Sivan Va'aki: The Wuushkam and the Ceiling

The third layer were the traders.

The wuushkam - the ones who came from the southeast, who had traveled this plain as a trade corridor before the Huhugam’s long building project began, who were older in their dead-register than even the great house and carried in their bones the memory of the plain before it had been organized into something. I found them in the third century. Not in the compound - the compound belonged to the Huhugam - but at the edges of the ruins, in the undifferentiated ground where the trade routes had run.

They spoke in the oldest register I have found outside the deep Mictlan levels. Not the pressure-and-image register of the near-ancient dead - something past that. Something that required me to stop trying to translate and start trying to be present in a different way, the way you stop trying to hear the words of a song in a foreign language and let the melody in instead. Three centuries of listening had given me enough practice in the un-translating to do this.

I learned things at the edges of those ruins I have never found words for in any of the four languages I think in. I am not withholding. I genuinely mean that the wuushkam gave me something that lives below the level of articulation and that is where it has stayed for two hundred years. Not inaccessible - I can act from it. I can make decisions from it. I just cannot say it.

And then the repetition started.

I did not recognize it at first. When the dead begin to say what they have already said, the early repetitions sound like emphasis. You think: they are telling me again because I have not understood the depth of what they mean. I have been in the dead-conversation long enough to know this feeling. You sit with it. You listen harder. You assume the problem is your ear.

It took another decade to understand that the problem was my capacity, not their meaning. Three centuries had done something to the available space in me - not filled it, exactly, but saturated it. There was no longer room for the archive to go deeper into me. I had reached what the Huhugam builders, in their own way, might have called the ceiling: the point where the structure cannot hold any more, where the next thing would require a different form.

The dead were not repeating themselves because they had run out. They were repeating themselves because I had.

This is the most humbling thing the dead have ever taught me. Not the Hopi expulsion, not the Navajo absence, not the five-hundred-year mystery from the canyon. The humbling thing was sitting in the third century of the most generous communion any dead had ever offered me and discovering that the limitation was mine. I had come to the ceiling of what I could hold.

I thought about the Huhugam then. They had looked at what they built and chosen to leave. They did not stay until the walls fell. They chose the moment of departure before it was chosen for them.

I had two good years at Sivan Va’aki after the ceiling. I spent them in something that functions as gratitude - I do not know another name for the deliberate attention to what has been given before leaving. The owls stayed in the open roof. The dead spoke and I listened even though I had no more room, because listening was still the appropriate form for what was offered, even when the offered was more than I could carry.

The railroad was already showing up in the landscape by then. I had been watching the Americans arrive at the edges of my awareness for decades - their bones felt different from the Mexican settlers’ bones, louder somehow, less settled into the specific character of the ground. I did not leave because of the railroad. I left because I was finished.

I left when I was ready. That is what the Huhugam had given me: the knowledge of what ready felt like.