Journal #3: The World of the Indio

 (Continuation of the Journal begun in previous entries. The text dates from the early 1990s.)

Wall in Cuzco - 12 angle stone

 I got my hands on José María Arguedas' novel Los Rios Profundos, 1973 .(His only novel translated and published in English: The Deep Rivers.) How many times have I read it?  Yet it always drives me back into a re-examination of my soul. Young Ernesto sees the world through the "magincal" eyes of a child and of his native culture. He, like Arguedas himself , is a bridge between Western and Aboriginal cultures. (He was an anthropologist by formation, son of a lawyer but essential raised by a Quechua family while his father travelled.) Everything is alive and speaks of the stories of the people, especially the walls of Cuzco and their "living stones" - puk-tik: "stones of boiling blood." The Maria Angela of the Cathedral rings out its sad tones because it carries the blood of the Indians. The magical zumbayllu (a wooden top that hums as its spins) that sends out its cry and can be heard by his father as a voice of pleading from a small child across the valleys and mountains. These may be the imaginings of a child but they touch deep chords of  Quechua cosmology and provoke profound insights into the reality of our place in the universe. For Ernesto, all is alive, all speaks, all has a stgory to tell, all responds to the pain of the "indio."