{"id":6742,"date":"2015-11-03T09:45:26","date_gmt":"2015-11-03T17:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=6742"},"modified":"2016-08-26T10:13:35","modified_gmt":"2016-08-26T17:13:35","slug":"trip-to-guanguato-2-post-op-diego-and-hunhunahpu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/03\/trip-to-guanguato-2-post-op-diego-and-hunhunahpu\/","title":{"rendered":"Trip to Guanajuato #2. Post-op. Diego and Hunhunahpu."},"content":{"rendered":"

Added November 11, 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n

I finished that painting I was talking about in this post! Love this picture.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cDiego\u2019s Hunhunahpu\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, November, 2015, 36\u201d\u009d x 36\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

As always, more info on my Paintings <\/a>page.<\/p>\n

And now back to the original November 3, 2015, post.<\/em><\/p>\n

That new hip I got in March, 2015, didn\u2019t take, that is, its cup never bonded with my pelvis bone. So day before yesterday, on Monday, October 26, I had my third artificial left hip implanted. There was the usual jump-cut in consciousness. I\u2019m lying on the operating table with an IV in my arm, and then I\u2019m waking up in bed in the recovery room. I couldn\u2019t move my feet at first, as they\u2019d given me a spinal block injection to paralyze the lower half of my body. I could hardly talk.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs the operation over?\u201d\u009d
\n\u201cYes.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And then I\u2019m looking around the room, lying there for maybe 45 minutes, a large room with other patients, nothing very interesting to see, nothing alive except for the humans, just steel and white, cloth and plastic. Now and then a nurse. And then they wheeled me to my room, and Sylvia came in, and my life began again.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A hospital is the opposite of Guanajuato. Knowing this operation was coming up, I\u2019ve been feeling kind of down for the last few months. The day on Route One with Isabel, and the four days in Mexico\u2014those were breaks that gave me a much-needed lift. And Syvlia and I went to see The Magic Flute<\/em> opera in SF the day before the operation, so uplifting.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But here I am in the post-op present tense, venturing out once again into the psychic surf, wanting to get back on my board and ride some painting and writing waves.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

On my last day in Guanajuato, I toured Diego Rivera\u2019s childhood home, right next to my hotel. They\u2019ve made it into a museum with replica\/reconstructed furniture, and a few of his smaller works.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t really grasped how great an artist Diego Rivera was\u2014in the US he\u2019s mostly known for his murals, which are wonderful, but he could do really lovely fast stuff at smaller scale. Like this one here is a 1943 painting of an exploding volcano called Paricutin\u2014Diego was sent there as part of a journalism gig. There\u2019d be no good way to get a photo, so they sent a painter. Wonderful brush strokes.<\/p>\n

Maybe the most interesting works on display are drawn from a set of 24 watercolors that Diego made, intended for use as illustrations in an book based on the legends in the hieroglyphic Mayan codices<\/a>, a book to be called Popol Vuh<\/em>, never published, to have been edited by one John Weatherwax\u2014I wonder if William Burroughs knew this guy, Bill was always talking about the Mayans and the codex.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Re. the codices, in an amazingly evil act, the conquistadors and the Spanish priests burned most of them. Writing in July of 1562, Bishop Diego De Landa wrote: <\/p>\n

“We found a large number of books in these [hieroglyphic] characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they [the Mexicans] regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.” Such codices were primary written records of Maya civilization\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anyway, back to the good <\/em>Diego, you can find the manuscripts for the book he was going to illustrate for this John Weatherwax guy, a 1930\u2019s Communist pal, online <\/a>in the Smithsonian collections. I get the impression the texts are more or less public domain at this point. It would be cool if some small press could finally publish the book with Diego\u2019s illos.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Wonderful, wonderful images by Diego, like alien cartoons. Mayan gods, yes! So gnarly. I\u2019m going to work them into Million Mile Road Trip<\/em>. A number of gods cooperated (or competed) on creating our cosmos and on creating human beings (shown above). Think of a Hollywood movie, or big budget videogame. Hundreds of people are involved, contributing to it. Graphic art, CG, makeup, costumes, sound, cinematography, casting, actors, and numerous directors. Not just one director. No boss, no top director, no head producer. Like some Hollywood movies will have a \u201csecond unit\u201d\u009d filming stuff. And a universe emerges.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Hunhunahpu <\/a>, the tonsured corn god, making humanoid shapes on this calabash(?) plant, including perhaps a copy of his head. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Later a woman lies under the bush and the head drips spit on her crotch and she gets pregnant, and I think bears twins, one of whom is just plain Hunahpu, with Hunhunahpu the dad. At this point I know next to nothing about the Mayan cosmogony. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As part of my post-op physical and psychic rehab program, I\u2019m working on a copy of that first Hunhunahpu painting. After three days in a daze, I kicked the oxy meds and went, more or less, back to being Rudy. And then I wanted to do something creative, and I wasn\u2019t quite ready to write, so I started painting. I\u2019m using acrylic paint instead of oil paint, as the clean-up is easier this way. And acrylic paint dries so fast that it\u2019s easy to paint over things and revise. That’s a working mock-up shown above. The colored part is my painting thus far, and the Hunhuhahpu is just a collaged-in copy of Diego’s version that I still need to paint in. [You can see the finished version at the start of his post.]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a harsh, saturated, Mexican-wall-paint quality to the acrylic colors that I like.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nCool composite painting of Don Quixote. Artist\u2019s name is Trigos? (Correct me if wrong.) Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The last touristic type site I saw in Guanajuato was a surprisingly interesting museum of paintings and statues of the character Don Quixote\u2014from the Cervantes novel. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never managed to read much of the novel, so when I was home I sought out a couple of translations, and give it another shot, but to no avail. To me, the character Don Quixote is just an idiot.<\/p>\n

But you could say there\u2019s a sense in which Don Quixote stands for writers. His lance is like a pen. He\u2019s surrounded by books at home\u2014which is like having a manuscript you\u2019re working on. He goes out on missions and gets everything wrong\u2014because he\u2019s overlaying his transreal novelistic notions upon the world. Tedious, long-winded, overbearing. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Out in the surf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Added November 11, 2015. I finished that painting I was talking about in this post! Love this picture. \u201cDiego\u2019s Hunhunahpu\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, November, 2015, 36\u201d\u009d x 36\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting. As always, more info on my Paintings page. And now back to the original November 3, 2015, post. That […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-million-mile-road-trip","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6742"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6753,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6742\/revisions\/6753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}