What did the hummingbird say to the Old Wealth God? "So many rabbits and all I got is this darned turkey!" This is the punchline to a joke circa about 700 A.D. inscribed in glyphs on a Maya pot. The pot depicts a hummngbird (represented by a heron-like being with a long beak wreathed in flowers) in a colloquy with a turkey and the Old Wealth God, a toothless hunched figure with the profile of a buzzard. Between the turkey and the hummingbird there are about twelve rabbits heaped up in a pile that rises both above and below the line representing the surface of the earth. Glyphs hang in the air between the figures like cartoon speech-balloons. Stephen Houston describes the pot in the sixth (and last) of his absorbing lectures on Maya visual culture, a series of one-hour talks presented at the National Gallery of Art in thge Spring of 2023 as the 72nd Annual A. W. Mellon lectures on the Fine Arts. I enjoy the Mellon lectures -- you can watch some of them on You-Tube -- and try to acquire the accompanying books published, usually, about three to four years after the lectures by Princeton Press.
Stephen Houston, a nondescript little man with a affable professorial style, is, probably, the world's leading scholar on the Maya. He currently teaches at Brown University and has spent forty years excavating seasonally in the Yucatan. He brings an easy-going, highly fluent style to his lectures -- the viewer has the sense of auditing a class conducted by an extraordinarily well-informed and articulate professor. Houston speaks several languages (including Swedish, I think) and has mastered, at least, one of the Mayan languages in currency today -- one of the pleasures of the lecture series is his exuberant pronunciation of ancient Mayan glyphs, recitation that he accomplishes with zest using booming pronouns, guttural clicks, and half-aspirated consonants. I own several of Houston's books on this topic and they are very interesting, highly readable, but, often, prone to conjecture -- nonetheless, he's an excellent writer and his lectures, although very wide-ranging (he uses comparative examples including modern graffiti, Chinese painting, and many medieval and renaissance European images to make his points), nonetheless generally quite coherent and well-organized. There is nothing flashy about the form of the lectures which are overtly pedagogical -- he uses the standard two or three side-by-side slide art history lecture format to make comparisons between images and flashes unusual words and technical terms on the screen so that his students (for that is the posture of those in attendance) can take accurate notes. In fact, I felt that I should take notes on these presentations, although, ultimately, I more or less refrained from this useless indulgence. (I hope I can buy Houston's book account of the subject in a couple of years and so notes, I think, would be superfluous.)
Houston's initial lecture establishes his premise: Mayan glyphs are things that are invested with life; they not only represent reality but have a vitality of their own. This premise is supported by examples from graffiti and argues that Mayan writing often takes the form of a hyperglyph -- that is, a densely encoded pictorial cipher that can be read on many levels and that involves what Houston calls "toggling". "Toggling" is an interaction between glyph as image and glyph as phonetic or syllabic sign. Houston continues these themes in his second lecture. The third lecture involves issues pertaining to size and scale -- that is, representations that are enlarged (monumental stelae), reduced (delicate etchings on conch shells and bones), and "commensurate" (that is, duplicative of the actual size of the thing represented.) In this context, Houston also discusses sumptuary rules reifying class distinctions in Maya society. The fourth lecture involves glyphs and images representing music and introduces the question of what Maya society sounded like; what sort of music was played at Court entertainments. The following lecture, number 5, addresses Mayan glyphs signifying motion and provides images demonstrating how these people represented moving things. Houston's method is presumably akin to his lifelong enterprise which has been the cooperative effort of deciphering the meaning of Mayan glyphs in the context of ethnography (modern Mayan languages and customs) and with reference to imagery, most typically on painted ceramics. Interestingly, Houston doesn't talk about Maya urbanism or the spectacular temples and archaeological sites in the Yucatan nor does he conduct any systematic study of Maya religion -- there is nothing, for instance, about heart sacrifice and very little on the subject of the bloodletting that royalty inflicted on themselves to propitiate deities and achieve altered consciousness.
Houston's last lecture, in many ways the most fascinating, is about humor and our "limits of empathy" -- that is, are we able to imaginatively reconstruct why the Maya found certain things funny? (The answer is, mostly. no.") Houston argues that Maya culture was highly authoritarian and, therefore, "agelastic" -- a word that means discouraging comedy, satire, and irony, species of discourse that might be politically subversive. Simply stated, Maya elites don't smile and are never shown laughing. Objects of humor were apparently animals acting like humans, various representations of defecation and vomiting (Mayan youths are, often, shown as drunk and puking), unnatural couplings between women and beasts or between very old and randy gods and young girls, Many of these visual jokes are captioned with glyphs on ceramic vessels, presumably for serving chocolate or pulque (chih in the Mayan language.) Scholars are working to decade these "captions" as it were to the images but they remain very resistant to understanding. In one image, a rabbit has stolen the clothes of the Old Wealth God, a sort of divine miser portrayed in a spidery line a bit like the drawing in pictures by Callot. The glyphs say: Look! Burn!" But "look" at what? And what or who is burning? In one disturbing image, a human scribe is having his head sawn off -- next to this grisly tableau, we see a rabbit now acting as a scribe. (Houston thinks the image has something to do with embezzlement -- scribes were the keepers of accounts). One conch shell shows a deer receiving a sea-shell -- glyphs etched into the shell say "It is the great work! Offered for you!" The Maya seem to have laughed also at prisoners being tortured (some are shown with huge genitalia), dwarfs and maimed people. In the end, Houston doesn't venture any grand synthesis of his material on humor or on Maya culture in general -- he decodes some of their writing, explains some noteworthy images, and leaves his auditors to make their own conclusions. We don't really understand humor -- even when it originates within our own culture.
In Tim Lawrence's sketch comedy show, I think You Should Leave (on Netflix), a skit begins in a corporate conference room where a boss with about ten lackeys is tediously going through some kind of loose-leaf policy manual. At addendum 4, the boss gets up and leaves the room (presumably to go to the toilet). One of the workers hops on the conference room table and pretends to surf. At first, the other workers are disapproving or simply frightened to act on their own rebellious inclinations. But someone starts humming surfer rock and roll and the girls pretend to dance; someone else mimes a shark and a guy spins two chairs saying that they are whirlpools. Then, Lawrence's character jumps up, cries "It's a real big wave" and knocks over the table with the looseleaf notebooks and the surfer boy atop it. People get hurt and someone says: "What the fuck?" Lawrence's character says he's sorry that he got carried away and that this always happens to him. A few months earlier on his birthday, someone gave him "chode" pants and this put him into a deep funk. ("Chode" pants, it is explained, have a 57 inch waist and legs that are only ten inches long.) Lawrence starts moping and says that the woman who gave him "chode" pants could have afforded a better gift for him. "After all, your husband is loaded," he says. Then, he remarks: "He's not very attractive." Distressed, the woman says that her husband is very attractive. When she speaks these words, Lawrence's character plants his hands on his hips, pouts, and rolls his eyes. I thought this was very funny but couldn't figure out why. I suppose the story could be etched into a pot and, then, described in glyphic writing. Maybe, that would clarify things for me.
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