Savage Disquisition (April 17/06)
A fair to middling Monday morning, a clench of crows crackling in the tree outside my bedroom window. An aviary black as death and twice as final. Last night, scalloped in bed linen and gander, I began reading Homero Aridjis’ 1492, The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile. A coterie of whores and beggars, savages and dwarfs, innkeepers, penitents, mystics and the inclemency of the Christian Inquisition, a Spanish Inferno that would have shuddered Sancho and Don Quixote. Had cocaine been a staple victual in the fifteenth century, things might have been different, whores become kings, beggars become innkeepers, and penitents become agnostics. As it was, the Christian brethren held forth with their savage butchery, lopping off topknots and skullcaps with the dissever of the pietistic broad sword. Octavio Paz and Juan Carlos Onetti taught me that life, all life, is meaningful, that a beggar is a king and a prostitute a lady in waiting, that life is the gift of humanity, not a trinity of love, hate and savage disquisition.
A fair to middling Monday morning, a clench of crows crackling in the tree outside my bedroom window. An aviary black as death and twice as final. Last night, scalloped in bed linen and gander, I began reading Homero Aridjis’ 1492, The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile. A coterie of whores and beggars, savages and dwarfs, innkeepers, penitents, mystics and the inclemency of the Christian Inquisition, a Spanish Inferno that would have shuddered Sancho and Don Quixote. Had cocaine been a staple victual in the fifteenth century, things might have been different, whores become kings, beggars become innkeepers, and penitents become agnostics. As it was, the Christian brethren held forth with their savage butchery, lopping off topknots and skullcaps with the dissever of the pietistic broad sword. Octavio Paz and Juan Carlos Onetti taught me that life, all life, is meaningful, that a beggar is a king and a prostitute a lady in waiting, that life is the gift of humanity, not a trinity of love, hate and savage disquisition.
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