The Haunted Teapot

Okay, you thought the last entry was trivial...I bought a red Chinese teapot last week that looks really amazing, but was nonetheless made in a factory and isn't really precious or anything, just unusual for being glazed red. Anyway, I was marvelling at it while I drank out of one of the three matching teacups that came with it and feeling this really insipid pride-of-ownership thing like I get sometimes and I remembered my friend Alejandro Eclarino once told me red Chinese teapots are meant to be unlucky because they house a demon. had shown me some of the cursed objects he had at the time (that was more than a year ago) and I came to see how you know if an object is cursed: it pulls this desire to possess it out of you as if you were five years old and looking at the best toy in the whole world and were told you couldn't have it. The difference is, sometimes you can have these things as an adult, but he more you desire them the more it just proves the object is too strong for you--Like what the martial artist woman said to the girl with the magic sword in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Anyway, Alejandro doesn't remember telling me that about red teapots and I didn't find any legends like that when I googled "teapot legends." But what's really cool is three days in a row I've come home in the afternoon and all three of the teacups have coffee stains at the bottom and need to be washed out, as if my three dolls were having a coffee party. I live alone so this is very cute. That's all for now.

Earrings of the Queen

    Here are a couple of plant stories. I was sitting on the curb outside my girlfriend's apartment last week and her neighbor, Eleutheria, came by with these weeds in her hand that didn't have flowers, but which had big triangular seed pods at the end of each stem which made the weeds look kind of beautiful to me and I guess to her too. Eleutheria said the plant is native to Greece, where she was born, and that the king and queen of Greece had stolen a lot of the state treasury and fled the country shortly before the invasion of the Nazis in World War Two. The queen had always wanted the earrings of Marie Antoinette, though she never quite got them. Anyway, after the war, the king and queen wanted to come back and the Greek people said, "No," and so the king and queen were without a country. I don't know if the plant  got the name, "Earrings of the Queen," because of that event or not, but my guess is it was called that beforehand, because the queen had in fact thrown away the right to call the weed hers when she escaped the country with treasury money at the hour of greatest need. I told the story to my coworker, El, and she really liked the story and she told me she likes to go with her friends when they go wine-tasting, because rosemary always grows in the vineyards in the Napa Valley and she finds the smell of the rosemary wonderful to rub on her hands, because of the differences in light and soil and moisture and location that the rosemary grows in. I do not lie. Anyway, that's my plant stories.

Templo de San Cayetano de la Valenciana--Guanajuato, Mexico

     I'm going to try to post sometime a picture of the cathedral in my calendar whose name is the title of this post. The picture I have on my wall shows how this church was built out of bricks taken out of the walls of a pre-Columbian temple that was there before by Indian slaves. A friend of mine, Angel, once asked me, "Do you know why we are born? I know why we are born. Do you know why we are born?" I gave some mealy-mouthed comfortable answer and he said, "No. I learned from my ancestors why we are born and this is it: We are born to die." He then proceeded to tell me the other thing he got from his ancestors, according to him. He said in Mexico there were churches built by slave labor by bricks taken from native temples, and he said the locals had a name for the slaves that did the work. They called them "Living Ancestors." Now is that profound or what?
     I sometimes aspire to be a living ancestor when I appropriate a bit of the bad around me and try to turn it around into food for the embryo of a better world I hope is forming. As for being born to die, I watched a Time/Life video a few years back called "Aztlan," in which historians said many of the indios the church encountered in what is now Mexico were actually enthusiastic when they heard Jesus had died for the sins of the whole world. Their native religion had forever commanded them to cut themselves and slaughter prisoners and have open heart sacrifices just to have a harvest and a sunrise and victory and basically just to keep life at the same crummy level it always is. The native religion had recognized the impossibility of an individual's ever repaying the debt of what has been given him and her and the message of Jesus was the piece that was missiong and everyone was initially ecstatically happy. What is so very tragic is how the conquistadores and the Church and then later the French and the US and the various revolutionary governments proceeded to take such advantage. What is interesting is most modern Mexicans and US citizens of Mexican descent still don't want the old gods back in quite the same way they had been here before. Most are fiercely anti-Church, but just as devoutly Catholic, in what can only be called a "Mexican way." One woman I used to go out with was convinced she was going to Hell, but she still loved God with all her heart. I kept telling her she was crazy as if that was going to help anything, but now I find that paradox beautiful. She was being a Living Ancestor. I wish all religious people could be so courageous and good.