incribing oral tradition

oh how i long to take a lstroll with garcilaso de la vega

Pisaq’s archaeological ruins, layered on the hillside so beautiful that I have no comparison, they become the comparison itself, fills my soul with so much wonder and appreciation for the world that I swear I remember every moment, every passing person, every silence.

“2001 species of potatoes”, says a guide, “Gravity pulls the slingshots,”

I had 2 types of potatos this morning, I think about the terraces, imagining the different colours, purple, red, gold, tiny beneath the dirt, their leaves tall or bushy. The fish I had for lunch was whole, its white eye staring at me, I think about the people here fishing, sliding knives accross the skin to rid of their scales. I think about how if someone wanted to kill me with a stone from the top of the mountatin I’d be so done for.

My family is impressively atheist, I was not told many creation myths growing up, but the few still linger deep in my mind. The clash between the heavens and the oceans, how a hole in the sky opened and the gods fought as a shower rained down on the villages. Perhaps earlier, how the Nuwa, the woman goddess, slit her wrists and let her blood mix with the earth, and shaped people as her children. How there used to be nine blaring red suns until a mortal archer shot down them, rewarded with an elixer of immortality only for his wife to betray him and rise to the heavens with her rabbit, the embodiment of the moon. I am but a small part of my world’s history, there is grandness and width in the universe, and it is so beyond me. I’m smaller than a grain of sand, as manipulable was the winds.

“I shall answer you with the greatest pleasure, because it is important for you to have heard these things and you should preserve them in your heart.” says, de la Vega’s elder. He describes their creation stories, realtions with the mountains the rivers the soils the people, and I stare at each word, roughly eight letters each, three types of mountains flash through, skinny whitewaters, streams, or eroding currents for the rivers, red, brown, sanding soil. I don’t really know what I should see, Peru’s landscapes are complicated and diverse, with one mountainside lush with trees as if a rainforest, the other tapestries of red lichen and sand as if a desert. These creation stories do not speak to me, I wish for someone to tell me as they point to the trees and the rivers, as they show me the fish and the earth that flourishes for food. There is never enough context on the words of not even a page, but a scanned PDF on my Macbook. I, always in a rush, so conservative with my money that I cannot even read the prints on a page.

I will remember the potatos every time I eat them, but I may not remember the details of the sun’s commands, whether the prince and the princess went north or south, which parts of Cusco were to be settled on. De la Vega writes in gentle but grounded prose, and I feel it is utterly tragic how it does not reach me.

Back home, the remnants of precolonial contact are few, nomadic nations circling around certain areas, but never to strip the land of more than it can take to rejuvenate itself. The only signs that they were there, scattered arrowheads and flakes with specific waves in the chert, a few atlatls form the preservation of glaciers, campfire charcoal buried under a layer of volcanic ash. And it is meant to be like that, the traces of humans hardly surpassing the traces of animals. Memory is to be passed along communities, left in the place it came from, not to make its way around the world in a contest of who is the greatest empire.

Hence, when de la Vega’s elders speak so poetically, when de la Vega himself is spilling with the orally transmitted knowledge, the strength of his community deep in his soul, I wonder, what the purpose of transcription poses. The evidence of a living and thriving culture deeply embedded in their oral traditions and histories—the Incas were not thinking about Rome, were not thinking of leaving a physical trace in the form of writing. The ruins are carved from the same shale, melting into the mountains, like how a bird nest seems so fitting on the top of the tree.

All I can think about when I read the Royal Commentaries, is whether or not the descendants of Incans know these stories, still passed on through them. For if that knowledge has been lost, it would not have been natural, but from that forced assmiliation into Catholiscim, and perhaps de la Vega’s transcription, which is so discontextualized, which reaches the mind but not the heart, was just a final preservation tactic, in case the community has the time to revivee their traditional practices, and a piece of colonial literature is the only solution.