In the Garden of the Bridehouse

Notes, About the Author

67 Notes In the Garden of the Bridehouse  By allowing the “butterflies of song” to be born in himself, the Nahuatl wise man began to express “that which is true on earth.” And the painter, “the artist of the black and the red”; the sculptor, carver of the signs that measured time and of the images of gods and myths; all of the philosophers, musicians, architects, and astronomers sought the same thing—their own truth and that of the universe. Nahuatl philosophic thought thus revolved around about an aesthetic conception of the universe and life, for art “made things divine,” and only the divine was true. To know the truth was to understand the hidden meaning of things through “flower and song,” a power emanating from the deified heart. —Miguel León-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture Self-Portrait as Your Voice, Trying to Stop an Echo the vulnerability of precious things From Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace. The Gospel of Ometéotl, the Brown Adam Miguel León-Portilla, in his Aztec Thought and Culture, describes the deity Ometéotl. Ometéotl, in its manifestations, as the Lord and Lady of duality, is both feminine and masculine at once. In its feminine manifestation, Omecíhuatl, the Lord and Lady extend out into the various other deities of the Mexica pantheon. León-Portilla describes Ometéotl as inhabiting the garden Omeyocan, the land of duality. Ometéotl is duality as singularity, the two that is one (2:1). He also describes Ometéotl as appearing from a lake of glass as a creature of a single torso, male and female incomplete and intertwined. His words describe the deity as bouncing around “like a sparrow” and in an infinite embrace. The Chrestomathies of Omecíhuatl, Giver of Life In The End of the Poem, Giorgio Agamben writes, “For Augustine, this experience of an unknown word (verbum ignotum) in the no-man’s-land between sound and signification is the experience of love as will to know.” Omecíhuatl in the Garden Where Yes Is the Only Island the silence making silence real From Thomas Merton, Thoughts on Silence. 68 Where Timid Gestures Black territory into tradition From Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. The Child’s Dream of Asters and the Water’s Elegy The folk tale of La Llorona is a classic Chican@ narrative. As told, La Llorona is an indigenous mother who drowns her children after being spurned by a Spanish lover. She returns as a banshee, drowning children who wander too close to the river. The Bridehouse’s Harmonograph The harmonograph is a nineteenth-century instrument used to draw the numerical value of musical tones on an X/Y axis. An octave, with the numerical value of 1:2, appears like butterfly wings. Here, the harmonograph, using numerology representing Ometéotl, is an octave. The shape is filled out by the present manuscript’s language, cut and pasted hundreds of times. About the Author J. Michael Martinez received the Academy of American Poet’s Walt Whitman Award for his book Heredities. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado, Boulder. ...