. You are reverting.”

Fox was laughing. He said, “Seriously, Oriole, why did we grow up so fast? Only yesterday, when we began our story and I started to see the world with my father, who was then a real Bear. . . . ”

Oriole interrupted. “No, you are mistaken. He was not a real Bear yet, he was only a beginning of a bear, he was a person-bear. Now he is a bearman—I mean a man-bear… I mean…”

“Oh, keep quiet. You are getting me all mixed up again.”

“No, Fox, listen to me; I will explain. The man who is telling our story, it’s his fault, he has done something wrong with the machinery of time, he has let it go too fast. You see, he was supposed to take a million years to tell our story. The poor fellow, he is too old, he gets all mixed up. He should go and take a rest in the country for a while.”

“Oh, my, my, my!” sighed Fox, “the only thing to do is to start again RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING.” Fox looked curiously at Oriole. “What do you mean, a MILLION years?”

“Why, I mean an infinity of time, just as Tsimmu was telling in his story of the creation of the world. Don’t you remember? Ten times ten times ten times ten years, molossi molossi molossi tellim piduuwi. When Cocoon Man was floating around in nothing but air and fog he waited a million years for that cloud to come near enough so he could jump on it.”

“Yes,” said Fox. “Yes, just like Marum’da, who made the world and then he went to sleep. That’s an infinity of time, but it must stop somewhere—it can’t go on forever. It must stop somewhere.”

Oriole asked, “WHY?”

Fox thought a moment then he said, “I dunno. But listen, Oriole, what’s time anyway?”

Oriole said, “Why it’s ten times ten times ten times ten years. What else do you want it to be?”

Fox said, “I dunno. I guess it’s growing old.”

Oriole said, “All right, then, some people just grow faster than others. You know that yourself. Just as some people walk faster than others; it all depends on who is looking at it.”

“Why, Oriole, you are crazy. It depends on who is walking, not on the man who is looking at the fellow who is walking.”

“No, certainly NOT. Look at that man over there walking. He seems to be just crawling along, but if you were close to him, he would be going much faster. That’s the way with the man who is telling this story. Sometimes he is closer and sometimes he is farther away, so for him that makes us go faster or slower.”

Fox said, “Oriole, you drive me crazy. Now I don’t know whether I am standing on my head or my feet. It’s like that time when we first met you and your father.”

“Listen Fox, it is not I who started this idea that there was a man telling this story, it was you. For all we know, there is no such man.”

“Of course, there is not. I invented him.”

“That doesn’t prove anything. Marum’da invented the people, and they existed whether he liked it or not. Maybe you invented the man who is telling this story, so now he exists. It’s too bad, but now you can’t get rid of him.”

“Yes, I will. I’ll destroy him the way Marum’da did the people.”

“Then you know what will happen Mister? You won’t exist any more, because he is the one who is telling the story.”

“Oh, oh, oh, stop, Oriole!” Fox was holding his head in both hands. Then he laughed as he pulled Oriole to her feet and they both ran down the hill.

Jaime de Angulo, from the Taos Papers, ed. Gui de Angulo

Monday Morning [1924].

Anyway, here it is, all over this region of Arizona and New Mexico, a highly developed sense of art, and it is expressed in everything; in the designs of blankets, in ceremonies, in dress, there is color, there is form, there is pattern. All of the psychological stuff, I mean that mess of material that comes from all the outer world and is there cooking, par-boiling, simmering the bottom of their souls, all that stuff here seems to get projected once more into the outer world, in the shape of pattern, of form, of design, in everything, in dancing and in ritual, in weaving, in pottery. —It seems almost as if these people could not stand the existence in their souls of the psychological reflection of the outer biological world . . . something too strong, too powerful, would make you vomit, have to conjure it, to exorcise it, get it out, “fix” it in pattern, in outer form, —there it still lives, it’s not dead, it lives for anyone who can understand the heart, not with the eyes, the pattern on the blanket, or in the ritual, it lives for him, but it is not dangerous any longer.

That’s how they impress me, and I think this is true not only of the Pueblos, of the true Pueblos, but also of the Hopi (who live in pueblos also, and have all the culture of the Pueblo, but are Shoshonean by language) and also of the roaming Navajo and Apache who are Athapascan by language.

Now most of this country is the picturesque Grand Canyon type of landscape, chuck full of colour and form, where erosion has produced grotesque monstrous shapes everywhere, where instead of the multitudinous variety of trees, shrubs and hillocks, valleys with woods and streams and boulders—indeed of that nature broken into an infinity of small pieces, there are immense spaces, desert, no trees, no shrubs even, but the result of erosion in stratified rocks, in violent colours, definite lines, many parallels, many perpendiculars, other angles also, but always well defined, a merciless sunlight and sharp shadows from the luminous to utter black. Our artists try to paint it, they can’t, they are too subtle, they know their art too well, they see too many colors, too many shades—worse, they try to imitate the Indians but they don’t understand fear, they are afraid of material dangers, of snarling dogs, of a rushing train, of the flu, of their boss or their wife, but they are not afraid of the spirit that walks silently in the shimmer of the sunlight, and so they can’t paint the desert. You can’t paint the desert or even talk about it, you can only put it in a blanket design, and the Navajo know the desert better than the rest and their designs are fierce and uncompromising—that’s why Lawrence (and Mabel too) don’t like Navajo rugs. Lawrence is jealous of everything that is wild and untamed and strong. He thinks he has a copyright on it. Mabel both because she is under his influence and because she has identified herself with these Taos Indians, who are the least wild, the most bourgeois of all.

Well, to come back to my sheep, I mean: Is it perhaps that this kind of geography (high plateau, dry, sand, light, etc. etc.) is responsible for the external form, I mean rather for the aspect of the form into which these people had to exorcise, to fixate, to crystallize and externalize their inner feelings? I don’t think much of the sort of explanation that is always trying to reduce psychology to a question of climate and economics. But that factor must also be remembered.

And now I think of the California Indians. (I speak of the Achumawi especially). Have they externalized their inner feelings? They have no pottery, no blankets, no houses, nothing to put pattern into, not even dances or ceremonials. They go around naked (I paint them as they were before ’49); all they have is a piece of flint for a knife and a bow and arrows. They do not till the soil. They just collect what the soil grows: roots, bulbs, acorns, pine-nuts—and whatever is an animal, from worms to bears—they eat anything, and almost raw. Why, they are hardly differentiated from the trees and the brushes and the deer and the antelope and the rain and the snow and everything that is Nature. Where is the line of demarcation between a juniper tree and an Achumawi Indian? What’s the difference? Not much. But there is a hell of a lot of difference between a Taos Indian and the corn he has planted and raised! He already controls nature (or tries to control it)—he is no longer nature itself, like the Achumawi Indian. The Achumawi (especially he who is more or less of a “doctor,” who has “power”) is in constant relation with the living part, the “spirit” part of every tree, every rock, every cloud, every shrub, every toad, and every deer who lives around. I doubt very much whether they have any image inside of them, in their souls, I mean. So he is afraid of them and of their possible malignancy (just as he is afraid of every other Achumawi Indian, or any Indian), he is afraid of them, and tries to keep them well disposed and on good terms of intercourse, he even feels them as rather weird and dangerous and too powerful (like electricity with us); but he is not so damn scared, blue scared of them and their inside image (maybe just because he has no inside image) that he must needs exorcise them out into objective reality. The Pueblo Indian takes everything that is aweful, terrible, powerful in nature, Sun, Moon, Earth, pollen and flower, and he corrals it into a ceremony, or a pattern, now he doesn’t have to deal with it anymore at every moment of his life, like the Achumawi, now he can become a gentleman, safe and sane.

"Incantation XXXII: A Worm in the Tooth, a Flaming Worm" Ritual of the Bacabs: A Book of Mayan Incantations, trans. Edgar Garcia

         rash noxious come claim now thy game

         harsh to become chained to cheating so become

                           quick to speak

                           scarlet speak sable speak kernel speak

say it man how brazen thy purport to puncture corely the splash fabacea

                                                      the chimpy shrub

                                                      the coffee firebush

                                                      the blackshelled conch and

                                                      the calyx sky-knurl

                                                      bedstraw of flint quartz

to take then the second to come back to split with lip-axe spit analysis

                                             the symbol for beaks

                                    for instruments of copper

                                    speech are brackish roselle

                                    and the roselle tinged rose-peach

and each to each now bail back to no climax

                                    caterpillars masticating man

                                                               his mom

                                                               and his dad

                  drizzled from the stamen

                  to a chunk of bark illumed

just like that stretch of earth had been painted by a brush

dipped in the night sky’s reddest looming

                           constellation painted

                                             bark of our mangrove

                                             red gumbo limbo

                                             dogwood and

                                             citharexylum

                           that painted also

                                             the sunburnt strips of the gumbo limbo and

                                             the blazing mohawk of the chestnut woodpecker

                                                                        caught like a symbol

                                                                        striking at the bark

                                                               where my head-feathers redden

Waiting I perch in wait to take the fire

                                             crystalline to my patient

                                                               who too coaxes

                                    with a figure constructed

         by my speech of scarlet speak sable speak and kernel speak

                                    but which wood is of this the patient’s?

                                             bark of clear speech of

                                             scarlet gumbo limbo

                                             sable gumbo limbo

                                             kernel of the gumbo limbo

                                    and of birds which to this patient belong?

                                             woodpecker of clear ontic of

                                             scarlet collision

                                             sable collision

                                             kernel of colliding bird-heads against the bark

                                            

                                    libations set upon the furnace

                                             clear liquid

                                             my stone scarlet

                                             my stone sable

                                             my kernel-stone furnace

                                                      into which I throw your eye

                                                      the steam becomes my speech

                                             quick to speak

                                             scarlet speak sable speak kernel speak

                                    in flint-quartz cast be you

                                             scarlet flint sable flint kernel flint

                                   

                                    be you cast into a clear conch

                                             scarlet conch sable conch kernel conch

                                    be thus lichen upon the firm heartwood

                                             of the dogwood its

                                             scarlet heartwood

                                             sable heartwood

                                             kernel heartwood

                                    be thus upon the furnace

                                             clear liquid

                                             my stone scarlet

                                             my stone sable

                                             my kernel-stone furnace

                                    be thus my acacia needle-bush

                                    lift thus frantic this fire

into which I throw your eye and feed lunatic speech in-

         to your tooth tooth tooth

José Pacheco, "A Chegada de Lampião no Inferno"

Glauber Rocha, "Antonio das Mortes" (1969)

Augusto de Campos, "Concrete Poetry: A Manifesto," trans. John Tolman

——concrete poetry begins by assuming a total responsibility before language: accepting the premise of the historical idiom as the indispensible nucleus of communication, it refuses to absorb words as mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality, without history——taboo-tombs in which convention insists on burying the idea.

——the concrete poet does not turn away from words, he does not glance at them obliquely: he goes directly to their center, in order to live and vivify their facticity.

——the concrete poet sees the word in itself——a magnetic field of possibilities——like a dynamic object, a live cell, a complete organism, with psycho-physico-chemical properties, touch antennae circulation heart: live.

——far from attempting to evade reality or to deceive it, concrete poetry is against self-debilitating introspection and simpleton simplistic realism. It intends to place itself before things, open, in a position of absolute realism.

——the old formal syllogistic-discursive foundation, strongly shaken at the beginning of the century, has served again as a prop for the ruins of a compromised poetic, an anachronistic hybrid with an atomic heart and a medieval cuirass.

——against perspectival syntactic organization where words sit like “corpses at a banquet,” concrete poetry offers a new sense of structure, capable of capturing without loss or regression the contemporaneous essence of poeticizable experience.

——mallarmé (un coup de dés——1897), joyce (finnegans wake), pound (cantos, ideogram), cummings, and on a secondary plane, Apollinaire (calligrammes) and the experimental attempts of the futurists-dadaists are at the root of the new poetic procedure which tends to impose itself on a conventional organization whose formal unity is verse (even free-).

——the concrete poem or ideogram becomes a relational field of functions.

——the poetic nucleus is no longer placed in evidence by the successive and linear chaining of verses but by a system of relationships and equilibriums between all parts of the poem.

——graphic-phonetic functions-relations (“factors of proximity and likeness”) and the substantive use of space as an element of composition maintain a simultaneous dialectic of eye and voice, which, allied with the ideogrammatic synthesis of meaning, creates a sentient “verbivocovisual” totality. In this way words and experience are juxtaposed in a tight phenomenological unit impossible before.

——CONRETE POETRY: TENSION OF THING-WORDS IN SPACE-TIME

“The Lacondón Song of the Jaguar,” dictated by Mateo García to Phillip and Mary Baer, trans. Edgar Garcia

my backpaws I lift and let fall

my forepaws I lift and bring down that

which always stirs my tail

to hear from far off your voice coming this way

almost stupefying

I look for and find myself a fallen tree

to stoop over into sleep

its strips merge into my hide

its strips merge into my forepaws

its strips merge into my ears

Simon Ortiz, "Out of the Canyon near Two Turkey Ruin"

We walked up towards the sky.
From some millionth year to the present.
Cold rock under our feet
and all around us.
You breathe the same wind which is kin to sky.


Croak. Off the stone cliffs.
Crow. Black rag.
"Do you think I'm pretty?" asked Crow.
"You think too much," said Coyote.


Look back
down into the canyon, horses, winter cottonwoods,
silver stream, across the canyon, shadows,
red cliffs and white snow.


Crow slips past the edge of the canyon,
all the way into the sky.
"I wish I wasn't so scorned," said Coyote.
"You wish too much," said Crow.


Talk about life
all the sun and blue sky time
and smile.

Walter Mignolo, "Signs and their Transmission: The Question of the Book in the New World"

This long detour through the house of words leads me to believe that a more accurate translation of amoxtli would be biblos, papyrus, liber, or boc, rather than “book” or “libro,” as shown through a closer look at some of the Aztec words related to amoxtli:

Amoxcluiloa, whose roots are amoxtli and icuiloa, “to paint,” “to inscribe something;”

Amoxcalli, whose roots are amoxtli and calli, “house,” “room;”

Amoxitoa/amoxpoa, both of which have as their roots amoxtli; itoa means means “to say” or “to narrate something by heart;” and poa means “to tell,” to “summarize a process,” “to count.”

The translation of amoxitoa/amoxpoa, offered by Simeon as “lire un livre” (to read a book), is quite misleading if it is understood either in the sense of “to go over a written page with the eyes” or “to pronounce out loud what is written,” for the romance words “lire” or “leer” (to read) come from the Latin legere meaning “to collect” (lectio, a gathering, a collecting). The sense of “collecting is absent from the Nahuatl word designating the “same” activity, and the emphasis on “telling or narrating what has been inscribed or painted on a solid surface made out of amoxtli.” The difference is not trivial. It gives us a better understanding of the idea of the sign carriers in societies with alternative literacies.[1]

Now it is possible to attempt a definition of “book” which, contrary to that of “sign,” will be culture-specific: (a) a solid surface is a book as an object to the degree to which it is the sign carrier for some kind of graphic semiotic interaction; (b) a book as an object is also a book as a text to the degree to which it belongs to a specific stage in the development of writing (“pure writing,” according to Diringer’s classification) and the members of a given culture represent the system of graphic semiotic interaction in such a way that it attributes to the sign carrier (the book as an object) high and decisive functions (theological and epistemological) in their own organization.

According to this definition, the book as text implies “pure” writing, although “pure writing” does not necessarily imply the idea of the book. The necessary connections are founded in the presuppositions underlying cultural expression. A rereading of the seminal chapter by Curtius on “The Book as Symbol” (in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages), will show that he devotes a great deal of time to metaphors about writing; and he seems to assume that they are plain and simple synonyms of metaphors for the book.

Be that as it may, some example needs to be drawn from Curtius in order to back up our definition of the book as text. In 1948 Curtius called attention to the amount and the significance of the images that different cultures had constructed to represent their ideas about writing and the book. He began his survey with the Greeks, noting that they did not have any “idea of the sacredness of the book, as there is no privileged priestly caste of scribes.” What is more, one can even find a disparagement of writing in Plato. There is the familiar last part of Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates attempts to convince Phaedrus that writing is not an aid to memory and learning but, to the contrary, can only “awaken reminiscences” without replacing the true discourse lying in the psyche of the wise man, which must be transmitted through oral interactions. It should be emphasized that Socrates is mainly concerned with “writing” in its relationship to knowledge and transmission, but not with the “book.” If one thinks of the rich vocabulary associated with graphic semiotic interactions inherited from the Greeks and also remembers that the idea of the sacred book was alien to them, for they were more concerned with “writing” that with the “book,” it should again be concluded that to translate “biblos” as “book” implies imposing our meaning of what a book is upon theirs, rather than fully understanding their meaning of “biblos.” This observation, amounting to the general problem of “fusion of horizon” or “fusion of cultural expressions,” is also valid in the case where amoxtli is translated as “book.”

Contrary to the corrupted nature of writing in which Plato represented graphic semiotic interactions, nothing is found but the utmost praise (and with God as the archetypal writer) in Christianity. In this form of representation, the tongue becomes synonymous with the hand[2] and the Universe with the Book. While Socrates anchors knowledge in the psyche and conveys it through the oral transmission of signs, Christianity secures knowledge in the Book and conveys it through the graphic transmission of signs. One could surmise that “the idea of the book” may have entered into the system of representation of graphic semiotic interaction at the point when “writing” gained its autonomy from orality and the “book” replaced the “person” as a receptacle and a source of knowledge. It is quite comprehensible that when the word was detached from its oral source (the body), it became attached to the invisible body and to the silent voice of God, which cannot be heard but can be read in the Holy Book. However, the theological view of writing developed by Christianity and the epistemological view of knowledge provided by Socrates/Plato (where God is not only the archetype of the writer but also the archetype of wisdom) joined in the Middle Ages (Le Goff 1957: 90-97; Glennison 1988: 115-163) and continued into the Renaissance. Nature is the book that God wrote, and to know nature is the best way to know God. Curtius quotes a telling passage from Fray Luis de Granada’s Símbolo de la fé, in which Granada uses the expression “to think philosophically in this great book of earthly creatures” to mean that because God put us in front of the “marvelous book of the entire universe” we must read the creatures as live letters and thus, through them, come to know the excellence of their Creator.

Christianity is not, of course, the only religion having a holy book or scriptures (take, e.g., the Koran, or the Torah). But it shares with these others the disequilibrium of power between the religions that possess the Book and those that do not. What is at stake here is the role played by “the book as a text” during the process of colonization carried on by literate societies. As a matter of fact, the role of the book in our understanding of the colonial period in the New World may not have been entirely exploited. One could, perhaps, profit by taking an example from J. Goody as an analogy. To practice the Asante religion, observes Goody, you have to be Asante. Due to the lack of written narrative that traces the border between the internal and the external space, between what is prescribed and permitted and what is proscribed and forbidden, the “idea” attached to the Asante religion varies considerably over time. Religions founded on alphabetic writing and the corresponding idea of the book are, concludes Goody, “generally religions of conversion, not simply religions of birth. You can spread them, like jam. And you can persuade or force people to give up one set of beliefs and practices and take up another set” (Goody 1986: 5). What is important here is not the “content” of the Book but rather the very existence of the object in which a set of regulations and metaphors were inscribed, giving to it the special status of Truth and Wisdom… Speaking, writing, and sign carriers, as well as their conceptualization, constitute one set of relations or network in which colonization took place. Thus, the spread of Western literacy linked to the idea of the book was also linked to the appropriation and defense of cultural territories, of a physical space loaded with meaning. The Western book became a symbol of the letter, in such a way that writing was mainly conceived in terms of the sign carriers: paper and the book, and the practices associated with reading and writing more and more came to be conceived in terms of the sign carrier; reading the word became increasingly detached from “reading the world,” as the tlamatinime would have preferred to say... Printed books facilitated the dissemination and reproduction of knowledge and replaced, in the New World, the practice of the tlacuilo and the function of the amoxli, thus contributing to the colonization of languages.

---

[1] I cannot resist the temptation to recall that, according to Curtius ([1948] 1973: 313), exarare (to plough up) could also mean “to write,” which, on the one hand, explains the comparisons between “book” and “field” and, on the other, the fact that legere is used in noncultivated Latin in the sense of “gathering and collecting.”

[2] “Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribentis” (My tongue is the pen of a ready writer) (Curtius [1948], 1973 p. 311).