The Original Entwine: On Edgar Garcia’s “Emergency”
Edgar Garcia | Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis | University of Chicago Press | 2022 | 144 Pages
I find it impossible to write about, and introduce, Edgar Garcia’s Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis without referencing the pandemic. The shutdown following the virulence of Covid-19 was a time of scathing reverberations and actualities undreamt. I like to think of the term “dreaming of,” often used when in awe, when placed into a strange situation, a place opaque and unexpected, the unfathomable. To dream, in this word processing, in this axiom, is to have access to a realm outside of oneself, outside of quotidian possibilities. There, too, lies an inclination toward an expertise: being able to know something, foretell, or portend. In the case of this saying, to dream of something is to know. Maybe some of us did literally dream of the pandemic, but what emerged was a new form out of a dehiscence of previous mourning, a prior colonial crisis.
It is also impossible, and would be myopic, to write about and introduce Emergency without including the Popol Vuh, a K’iche’ Mayan creation story, described by Edgar Garcia as “a book about emergency… the emergency of colonialism, and how the emergency of colonialism is ongoing.” The Popol Vuh was physically transcribed in 1702 as a tool of conversion to Catholicism by a Dominican friar in the Guatemalan highlands, and is now housed at the Newberry Library in Chicago. As a new global crisis arose, the texts Garcia found himself left with at home were translations, transcriptions, and examinations of the Popol Vuh, which he had just finished teaching at the University of Chicago in winter of 2019.
The Popol Voh is a shapeshifting book, finding itself syncretized in the pages of Emergency. In turn, Emergency is a work concerned with multiplicity. Subtitled Reading the Popoh Vuh in a Time of Crisis, the book defies itself as an authority, deferring to the collective in its own specific gesture of “reading.” Garcia spoke to this at his New Writers Series visit at UCSD. The distinction was an important choice, disregarding expertise. For Garcia, the idea of reading is a form of learning, or a reading along. And here I am paraphrasing an answer I didn’t write down, nor transcribe, relying on fallible memory and interpretation. Maybe this isn’t the case at all. But, perhaps, there can be a reevaluation, or a relearning through the act of reading, as though one is reconsidering ideas as they are being absorbed. As though the act of reading in the form of writing is open ended; it can be reread and reinterpreted, depending on the context of the situation and the context of the reader themselves.
Reading itself becomes a protean act. During his visit, Garcia and I discussed how mutable a text can be, altering itself depending on one’s perspective or trajectory. Garcia shared an anecdote about a poem he had written for the Skins of Columbus (Fence, 2019) morphing into a poem adjacent to his dog’s death. Now he calls it a “dying dog poem,” having read this particular verse to his dog while she was beginning to pass. The poem itself did not change, the text stayed the same, yet the connotation, or the interpolation of its reading, shifted, transformed.
Emergency opens up an immensity, an undetermined profundity, relaying a susurration of past ideas, woven, of a place to emerge from; an intimate matter. This literary position seems to be familiar to Garcia, who previously immersed himself in reading Christopher Columbus’ diary before sleep for three months, and subsequently wrote Skin of Columbus. He read, transcribed, and composed his dreams in order “to examine suppressed memories, but to see what of historical memories were supposed in my colonial subconscious… ‘rescuing forms’—rescuing forms from ruin, and also rescuing forms of ruin.” Re-informing, reforming, and reformatting content in its relationship with epistemology. Ava Mooses invited Garcia to speak at her 2021 Cooper Union fall sculpture class, in collaboration with his “specific interests in the poetry and poetics of the Americas and how forms and histories interact.” She writes in a preface to their conversation together:
When people talk about form, they often mean something like canonical forms that came from white artists in the United States and Europe, and Garcia has tried to think about what indigenous form is, what the native forms of the Americas are, and how that viewing of contemporary works of art, literature, and even legal philosophy, and environmental activism changes when we charge the formal frameworks in which we understand these works.
Garcia’s Emergency is a reorientation, a shift in perspective, while recognizing there is no such thing as a return to originality nor to a specific origin point. What if origin is a weaving, a constant wearing of stories and timetables, perpetual changes and cyclical advantages? A translucent emergence out of the middle, a vastness. The Popol Vuh is partly that—a continuous reattempt at imagining what would happen if origin were to restart, remerge; what if origin wasn’t the beginning, but a dual re-emergence? Garcia writes,
Unlike the fatalistic bifurcation that characterizes action in Greek and Roman epic, where action now will forever shape an inescapable destiny down a chosen path, action in the Popol Vuh does not bifurcate. It loops back on itself, in generation relations that enable revisions, redemptions, and reconfiguration of the seemly fated or forlorn.
It is not surprising to find the pith of Emergency, its nucleus, toward the end of the book; emergence out of substance. Etymologically, “to emerge” is derivative of the Latin emergere, meaning “to rise from or out of anything that surrounds, covers, or conceals; come forth; appear, as from concealment; bring forth; bring to light.” And thus Emergency finds meaning in “unforeseen occurrences [that] require immediate attention.” This is where our definition of emergency falls flat. It is not immediate attention which is required, but vigilant heedfulness to the criss-crossing, overlapping, and tenuous events of history, actions of people, and the whims of Gods; “frequencies, mirrors, resurgences.”
To emerge, a previous strata must have existed. Something to (e)merge out of, and into. Garcia wrote Emergency during a global crisis, immersed in study of the Popol Vuh. This form lacks centrality, being sculpted in multi-rootedness. “The idea that there’s not one origin from which everything else was cast out but there are a whole host of spaces where roots are grown and where relationships are cultivated,” observes Claire Schwartz in an episode of Between the Covers, further decentralizing singular origin. The notion of dispersed origin is a destabilizing force in the face of colonialism and its reliance on authentic or authoritative genesis within a fixed temporality. Centrality morphs into movement, akin to the migrating onomatopoeic whip-poor-wills extending into new environments in Garcia’s first chapter. The language of the birds, their song, stays the same, urging those around to adapt as well.
I often return to an excerpt from Skins, echoing and flickering in my mind’s periphery, especially now, thinking about creativity in a time of crisis:
On of my favorite lines of Mayan poetry—spoken by Andres Xiloj Peruch, a Mayan daykeeper or diviner—is a description of dreams which calls on this idea: ‘it shines, it shimmers, in the blackness of the night.’ It is in the blackness of the night that the light of the dream shines; the visibility of its light depends on darkness, the darkness which in turn depends on the light to draw to draw out its signification from the void.
One exists due to the other.
“There is no finally in this book,” Garcia asserts in the second to last chapter of Emergency, reorienting one to ask, “which book?” Is Garcia referring to the Popol Vuh, or is it the book in the reader’s hand? It is both. Popol is often translated to “woven mat,” and vuh, “book,” rendering the title as the Book of the Mat. In a weaving of a mat there persists a corner, a critical edge, a plunge. The beginning, however, the original entwine, is unknown, hidden in the pleats. Garcia weaves the two books together to create a third, cornered and edgy in its shape, yet informed by the “dyadic Maya world forms. If there must be Christendom, the book says, the contact of Christian and Maya will take place inside the dual design of lifeworlds of the Popol Vuh.” Because emergency has always been and will always be here. Forever mutable, unsettled.