This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 on the third Monday of the month I post some of or something related to my own work.
This Monday finds me working on my Far West Texas book. More about that anon. Meanwhile, an essay from the archives:
TULPA MAX OR, NOTES ON THE AFTERLIFE OF A RESURRECTION by C.M. Mayo Originally published in Catamaran Literary Reader, summer 2017 (and in Spanish in Letras Libres)
Coffin used to transport Maximilian’s body from the Cerro de las Camapanas. The table it sits on is the table used for embalming the body. Photo by C.M. Mayo
In a manner of speaking, we historical novelists are in the resurrection business. But who, or rather, what precisely is it that we bring to life? These characters infused by our imaginations, yet based on beings who were once flesh, blood, and bone, can they escape the page and, like the tulpas of Tibetan esoteric tradition, take on a will of their own and haunt their creators? In the case of Maximilian von Habsburg, that Archduke of Austria who ended both his reign as Emperor of Mexico and his life before a firing squad in Querétaro one hundred fifty years ago, and whom I made a character in my novel based on the true story of Agustín de Iturbide y Green, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, I must confess that yes, he haunts me.
To start with, soon after the novel’s publication (more years ago than I would care to count), Tulpa Max, as it were, prompted a little avalanche of correspondence that continues rumbling into my email inbox to this day.
Had I seen the mega alebrije, “Amor por México, Maximiliano y Carlota”?
Did I believe that Maximilian was a Mason?
What did I think of the legend of Justo Serra, was he really Maximilian, having escaped that firing squad to make a new life in El Salvador?
From another reader, Maruja González, friend of a friend in San Miguel de Allende, I received, along with her generous permission to post it on my blog, a family story about the dessert prepared for Maximilian on his visit to that city in 1864. It so happened that Maximilian had stayed in her great great grandparents’s house.
“…and there they made him a very solemn banquet with music and soloists, and the all ladies, their hair coiffured, lamented very much the absence of the empress, Carlotita, as they were already calling her with affection. All these ladies of the cream of San Miguel society jostled to outdo each other in making the most elaborate, brilliant, and exquisite delicacies. One of my aunts had the honor of preparing some pears in syrup for the monarch, who turned upside down in praise for this most wonderful dessert… “
An email as if from beyond the tomb, for it literally had to do with a tombstone, came from Jean Pierre d’Huart, great grand nephew of the officer shot in the head on the highway near Río Frío in March of 1866. That officer was a high-ranking member of the delegation that came to Mexico after the death of Carlota’s father, King Leopold of Belgium, and the assumption to that throne of her brother, Leopold II (yes, he of Congo infamy). That bandits would so brazenly attack such a party on that highway—the major artery connecting Mexico City and Veracruz, gateway to Europe—was at the time and to this day widely considered, both in Mexico and abroad, a turning point for Maximilian’s reign, a harbinger of its end. I had it wrong in the novel, my correspondent gently informed me. The Baron d’Huart murdered near Río Frío was not Charles, then serving in Mexico with the French Imperial Army, but his distant cousin, Frédéric Victor. Attached was a photograph taken in Tintigny, Belgium of the very tombstone, wreathed in vines and its base tufted with moss.
But the most Edgarallenpoe-esque email to date came from a friend, Roberto Wallentin, with the Spanish translation by his father, Dr. Roberto Wallentin, of an Hungarian newspaper article of 1876 by Dr. Szender Ede. Experts on the period will recognize Dr. Szender Ede as the individual responsible for the grotesquely inept embalming of Maximilian’s corpse. Dr. Szender Ede tells us:
“While I was working on the embalming, and afterwards as well, many people asked if I could get for them some of the personal belongings of the deceased. To my knowledge, during his imprisonment in Querétaro, through varios different people, he sent all of his personal belongings to members of his family. The only thing left in his room was the iron frame of the bed in which he slept. Dr. Rivadeneyra assured Dr. Basch that the Emperor had promised him that and so, on good faith, Dr. Basch authorized the “donation” to him. On the other hand, Dr. Licea (and this was also commented upon in the Mexican press) made a genuine business with objects that, according to him, had belonged to Maximilian. I kept some clippings of Maximilian’s hair, and most of those I gave to my friends in San Luís Potosí.”
More than messages from the depths of cyberspace, however, Tulpa Max prompts comments, generally kind ones, but on occasion cutting. As the latter have revealed, and not entirely to my surprise, many Mexicans are dead-certain that, for having published a novel that has to do with Maximilian, its author must be enthralled by both the red-bearded charms and anachronistic political philosophy of that antique aristocrat. Obviously, such persons have not read my book, in which, closely following the documented history, Maximilian is capable, as in his dealings with the young American mother of Agustín de Iturbide y Green, and in his Black Decree (that anyone found with a weapon could be summarily executed), not to mention his reinstating slavery, of dunderheaded heartlessness. True, I bring as much empathy as I can muster to my portrait of Maximilian, but empathy—seeing with the heart—is the novelist’s first, best, and most powerful faculty, and it does not necessarily imply sympathy for that character’s actions or ideas.
There are many ways to buy a yacht; uness your name is J.K. Rowling, writing a novel is not one of them. By far my richest reward for having resurrected Maximilian has been the cornucopia of opportunities for “the feast of reason and the flow of soul.” I quote the English poet Alexander Pope, as I like to think Maximilian would, to describe tete-a-tetes with readers, fellow writers, and scholars of that exotic, bloody, labyrinthian and transnational firecracker of an episode of Mexican history.
And there was one shining moment of an afternoon on the cool and plant-filled terrace of the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México in Chimalistac when I chanced to talk with Luis Reed Torres about one of Maximilian’s undeservedly forgotten generals, Manuel Ramírez de Arellano, who escaped a firing squad only to die of fever in Italy.
I went to Puebla just for the joy of listening to Margarita López Cano talk about operas by Bellini and by Verdi in the time of Maximilian.
Most memorable was an entire afternoon of a lunch with Guillermo Tovar de Teresa in his old (and assuredly haunted) house in Colonia Roma—lace tablecloth, and rain pattering on the windows. I had always wanted to meet the author of that glorious book about Mexico City, La ciudad de los palacios (The City of Palaces). We talked until it grew dark about Maximilian and the Iturbides and Miramón and the rarest of rare books.
Speaking of rare books, I treasure my autographed copies of the works of Austrian historian Konrad Ratz, untill his passing in 2014, a tireless researcher into the life and government of Maximilian. It was a great honor to have presented his and Amparo Gómez Tepexicuapan’s book, Los viajes de Maximiliano en México (Maximilian’s Travels in Mexico) one twinkly night in Chapultepec Castle, no less.
Tulpa Max, who so loves nothing more than to hear about himself (even his dessicated corpse with eyes pried from a statue of the Virgin laid over his orbital sockets, and his legs broken so as to fit into the box), is standing a little straighter now. The color has risen to his cheeks and his eyes shine open and bright like a fox’s. He runs a gloved hand down his beard, and he sniffs what he wishes were a sea breeze. But it’s just the humble perfume of my mug of coffee. No garlic, not yet.
Now if you will excuse me, dear reader, I must check my email.
How wide is your Overton window? Some peoples’ seem to me to be pretty well squished. My writing assistant’s Mr. Duckie demonstrates the concept.
Of course your Overton window can be tooooo wide open. Watch out, pterodactyls might fly up your nose and chomp your brains.
From the Archives:
On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises
Transcript of Centennial Lecture University of Texas El Paso El Paso, Texas, October 7, 2015 BY C.M. MAYO
Thank you, Diana Natalicio, President of University of Texas El Paso, and everyone at here who made my visit and this lecture possible. And thank you very much to Roberto Coronado and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, El Paso Branch. And thank you all for making the effort to attend this evening. Special thanks to my much-admired creative writing colleague and old friend, Lex Williford.
My husband, who is Mexican, likes to joke that I missed being born Mexican by five miles. You might guess that means that I was born right here in El Paso—this “City of Surprises,” as writer and editor Marcia Hatfield Daudistel calls it. My dad was an artillery officer stationed at Fort Bliss—and I understand that he took some engineering classes here at UT El Paso. So it is a very special honor for me, as a native El Pasoan, to have been invited to speak to you today.
I can’t say it’s like coming home, because my parents are from Chicago and New York, and when I was still a baby, my dad decided on a career in business, and he took the family out to California—to the part of the San Francisco Bay Area now known as Silicon Valley. Culturally speaking, I’m a Californian.
But back to El Paso—to quote Marcia Hatfield Daudistel again— this “dark-eyed stranger abducted into Texas by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.”
For me, to be here in El Paso is like coming home in another, deeply meaningful sense. This is a border city. I am a border person. Where others might be… let’s say, a little nervous… we border people go back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico with ease, we are oftentimes bilingual, bicultural— or at least we don’t blink at some of the more exotic juxtapositions, whether culinary or musical, and the mixed up lingo. I too, have been known to speak my gringa-chilanga version Spanglish—or, I might throw clumps of español— para que me entiendes bien— into my English.
I don’t live on the border geographically, but culturally. I mean to say, when I got married 29 years ago, my husband and I moved to Mexico City—his home town, Chilangolandia—and now I have lived in Mexico City for more years than I have lived anywhere else, including California. And I should mention, I don’t live in Mexico as a typical expat, coccooned among my fellow Americans and Canadian snowbirds. I am enconsed in a Mexican family, living in a Mexican neighborhood, and I have many very dear Mexican friends and colleagues.
Long story short, over the last three decades of my life, although I remain a U.S. citizen, Mexico has become my world. This is why my books are all about Mexico.
I hope my books might be both beautiful and useful—I write them with as much courtesy for the reader as I can muster. But the truth is, the reason I write them is because I want to delve in and explore the complexity around me, and then, having gained a new level of understanding, tell the story my way. Living in Mexico, very quickly, I learned to distrust the easy assumptions and much of the narrative about Mexico spooned out for us, whether on this side of the border or the other, whether in tourist guides, newspapers, television, paperback novels, movies. And sometimes… even in textbooks.
In Mexico, it is often said that nothing is as it seems. If you halt the show and question— sincerely and energetically question— read the bibliography, and read beyond the bibliography; take the time to interview people, really listen, with both an open mind and an open-heart; go to places and stand there and look around for yourself; roll up your sleeves and dig into the archives… it has consistently been my experience that you will uncover secrets and surprises.
Of course, that could be said about the whole world, from Azerbaijan to Zambia. And El Paso, Texas, itself. But Mexico is what my books are about. I won’t stretch your patience to go on about all the books. I’m going to give you but three examples.
The title comes from a quote from John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez. “The very air here is miraculous and the outlines of reality change with the moment.”
There were a multitude of surprises for me in writing this book, but here is one:
What I had been told as a child in the California public school system, that the California missions, founded by the Spanish padres, began in San Diego, was not only not true—it obscured one of the greatest, strangest, and most tragic stories of the Americas, that of the indigenous peoples’ encounter with the Jesuit missionaries, whose first permanent California mission was hundreds of miles south of San Diego, on the Sea of Cortez at Loreto.
Loreto: Yes, that is an Italian name. The Jesuits named it after after an important basilica in Italy which enshrines a brick house— as the Church asserts, this is house of the Virgin Mary, brought from Nazareth during the Crusades by angels who flew it over the Adriatic Sea.
Loreto was founded in the late 17th century— roughly the same time that in the province of Texas, we see the first Spanish settlement at San Francisco de los Tejas.
When the Jesuits arrived in California, as they called this nearly 1,000 mile-long peninsula, they believed it was an island. Today we call it Baja or Lower California and unlike Upper California, lost to the United States after the US-Mexican War, it remains part of Mexico.
Spanish padres all? Hardly.
The Jesuit missionary who founded Loreto was Giovanni Salvaterra, an Italian from Milan, who, on arriving in New Spain, hispanicized his name to Juan María Salvatierra. One of his right-hand men, and a founder of other missions in California, was Father Francesco Piccolo, a Sicilian. Among the Jesuit padres in California, or as we say today, Baja California, there were a Frenchman, a Czech, a Scotsman, a Bavarian, a Bohemian. Many Germans.
In 1767, for reasons known only to himself, the Spanish king decided to expell the Jesuits from his realm. The newly appointed governor of California, Don Gaspar de Portolá—who would, eventually, head north with the Franciscans who would found the so-called California missions that I learned about in school— arrived in Loreto later that year.
And this is what happened—the part of the story—and it is only a part—as I told it from the Jesuits’ point of view:
From all over the peninsula the missionaries began to arrive at Loreto: from the South, Ignác Tirsch and Johann Bischoff; from Dolores, Lambert Hostell; from San Luis Gonzaga, Johann Jakob Baegert; José Juan Díez from La Purísima, Franz Inama von Sternegg from San José de Comondú, Miguel del Barco from San Javier. Francisco Escalante came from Santa Rosalía de Mulegé, José Rothea from San Ignacio, and Victoriano Arnés from Santa María Cabujakaamung, leaving still-green his first crops of wheat and cotton. At Mission Santa Gertrudis, Georg Retz had broken his leg and could neither walk nor ride; his neophytes carried him on a litter the nearly two hundred miles through the canyons of the Sierra de San Francisco, the Vizcaíno Desert, and the Sierra de Guadalupe. Wenceslaus Linck arrived last, because he was delayed tending to the dying in an epidemic at his Mission San Francisco de Borja. When the missionaries reached Loreto, Governor Portolá embraced each of them and, as was the Spanish custom, he kissed their hands.
Portolá had read the Order of Expulsion and taken possession of the Jesuits’ treasury and storehouse: a meager supply of gold and silver coins, a few bolts of cloth, tools for the soldiers and other gente de razón, and some dried meat and grain. No one was arrested.
The Jesuits were to sail on February 3, 1768. Their ship, the poor two-masted Concepción, waited at anchor in the harbor. They would cross the Sea of Cortés, then travel overland to Veracruz; from there, they would be sent to exile with their fellow Jesuits in the Papal States and Germany.
Against the king’s explicit orders, Governor Portolá permitted the missionaries a final High Mass. Father Retz celebrated before the Virgin of Loreto, which was draped for the occasion with a black shroud. Father Ducrue gave the sermon. After supper, the missionaries returned to the church, to pray for California and ask God’s mercy and assistance. And then, as they walked towards the shore, wrote Father Ducrue,
“behold we were surrounded on all sides by the people, the Spanish soldiers among them. Some knelt on the sand to kiss our hands and feet, others knelt with arms outstretched in the form of a cross and publicly pleading for pardon. Others tenderly embraced the missionaries, bidding them farewell and wishing them a happy voyage through loud weeping and sobbing.”
The Indians carried the priests on their shoulders through the surf to the launch. There the priests recited the Litanies of the Virgin of Loreto, their voices carrying over the darkness of the water.
“We were sixteen Jesuits in all,” wrote Father Baegert. “Exactly the same number, that is, sixteen Jesuits, one brother and fifteen priests, we left behind, buried in California.”
The Jesuits had been on the peninsula for nearly seventy-one years.
Though fiction, this book is based on several years of original archival research. What empire? What prince?
Well, it turns out that Mexico’s first emperor, the Emperor Iturbide, had a grandson. Those of you know know your Mexican history will recall that the Emperor Iturbide was the final leader of Mexico’s Independence from Spain, he was crowned Emperor of Mexico in 1822, he abdicated in 1823, and alas, he was executed in 1824. The Emperor Iturbide had two grandsons, actually, but I’m going to simplify and just talk about the one who was a two year old child in Mexico City when the second emperor—Maximilian von Habsburg—whose arrival in Mexico had been made possible by the armies of Louis Napoleon—made a secret contract with the Iturbide family to bring this child into his Casa Imperial. It’s wasn’t an adoption, exactly, but kind of sort of—there’s more to say about that, but the bottom line is—and here is the surprise: in 1865-1866, the “high noon” of Mexico’s Second Empire, the heir presumptive to the throne of Mexico was a two year old half-American.
And then came a tremendous drama, for his heart-broken mother tried to reclaim her child. The Emperor Maximilian arrested her and expelled her from Mexico—and she went straight to Paris, to her ambassador there, and got up such a scandal that the story made the front page of the New York Times: about “the kidnapping of an American child” by the “so-called Emperor of Mexico.”
This was the same time that the U.S. government was supporting Benito Juárez and his Republicans in their struggle to overthrow Maximilian and expel the French. Benito Juárez, as in Ciudad Juárez.
As I wrote elsewhere:
When The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire came out in 2009 and in Spanish in 2010, two reactions surprised me. First, that many readers, especially younger ones, were disturbed by the photograph, a formal carte-de-visite, of the little prince. Agustín de Iturbide y Green was a beautiful child, with a cupid’s mouth, and he looked more like, say, an English prince than a typical Mexican. Those readers would make a twisted face, asking, “Why is he in a girl’s dress?” (Well, folks, that’s how they dressed aristocratic little boys back then.)
Second, that so many marveled at my having spun a novel out of “a little footnote.” Except for misinterpreted snippets, the story of Agustín de Iturbide y Green in the court of Maximilian may have been forgotten in the archives until I dug it out, but it was no mere footnote. In a monarchy, the heir presumptive, though he be in a dress and diapers, is the living guarantee of the regime’s future, and more: he is the living symbol of his future people—his subjects.
Would Mexicans be subjects, creatures born to obey—or citizens, men and women who with their full rights participate in creating their own polity? This had been Mexico’s bitter and bloody question for the whole of the nineteenth century.
In telling the prince’s story, from the high-noon of the Second Empire in 1865 to its collapse, and his return to his parents in Washington in 1867, I was telling the story of the fall of Mexican monarchism, a powerful idea up until that time, which asserted the mystical embodiment of all Mexicans in the person of a hereditary sovereign.
To be honest, in sorting out Mexico’s most convoluted and transnational episode, it took me more time than I would like to admit to boil my aim down to so few words. And so, in fairness, I should not have been surprised by the reaction of those readers, for whom (as it was for me) monarchism is just a quaintly ridiculous thing preserved in the formaldehyde of textbooks or the syrup of entertainment, and where still living, as in Spain and the U.K., its royal families harmless fodder for the sorts of magazines one reads at the hairdressers.
But back to the last prince, Agustín de Iturbide y Green.
The child’s father, the second son of the Emperor Iturbide, was a Mexican diplomat, and his mother, née Alice Green, was a Washington belle, descended from the Platers—a very prominent Tidewater Maryland family—and she was a granddaughter of General Uriah Forrest, who had been an aide to General George Washington in the American Revolution.
So if you can believe it, I was able to find items of interest about the last prince of the Mexican empire in the libraries of the Society of the Cinncinati and the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington DC.
And much more in Washington DC: Agustín de Iturbide y Green’s personal papers are at Catholic University; there is also a small archive at Georgetown University; and many documents, including the record of his parents’ marriage and much about the family estate at Rosedale, in Washington DC, is in the Historical Society of Washington DC.
Most crucially, the archive of the Emperor Iturbide and the archive of the Iturbide Family are not in Mexico but in the Library of Congress.
Yes, there certainly are archives of interest in Mexico and in Texas and New York and Vienna and elsewhere, but the most pertinent ones for the story of Agustín de Iturbide y Green are in Washington DC. Why Washington DC?
Upon the execution of the Emperor Iturbide in 1824 his widow and children had fled to Washington DC, under the protection of the Jesuits in Georgetown, where they had their college overlooking the Potomac. Flash foward to the early 20th century: Agustín de Iturbide y Green was living in Washington DC, teaching Spanish and French at Georgetown, when he sold the Emperor Iturbide and Iturbide Family papers to the Library of Congress. I’m sure he needed the space and the money, but given the turmoil in Mexico at the time, this was probably the wisest decision he could have made to preserve the papers. And I for one am immensely grateful that he did.
Ah, archives, they are full to the brim with secrets and surprises. Which leads me to my latest book, which was prompted by a visit to an archive in Mexico City’s National Palace where I found… a secret book. And on a whim, because I am a translator, I offered to translate it. And it was such a strange little book that I then felt compelled to write a book about that book.
Well, here we are at the US-Mexico border, so I am sure that most of you know perfectly well who Francisco I. Madero was— after all, he prepared for the famous Battle of Juárez from here in El Paso. And in the thick of that 1910 Revolution he came over here to El Paso to have dinner a few times, as well, as I recall. But if you’re rusty on your Mexican history, these are the barebones basics:
Francisco I. Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, and President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913, when he was overthrown in a coup d’etat and, with shocking casualness, executed. The Mexican Revolution then exploded into a new and more violent phase, churning on until 1920 with Alvaro Obregón’s presidency or, as some historians argue, the end of the Cristero Rebellion in 1929.
Here is a little bit more about Madero from my book, to quote:
Popular imagery of the Mexican Revolution usually features rustic characters in bandoliers and washtub-sized sombreros, such as smoldering-eyed Emiliano Zapata, with his handlebar mustache and skin-tight trousers, or Pancho Villa, who always seems to wear the smirk of having just quaffed a beer (though he was a teetotaler; more likely it was a strawberry soda).
Less often are we shown Don Francisco, handsomely-dressed scion of one of Mexico’s wealthiest families—usually bareheaded, occasionally in a top hat—for he was and remains a confounding figure. He was a Spiritist, and what the devil is that? I had no idea. And until 2008, it had not occurred to me to wonder.
2008 was when I first encountered his Spiritist Manual. Any student of the Mexican Revolution learns about Madero’s first book, La sucesión presidencial en 1910, or The Presidential Succession in 1910, which was published in 1909. This spelled out Madero’s political platform, and it worked like a magnet to bring together his political party and the nation-wide support for his candidacy and presential campaigns.
Less known is that in 1911, when Madero was president-elect, under another name—Bhima, after a warrior in the Hindu sacred text known as the Bhagavad Gita— he published his Manual espírita or Spiritist Manual.
Madero was in fact not only an ardent Spiritist but a Spiritist medium who left a substantial archive of his mediumnistic notebooks. In other words, Madero practised what is called automatic writing, or channeling written messages from what he believed were disembodied consciousnesses. These spirits urged him to write La sucesión presidencial en México—and to write the Manual espírita.
What exactly is Spiritism? In essense, to quote from my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, it is the belief that:
We are not our physical bodies; we are spirits, and as such we are immortal and we are destined, lifetime by lifetime, not by any ritual intermediated by clerics, but by freely chosen good works, to evolve into ever higher levels of consciousness and so return to God.
To quote Madero himself in my translation of his book, Spiritist Manual:
Spiritism is the science concerned with investigating the powers of the human spirit, its past before ariving in this world, and its fortune on abandoning it.
I hasten to mention, I am not the first to write about Madero’s Spiritism.
Enrique Krauze, probably Mexico’s best-known historian, publishedFrancisco I. Madero, místico de la libertad, which introduced the topic to a broad public, back in the late 1980s.
Yolia Tortolero, who wrote her deeply researched thesis at El Colegio de México under the highly regarded historian of the Revolution, Javier Garciadiego, published that as El espiritismo seduce a Francisco I. Madero. Dr. Tortolero’s is a both vital and superb work— and by the way, you can now download that in Kindle.
Others to mention are Mexican historians Manuel Guerra de Luna and Alejandro Rosas Robles, and the novelist Ignacio Solares who wrote the now classic novel Madero, el otro.
That said, few of the histories of the Revolution give Madero’s Spiritism more than a passing— toe-curlingly brief!— mention. His main biographer, Stanley Ross, relegates the Spiritist Manual to a footnote! And one otherwise excellent university press textbook on Mexico says that Madero was an atheist—which is rather like calling the Pope Protestant.
My contribution was to have translated the Spiritist Manual and to have given Madero’s metaphysics more of an historical and North American context in a narrative that you might call “creative nonfiction”—in other words, it’s not a novel, but I hope it reads like one.
I also had the prividege of being able to go through Madero’s personal library which is the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México in Mexico City—walking distance from my house, happily for me, because I had to visit multiple times to get through what is, very probably, one of the most important collections of esoteric literature in the Americas. Many, many secrets and surprises in there… Books on reincarnation, Williams James’ favorite medium, Madame Piper, books by Madam Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Papus, Swami Vivekenanda, Dr. Peebles, Dr. Krumm-Heller, aka Maestro Huiracocha. … But I am racing the clock.
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To conclude. The Jesuit missions in California, a half-American heir presumptive to the throne of Mexico, a revolutionary hero and president who was a Spiritist medium: each is a story that has interests who would prefer that it not be told.
As for the Jesuit missions of California, my guess is that those setting the teaching agenda for the California public school system of my time—this would have been in the early 1970s—felt constrained by the available number of teaching hours and the state border, and if a major limb of the story didn’t fit in their box, well, whack! Amputate as needed.
As noted, until I drew it out, the story of the little prince, Agustin de Iturbide y Green, was languishing in archives outside Mexico and, in the days before the Internet, these were very time-consuming to track down and consult. Furthermore, until relatively recently, say, the past two decades, in Mexican academic circles, Mexican monarchism has been a hot potato of a subject—better not to touch. And in some ways it still is a hot potato of a subject.
Another complicating factor, perhaps the most important, however, was that for the Mexican monarchists, the Emperor Maximilian’s entanglement with the Iturbide family was embarrassing. It underscored the fact that after eight years of marriage Maximilian and his wife Carlota had been unable to produce an heir. And, alas, Maximilian and Carlota’s treatment of the child’s very young and heartbroken mother was hamfistedly cruel. Many things about the arrangement with the Iturbides were mystifying even to those close to the imperial couple, and especially for those unfamiliar, as most Mexicans were, with the rarified traditions of the House of the Habsburgs and of other European royal families.
On their journey from Europe to Mexico in 1864, Maximilian and Carlota wrote a book of court protocol, Reglamento y ceremonial de la corte, which was published in 1865. Almost unknown is the fact that in 1866, a second edition was published with an all-new first chapter on The Iturbide Princes. It explained that the Iturbide princes were not imperial princes—for they were not children of the sovereigns. However, they had the status of the Murat princes.
The Murat princes! Then, as now, for most they would be, shall we say, pretty obscure. The Murat princes were descendants of the King of Naples, Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. So the Murat princes were descendants of a sovereign and cousins to Louis Napoleon and so considered part of his Imperial Household.
So we see that the eyewitness memoirs that were sympathetic to Maximilian are all strangely vague on the Iturbides or, as in the case of José Luis Blasio’s Maximiliano íntimo, serve up slanderous stories about the Iturbides that are flatly contradicted by official birth, marriage and death certificates.
But as an aside, I must mention that one of the biggest surprises for me was to have encountered José Luis Blasio’s Maximiliano íntimo. Yes, I have my quibbles with it, and it is politically very incorrect: Blasio was Maximilian’s loyal and admiring secretary. But it so sparkles with heart and with life that I would put Maximiliano íntimo on par with Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain as one of the greatest literary treasures of Mexico. And for the period—Mexico’s Second Empire or “French Intervention”— Maximiliano íntimo is a gem beyond compare.
Finally, Francisco I. Madero. For not all, certainly, but for many Mexicans, and indeed many members of Mexico’s intellectual and political elite, Francisco I. Madero, Mexico’s “Apostle of Democracy” as a Spiritist medium is a disturbing image. They regard the idea of communicating with spirits as a species of supersition, or pura locura, craziness, beneath the dignity of serious consideration. Moreover, if you didn’t know already, I am sure you guessed, the Catholic Church prohibits Spiritism and its main ritual, the séance.
The poet Alan Ginsburg, perhaps channeling Gertrude Stein, said, “Notice what you notice.” As I understand it: that means, remove the filters—the filters other people want you to wear to distort your clear vision.
Notice. Notice what you notice! Next step: really look. And look again. Keep looking. Delve in. Whether your concern is Mexico, or the border, or El Paso, or the world itself, all manner of secrets and surprises await you.
THANK YOU.
PS The transcript of this lecture is also available in German on my German-language website, www.cmmayoschriftstellerin.com
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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
After two years of high school German with an excellent and demanding teacher; an intervening eon of forgetfulness (in which, while living in Mexico City, instead I learned Spanish); and then, more recently, three years of minimal but, bei Gott, daily German practice plus occasional classes, I have improved my German to the point where— Trommelwirbel und Vorhaung auf!—I now have a website in German:
For those of you who read German, I hope you’ll have a look. It is embryonic, nonetheless, it already has some content, including a fine translation by Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau of my University of Texas El Paso Centennial Lecture, “On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises,”and another fine translation by Rebecca DeWald, of my essay about Maximilian von Habsburg as a fictional character, “Tulpa Max.”
(You can find these and other works in English on my main website, www.cmmayo.com).
So why my interest in German, when most of my work is about Mexico and Texas? Both Mexico and Texas have a strong tradition of German immigration, and I expect I will have something to say about that in my work-in-progress on Far West Texas. Another motive was that, some years ago, I wrote a novel based on the true story, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, which is about Agustín de Iturbide y Green (1863-1925) but revolves around the childless ex-Archduke of Austria Maximilian von Habsburg, then, albeit briefly, and thanks to Napoleon III’s support, on the throne of Mexico. By means of a secret contract signed in 1865 with the Iturbide family, Maximilian made the half-American Agustín, then 2 1/2 years old, a prince of his Casa Imperial (Imperial Household). It was not an adoption as we would understand it today, but politically that’s what it amounted to for, many people, including the Iturbide family, then considered the child the heir presumptive to the Mexican throne. When I wrote the book, and so delved into many an archive, I was able to read German (although not, alas, the documents left to us in Gothic handwriting). Fortunately for me, however, the relevant documents and books were in Spanish, English, and French (which I could also read). I would like to see my novel translated into German (translated by someone more competent than myself, obviously), and when that happens, to be able to evaluate the translation, and discuss it in German. I also have on my horizon a couple of German-to-English translation projects, including a 19th century memoir, which I plan to annotate and introduce.
More than anything, however, as I know from learning Spanish, while acquiring a new language can oftentimes feel like an endless, pointless slog, in fact, if ever-so-slowly, one does begin to understand and to be able to express oneself… and eventually, the new language opens doors to endless wonders, adventures, understandings, and opportunities.
(Who’d a thunk my new favorite word would be Gartenzwergsammler?)
If you, dear reader, are interested in learning German—or any other language—I am hardly your go-to expert on rapid language acquisition—I still have a ways to go before achieving fluency— but I can tell you that what worked for me to get as far as I have was a tiny habit—an idea I took from B.J. Fogg‘s revolutionary Tiny Habits. (Fogg, by the way, is the head of Stanford University’s Behavioral Design Laboratory.) My tiny habit was—and remains—that, every day, directly after my morning coffee, I sit down and do at least 10 minutes (preferably more), and on average 30 minutes, of German. I might watch a short video on the Easy German YouTube channel and/or read aloud from a book in German (Rilke poems!), and/or do some homework exercises from a textbook and/or practice identifying genders (der, die, das) using the Seedlang app. It varies. I try to keep it fun. In addition, for improving my conversational and writing skills, I take an occasional private class, lately by Skype.
There are a number of demoralizing clichés retailed as the Wisdom of the Ages when it comes to language learning (for example, that adults cannot learn as quickly as children). A huge help in getting past all that nonsense was the book by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language (MIT Press, 2015).
My mantra is, your best teachers are the books you have already read and truly loved. One way to extract the lessons they can provide to you as a writer is by way of what I call emulation-permutation exercises.
I especially admired this fragment in Henry James’s The Ambassadors :
the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish
so I broke it down as follows:
the sky was [some kind of metal] and [some of stone] and [some kind of liquid].
Mine:
the sky was gold and sapphire and milk.
the sky was tin and coal and whiskey.
the sky was brass and amber and bootblack.
Try doing as many of these as you can, whether one, two, or seventeen. Then, circle the one that strikes you as the most vivid and/ or apt for the manuscript you are currently working on.
Another example:
In reading Julia Glass’s novel, Three Junes, I admired this passage:
“Paging through the news from afar, he finds himself tired of it all. Tired of Maggie Thatcher, her hedgehog eyes, her vacuous hair, her cotton-mouthed edicts on jobs, on taxes, on terrorist acts.“
So, breaking this into chunks:
her [name of uncommon animal] eyes,her [quirky adjective] hair,her [adjective describing mouth / voice] [some form of speech] on [noun], on [noun], on [noun].
At the time I was writing The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire and struggling for a vivid description of one of my key characters, Princess Josefa de Iturbide, then an aging and overpowering spinster who has taken over the care of her nephew– from the point of view of another character, who was disinclined to be sympathetic. I used this basic structure (with a little wiggle room) to come up with the following:
Her lizard eyes, her coiled-up hair, her sharp-tongued pronouncements on his toys, his nap-times, his hot milk with sugared bread.
I decided I quite liked just the first part – her [name of uncommon animal] eyes, her [quirky adjective] hair – so I kept going just for fun (I didn’t use any of these):
Her angel-fish eyes, her dumpy hair Her ferret eyes, her over-blown hair Her Shetland pony eyes, her indecisive hair His raccoon eyes, his ludicrous toupee His weasel eyes, his cockamamie comb-over
and so on…
Once you’ve done a few, or several, circle the one that most appeals to you.
January 25 “Emulation-Permutation” Take a particularly vivid and rhythmic sentence or two from someone else’s book or story, and then exchange the verbs and/or adjectives and/or adverbs and/or whatever to make it your own. For example, while reading Conversations with Gore Vidal(edited by Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole), I came across this vignette in the piece by Larry Kramer, “The Sadness of Gore Vidal”:
“He is very fat. His face is lined. His hair, all of which he still has, looks like its in the end stages of a coloring job. He says he has to worry about his health. He orders a steak.”
Here’s my emulation-permutation on that:
She is very thin. Her face is as smooth as a child’s. Her hair, which is sparse and frizzed, reminds me of what might be a fried mermaid’s. She says she is ravenous. She orders the sardine sandwich.
And another:
He is huge. His face appears to have been inflated. His hair has been slicked back with a strong-smelling lotion. He says he hasn’t time for more than a quick bite. He orders the brisket.
Do as many emulation-permutations as you can on this, or on another selection– preferably from your own favorite reading. No rules.
P.S. You can find the archive of workshop posts here.
Those of you who follow me here know that I am fascinated by attentional management and the creative process. Of late I have posted here on my advances in email management; finding time for writing (gimungous swaths of it!); and most recently, my distraction-free smartphone (which post includes an app evaluation flowchart to tailor-make your own, should you feel so inclined).
That last post about the smartphone appeared on the eve of the publication of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. Because I am a fan of Newport’s books, especially Deep Work, which I recommend as vital reading for writers, of any age and any level of experience, I expected Digital Minimalism to be good. As I noted in that post, if nothing else, in broadening our ability to think about the technology we use, Newport’s term “digital minimalism” is an important contribution in itself.
Reader, Digital Minimalism is beyond superb. It is a healing book, on many and profound levels, and I believe that it is not only vital reading for writers, but for anyone who finds themselves staring at a screen more often and for longer than they know is good for them– and, alas, these days, that would be just about everybody. (Including parents.)
In Digital Minimalism Newport says much of what I have said here at Madam Mayo (I found myself nodding, yes, yes, at almost every page), but he goes thirty miles higher and a loop-de-loop beyond.
And perhaps most importantly, for the general reader looking for something in the burgeoning self-help genre addressing the behavioral addictions of our Digital Age, as a tenured professor of Computer Science at an elite university, Cal Newport has authority rarer than an orchid in the Sahara.
My intention in this week’s post is not to provide a full review of Digital Minimalism, but rather to focus on one chapter, “Reclaim Lesiure,” and, more generally, the importance for writers of quality leisure.
QUALITY LEISURE
Writes Newport:
“The more I study this topic, the more it becomes clear to me that low-quality digital distractions play a more important role in people’s lives than they imagine. In recent years, as the boundary between work and life blends, jobs become more demanding, and community traditions degrade, more and more people are failing to cultivate the high-quality leisure lives …crucial for human happiness. This leaves a void that would be near unbearable if confronted, but that can be ignored wih the help of digital noise. It’s now easy to fill the gaps between work and caring for your family and sleep by pulling out a smartphone or tablet, and numbing yourself with mindless swiping and tapping. Erecting barriers against the existential is not new–before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions–but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.” (p.168)
I think that bears repeating.
“Erecting barriers against the existential is not new–before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions–but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.” — Cal Newport
Newports recounts the experience of a writer who tried to go cold turkey from digital distractions. As that writer summed it up, it was “Torture.” Writes Newport:
“[He] felt uncomfortable, in other words, not because he was craving a particular digital habit, but because he didn’t know what to do with himself once his general access to the world of connected screens was removed.” (p.168)
Then:
“If you want to succeed with digital minimalism, you cannot ignore this reality… The most successful digital minimalists, therefore, tend to start their conversion by renovating what they do with their free time–cultivating high-quality leisure before culling the worst of their digital habits… When the void is filled, you no longer need distractions to help you avoid it.” (pp.168-169)
NOT THE DREAMTIME OF A CHARTREUSE MOON OR, THE PERILS OF PROCRASTINATION
As anyone who has taken on writing a book or three knows, only in the dreamtime of a chartreuse moon do they “write themselves.” It happens. But the experience is more often one of initial enthusiasm soon weighted down by one frustration and then twenty-nine others, delays for good reasons, for stupid reasons, more frustrations, distractions galore… and so, slowly, or quickly, a slide into the warmly inviting moist sand of procrastination.
Some books escape this trap. Most do not because the writer soon feels bad about having procrastinated–oh, very bad– and on top of this, in march the clanking, hammering, pounding round-n-round of woulda-coulda-shouldas… which makes the mere thought of the book so disagreeable that… eventually… it sinks deeper into the quicksand… and deeper…. And there it dies.
So how did I manage to write so many books, including the epic historical novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire? A novel, moreover, that deals with Mexico’s most complex transnational episode and recounts it by means of a Jamesian roving omniscient point of view? Whatever you may think of my novel, were you to read it, I am sure you could agree that it was not a modest undertaking. I won’t tote up all my challenges and frustrations over the eight years I needed to research and write it. For purposes of this blog post, the answer to the question is that, apart from a perhaps unusual streak of tenaciousness in my personality, when the going got really funky with The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, I happened upon the lifesaver–I grabbed it!– of psychologist Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit.
And now here I am in the midst of another multi-year book project– multi-year by its nature–but also one that, alas, has been interrupted by two other books, a death in the family, and two household moves… I was starting to sense a bit of dampness there in the encroaching sand, as it were. But then, in one of the boxes I opened after my latest move, I found again my dog-eared copy of The Now Habit. I reread it, and I can report that Fiore’s advice is as consolingly golden as ever.
And then, after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, in the light and freshness of that, I sat down and went through The Now Habit yet again.
It was eerie to be reading Fiore’s The Now Habit in 2019, for it appeared in 1989, before anyone, outside a coterie of high-tech scientists and miltary people, had more than a notion, if that, of the Internet.
When I first read The Now Habit in the early 2000s, email had become a thing, but only a few writers had one of those newfangled things called “websites.” I did not yet know of a single one with a blog (I don’t think I’d yet heard of blogs). Cell phones were just phones. To get to school, we walked a mile in the snow without shoes (just kidding). For mindless procrastination there were trashy fiction, newspapers, magazines, and TV on tap, ever and always. In short, writers have always had to battle procrastination, albeit relatively low-octane stuff compared to the engineered-to-be-addictive apps of today.
But back to the question of quality leisure.
Of immense value for me in Fiore’s The Now Habit was the chapter “Guilt-Free Play, Quality Work.” Speaking to us from a time essentially free from “digital distractions,” Fiore says much the same thing as does Newport: for health, happiness, and productivity, we need quality leisure– or, as Fiore calls it, “guilt-free play.”
Writes Fiore:
“Attempting to skimp on holidays, rest, and exercise leads to suppression of the spirit and motivation as life begins to look like all spinach and no dessert… we need guilt-free play to provide us with periods of physical and mental renewal.”
It’s counterintuitive: when we seriously, urgently want and need to get work done, why first schedule play?!
Writes Fiore:
“Enjoying guilt-free play is part of a cycle that will lead you to higher levels of quality, creative work. The cycle follows a pattern that usually begins with guilt-free play, or at least the scheduling of it. That gives you a sense of freedom about your life that enables you to more easily settle into a short period of quality work. Having completed some quality work on your project, your feeling of self-control increases, as does your confidence in your ability to concentrate and to creatively resolve problems. In turn your capacity to enjoy quality, guilt-free play grows.” (p.82)
Play and work enhance one another in this cycle:
“…You are now well-rested, inspired, and ready for greater quality work. Guilt-free, creative play excites you with motivation to return to work.” (p.82)
I would urge anyone who wants to overcome procrastination to carefully read Fiore’s The Now Habit; he has much to say about the ways over-work can lead to procrastination, and the precise way to schedule guilt-free play with what he calls an “unschedule,” and how to overcome blocks to action. (Much of this good old-fashioned, yet oft overlooked, common sense, for example, what he calls “Grandma’s Principle,” that your scheduled guilt-free play should come after a good, solid half hour of quality work– “your ice cream always comes after you eat your spinach”.) My purpose here is not to review Fiore’s book however, but to focus on the counterintuitive importance for writers of quality leisure.
“GUILT FREE PLAY” AND “QUALITY LEISURE”
First, it should be triple-underlined that the “quality” of leisure is not necessarily related to its cost. Golf resorts, wide-screen TV manufacturers, purveyors of recreational vehicles, time-shares, sports equipment, Princess Cruises, et al would like you to imagine that what they’re selling is “quality leisure,” and the more expensive the upgrades the better!
But “quality leisure” could be an activity as pennywise as sitting in a chair in your livingroom and knitting a scarf from a ball of yarn that had been stashed in your closet for the past 20 years. Or, say, baking peanutbutter cookies; playing with your dog; walking out to the park and tossing around a frisbee with a friend. Biking to your public library to read War & Peace. Or playing baseball, curling, taking a yoga class, doing yoga on your own in your backyard, or on the beach at dawn! Scottish country dancing, baking bread, watching Casablanca at your local film school’s movie festival. Learning to play the guitar or the kazoo. Baking lasagne. Casting bronze sculpture! Or squishing together a super weird alien head the size of your fist out of papier mache!
In sum, “quality leisure” can be pretty much any activity that you truly enjoy doing and that you find energizing. (Hint: TV watching and pecking at the smartphone don’t count. Neither does bar-hopping or sitting around toking weed.) Newport has more to say about identifying and pursuing quality leisure. Before I return to that, a brief note about the “artist date.”
THE ARTIST’S WAY
By this point I imagine that many of you writerly readers may be thinking, didn’t Julia Cameron say something like this in The Artist’s Way?
Indeed she did. Cameron’s concept, a potent one, is what she calls “the artist date.” The idea is that this is scheduled quality leisure (to use Newport’s term) / guilt-free play (to use Fiore’s) but you go alone— absolutely not with someone else–and do something that nurtures your artist self. For me it might be something like a visit to a museum, reading a Willa Cather novel for an hour in a favorite coffee shop, or attending an organ concert. (In one of my most challenging moments in writing The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, one “artist date” I made for myself was to attend a planetarium show. Of all things.) Some people might like to get out the crayons or the Play-Dough. Of course, there’s no formula; what nurtures one artist, or writer, might not another.
So, advises Cameron, if you want to get some good writing done, go forth, by yourself, at a scheduled time, and do some fun and possibly wacky-nerdy thing!
Cameron’s The Artist’s Way was originally published in 1991, before the tsunami of digital technologies swept over our world, and yet like Fiore’s The Now Habit, it offers wise and timeless advice for writers. Cameron has a New Age spiritual slant, however, and that isn’t every Atheist’s slug of coffee. With that caveat, I warmly recommend The Artist’s Way.
CAL NEWPORT’S LEISURE LESSONS
Back to our computer professor and attentional focus expert Cal Newport and his latest, Digital Minimalism. In the chapter “Reclaim Lesiure,” Newport offers specific insights into which types of leisure are most effective for filling the void otherwise taken by low-quality digital distractions, and for enhancing well-being and productivity. These are those endeavors that:
(1) “prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption”;
(2) “use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world”; and
(3) tend to be those “that require real world, structured social interactions.”
Newport is not talking about eliminating digital technology, and in fact he points out ways in which websites, email, social media and more digital technologies can assist us in engaging in more and higher quality leisure. There is, Newport concedes, “a complex relationship between high-quality leisure and digital technology.” In my own case, I recently found out about and registered for a university extension course (which I attended in person) on a website. Many similar examples of how texting, social media, and YouTube, can assist and enhance real world meetings and activities no doubt pop into your mind. Newport stresses: “The state I’m helping you escape is one in which passive interaction with your screens is your primary leisure.”
“The state I’m helping you escape is one in which passive interaction with your screens is your primary leisure.” — Cal Newport
Newport concludes his chapter “Reclaim Leisure” with four practices, each amply explained, argued, and with illuminating examples:
Fix or build something every week;
Schedule your low-quality leisure;
Join something;
Follow leisure plans, both seasonal and weekly, stating both the objectives and the habits you aim to establish.
AND TO CONCLUDE WITH FRIEDRICH DÜRRENMATT
Here is an example of one writer’s quality leisure activity: Swiss writer, playwright and artist Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) painted the bathroom adjacent to his office. This is a partial view, of side wall, back wall, and ceiling. I decline to publish here the principal appurtenance.
Thanks to poet Joseph Hutchison, who recommended Dürrenmatt’s work to me, as I am temporarly living in the area, I made it, shall we say, one of my “quality leisure” activities to visit the house / museum, now the Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel. (I would also call this visit “guilt-free play,” to use Neil Fiore’s term, but not an “artist’s date,” as Julia Cameron defines it, because I did not go alone.)
In the museum:
In English: “I can play with this world: that is my freedom as an artist.”– Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Here is the writer at his desk, as shown on the cover of this book (which I would translate as Dürrenmatt: His Life in Pictures):
With México en las miradas de Estados Unidos (Editorial Las Animas, 2017), Mexican writer and historian José N. Iturriaga has edited an anthology that is at once a vital scholarly contribution towards the history of Mexican and of US-Mexico relations, and an “armchair read,” as I like to think of those box-of-chocolate tomes one can dip into here and there, on some quiet afternoon (perhaps with a bit of a birdsong and by a burbling fountain…) In short, this is a book I will keep on an eye-level shelf of my working library, but also return to time and again just for the fun of it. (For this reason furnishings for a proper working library include an upholstered armchair and ottoman!)
For those who can read Spanish and have even an
iota of interest in Mexico, México en las miradas de Estados Unidos is
a must-have. Over 130 American voices are represented here, and of an
astonishing variety, from the early 19th century to recent years, and of all
sensibilities. To quote [my translation] from Iturriaga’s introduction, they
are:
“traders and engineers, adventurers and sailors, explorers and historians, photographers and archaeologists, diplomats and journalists, novelists and miners, geographers and artists, poets and filmmakers, priests and planters, scientists, various soldiers, a comic and a president.”
That comic would be Groucho Marx, and the
president, James K. Polk.
Many of these authors will be familiar to those
who who have already read widely on Mexico in English: Fanny Chambers
Gooch, John Kenneth Turner, John Reed, Katherine Anne Porter, Alma Reed,
William Spratling, John Steinbeck, William Burroughs, John Womak.
And I was delighted to see so many of my personal
favorites, among them, pioneer trader and explorer Josiah Gregg, Princess Salm
Salm (suffice to say, had Andy Warhol been alive in 1866 they would have been amiguísimos),
Charles Macomb Flandrau, and my own dear amigo, the accomplished biographer and
historian Michael K.
Schuessler.
I am immensely honored to find my own work in
such company, with an excerpt from my novel based on the true story of Mexico’s
half-American prince, The Last Prince
of the Mexican Empire.
Although I have been reading on Mexican history
for decades now, and in fact collect memoirs of Mexico in English, many of
Iturriaga’s selections were new to me, for example, General John E. Wool,
soldier Thomas Yates Lundie, traveler Maude Mason Austin, and more.
Read about José N. Iturriaga’s many works,
including the recent Saberes y delirios, his fine novel about the
incomparable 19th century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, here.
Edited transcript of remarks by C.M. Mayo for the Panel on “Writing Across Borders and Cultures,” Women Writing the West Conference, Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 15, 2016
How many of you have been to Mexico? Well, viva México! Here we are in New Mexico, Nuevo México. On this panel, with Dawn Wink and Kathryn Ferguson, it seems we are all about Mexico. I write both fiction and nonfiction, most of it about Mexico because that is where I have been living for most of my adult life— that is, the past 30 years— married to a Mexican and living in Mexico City.
But in this talk I would like to put on my sombrero, as it were, as an historical novelist, and although my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, is about Mexico, I don’t want to talk so much about Mexico as I do five simple, powerful techniques that have helped me, and that I hope will help you to see as an artist and write across borders.
I start with the premise that truth is beauty and beauty is truth, and that seeing clearly, seeing as an artist, is what brings us towards truth.
My second premise is that through narrative we become more human—and that sure beats the alternative.
My third premise is that writing about anyone else, anywhere, is to some degree writing across a border. The past is a border. Religion is a border. Gender is a border. Social class is a border. Language. Physical conditions— people who have peanut allergies are different than people who do not have peanut allergies.
“writing about anyone else, anywhere, is to some degree writing across a border”
THE CHALLENGE
The challenge is this: As Walter Lippman put it, “For the most part we do not first see and then define, we define first and then see.” And I would agree with Lippman that in our culture, for the most part, and of course, with oodles of exceptions, we are not educated to see, then define. Ironically, the more educated we are, the more we as literary artists may have something to overcome in this respect.
The poet e.e. cummings put it this way: “An artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.”
Betty Edwards, the artist who wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, calls seeing as an artist “a different, more direct kind of seeing. The brain’s editing is somehow put on hold, thereby permitting one to see more fully and perhaps more realistically.”
How many of you are familar with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain?
How many of you have tried that exercise where you take a black and white photograph of a face, turn it upside down, and copy it?
Turning the picture upside down tricks your brain to get past the labels of that is a nose, or, say, that is an eyelid, a wrinkle, a cheek… You are just drawing what you actually see, this weird jumble of shapes and shadows.
You turn it right side side up and, wow… it’s Albert Einstein!
And why is seeing this way, seeing as an artist so important? Because if we as writers cannot see as artists, with that wide open, innocent sense of attention and wonder that would see first, and then, maybe, define, whether we are writing about a Mexican or a Korean ballet dancer or a Texas cowboy or the old lady who died in the house next door one hundred years ago— whomever we are writing about, if we cannot see that human being with the eyes of an artist, our writing about them will not be fresh, it will be fuzzy, blunt, stale, peculiarly distorted. In a word: stereotypical.
It will be distorted in the same way that people who do not know how to draw will make the eyes too big, the foreheads too small, and ignore most of the shadows—the face they draw looks like a cartoon, not the way the face actually looks, because the left side of their brain was busy labeling things.
Seeing as an artist, on the other hand, is seeing without filters. Radical seeing. For us as writers this means seeing without prejudice, without bias, without the… shall we say, enduring presumptions.
It is, to quote the artist Betty Edwards again, “an altered state of awareness.” And “This shift to an altered state enables you to see well.”
So how do we get to that altered state? And then see?
FIVE TECHNIQUES FOR RADICAL SEEING
Technique #1 It starts with slowing down, being here now, in your body. Breathe in and breathe out, slowly, keeping your attention on following each breath, in and out. In and out. Five to 10 of these usually works just fine. If you’re really stressed out and distracted, maybe more. Whatever works for you.
Technique #2 This quiets the so-called “monkey mind.” Using a pen and paper, and using the present tense—using the present tense is key—simply writing down what you want to set aside for the duration of your writing session.
I write:
For now I’m not going to worry that The phone might ring. I am concerned that the front tire of my car looks low. I am worried that so and so will say thus and such…
Whatever. You just write them down and set them aside. And because you are writing them down, no worries, they will be there for you when you need to pick them up again.
Really, it is that simple. And incredibly powerful.
Now to actually seeing as an artist. I think of it as adopting the mindset of a four year old child. A four year old is old enough to speak and maybe even read and write a little bit, but young enough to have no presumption, no bias, no definitions, no worry about time, no social status to defend. No need to be “cool.” It’s just, you’re four and you’re noticing things, playfully. Innocently. Dangerously. Like that little boy who asked, Why isn’t the emperor wearing any clothes?
So we can start noticing things. Like, ooooh, the person sitting next to us.
What is the shape of her hair?
What’s on her left hand?
If you could touch her sleeve what would it probably feel like?
Other people may inform us that a wall is, say, pink. But if we can see as an artist, get past all the filters, we will see that the wall is cotton candy pink, over there. Down in the corner, away from the window, it might be more of an ash rose. Over there, where it catches the glow from the reflection, it’s a salmon pink. Up near the ceiling light, almost white. It’s gray, it’s lavender. That wall might have hundreds of different colors.
“The uniformity of the wall’s color is a social fact, and what I perceive, in every day life, seems to be such social facts, rather than the facts of optics… To perceive the wall as variously colored, I have to suspend my normal socially informed mode of perception. This is what an artist does.”
Other people may inform us about other people, such as, say, Mexicans. Mexicans are like this or, Mexicans are like that. But if we can see as an artist, we may see something, someone who does not fit into, shall we say, the enduring presumptions.
Such as Maximilian von Habsburg.
Maximilian von Habsburg
Speaking of emperors, Maximilian wore some very nice clothes. Beautifully tailored suits and uniforms.
Who has heard of Maximilian?
Most Mexicans will tell you that Maximilian was not Mexican, that he was Austrian, he was the Archduke of Austria, he was a puppet monarch imposed by the French Imperial Army. But at the time Maximilian died, executed in Mexico by firing squad in 1867, there were many Mexican monarchists, a minority of Mexicans certainly, but many, who considered Maximilian Mexican, as he did himself—he considered himself the mystical embodiment of his people, his subjects, the Mexicans.
His skin was very pale and he had this down-to-here red beard. As you might recall, the Habsburgs had once ruled Spain. So to Louis Napoleon and the Mexican monarchists, for the throne of Mexico, Maximilian seemed a logical and very apt choice. And the Pope thought so, too, by the way.
Technique #3 Do your reading and research, and I could talk for an hour or more just about reading and research…archives and handwriting and photographs and newspaper clippings… but the clock is ticking.
One thing I would urge you to consider is to read for perspectives outside your comfort zone. For example, I am the last person who would pick up the memoir of Princess Di’s butler. But in fact, that memoir, Paul Burrell’s A Royal Duty, as well as many other dishy English and European palace memoirs that have oozed out over the past couple of centuries, helped me see palace life in ways I might not have been able to otherwise—to crack its brittle surface of glamour and glimpse some of those oh-so-very human beings.
Technique #4 Always, always question the source. You might be surprised— I certainly was— by how many “facts” rendered in standard histories turn out to have originated in wartime propaganda or were complete fictions tossed off by political enemies. Whenever someone says something about someone, ask, what was their aim? What was the information they had at the time? Their biases? And what were their incentives?
Finally:
Technique #5 Visit relevant places, if you can, always trying to see them from the point of view of your characters. When you’re there, put yourself in their shoes. You may or may not have sympathy for them, but your artist’s imagination, your artist’s eye, must.
MAXIMILIAN’S POV
I’d like to end with a brief reading from the novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, from a flashback in Maximilian’s point of view.
When he was a twelve year-old boy, there was a distinct moment of a gray winter’s day in the Hofburg when he looked up from his schoolwork, the endless hieroglyphics of trigonometry, and caught sight of his reflection in the window. Four o’clock and it was nearly dark outside. He had been horrified: how old he looked. The life drained out of him! In a whisper that neither his older brother Franz Joseph nor their tutor could hear, he solemnly swore: I shall not forget who I truly am.
Adults, it seemed to Max, were as butterflies in reverse: they too, had been beautiful and free, but they had folded in their wings, cocooned themselves, and let their appendages dissolve until what they became was hard, ridged, little worms. One’s tutor, for example, reminded one of a nematode.
Twiddling concern with numbers, “practicality” in all its Philistine guises makes Maximilian stupendously bored. He needs vistas of sky, mountains, swift-running, sun-sparkled water; he needs— as a normal man must eat— to explore this world, to see, to touch its sibylline treasures: hummingbirds. The red-as-blood breast of a macaw. The furred and light-as-a-feather legs of a tarantula. God in all His guises: mushrooms, lichens, all creatures. As a boy, Max had delighted in his menagerie: a marmoset, a toucan, a lemur. The lemur had escaped, and left outside overnight, it had died of the cold. A footman had opened the door in the morning, and there the thing was, dusted with snow and stiff as cardboard.
“I detest winter,” Max had declared. Franz Joseph, Charlie, and the little brothers, bundled in woollens and furs, they could go ice-skating or build fortresses for snow-ball fights; Max preferred to stay inside with his pets, his books, and the stoves roaring. The one thing he relished about winter, for it was a most elegant way of thumbing his nose at it, was to go into the Bergl Zimmer and shut the door behind him. Its walls and its doors were painted with murals, trompe l’oeil of the most luxuriant flora and fauna: watermelons, papayas, cockatoos, coconut trees, hibiscus. Where was this, Ceylon? Java? Yucatan? Sleet could be falling on the other side of the Hofburg’s windows, but this treasure of the Bergl Zimmer, painted in the year 1760 for his great-great-grandmother the Empress Maria Theresa, never failed to transport one into an ecstasy of enchantment.
Mexicans, walls, in the news. Couldn’t resist.
So in this excerpt I am writing across multitudinous borders and cultures: about a man, when I am a woman; about an Austrian turned Mexican, when I was born in Texas and grew up in the suburbs of California, then moved to Mexico, remaining a legal resident, not a Mexican citizen; someone whose native language was German, when mine is English; one of Europe’s highest ranking aristocrats, when I have no title nor did any ancestor I know of; someone who was born more than a century before myself; furthermore, someone whose personality, religious beliefs, political values, pastimes, intellectual interests and aesthetics were all dramatically different than my own.
Did I get Maximilian “right”? I don’t know. There is no triple-certified committee of quadruple-authorized red-bearded blue-blooded Austrian-Mexican monarchist-Catholic-sailing-and-botany-enthusiasts to tell us. And even if Maximilian himself were available to provide feedback by means of time travel or, say, a credible séance, would that Maximilian, plucked out of 1866 or disembodied orb of some 150 years of floating about the astral, have the self-awareness, confidence, and good will to communicate to us a valid yea or nay?
What I do know is that what I wrote, that bit I just read to you, is the product of my applying these five techniques, including heaps of reading, archival research, and a visit to Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, and however good it may or may not be— let the gods and the reader decide— it is a mammoth stretch beyond what I could come up with in my first drafts.
EMPATHY
The stretch is towards empathy. But be careful: Empathy is not the same as sympathy. I do not have sympathy for Maximilian von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria and so-called Emperor of Mexico and all that he represented and fought for; but for Maximilian the human being, I do have empathy. That empathy was something I achieved because I wanted to see him.
“Recognizing the reality of another’s existence is the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy, a word invented by a psychologist interested in visual art. The word is only slightly more than a century old, though the words sympathy, kindness, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, and others covered the same general ground before Edward Titchener coined it in 1909. It was a translation of the German word Einfühlung, or feeling into, as though the feeling itself reached out… Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so.”
In other words, such seeing takes heart and the writing that results is a journey of the heart, both for the writer and for the reader— although the latter may not choose, or perhaps may not be able to take such a journey. One can proffer “the pearls of the Virgin,” as they say in Mexico, and there will always be unhappy souls who loudly proclaim that they do not like hard little white things.
In the spirit of seeing past stereotypes, I would like to leave you with a quote not from an artist nor a beloved poet nor an esteemed literary writer but a Harvard Business School Professor of Marketing. In her wise and provocative Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, Professor Youngme Moon writes, “Wherever you go, what matters less is what you are looking at, but how you have committed to see.”
The two volume anthology by José N. Iturriaga, a collection of writings by foreigners in Morelia, from the 16th to the 21st century.
To see one’s own country through the scribbles of foreigners can be at once discomfiting and illuminating. Out of naiveté and presumption, foreigners get many things dead-wrong; they also get many things confoundingly right. Like the child who asked why the emperor was wearing no clothes, oftentimes they point to things we have been blind to: beauty and wonders, silliness, perchance a cobwebby corner exuding one skanky stink. And of course, there are things for foreigners to point at in all countries, from Albania to Zambia.
As an American I have to admit it’s rare that we pay a whit of attention to writing on the United States by, say, Mexicans, Canadians, the Germans or the French. True, we have the shining example of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which every reasonably well-educated American may not have waded through but has at least heard of (and if you haven’t, dear reader, now you have.) But de Tocqueville’s tome is a musty-dusty 181 years old (the first of its four volumes was published in 1835, the last in 1840– get the whole croquembouche in paperback here.)
José N. Iturriaga, signing copies of his anthology, July 1, 2016, Centro Cultural Jardin Borda, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico.
This past Friday, July 1, 2016, I participated in the launch of novelist and historian José N. Iturriaga’s anthology Otros cien forasteros en Morelos [Another One Hundred Foreigners in Morelos], the companion volume to Cien forasteros en Morelos [One Hundred Foreigners in Morelos], from the 16th to the 21st century.
(For those rusty on their Mexican geography, Morelos is a large state in central Mexico that includes Cuernavaca, “the city of eternal springtime,” which it actually is, and Tepoztlán, a farm town surrounded by spectacular reddish bluffs that, despite an influx of tourists from Mexico City and abroad, still has a strong indigenous presence, and has been designated by Mexico’s Secretary of Tourism as a “pueblo mágico.” The most famous resident of the state of Morelos was Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata.)
The launch was held in the Centro Cultural Jardín Borda (Borda Gardens Cultural Center), an historic garden open to the public in downtown Cuernavaca– about an hour and a half’s drive from Mexico City.
Jardín Borda, entrance patio.
As Iturriaga said in his talk, for almost forty years he has been studying the writings of foreigners on Mexico, precisely for the fresh, if not always kind nor necessarily accurate, perspective they offer on his own country.
I admire Iturriaga’s work, and his curiosity, open-mindedness, and open-heartedness more than I can say. It was a mammoth honor to have had an excerpt from my novel included in his anthology, and to have been invited to participate on the panel presenting his anthology. The other two panelists, whose work is also in the anthology, were poet, novelist and essayist Eliana Albala and journalist and poet María Gabriela Dumay, both of whom came to live in Cuernavaca in the early 1970s, political exiles from Pinochet’s Chile.
Mexican book presentations tend to be more formal affairs than those in US (the latter usually in a bookstore with, perhaps, a brief and informal introduction by the owner or a staff member. I have war stories.) In Mexico, in contrast, there is usually a felt-draped dais, always a microphone, and two to as many as five panelists who have prepared formal lectures about the book. The author speaks last, and briefly. Another difference is that the Mexican reporters, photographers, and oftentimes television cameras crowd the dais, lending the affair a glamor and gravitas rare for a US book presentation. Afterwards, there is a party with white-gloved waiters pouring “vino de honor”– in this case, for Iturriaga’s Otro cien forasteros en Morelos, whoa, mezcal.
C.M. Mayo, Eliana Albala, María Gabriela Dumay, José N. Iturriaga, July 1, 2016, Centro Cultural Jardín Borda, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
>> Where to buy Otros Cien Forasteros en Morelos? I hope to be able to provide a link shortly.
Here is my talk for the panel, translated into English.
Dear José Iturriaga; fellow panelists, Eliana Albala and María Gabriela Dumay; everyone in this beautiful Centro Cultural Jardín Borda who made this event possible; Ladies and Gentlemen:
First of all, heart-felt congratulations to José Iturriaga on this extraordinary anthology in two volumes, a magnificent and opportune cultural contribution that, no doubt, required endless hours of reading, not to mention the tremendous labor of love that went into selecting and then translating so many writers.
Between the covers of this second volume, Otros cien forasteros en Morelos, I find my fellow Americans Jack London, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Steinbeck– among the most outstanding figures in US literature. There is also the great novelist who arrived, so mysteriously, from Germany: B. Traven; and artists such as Pedro Friedeberg; and distinguished historians such as John Womack, author ofZapata and the Mexican Revolution, Michael K. Schuessler, biographer of the eccentric poetic genius Pita Amor; and the Austrian Konrad Ratz, whose meticulous research on Maximilian von Habsburg was essential, in fact a parting of the seas, in our understanding of the personality, education, and politics of the Archduke of Austria.
In three words, José Iturriaga’s anthology is eclectic, fascinating, and illuminating.
It is a great honor for me to participate in this presentation and an even greater honor that this second volume, Otros cien forasteros en Morelos, includes excerpts from my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. [In the anthology, excerpts are taken from the Spanish translation by Mexican novelist and poet Agustín Cadena, El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano.]
(*Agustin de Iturbide (1783-1824) led the final stage of Mexico’s war for independence from Spain, and supported by the Catholic Church, was crowned Emperor of Mexico in 1822, deposed in 1823, and executed in 1824. )
In the winter of 1866, Maximilian brought his court here, to the Jardín Borda. And since we are within those very walls and surrounded by those very gardens, in celebration of José Iturriaga’s work, I would like to invoke those foreigners of the past, that is to say, I would like to read the few very brief excerpts from the novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, as they appear in this anthology.
This bit from the novel is the imagined point of view of José Luis Blasio, a Mexican who served as Maximilian’s secretary:
Depend on it: Maximilian is shepherding Mexico into the modern world— so José Luis Blasio, His Majesty’s secretary, has told his family and tells himself. And this is no small task when His Majesty must grapple not only with our backwardness and ingratitude, but that thorn in his side, General Bazaine. The rumor is that, abetted by his Mexican wife’s family, Bazaine schemes to push aside Maximilian; they aim to have Louis Napoleon make Mexico a French Protectorate with himself in charge— not that José Luis would give that a peso of credence. But José Luis does consider it an outrage, the latest of many, that he would wire a complaint that Maximilian has removed his court to Cuernavaca, rather than “attend to business in the capital.”
Yes, they are here in the Casa Borda amongst gardens and fountains, fruit trees, palm trees, parrots of every size and color— a world away from Mexico City. But does not Louis Napoleon go to Plombières and Biarritz? Queen Victoria, who has sterner blood, travels as far as Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands. Dom Pedro II of Brazil retires to his villa in Petropolis. And did not the empress’s late father, Leopold, absent himself from Brussels in the Château Royal at Laeken? It is natural that for the winter, His Majesty should hold court in a healthier clime.
But even here where he siestas in a hammock, drinks limeade from a coconut shell, and wears an ecru linen suit with an open-necked blouse, Maximilian’s work never ceases. It is a wide, rushing river that José Luis can only hope will not overspill its banks. In the past year, José Luis has come to appreciate the uncompromising necessity of working long hours; indeed, his eyesight, never strong, has deteriorated from so much reading in the dim of early mornings. Maximilian arises at four; his valet attends him, and though he might linger over breakfast, by no later than six, he is at “the bridge,” as he says, that is, his desk— or, as here in Casa Borda, a folding table on the veranda. His Majesty’s dispatch box is heavy, and growing ever heavier…
And now Pepa de Iturbide, daughter of the Emperor Agustín de Iturbide, godmother to Agustin de Iturbide y Green, and member of Maximilian’s court:
It is a holy miracle that she got a wink of sleep at all! So appalled she is by Maximilian’s whim to uproot the court to this hamlet two bone-jarring days travel up and down the sierra— good gracious, this is no time to abandon the capital, and go gallivanting about with butterfly nets and beetle jars! Matamoros is under siege; the whole state of Guerrero, from Acapulco to Iguala, is in thrall to guerrillas. And Pepa got it from Frau von Kuhacsevich, who got it from Lieutenant Weissbrunn, that whilst the empress was in Yucatan, Maximilian fancied a visit to Acapulco, but General Bazaine nixed it because it would have been impossible to maintain security for his person. That is the sum of things!
Oh, but in Mexico City Maximilian felt cramped, “an oyster in a bucket of ice,” he said. Over the past two months, the few times Pepa chanced to see Maximilian, he had spoken of the empress’s dispatches from Yucatan proudly but with— Pepa recognized it when she saw it— a glint of green. If Maximilian could not have his expedition to Yucatan, by Jove, he was going to go some place tropical! And Maximilian could not be outshone by his consort, oh no. A mere visit to Cuernavaca would not do; he had to serve himself the whole enchilada with the big spoon: an Imperial Residence with landscaping, fountains, an ornamental pond stocked with exotic fish, and furnishings and flub dubs aplenty, comme ça and de rigueur. Whom did he imagine he was impressing with this caprice? Poor Charlotte, exhausted after Yucatan. And as if the von Kuhacseviches were not already foundering in their attempts to manage the Imperial Household in Mexico City! As if the Mexican Imperial Army could offer its officers anything approaching a living wage! Or keep its depots stocked with gunpowder! It is a monumental waste of time, of effort, of money, and to boot, Casa Borda is a-crawl with cockroaches, beetles, earwigs, and moths— a bonanza for Professor Bilimek!
And now the Austrian Frau von Kuhacsecvich, Mistress (chief administrador) of the Imperial Household:
On the steps to the next patio, Frau von Kuhacsevich must pause to fan herself. Cuernavaca is not the Turkish bath of the hot lands, more, as Maximilian put it, an Italian May. Pleasant for the men, and Prince Agustín, perhaps, but a trial for those who must encase themselves in corsets and crinolines. Oh, poor Charlotte that her father has died, but Blessed Jesus, what would Frau von Kuhacsevich have done had she been obliged to wear mourning black! The thought simply wilts her. She is afraid her face has gone red as a beet. Her back feels sticky, and under her bonnet, she can feel her scalp sweating. Taking the bonnet off is out of the question: her roots have grown in nearly an inch— in all the rushing to and fro, there has not been a snatch of time to touch up the color.
An Italian May: in that spirit, for luncheon, Tüdos has concocted an amuse-gueule of olives, basil, and requeson, a cheese too strong to pass for mozzarella, but toothsome. In addition to coffee, he will be making a big pot of canarino: simply, the zest of lemons steeped as tea. Well, here it has to be made of limes, ni modo, no matter, as the Mexicans say.
Finally, Maximilian himself:
Here, this moment in Cuernavaca, one is happy: perfumes in the air, colors from the palette of Heaven, birds, flowering trees and vines and oranges, the music of the orchestra and of the fountains, this bone-warming sunshine…
