I brush the termites from the Bible and scan the lines of Genesis. Before forging the first humans, God separated light from dark, sky from land, earth from sea. Without borders, I realize, life could not exist. Cells would have no membranes to contain them, no wombs in which to thrive. Without borders, societies could not function. The border between good and evil is central to civilization. But borders can also be deadly.
Under a nearby tree, a human skull lies on its side. Dirt clings to crevices in the bone. A few meters away: a curving human spine. It’s attached to legs in brown pants. A hand lies by a bush. The remains are scattered all over the place, as if torn apart by a coyote or some other animal. I kneel in front of the skull and study its features. It has a broad forehead, just like you, Papi, just like me. I can’t help seeing us there.
* * *
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Diverse species of borders exist in the world. Some can be touched: steel gates, the skin of our bodies, coastlines. Others can’t be touched but can be drawn on maps: climate isotherms and ozone-layer breaks. Some are too abstract to delineate: between ethnicities, between languages, between dreams, between secrets and the said. The U.S.-Mexico border region expert Guillermo Alonso Meneses wrote a book called Fronteras simbólico-culturales, étnicas e internacionales. He argues that the word “border” did not always evoke a solid division between distinct places: “In its origins, the cultural artifact we call border, limit, boundary, conclusion, demarcation, stripe, mark, or frontier, could be a strip of territory defined by a river, a mountain chain, or the beginning of the sea….These references to the place where the known ends and the unknown begins speak of a world where there were not always precise borders but rather vague confines.” As the world became more connected through trade and transportation, countries scrambled to calcify national boundaries. Walls and fences between nations multiplied, writhing and stretching like snakes, thousands upon thousands of new miles of steel gates, splitting, colliding, separating.
* * *
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Borders are the opposite of motion. They are intended to stop it: stillness materialized. But it is in human nature to behold in borders the temptation of the beyond. Curiosity extends beyond the permissible, beyond the perceivable. God told the first couple in the Garden of Eden: “From any tree in the garden you may eat freely, but from the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” He must have known what they would do.
Papi, we have crossed so many borders, so carelessly, so frequently, in quest of omniscience. Now we are caught in the fabric of their nothingness. I lie on the desert floor beside the anonymous migrant’s skull, dehydrated and exhausted. I close my eyes and find myself back in the place where the roads are caracol. These corridors are full of water. It tastes of sal y cigarros. The ceiling sprouts wine-colored carpet. When I run my hands along it, I can feel the black plastic curves of cigarette burns, ouroboros shapes. There is something coming for me, Papi. It is a spider of some kind, like the one you swallowed in Paradise Hills. But it swims, it has legs like tentacles, and it speaks Spanish: Si no encuentras a tu Papi, vas a morir.
* * *
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¿Papi, dónde estás? I sought you in the United States. I sought you in Mexico. But you are neither Mexican nor American. You are not Mexican-American either. You are the dash that lies between. You are in the chasm between chasms—deeper than I may ever hope to reach.
Did you lose yourself looking for your own father? I found him for you. He is buried in the south of Mexico, dead for twenty years, but I have a photograph of the man you can’t recall: He sits on a boat in Xochimilco, the site of the few surviving chinampas—the ancient Mexica’s floating gardens—in what is now Mexico City. He wears a stylish striped vest, striped pants and a collared shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He is as handsome as you, furrowed eyebrows casting shadows over his eyes. Stringy aguehote trees form a fortress on the riverbank, their reflections reaching toward him on the water.
Beneath him lurk the dying axolotls, Mexican salamanders that never metamorphose. Unlike other amphibians, they can regenerate any part of their bodies throughout their lives. They are pale pink or gray, with growths like tree coral on their heads. The ancient Aztecs revered them as death-defying gods. Axolotls can’t be found anywhere in nature except in Xochimilco, but they are bred by the thousands in laboratories, snipped and chopped by scientists who seek to replicate their superpowers. Once, when I visited Xochimilco, a campesino brought me a slimy black one. He said: “Sometimes people see him all dark, and they think he’s poisonous or evil, so they step on him, and beat him. They eliminate him. But he cures asthma, bronchitis, arthritis, respiratory issues, cough, indigestion, mal de ojo, and he’s an aphrodisiac.”
I bring you the photograph of your father in Xochimilco. You tell me you don’t want to see it. “Some other time,” you say.
I’m sorry, Papi. Perdóname. I know how much you hate to be pursued.
What if it is I who haunted you all along? What if it was not ghosts, not gods, not the government whose voices you heard—but your daughter’s, calling your name? What if mine were the shadows that chased you?
* * *
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In a book called Orthodoxy, the philosopher Gilbert K. Chesterton argues that lunacy comes not from a lack of reason but from an excess of logical ambition. Lunacy is born of his desire to understand everything—to cram the infinite universe into his finite head. “And it is his head that splits,” Chesterton writes. He points out that the word “lunatic” comes from luna. “For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name,” he writes. The moon is clear and circular, like logic. It mirrors the self-devouring snake of the ouroboros. It is a symbol of erasure, a formula for nothingness. Like a country demarcating its borders, the ouroboros self-delineates and, in so doing, swallows itself.
* * *
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The United States was born of intellectuals in the Age of Enlightenment. The white settlers believed in the supremacy of the logical mind and its ability to subjugate the natural world; they grew a country of freedom and justice on the bodies of the killed and enslaved. A high-tech world sprang forth, with portable entertainment screens and skyscrapers as tall as gods. Its military became cross-continental, sending missile-firing drones into the clouds. It was the first country to send men to the moon. It suffers one of the world’s highest rates of mental illness.
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The white conquistadores and the brown indígenas who met, mated and murdered one another to create Mexico had a faith in spirits so profound and imaginative that the concept of death was hypnotic, the abyss competitive with reality. The Spaniards, like the ancient Maya and Mexica they encountered, perceived divine meanings in everything, even logical concepts like numbers. They were seduced by what frightened them, wrapped themselves up in what they destroyed, made love to their enemies. To this day, Mexicans consume tabloids of bloodied bodies, decorate their homes with skeletons and celebrate Día de los Muertos on the graves of their abuelos. Cartel killers build shrines to Santa Muerte. The country suffers one of the world’s highest homicide rates.
In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz compares the psychoses of the American and the Mexican: “The solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines.” In the United States, “the world has been created by [man] and it is made in his image: it is his mirror. But he no longer recognizes himself in those inhumane objects, nor in his fellow men. Like an inexpert sorcerer, his constructions no longer obey him.”
Mexicans are fixated on the past. They find inspiration backward and downward, in the earth’s cemeteries: in their future. Americans are fixated on the future. They find inspiration forwa
rd and upward, in the stars: light-years past. Both views are incomplete. Both fold back into themselves, self-devouring, like the ouroboros. The paths of logic and superstition unfold in parallel directions: beyond reality, toward delusion.
* * *
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My mother always spoke of the United States with admiration and pride. It was a country where anything was possible, where if you kept your eyes on the stars you could reach the greatest heights. But the more American I became, the more I despised the limits of my flesh. I tore at my skin until I felt invincible—until I felt nothing but the boundlessness of my own vision. I began to understand everything: my behavior, your behavior, the “miracle” of human life. Everything was reducible to atomic numbers, electron configurations, inert facts and formulas. Reality became a set of predictable forces acting on matter. The world—once a magical, mysterious place—became as dull as an instruction manual. I hated everyone and everything.
Mexico, too, was a country where anything was possible, where if you kept your eyes on the earth you might see corpses resurrected. It was a place where the border between life and death was permeable, where hidden forces forged paths toward immortality. But the more Mexican I became, the more I lost touch with the material world. I turned into a ghost.
* * *
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The philosopher Chesterton writes of an antidote to ouroboros illnesses: Mysticism. He describes it as a quest for truth that reveres the ultimate mystery—the contradictory nature of reality. The curiosity of mysticism never loses steam because it is fueled, not constricted, by contradictory information. It values truth over consistency. It is open to both free will and fate, prescriptions and prophecies, mathematics and miracles. Light is both a particle and a wave. Time is both linear and nonlinear. The world is both subjective and objective. “It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man,” he writes.
From another perspective, it’s the ethos of the United States and Mexico combined. Neither is correct on its own. Together, they are sane.
Chesterton calls for basking beneath contradiction as if under the blaze of a “shapeless” sun. We must not blind ourselves by staring straight at the sun, attempting to discern its contours and disentangle its rays. We must seek insights from the reflections and refractions of its light. There is power in the obliquely understood. Poetry is sane because it “floats easily in an infinite sea” rather than trying to “cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite,” he writes. Poetry does not prescribe. It does not diagnose or contain. It flowers outward, rooted and free. It is creative, like conception, which biologists can describe but not explain. It is not material or magical. It is both.
The philosopher points to the shape of the cross: “The cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.”
Across countries and centuries, the cross has been revered as one of the most powerful shapes in nature. Éliphas Lévi, an occult scholar from the nineteenth century, said that the cross controls spirit, matter, motion and stillness. The First Cause of the universe, he wrote, is “revealed invariably by the Cross—that unity made up of two, divided one by the other in order to produce four; that key to the mysteries of India and Egypt, the Tau of the patriarchs, the divine sign of Osiris, the Stauros of the Gnostics, the keystone of the temple, the symbol of Occult Masonry.”
Nature is rife with this shape: Light waves cross into cortices. Sperm cross coronae radiatae. Stringy roots burst forth from their seeds. DNA gathers in cross-shaped chromosomes.
The cross is a symbol for the language of creation. It is the opposite of the ouroboros. Rather than a singularity imbibed, it is duality yielding. Es la contradicción en un cuerpo—contradiction embodied.
* * *
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The human brain is divided into two hemispheres. They communicate through a bundle of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum, but a clear fissure exists between the halves. The left hemisphere is linear and logical. It separates stimuli into categories and plans methodically for the future. The right hemisphere is spontaneous and spiritual. It is holistic and dwells in the present. The left hemisphere creates borders. The right hemisphere connects the disparate.
An American psychologist named Julian Jaynes argues in his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, that the brains of early humans were not fully integrated via the corpus callosum. The activity of one hemisphere was perceived by the other as external to the self: thoughts were the voices of gods. “We could say that before the second millennium B.C., everyone was schizophrenic,” writes Jaynes. He points to one of the oldest works of Western literature: Homer’s Iliad. “The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections….When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon….[I]t is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath.”
As the connections between brain hemispheres multiplied, humans began to perceive the gods’ voices as their own internal dialogue. They merged with the divine. They acquired free will. Self-agency and the power of choice came not from logic or superstition, but from their crossing.
* * *
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I am starting to remember what the ocean made me forget, Papi. What always scared me about the world was not the unknown, but the fear that the unknown was nothing, that mystery was an illusion, that the world was this: just this. It is not. The whys of the world are uncertain; therefore they are alive. They are ethereal and shape-shifting. They twist, ripple, vanish. Label an object—reduce it. Name a person—subsume him. Truth is like the most colorful things in nature (el arcoíris, la mariposa)—clutch them in your fists and find pure dust. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real—only that they cannot be possessed.
Mysticism travels toward truth without trying to grasp it. It shatters omniscience into the freedom of discovery. The scientific method is mystical because it unites the magic of conjured hypotheses with the rigid structure of test tubes. Journalism is mystical because it is a never-ending renewal of records. Mysticism is the Migrant’s Prayer, la Oración del Migrante: “The journey toward you, Lord, is life. To set off is to die a little. To never arrive is to arrive definitely.” Mysticism is the chase for the father who becomes farther and farther away.
•
Papi, you ran from your daughters…
Como Juanita corría de sus hijos.
I chase you both and rediscover
La frontera entre los espejos.
* * *
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I find Juanita’s death certificate while scouring hundreds of pages of microfilm records from Tlaltenango. A scrawl tells me she died of an asthma attack on May 8, 1948, at the age of sixty-eight. The revolutionary woman? The healer? Asthmatic? I touch my throat. I know what it feels like not to be able to breathe. I know how painful it is: the terror, the loneliness. Time rhymes to tell us secrets. I don’t understand what the whispers are saying. I must dwell in the uncertainty.
* * *
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When I was a child, sick and feverish, I sometimes had horrific visions. I saw a substance that was incredibly smooth and unblemished. It was so immaculate it smothered me. When I could no longer stand it, another texture came: wrinkled and disfigured beyond comprehension. It was so flawed it gutted me. Both were unbearable to my body, which existed somewhere between the two substances. I raised my hands in front of my face and ran fingers along fingers, amazed by their physicality, which had become foreign to me: brittle, protuberant, terrestrial. I kept touching my fingers. Th
e terror fell away.
* * *
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Our five senses travel through a labyrinth of crossings: from skin to synapse, each part of our bodies corresponds to the opposing brain hemisphere via crisscrossing nerve fibers. Our left hands are controlled by our right brain hemispheres, and vice versa. Because the crisscrossing connections between our brain cells number in the trillions, our mental category systems are seemingly limitless. Unlike the minds of animals, human brains can combine concepts (mother, father) to create encompassing concepts (parents, lovers). This capacity—rooted in cerebral crossings—allows human consciousness to expand infinitely in all directions: like the minds of gods. Christ became immortal by dying on the cross. The cross is the coincidentia oppositorum of Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism and more: the unity of opposites from which all else is born. Like the counterclockwise or clockwise twist that turns a curled surface into a Möbius strip, the cross transforms finite dimensions into infinite ones by coaxing unity out of separation.
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