This is a story about loss. When something is lost, does that mean that you, the seeker, can no longer find the object, state or body that you yearn? Or does it mean that that object which we are discussing does not know where it is?
I had an acquaintance who lost her job. She woke up one morning and couldn't find it.
These things happen. She had spent too much time at the local pub drinking. This combined with the fact that she entered her bathroom at least 7 times a day, peeled the cover off the air vent and lit up a big glass bong stoked with hash. In the end, she awoke one morning and didn't know who she was, or her location, or why she should be here rather than anywhere else. She could not remember were she worked. She could not remember that she had ever worked. She found a tennis racket that was lying close by and, after I watched her make love to it, I explained that that was not what it was for and provided her a couple of furry green balls. She started licking these, but I stopped her and took her to a tennis court and that is where she is right now, running to and fro across the court swinging at balls with unknown people that come in with neat little tubes filled with more bright green balls to play with. I check in with her now and again, but mostly, she is lost to me, I can't get through to her. We used to have long discussions, conversations on the topic of death, on dying, on U.F.Os and Jesus and the disappearance of "los toltecas." It was my opinion that neither Jesus nor "los toltecas" had ever been really on earth, but she would shake her head and say,
"Y si la vida te pisa, desvaina una sonrisa y vuelvete a levantar."
Inspite of my own critical objections, I spent much of my time around of the midget closet wondering about both Jesus and los toltecas. I once knew an old man that told stories. He had claimed that he himself was a Toltec, the last one, a survivor, looking for his lost tribe like the unicorn whose voice was supplied by Mia Farrow had searched for her own milky white sisters. He insisted that the toltecs had gone "underground", to disappear from public view. It was their mores and not their origins which made them toltecs, and when a more belligerent culture came to the land with the power of a violent disease, the toltec culture simply slipped away, to get along until a better time emerged, a time where the culture of death would have spent itself in its bloody rage and be ready to sleep for another 1000 years or so.
These tales of the culturas prehispanicas were mostly lost on me. That is to say that they went all over my white flesh trying to get inside and lost their compass and settled in the valley between my breasts and multiplied in the warmth and wetness of my bosom, giving rise a whole new generation of stories, tales which twisted and turned like that of a grinning cat.
How is it possible for the last Toltec renew his culture without exposing it to the possibility of alteration? No, there was no way. Evolution itself is a form of mutation.
These fables that I spin now out of the wiggly spaghetti that we call the crown of Metus, (when I say "we", I mean all of us of the culturas post hispanicas, the gringos who have been provided secrets by lonely old men and women of naual who could find no one better to describe their stories to) are a new strain built upon the old foundation. They are the illegitimate children of a hidden teaching, the type of bastards that return to the kingdom someday to say that the King was their father and they are prepared claim the throne. The good King will embrace his child and take him into his heart and say:
"That which I was is no more, that which I am lives in you." And he will lay himself gently upon the pyre and wait for the flames to turn his flesh to ash so that he may join his ancestors in the halls of the glorious. Then the maidens will sing the old song, the song that says,
"Y si la vida te pisa, desvaina una sonrisa y vuelvete a levantar."
This is it, all that I have to give, all that I can share, an orphan of the storm. The foundation laid by the tequihua has succumbed to the vines of the twisted jungles within my heart. Zu birds fly with flaming wings among the branches of new trees in which shimmering demonesses crouch, waiting for the boy and the girl who will surely come down the path. The girl will say,
"Hansel, I'm afraid that we are lost."
"Don't worry Gretel, I have left a trail made from the powdered bones of our ancestors so that we will be able to see where we came from… but we will never go back, only forward. That star you see on the horizon is our destination. That is our Kingdom, but first, we must go and create it. For that is what we are."
The Tequihua Foundation www.tequihuafoundation.org
The Manticore is a creature of legend. With the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a dragon it is by nature an eater of humanity. This being is and has ever been composed of three parts; the face of a man, the most superficial aspect, the mortal component within this trinity, the body of the lion, the regal and fierce protector, and the dragon, most ancient and undying, These three beings work in conjunction.
