Liquid Crystal Wrapped in Rainbow Mist:

Cecilia Vicuna and the Weaving of Water

                                                                                                            by Christine de Lailhacar

1. The Metaphysics of Weaving.

To write about André Breton in a language other than that of passion is impossible. Besides, any other language would be unworthy of him. For Breton, the power of language was no different from that of passion, and passion, in its highest, tensest form, was nothing other than language in a state of savage purity: poetry. Breton: the language of passion - the passion of language.

            These words by Octavio Paz reflect the ever recurring intuition of the common nature of passion and language, language defined by Aristotle as expression of en tí psychí pathema. They can be directly applied to Cecilia Vicuña: to write about Vicuña in a language other than that of passion is impossible. The continuation of Paz` encomium to Breton shows even more striking parallels with Vicuña`s art:

Breton`s ideas about language were of a magic sort, but at the same time they possessed a precision...that I would call scientific...

[Among the key words] revelation and rebellion, innocence and marvel, passion and                      language, there is another, perhaps central word: magnetism.¹

            Someone privileged to meet Cecilia Vicuña will be immediately bewitched. Within a few moments such preconceptions as the incompatibility of scientific intellect with visions not verifiable by logic will have vanished into thin air as though by magic wand.

            This effect is not produced by some magic potion. The innocent, delicately bitter tea she prepares, in what seems an ancient ritual, is a mixture of herbs she has collected herself in the Andean mountains. Cecilia knows about herbs. Since her childhood in the precordillera andina  she has been in touch with native women shamans who instructed her in  traditional botany.

            The visitor is seated somewhere. There are no partition walls or other marks of spatial limits in her huge loft in downtown Manhattan, with a ceiling so high that its beams are lost in darkness. Pierced here and there by irregularly spaced small spotlights, it resembles a stellar space rather than a living room. One is suddenly unable to tear one`s eyes away from some work of hers, disquieting, orphic, such as “La Falda de la Momia,” (the mummy`s skirt). The ragged piece of loosely woven, ancient cloth, draped over a twig, is un-heimlich in Freud`s sense of the foreign, strange (Aristotle`s to xenikon) diabolically “thrown across” the familiar, the homely (Aristotle`s to oikeion). But why is it familiar? What chords of ancestral memory does it stir? What anamnesis of strange, forgotten cults?

            “The Mummy`s Skirt” is a spiritual trace of ancient northern Chile and Peru where, according to CÉsar Paternosto, the technique of mummification was known before it was practiced in Egypt. The visitor has hardly spotted the intriguing piece when several others, from different places in the loft, lure his attention in their field. He finds himself mesmerized within a magnetic web  like those Vicuña constructs outdoors, with strings that cross at points of cosmic energy. These works, neither sculptures, nor exactly collages, are objects she calls “precarios”  ephemeral, precarious combinations of worthless fragments: a scrap of old textile, a twig, a shard of pottery, a bone, a feather. These are things discarded by man and nature and picked up at random û or so it seems. If they were thrown on a garbage pile, no one would notice them, and, indeed, she calls them “basuritas,” little garbage. They constitute, however, the arch-repository of the shaman, from Siberia to Morocco. Vicuña calls the precarios “spatial metaphors,” that is, visual translations of her poetic work into space. In art, as in language, it is not the elements but their combination and articulation which creates a magnetic force capable of attracting cosmic energies into its field. Suddenly one “re-cognizes” something û in Paul Claudel`s sense of being “born-with” (con-naεtre), be it in a previous life. This is the nature of that “familiarity,” constitutive  part of the “uncanny” in Freud`s analysis.² The effect  on the “experiencer”³  of the precarios is “sideration.” ⁴ He is “turned into “iron” (Greek sideros) or “star-struck” (Latin sidus, star),  for both iron and stellar bodies have to do with electromagnetic fields.  This implies that these strange artifacts, this cosmic articulation of a material which is, strictly speaking, refuse, have the power to elicit an echo of atavistic memory. One reintegrates a world deeply buried in the most unfathomable layers of the self.

            The three-dimensional poetic objects, however, are not the only source, no more than the tea, of the special state of mind in which the visitor finds himself. There is the face, alternately concealed and disclosed, in accordance with Vicuña`s naturally ritual movements, by a veil of the Indian`s long, straight, shiny, light-catching-reflecting, raven-black hair. “Negro es el brillar” (black is the shine). From the intermittently black-veiled mouth of the Inka priestess, issues the highly controlled, articulate flow, in Spanish or English, of the most sophisticated western philosophical commentary, the most uncanny universal erudition which encompasses the Vedas, as well as the pre-Socratics and ranges from classical rhetoric to Derrida and the most esoteric post-structuralist notions.

            A sudden light-hearted laughter and frequent humorous remarks do not break the spell. They are the same diabolic symbol, the xenikon or incongruous element thrown across, which lends depth, inner dynamics, and iridescent ambiguity to her poetry.

            This unio mystica of mystic intuition and intellectual erudition does not take place in a “noche oscura del alma” (dark night of the soul), as in San Juan de la Cruz`s poem. It is not even the union or merging of two separate entities, but light answering light in an infinite reflection-refraction-reverberation “iridescence,” which is the title of one of her poems. The capacity for reverberation is inherent in the language itself, Quechua, which is the authentic voice (the etymon) of both Arguedas` and Vicuña`s poetic texts, although they appear to be written in Spanish. This is why, in spite of the close reading of “Atahualpa Huañui,” constant excursions into the Andean cosmovision as refracted through the Quechua language are still necessary in order to reach the poet herself. But in this cosmovision, as the characteristic palindromes and metatheses of Quechua intimate,<sup>5</sup> means and ends may become interchangeable.  I am unable to say whether I have become interested in the Inka world because an Einfnhlung  (feeling-in) into it would make Vicuña`s poetry more accessible, or whether I am fascinated by Vicuña because she incarnates whatever the word “Inka” and the word “mestizo” may evoke.

            The capacity of mirroring and refraction which characterizes Quechua is, as Robert Randall shows,⁶ cherished by Quechua-speaking communities and enjoyed in the form of word plays and riddles. These are not casual games, but an integral part of Andean cosmology. The dilemma of the critic lies in choosing between seduction and skep- ticism (a skepticism I have discussed previously in connection to the Nietzschean-Heideggerian-Derridean tendency of inferring ontological, i.e., universal truth values from the contingencies of a single language). The practice is tempting, poetically convincing, and sometimes, according to Derrida, “semantically infallible.”⁷ As Billie-Jean Isbell observes,

Derrida, Loewenberg, and many others have debated the truth value of metaphors. It is apparent that for the participants in Quechua riddling, it is not the truth of the statements that is important, but rather the new conceptualizations through analogy are important.8

             “After Babel,”⁹ no single language can claim to be the vessel of universal, cosmological truth. However,  the search by humans for truth as reflected in their own, particular language is, without doubt, a universal. Native speakers of Bamana, Fulani, Yoruba languages who read Randall`s article about the Inka language found something familiar in the idea of word plays as repositories of in-sight, i.e., wisdom. What is universal are, obviously, not the concrete words but the human desire for the truth and creative power deposited in them. Simicta chantani is the Quechua expression for the act of creating (making) by words: poiesis. There is the belief, not only in revelation by the word of what is, but in its power to “make,” i.e., to call into being: ontogenesis. “At the beginning was the Word.”                       

            With such primary value placed in language, its presumed constitutive nature, it follows that, like Quechua, the “lenguaje entretejido” (interwoven language),  the cosmos is truly the web of links and currents of energy seen by the watuq (watuq, from the verb watuy, to link by threads). In Andean folklore the wise men, amawta or watuq, are usually presented as old, as in “Atahualpa Huañui.” In the readers mind, this conjures the universal image of the venerable,  blind, old man: blind in every-day-light, like the “old owl” in daylight, incapable of “ob-vious,” i.e. conventional perceptions, but ultra-lucid in their in-sight, inner sight. They are Tiresias “ whose soul grasps all things, the lore that may be told and the unspeakable.” (Sophocles, Oedipus). “Blind” (homeros) is certainly one of the connotations played upon by Walcott when naming his epic poem Omeros.¹⁰

            The challenge for the modern poet, especially the one divided by the daimon of mestizaje, is not to be blind. Vicuña comes close to achieving some sort of unio mystica of energies deemed incompatible in the western mind: in Vicuña, rational intellect û what our eighteenth-century ancestors called “en-lightenment” is yoked together (zeugma) with the “clair-voyance” of intuition and imagination.

            It may “not be the first time this has been tried, nor is it the last time it failed,” one could quote Borges again with reference to our stubborn desire to define the nature of art. But with Vicuña, there is an adumbration that art has something to do with the intercourse between the erotic and the sacred whose crossing points spark imagination, as each reinforces the other. As both eros (according to Plato) and faith lift us up, this “mestizaje” leads to an ex-altation, i.e., to a “higher” region (Latin altus) or towards the other (alter). As an adolescent growing up in the precordillera andina (at the foot of the mountain range), Cecilia was fascinated by Quechua and Guarani erotic-sacred songs whose reflection or echo she later discovered in two French surrealist poets, Giselle Prassinos and Joyce Mansour. By a telling “coincidence” or rather “crossing of two vectors” in Vicuña`s vision, both are French by virtue of their language and their affinity with AndrÉ Breton. Otherwise they are respectively Franco-Greek and Anglo-Egyptian mÉtisses. We should keep in mind this “source” of Vicuña`s poetic vocation, the overdeterminations springing from the intersection points of the erotic and the sacred, when we read further, especially the poem “La Wik`uña.” This opening-up and stepping-out of the self (ex-altation, ec-stasy) is a phenomenon caused by in-spiration, whether erotic, artistic, or religious. It is comparable to the divine pneuma, life-giving breath, the Hebrew nafash ( to breathe, blow), whose noun is nefesa (soul), as God blew life and soul into inanimate matter (Genesis). An extreme form of ec-stasy are the epileptic “seizures” experienced by Saul/Saint Paul, Mohammed,  and Dostoevsky, the latter describing the “holy illness” of prophets and artists in clearly mystical terms. Epi-lepsis, from epi-lambanein  is “to be seized and set apart” (ek-stasis). The victim (or “the chosen one”) is, as one currently says “out of himself.” He is struck as though by thunderbolt, by extreme, demonic concentration of electromagnetic energy of non-solar light (illa) in its zigzag movement (kenko) dividing the dark cloud. Related is the trance, deliberately provoked in many cultures, from the Delphic Pythia to Haitian voodoo, where persons enter into communication with ancestors or gods.

            The sacred permeates everyday life in traditional cultures in general and in the Andean world in particular. It may inhabit an ordinary household object or turn a simple domestic gesture into a ritual, which, in turn may trigger the ecstasy in the midst of the world of the familiar. As we will see with Vicuña`s ephemeral art works, the precarios understood as “prayers,” no special cult site is necessary, no trance either. Hers is a “l·cido entrar,” an entering into a state of mind in which she communicates with the All (lo Inmenso) in perfect lucidity and simultaneous extra-lucidity.

            The interlacing/interweaving between verbal and erotic play and religion (religio, from Latin religere, to tie back back, suggests a need for a thread) is so complex in Andean culture that neat distinctions among its practitioners are hard to establish.Their missions overlap: the amawta interpret the mysteries of the cosmos; the toqueni hamuni is defined as “hechizero y adivino” (sorcerer and divine). Their skill in manipulating language confers high social status,  because, according to Randall, it also suggests extraordinary sexual skill. As with all oracular speech, theirs unfolds “en enigmas y oscurante.”  One is reminded of Saint Paul`s “nunc per speculum in aenigmate” (through a mirror in darkness), taken up by Saint Augustine, but the clear-sightedness strived for is of a different nature. From the Christian (western) point of view, it is the promise of seeing directly “facie ad faciem” (face to face). In this one-directional focus, the goal is to disentangle the knots that confuse our understanding. Taken to its extreme form, this principle leads to deconstruction, but even Derrida himself occasionally acts like a watuq.¹¹ In Incaic cultures, it is  the role of the shaman or watuq  (from Quechua watuy,  to bind and tie together û which, actually corresponds to religere, but refers to a multi-directional operation) to reveal linkages, as truth is not static but relational. The watuq is an ontological weaver;  consequently the most sacred form of artistic expression is the textile.

            In my introduction I tried to rehabilitate partly the activity of contemporary practitioners of western poetics from the severe charge of “vivisection” by none less than George Steiner. The following translation of a passage from Randall, however, vindicates Steiner while asserting the importance of our exposure to the cultures of the “other,” as facilitated by mestizos, such as Vicuña. As mestizos participate in both worlds, they may create “links” (watuy), not only among the things of the cosmos as easy to accommodate as distant galaxies, but also among the things of the cosmos as endemically resistant to accommodation as the human minds:

From a western point of view, we can decipher a textile by unraveling its threads. In this way we can determine the structure of the textile; we can analyze the fibers and discern their animal or vegetal origin; we may learn how they were spun; we analyze the colors and discover from which plants or animals there were produced and what mordants were used; we can equally submit the material to a radiocarbon analysis to establish its age. And so we will have deciphered the mysteries of the textile. In contrast, from an Andean point of view, not only will we have destroyed the textile, but we will have gained absolutely no concept of its meaning. And this is the purpose of the word play: to attach together the disparate elements of the universe in order to understand their interrelation instead of separating the filaments.”¹²

            It is interesting to note that our western metaphor for the process of gaining knowledge is not the separation of the threads of a textile, but the “dissolution” of a solid: ana-lysis from Greek lyein (to solve). Correspondingly, we “solve” a problem.

            Leaving aside for the moment the case of the Old Testament, made complex by the coexistence of the Midrash with the Torah, and above all, the Cabala which, due to obvious affinities, the “correspondences,” fascinates Vicuña û one observes that in all texts of revealed religions, such as the Koran or Christian Patristic, the Word of the Creator congeals into immutable dogma. In contrast, in the Inka con-text-ile, the word becomes mutant,¹³ because patterns, i.e., corresponding configurations of the threads of the weft and the warp, can be established wherever they seem to be obvious, that is, semantically appropriate in the vision of the watuq or amawta. “La fijeza es una ilusion, un momento de relacion” (fixity is an illusion, nothing but a moment of relations) declares Vicuña in the manuscript of her forthcoming book Palabrir.

            Vicuña`s outdoor “installations” are concretizations of what the watuq “sees”: tips and protuberances of boulders are connected by strings, or a round stone or nut (the globe) is enveloped by a web that unites continents and connects them to the stratosphere.  The threads give visual form to the echo. Andean mountain cliffs are wiñaq rumi (Arguedas), speaking, living stones which “germinate” in César Paternosto`s words, an idea he communicates visually in his photographs.¹⁴ By doubling returning syllables and blurring their sequence, the echo creates new words. These are sacred communications. There is, therefore, a factual, non-mythological reason for the status of Quechua as the “sacred language”: its most distinctive features, the repetition of syllables within a word, the metathesis (yuma-mayu, foam-river), and the palindrome (words or phrases that can be read both forward and backward), are the poetic techniques which emulate the sacred communications of nature. It is the imitation of the “imitator,” the echo, yachapayaq qaqa  (qaqa is the mountain cliff from which the echo resonates, and yachapayaq  is imitator). As the speaking cliffs are the voice of ancestors, these eternal stones, offer an entrance into a universe where time is abolished or cyclical like the universe of the sacred or of poetry, which “conjugates past and future simultaneously.”¹⁵ The one who “prays” for an answer enters “aquÉl pretÉrito en que serÉ un niño” (that past when I will be a child) of Davila Andrade.¹⁶ Vicuña conjures “un futuro pasado  que es el ur-texto del humanar, una constante invencion”(a past future which is the ur-text or arch-text of being-human, a constant invention).¹⁷ A constant invention, a perpetual spinning of new threads, establishes the “authenticity” of the ur-text which is an “invention” from the outset. It corresponds to the mental operation at the root of the universal phenomenon which I have designated as the achronic, atopic “Africa” or “Inca” realm, by quotation marks serving to indicate their partly fictional (“invented”) nature.

            Coded references to threads strung between the stars or certain  sacred mountain cliffs are the means by which an oppressed people may preserve its voice. Humans will always find a means for telling the story of their true being. Legends from all around the world describe how this was achieved through textile. In the “Voix de la navette” (the voice of the weaver`s shuttle) GÉrard Genette recounts a Greek myth about a young girl whose tongue was cut out by her rapist, so that she be unable to tell the story of the crime. But, like ArachnÍ, like Penelope, she was expert in the art of weaving. She wove the images into a cloth, and the shuttle became the means of revelation. And revelation, in Andean cosmology, is the back-and forth of reflection and echo û the movement of the shuttle.  From the beginning, the Andean universe was, according to Vicuña, “un mundo hilvan” (a fibrous world) unlike the European Stone Age. “Cultures describe themselves in the stories of their beginnings,” writes Dudley Young, inferring that “for our interpretation, mythology has often been a more efficient tool than science.”¹⁸

            What the Spaniards perceived as the Quechua-speaking Indians` fetishism of language is thus related to their “obsession with textile.” ¹⁹

            In one of Vicuña`s visions, the earth appears “wrapped in a web of crystal.” This is a zeugma,²⁰ as is the “weaving of water,” since the hardness of  crystal  is as irreducible to threads as is the fluidity of water. But these are mere physical impossibilities. Beyond them, there is “the  metaphysics of the textile”:²¹

     Tejido es el Ande en su  cuerpo animal    Woven is the Ande in its animal body   

Tejido fue el mundo en                             Woven was the world in

Tahuantinsuyo: cuatro partes                   Tahuantinsuyo: four parts

Unidas entre si                                          Linked among themselves

Tejidas fueron las cuentas                        Woven were the accounts

En khipus                                                  In khipus  22

 Los puentes en cuerdas                            The bridges in ropes

 Los mensajes en mantas                          The messages in blanquets

 El agua en canal                                      Water in channels (kenko) ²³

   Tejidos fueron los montes y valles           Woven were the mountains and valleys 

   En ce`que, lineas radial es                       In ceque, radial lines of ²⁴

   Adoratorios distribuidos desde un           Worship sites parting from a

   Centro como un gran khipu                     Center like a huge khipu

   Visto desde arriba                                     Seen from above.

                                                                    (“Metafísica del textil”)

            We find here again the surprising affinity between the apparently sheer intuitive Andean visions and the supposedly rational theorems of structuralists and post-structuralists. Roman Jakobson`s key image of meaning production, the horizontal and vertical lines of metaphor and metonymy is as much a reminiscence of the image of warp and weft as is Genette`s shuttle pulley.

            From Arachne (the name means “spider”) to Penelope, from Helen of Troy to Tennyson`s “Lady of Shalott,” weaving possesses a root symbolism. Certainly, it fulfills a basic need in the protection of the body, but no more so than, say, the tilling of the earth for food production. It would be too facile a clichÉ to stress the obvious “femininity” of weaving, although all mythological weavers are women, and the activity itself suggests permanence, security, the homely hearth,<sup>25</sup> an order or grid overlaid on the indifferent continuum of life. As such, it responds to the quest for origin-birthplace-home, the pacarina of both sexes. Thus weaving becomes the root metaphor, which includes the laboring of land. For instance, the tracing of regular furrows is a topographical weaving which, in Greek, gave its name to a form of writing, the boustrophedon, the left-right / right-left movement of the oxen pulling the plow. Weaving is also the dialogue, the back-and-forth of “reflexions” in both senses of the term. Vicuña writes: “The Spaniards came looking for gold [de oro sedientos in”Atahualpa Huañui”], but they did not see the golden thread, the textile culture, the intertwining of thought, the network of reciprocity and interchange.”<sup>26</sup> As to literature, Franτoise Lionnet goes as far as calling “every female text a métissage,” playing on the French word “métier” for loom, and the necessary interlacing in a woman`s text of her own thoughts and feelings with a male-informed general discourse.²⁷

            The fear of the destruction of the textile in which we wrap our identity is particularly strong in the Andes.²⁸ This fear may explain why the arch-weaver, Arachne, the spider, is (with the exception of some iconography on Paracas textiles) almost absent from Andean mythology, although its web is a more apt image for Andean modes of radial thinking than the straight lines and right angles of  warp and weft, because its narrow central triangles expand virtually ad infinitum in ever widening trapezes. Moreover, a spider web is iridescent, brilliant with drops of dew, water inspired by light. But it lacks the sensuous quality of the tactile, as it disintegrates û diabolically (like treasures offered by the devil) as soon as a hand touches it. And the hand may be punished by the spider`s sting and its devilish poison, especially in the tropics. In an intriguing study, “Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts”<sup>29</sup> Claude Gandelman presents a kind of seeing as a form of touching where the optical exploration of lines interacts with what he calls “the haptic probing of texture.” Vicuña qualifies a “listening with her fingers” as the most important preparation for her non-written art works. <sup>30</sup> We may admire the spider`s web, be tantalized by its beauty, but we cannot hold it or probe its texture lovingly. A textile made from animal hair or vegetal fiber is something we can touch with our eyes and see with our fingers, a concrete token of an otherwise “fugacious” brilliance (La Wik`uña) which transcends us.

            Oro es tu hilar                                    Gold is your spinning³¹                         

            Oro es tu hilo                          Gold (I pray)^a  is your thread                

            De orar                                                Of prayer^a

            Templo                                                Temple^b

            Del siempre                             Of always guiding the thread

            Enhebrar                                             Through the needle`s eye^c

            Armando casa                         To buttress your house

            Del mismo treznal                               By the same interlacing of braids                                                                                  

            Teja mijita                              Weave, my girl

            No más                                                    Do just that

            Trueños y rayos                                   Thunder and lightning^d

            Bordando al pasar                              Embroider as you go ^e

            Tuerce                                     Twist

            Que tuerce                               All that can be twisted^f

            El dorado                                The golden

            Enderezo                                             Bring out straight

            El fresco                                              As a fresh

            Ofrendar                                             Offering^g

            Nustas calmadas                                 Now that your girlish

            De inquieto pensar                              Worries are calmed

            Marcas y señales                                 Marks and signals will                                                                                                  orderly appear in your textile^h               

            Pallá y pacá                            Here and there

            Hilos y cuerdas                                    Threads and ropes

            Los negros y los dorá              The blacks and the goldenⁱ

            Cavilan                                               Mark depth^j and lightness

            En punto                                             of thought by regular stitches

            No se vaya                              Do not

            A escapar                                            Drop the mesh

            Hilo y vano                              Thread and interstice

            Lleno y vacío                           Full and empty

            El mundo                                 The world

            Es hilvan                                             Is fibrous

            Pierdo el hilo                           I lose the thread^k

            Y te hilacho                             Making loose threads hang out                                                                                     

            Briznar                                                Which spring forth like blades of                                                                                               grass                           

            Codigo y cuenta                                  Code and account

            Computo comunal                              Communal bookkeeping ^l

            Todo amarrar                         All must be linked

            Hilado en pos                          One element stitched to the other                                                                    

            Cuerdas y arroyos                               Ropes and brooks

            Aunar lo tejido                                    Uniting the textile

            No es algo inicial?                              Is it not so from the beginning?^m                       

            El cálido fuelle                                    The hot bellowⁿ

            Oro templar                            Tempers the gold / temple of prayer

            Habla y abriga                                    Speech and mantle^o

            El mejor juglar                                   For the best word juggler^p

I comment on this poem in detail because its close reading reveals in a condensed form most of Vicuña`s poetic concerns, Leitmotive whose variations we will find in all her verbal and visual art.

            Oro^a is “gold” in Spanish, i.e., symbol of the most valuable substance. Oro is the first person singular of the verb orar. Vicuña links words, prayer, and textile:

La palabra es un punto                 The word is a point (stitch)

De confluencia y union                 Of confluence and union (crossing point                                                                   in a textile)

Oro                                                Gold

De la oracion                                Of prayer

                                          (Palabrarmas, p. 76)³²

Temple (b) is a place of worship, i.e., where I pray (oro). Templar is to temper (a procedure used to obtain the most fine-grained, most resilient steel from crude iron), a refinement taking place in a crucible. The poem asks that gold appear under the hot air from the bellow; but what is infinitely more precious than gold, namely life, is breathed into a word by the prayer, as the divine pneuma breathes life into inanimate matter, an universal image. It is the Hebrew verb nafash (to blow, breathe) and its noun, nefesha  (soul, spirit, life) of Genesis.

            Spinning and “passing the tread through the needle`s eye”(c) are universal metaphors for storytelling, for instance, “to spin a seaman`s yarn,” as narration can be compared to a thread. In ancient Europe, village women gathered in a “Spinnstube” (spinning room), each in front of her spinning wheel, telling stories to pass the long winter evenings. They must have deployed so much imagination that “spinnen” was later expanded to mean telling crazy stories. These villagers had no mythical “Africa” to spin back to, only the same old thread. So they had to use it for imaginative “embroidery” (e). Stories, therefore, accompanied the making of a maiden`s dowry, matrimonial sheets, baby linen, and funeral shrouds from generation to generation.

            Thunder and lightning (d), i.e. illa, non-solar light, is woven into textiles, sculptured as reliefs on stone, in the zig-zag form of the kenko. With it, a whole metaphysics is evoked.

            Lightning may be an ill omen, as in “Atahualpa Huañui.”  But words often contain a pair of opposites, as well as radial extensions. The lightning is also the piercing of obscuring clouds. It announces heavy rains, potentially destructive, but representing fertility if channeled into the ceremonial kenko  of a cult site outside Cuzco. The kenko  zig-zag line, if turned to the left by forty-five degrees, resembles a stair. It could be the line of very old temple steps inclined downward, with their angles smoothened by pilgrim`s feet and erosion over the centuries. The assoc-iation with the stair-like irrigation system allowing the Inkas to make use of the narrowest strips of land on the mountain terraces is, therefore, quite natural.  The kenko, relative to water cult, could be imagined as “escaleras ... no para el piÉ” (stairs not built for the human foot), as Vicuña describes the “black ziggurat” of the ceremonial center of Ollantaytambo in “Incamisana.”  Water refuses to take angular shape. Its movement downward a stair smoothes the edges of the steps into arcs, giving it a shiny, serpentine line (Vicuña`s “curvo manantial” in “Unui quita”).The kenko is, therefore associated with amaru, the snake which, in the constant semantic reflection, thus symbolizes water, fertility (including in the form of mist or river foam) and rebirth (the snake shedding its skin). The zig-zag of the thunderbolt and the moving curbs of the serpent become interchangeable in mythopoieic imagery. Thunder follows lightning immediately or after a few seconds, depending on the distance of the celestial upheaval. But we know the explosion is imminent. The entire electromagnetic tension pushes to this final discharge. Andean musicians excel in the illa-pa vivon, “the edge of the thunderbolt,” a rhythm of irresistible crescendo.³³

            Kakakakay,  to thunder, shows the characteristic repetition of syllables, as in an echo. It is the imitation of the cracking, the accelerated small explosions leading to the outburst.

            khatatatay, to tremble, palpitate, is an important notion, associa-ted both with deadly agony (convulsion) and poetry³⁴

            phatatatay,  moving convulsively

            pharararay,  to beat one`s wings with violence³⁵

Embroider (e): One may, of course, embroider a kenko line on a cloth or weave it into it; it is the most typical Indian motive. But here the encouragement to embroider is directly related to language and, therefore, poetry. Since “ `la lengua sagrada` se concibe como un hilo” (the sacred language, Quechua, is conceived as a thread) (La Wik`uña, p. 85), this is special embroidery. “Chantaysimi, el hablar hermoso, es hablar bordando” (beautiful speech, is to speak as embroidering, La Wik`uña, p. 85).  The term brings up the whole problematic of figures of speech as “embroidery,” the question whether tropes have no more than an ornamental function (Aristotle`s inclination) or whether they are impossible to dissociate from the genesis of language itself. On the latter assumption, tropes are not secondary, but primary. We call them “catachreses,” meaning that the use of the “secondary,” figurative term is unavoidable, due to the lack of a primary term. Paul de Man,³⁶ the preeminent representative of the latter assumption, gives as examples of catachresis “the leg of a table”, “the face of a mountain,” metaphors we cannot help using, even if we wish our speech to be sober and without adornment. In Quechua, embroidery is clearly not secondary. What is beautiful is meaningful. The kenko line is the water, the thread, the language.

            “Twist what can be twisted”(f): in urging the young weaver to twist, tie, knot, braid, Vicuña speaks from the arch-Quechua perspective, which is quite different from the Western one. But as a participant in the Western tradition, she rather “opens-up” the problem to “reflection.” Not from Vicuña can we expect the oversimplifying statements imputing to western people an obsessive need to categorize and to separate what is united, tied and twisted together by nature. Such soulless analytical orientation holds for expository discourse.  European poetry in contrast, especially among the Romantics, such as Wordsworth, it is much closer to the Andean, and universal-traditional cosmovision: “Our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things / We murder to dissect.” (Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”).

            In the Andean scale of values, wisdom ranks highest. It consists, as we have seen, of the ability  to link things together (watuy), as embodied by the watuq. Straw is twisted together to form a rope, the means of linking, which is why Randall considers quite plausible³⁷ Jorge Lira`s suggestion that the word “quechua” derives from q`eswa or rope of twisted straw. Vicuña`s appeal to the weaver to link what can and should be linked in the weaver`s view belongs to this frame of reference. A further connotation of twisting is the wick of a candle or oil lamp, torcida, i.e., twisted wool as the “hilo de ofrenda” (thread lighting the sacrificial offering) “que el Inca incendia” (lit by the Inka). (La Wik`uña).

            Vicuña has an innate ritualistic disposition due to her perception of the transcendental dimension inherent in everyday life. Weaving, basically the production of clothing and bedding, is usually as utilitarian and prosaic an endeavor as, for instance, potato cultivation. Yet, just as one may speak with Vicuña of the “metaphysics of weaving,” in “The Potato as Cultural Metaphor,” Regina Harrison presents what amounts to an Andean metaphysics of the potato, a metaphysics so profound and complex as to require twenty-three pages of exegesis. ³⁸

            Every endeavor, every gesture may be a gift, an “offering” (g). A “precario,” an ephemeral, commercially valueless thing, a “little garbage,” can be sacri-ficed (lit.“made sacred”) if the offering is inspired by the “gold”  (oro) of prayer. That universal dream of turning straw into gold (an example is the German fairy tale “Rumpelstilzchen” where, significantly, everything depends on the knowledge of a word) is veri-fied (made true) here at a higher level. It is true that shafts of ripe straw have the shimmer of gold û and shimmer, reflection, iridescence is, in the Andean mind of Vicuña, infinitely more meaningful than the heavy solidity of gold. Metal ore comes from the entrails of the earth, from its kuraz·n: not from its shunga (heart as center of the soul).

            “Marks and signs” (h) should be woven into the textile. The tocapu  symbols are what comes closest to  writing in Quechua, in addition to the khipu  or knotted string. These non-pictographic symbols, i.e. geometric crosses, dots, kenko lines are displayed in small squares on textiles, predominantly used for the unku   (the shirt better known by the colonial term “poncho”) of a person of high rank. Tocapu  visual codes also appear in paintings of the colonial era and were still used in the writings of the most eminent mestizo chroniclers of the seventeenth century, Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui and Guaman Poma de Ayala. They continue to inform popular and poetic imagination, as Vicuña`s. In the last line of the poem, the fruit of the weaving girl`s labor is destined to become “the speech and the mantle” of the most distinguished “juggler of words” û surely the watuq, who in his prestidigitation with words, knows how to expose the hidden links in the cosmos.

            Vicuña makes notable use of the poetic device of turning the infinitive into a noun (substantivization of the verb, here el inquieto pensar). This is possible in Greek, German, and Spanish, while in English a verb can only be associated with an article by use of the all-purpose gerundium (-ing). For Vicuña, this is more than mere stylistic idiosyncrasy. As the non-conjugated verb does not express the individual or grammatical “person,” the infinitive with article suggests the non-individualistic, rather communal feeling of traditional societies.  Above all, there is a metaphysical dimension: by eliminating the finite actor, the grammatical infinitive opens up the Infinite. The verb designates the timeless essence of the activity. Beyond static Being, it turns into dynamic Becoming.

            This is one of the striking similarities between the Greek (Herak-litus)-inspired Heidegger and Quechua-inspired writers. Comparable to Heidegger`s das Sein, das Dasein, etc.,<sup>39</sup> in Vicuña`s poem there are several examples of actions which exist independently of the contingent doer:”the-always-to-push-thread-through-the-needle`s-eye,”“the-to-offer,” “the-to-inquiet-think,” “the-to-juggle.”

            “The black and the golden” (i) corresponds to the privileged Andean concept of twins or pairs which I mentioned in connection with Claude LÉvi-Strauss in chapter III.  Harrison sees tinkuni, a key Quechua word meaning matched items which provide unification of deviant ones, such as loose threads (k), illustrated in Andean weaving by colored bands of mirrored opposition, such as black and white, black and gold, etc.⁴⁰ But tinkuni is not a reductive principle of order. If thought is a thread, loose threads can “sprout” new insights and imaginative adventures for the person who knows how to link them in so far unseen combinations. The importance of loose threads, i.e., fringes and tassels on Andean clothing and bags, “radiating,” so to speak, from the orderly woven textile, can be related to the concept of tinkuni.

            The black (the disquiet thinking) and the golden (the fresh offering [g]) can produce a harmonious textile when artfully combined. They form a grid of stitches in which the voids (cavilar [j] is to create cavities, metaphorically to meditate deeply) are light, if the textile is loosely woven, and the full ones dark û or vice-versa, depending on the color of the threads on the weft and the warp or on the angle from which light is falling on the textile. Cavilar suggests cabalgar, and, indeed, the threads are “galloping” like horses jumping one over the other alternately. The whole constitutes a gracefully controlled choreography, lit. space-writing, an image of the world, because “el mundo es hilvan” (the world is fibrous), held together by threads, as are the stars.

In the Southern Andes people say: the warp and weft are the male and female, the cross is the union. A weaving of light corresponds to a weaving of shadow...Penetration [a form of cavilar ] and fecundity, to weave is to copulate. The future Ande is mestizo and clear like a woven cloth, dense and hard  in order to contain the vital water.⁴¹

“They did not write, they wove. They wrote the holy events in a hieroglyphic system composed of orderly arranged signs which found in the textile its richest expression.”⁴²

            This fibrous “writing” originated, as did arguably all writing û from the accounting of the number of bisons killed as painted on cave walls to Mesopotamian cuneiform incisions on clay tablets, from hieroglyphs to numbers and alphabets û as a very pedestrian recording of quantative data. Consequently, the primitive function of writing was bookkeeping (l) and administration. This is, for one example, Robert K.Logan`s thesis.<sup>43</sup> But the everyday turned sacred and the bookkeeping marks turned Writ. Holy scriptures, in turn, started to become guidelines for market practices, especially in the Koran (Surah II, 282), as the secular was not separate from the sacred. In contrast to the conventional historiography of writing such as Logan`s, Vicuña views the origin of writing as the initial attempt to communicate with the Sacred. I tend to agree, not out of intellectual conviction û Logan`s sources must be taken seriously û but because I prefer the noble origin of writing as sacred gesture to the subaltern one of writing as a merchant`s tool. After all, hiero-glyph  means sacred engraving. Yet as the mirror opposites of tinkuni suggest, we can only speculate (confront mirror images or reverberations) on the authentic first origin (videmus per speculum in aenigmate). CÉsar Paternosto may be right in contending that notation û whatever form it took û evolved out of different needs. Any glyph may be something “initial.” Hence Vicuña`s rhetorical question: “Is this not something initial?” (m).

            The hot bellow (n) û yet another reminiscence of  pneuma and nafash, divine breath, inspiration (cf. b) û “tempers”  (templar is a phonetic-semantic con-flation or blowing together of “temple” and “to temper,” the purification and hardening of the precious metal), the oro  of prayer.

            Thus, golden strands are woven into the mantle (o) or unku (poncho), studded with tocapu symbols, of the most distinguished: the one who weaves together the strings of the universe, the imaginary lines that hold constellations together: the watuq, juggler (p) of words û but thread is itself  “el mejor juglar.”

            From her multiple, voluntary “exiles” in Sanscrit, Hebrew, Greek, Latin cultures, the mestiza Vicuña has “thrown across” diabolic symbols into her discourse. She does so freely, not by necessity, as did her Inka cultural ancestors in their attempt to confuse the Spaniards. She throws her symbols into a most receptive universe, the Andean cosmovision. From there they radiate.

            It is because Vicuña is so steeped in the Andean world that the xeniká or foreign sparks of erudition which  û as though by lightning û she throws across her being-Andean, could ignite the visions latent in popular, i.e., language-forming, entity-linking, intuition all over the world.

            In “The Metaphysics of Textile” (which I paraphrase here), Vicuña presents the thread the as the “primordial metaphor” û but can “metaphor,”which is classified as “secondary meaning” by rhetoricians be primordial? It can, in the different mode of thought permeating the oral universe where, as I have tried to show, the term “metaphor” can at best be taken...metaphorically. The thread is a “primordial metaphor,” if taken “tautologically” as the first thread, “the umbilical cord, union of mother and child.” Furthermore, according to Vicuña, to “go back to the first textile means to imagine the first interlacing of twigs imitating a nest to give birth” or the” first twisting of a vegetal fiber in imitation of a natural vine.”  Or to see the “first thread producing itself all alone from a strand of the wool of a passing animal caught by vegetation” (from  Metaphysics of the Textile ).

            What makes Vicuña`s poetry truly universal is her quintessentially Andean specificity û and that is her admittedly “invented indian-ness.”⁴⁴

            In “Metaphysics...” she reminds us that the Sanskrit sutra, the commentary on the holy Buddhist text, means “thread.” Tantra, the holy text derived from the Vedas , is “thread and cloth.” Identical associations occur in ancient Chinese texts which go as far as to make a distinction between the weft and the warp as direct and reflected light (the latter corresponding to illa  ).

            “To weave is to give light” (dar luz, meaning to give birth), Vicuna quotes an Andean saying. The crucial link is the crossing. It may be the original crossing from the darkness of the womb to the light of life, or it may be the birth of new images at the crossing points of the conscious and the unconscious (overdetermination).  The all-connecting, mutually illuminating, horizontal and vertical lines of the weft and the warp testify to the truth of this expression of popular wisdom.

2. The Iridescence of Words.  

            Without the gaudy, commercially eye-catching colors, the stark, plain ( non-”mestizized”) blue and yellow  smashed on the front and back covers of the original edition of La Wik`uña, the slender volume would have the same mesmerizing effect  as Vicuña`s precarious sculptures. When the book is laid flat to reveal the continuity of the two covers, the photograph is hypnotizing. It is a work by César Paternosto, the sculptor, painter and photographer (light-writer), Cecilia`s husband. The picture does not re-present, not even make present an ancient stone, but inspires with life a mineral porous from hundreds of years of rain and sun and vegetal embrace. The slightly blurred, but distinguishable relief on the weathered sandstone is a cross framed by a stepped line suggesting a kenko whose meandering, losing itself in the decaying matter, points to the Infinite û a reflection of Vicuña`s grammatical infinitives.

            There could be no greater symbiosis between two artists. As Vicuña acknowledges in “Gratitude,” at the end of La Wik`uña, the genesis of Paternosto`s book Piedra Abstracta: La Escultura Inca, Una Vision contemporánea ⁴⁵ and that of La Wik`uña took place over the same span of years, and “the two books dialogue: one reflects the ideas of the other.” (La Wik`uña, p. 109).

            The result is a cross-breed of visual and verbal art, each enhanced by the xenikon  thrown across from the other. Cecilia occasionally adds a music and dance solo to this mestizaje among arts. One might pose again the question of “Gold is your Spinning” whether this mestizaje “is not something initial.”  It is the prototypical art form, as it existed long before the multi-media hype of the present day. Vicuña does not reject any medium, as long as it is “semantically appropriate,” the one and only “requerimiento” (requisite) for the watuq.

            One of her creations û this one unique in its kind is the animation (from anima, soul, i.e.”breathing life-soul into” inanimate matter) of the figures woven into a two thousand-year old textile û just as Paternosto makes paleozoic stones “germinate.” Her process is as follows: she photographed the figures (warriors, priests, musicians) that conform the fringe of a Paracas (Peruvian) textile belonging to a collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She pasted the photographs on cardboard and cut the individual figures out. The two-dimensional characters were equipped with strings, so that she could make them move, not in the up-and-down movement of puppets, but back and forth, to enact scenes of harvest, battle, and worship against the background of a  painted cardboard Andean landscape of her creation.

            We don`t know much about the music of the Paracas and other early pre-Columbian cultures, but it is possible it resembles the illapa vivon (edge of the thunderbolt) or the yawar mayu  (bloody river), most violent tempo of war dances. We may imagine how “the musicians made [the drums`] gut explode [qaqaqaqay]  or [flutes] wail [huañuy] during the sad steps of the dances.”⁴⁶ But we do not have to imagine the scene. The battle from two-and-a half thousand years ago, conceived as a visual and sound poem, is “given to see” (videtur) on a video and an animation film.⁴⁷ There is no voice-over (no anthropological explanation). The experiencer is invited into a unique visual and sonic space. The sound track is a double palimpsest consisting of three layers of music. The first are field recordings from contemporary Andean festivals where the characteristic sounds of the ancient instruments played by the Paracas musicians (drums and flute, percussions of stones and sticks) still clearly “sound through” in a way analogous to Heidegger`s “shining through,” as an old text is visible under the newly inscribed one in a palimsest. On this double “hypotext,”  José Pérez de Arce and Claudio Mercado, ethno-musicologists of the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, together with Cecilia Vicuña, “inscribed” or “wove” a new text(ure). They were indeed, “weaving waves” û of sound. The three voices utter a “saint language which can be heard but not quite understood.” (Vicuña`s description). “Palabras agenas y oscurantes...” and as intriguing as were those heard by the first Spaniards intruding into the Andean space. 

            This space, a metaphysical space, could be visualized in a graphic representation, such as Randall`s in “La lengua sagrada”, of the khipu as cruci-gram. It consists of two crosses which are superimposed in such a way as to form a star (or the “radiating” sun). Four straight perpendicular lines linking the rays represent the nodes of the radial threads, while the whole is surrounded by a double circle. The resulting division into many sectors of various geometrical shapes suggests an extremely complex metaphysics. The words written along the different axles and quarters or eights of circles are disposed as palindromes (words that are identical whether read backwards or forwards), under whose combinations we recognize “llama,”“illa,”“yaya” (father), “mama” (mother), and “yachapayaq qaqa” (echo).  This concept of “crossroads in space,” is tangibly present in every home and field, in form of the most humble object of everyday use, the basket: a widening spiral woven around a star, the initial crossing of reeds. In Andean logic, the world view given tangible expression in the khipu is, therefore, necessarily û by philosophical necessity û true, because material reality, the obvious empirical necessity of weaving the reeds in one specific way and not in another, confirms the concept as the only possible one. There is no other way of producing a basket than by starting from an initial crossroads in space. There is nothing metaphoric nor re-presented by simile. The cosmos and the basket abide by the same law, have the same mode of existence.

            The Eternal and the Infinite are reflected in the most fleeting of light effects, in  a hardly perceivable iridescence: in a shade of difference in the skin color of the mestizo, in the “prismal pores” of the wik`uña, in the “flying prism” of the hummingbird, in the shiny polychrome skin paint of the African ritual dancer⁴⁸

                                    Iridesce (Iridescence).

Adonde van                         Where are they going (a)

Los suaves in·meros                        Those countless tender ones(b)

Apiñandose en haz              Apparently pressing toward each other?

La luz                                              Light itself (c)