Stone Turtle Man

Last week I took my class to Harvard’s Peabody Museum.  Their
assignment was to choose one object or exhibit in the museum and write
a detailed physical description of it.  I told them to try to describe
the object for a reader who would never see it, to paint a picture with
words so that it could be imagined with clarity and accuracy.

Of course, nowadays all of my students have clever little digital cameras
which produce excellent photos like the one above, and know how to insert
them into their word processing documents. I have noticed a corresponding
decline in the the detail of the descriptions.  I suppose I should
ban digital images from essays, except that I
am a big fan of them myself and a believer in the old adage about a
pic v. K words.

The object above is one of my favorites in the whole museum.  It
is called "Stone-turtle Man" and was created in Tenochtitlan, near what
is now
Mexico City, by

Aztec artisans. There are many levels of symbolism layered in this intriguing
sculpture.  The Aztecs believed that marine turtles and other aquatic
creatures were symbols of fertility and the afterlife.  The fact
that the image represents and anthropomorphic combination of man and
beast, it may represent a nahualli, a transforming animal spirit linking
a person to a deity.  In addition, many native Americans cosmologies
believe that the entire world is splayed on the broad arching back of
a giant turtle.

However, personally, I think the guy who created this little gem was
just a regular joe like me, who sometimes just wanted to crawl back
into some kind of a secure shell and let the world take a hike.  He
probably owed money to his bookie (gambling was big among the Aztecs) for betting on the wrong team in tlachtli,
the Aztec wall-ball game, sort of a cross between squash
and basketball, he hadn’t been home in days and his wife was looking
for him all over the jungle,his girlfriend
was
in
the middle
of a
six-day
sweat with
the village
shaman, his cretinous brother-in-law wanted to borrow his hammer and
chisel, he was overdue for his two weeks of gratuitous labor in the
King’s salt mines, and he was convinced that he was on the permanent
shit list of Macuilxochitl, the Aztec god of Sport and Gambling,
a.k.a. the God of Five Flowers.

So he brewed up some lotus-mushroom space soup and imagined he had a
magical carapace to crawl into where he could dream away, invulnerable
and inviolate, unreachable and secure.  I can relate, Stone-Turtle-Man.