tarea
Guess what onerous project is starting again? The new reading list:
—Mesoamerican Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs of Mexico and Central America
—Precolumbian America: Myths and Legends
—The Mayan Languages—A Comparative Vocabulary
—Time and the Highland Maya
—Time Among the Maya
—The Chixoy Dam and the Massacres at Río Negro, Agua Fría and Los Encuentros: A Report on Multilateral Financial Institution Accountability
—Handbook of Applied Hydraulics
—Optimal Long-Term Operation of Electric Power Systems
—Transnational Capitalism and Hydropolitics in Argentina: the Yacyreta High Dam
—El Sistema Electrico Nacional de Guatemala
—Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman's Journey to the Heart of the Indigenous Soul
—Long Life, Honey in the Heart: A Story of Initiation and Eloquence from the Shores of a Mayan Lake
—The Story of Big Creek
—Unfinished Conquest: the Guatemalan Tragedy
—Son of Tecún Umán: A Maya Indian Tells His Life Story
—Campesino: the Diary of a Guatemalan Indian
—Ignacio: the Diary of a Maya Indian of Guatemala
—On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems
—Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings
—A Beautiful Mind (I know, I know. But I have to see what she did.)
—Guatemalan Journey
—Days in the Jungle: the Testimony of a Guatemalan Guerrillero
I don't even know how to articulate that dry, scraped-from-the-inside feeling you have after a day of research. Any fact you encounter could lead you in five different directions, probably all bad ones. It's hard to avoid the sense that you're running in circles. I bought little color-coded report covers to organize all the documents I've been downloading from the web—it's something, but not enough.
I need to begin writing again, even if it's all wrong, even if it all has to be redone once I've finished the reading, and redone again after I go to Guatemala. But I'm very afraid of this book. I've tried to write it three or four times, and each time it's derailed horribly. I hope I've gotten smarter since then. On the edge of a precipice. Blinding lantern. No idea what's down there.
