The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture

6. “TO KNOW THE ALL": The Spectacular Esoteric City in Mexico

Nothing is more beautiful than to know the All. Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna sciendi [Great art of knowing] (1669) Plato said, “Nothing is more divine than to know everything ,” sagely and elegantly, for just as Knowledge illuminates the mind, refines the intellect and pursues universal truths, so out of love of beautiful things it quickly conceives and then gives birth to a daughter, Wisdom, the explorer of the loftiest matters, who, passing far beyond the limits of human joy, joins her own to the Angelic Choruses, and borne before the Ultimate Throne of Divinity, makes them consorts and possessors of Divine Nature. Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna sciendi I. Two Cities Over the course of the seventeenth century, a prosperous Mexico City experienced a veritable orgy of construction and renovation that rendered it indisputably spectacular in material terms. Agustín de Vetancurt remarks with awe in 1698 that more than twenty sumptuous churches and thousands of buildings had recently been constructed, that practically every street boasted houses either being built or refurbished (3:193). Scores of new monasteries, convents, and schools ringed the Zócalo. Previously low city structures reached for the sky, growing new levels, balconies, cupolas, and domes. Gilded rooftops crowned highly adorned buildings fashioned out of gray quarrystone (cantera) and contrasting bright hues of the rosy tezontle that another seventeenthSix “ TO K NOW T H E A L L” The Spectacular Esoteric City in Mexico 196 The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture century observer called “an exquisite reddish stone, a great oddity” (Maza, Ciudad 14). The Baroque esthetic had already left its grandiose mark on the Solomonic portals of the ever-evolving Metropolitan Cathedral , the luminous Baroque murals of its sacristy painted by none other than Cristóbal de Villalpando, and especially on the astounding altarpieces of the city’s churches. Baroque stage sets designed to inspire divine reveries, the reredos’ gold, polychrome, and endless involutions dazzled and interpellated spectators no less than the city’s festivals. Spectacular church altarpieces and Baroque festivals met their match in the ready supply of actual theater. Venues for theatrical performances burgeoned . The theater-crazed city, whose royal palace sported a Sala de Comedias, offered all citizens the opportunity to experience religious and secular entertainments at the public theater in the Hospital Real de Indios founded in 1638 (Maza, Ciudad 25). In the dramatic Baroque city, poetry became a performance art. Performances of abstruse, almost unintelligible Baroque compositions in poetry contests that helped anoint a Mexican literati mushroomed into major public occasions, with a lavish pageantry of their own. Weeks before the tournament, a parade far outstripping that of little Querétaro would march through the city to announce the literary competition.1 Mexico City festooned itself as if for a viceroy’s festive entry. Crowds lined the streets to gape at the long line of brilliantly clad religious and secular officials avid to be included in society’s prime cultural event. When the contest finally took place, the city’s elite—the viceroy himself often among them—mingled with poets who performed their offerings in sumptuously decorated halls replete with tables of glittering, costly prizes. The event lasted for hours, taxing even the most literarily inclined but confirming the surpassing value that colonial Hispanic subjects attached to stratospheric poetry. “What extravagance, what magnificence!” comments Carlos de Sig üenza y Góngora of a poetry contest held in conjunction with a Marian festival (Triunfo 55). The display and prestige that poetry competitions commanded speaks to the extraordinary force in late seventeenthcentury Mexico City of a body that hovers over and animates the real city of tezontle, gilded rooftops, and altarpieces. I will call that thriving , peculiar body the esoteric city and define it as an entity composed of the rarefied cultural practices of late seventeenth-century Mexican intellectuals—an entity that, like any city, has its own citizens, laws, and life. The improbable currency of the esoteric city derives from the en- “To Know the All” 197 trenched view of high culture as sublime and ennobling that Bernardo de Balbuena had compellingly articulated at the outset of the century. Baroque society, now at its dizzying, complex peak, values and promotes recondite intellectual practices all the more. Under such circumstances the esoteric, intellectual city flies high, yet, as the poetry contests suggest , it maintains an unshakable connection with materiality. The colonial esoteric city constantly interacts with the material...