Inequality and the clash
Five fingers -
the fingering of inequality,
consequently
the clash is inevitable
between
sustainable happiness for a few
and non-washable sorrow for others.
Five fingers -
the seed of argument and counter-argument,
they cause tumultuous festival
in seminar and conference
but remain
as fathers' unanswered question
and sons' unquestioned answer.
Five fingers -
a universal longing of the moderates
for forgetting the egoism
who know the significance
of their grammatical sizing and shaping
as nobody can ignore
the fruits of work and protection.
Five fingers -
a chained bunch of Keys of different sizes.
What is the requirement?
No need to itch hair
as the answer is kept in the custody of time
to open
the mysterious doors of El-dorado one day.
The Beast with Five Fingers -- Lynn Ward
El Dorado is a metaphor for the ultimate prize (perhaps true love, heaven, happiness, or success) that one might spend one's life seeking, or as something much sought after that is never found or may not even exist, as in “El Dorado,” one of Edgar Alan Poe's last poems:
ReplyDeleteGaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
But he grew old—
This knight so bold—
And o’er his heart a shadow—
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow—
‘Shadow,’ said he,
‘Where can it be—
This land of Eldorado?’
‘Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,’
The shade replied,—
‘If you seek for Eldorado!’
The poem was a metaphor for Poe’s own fruitless search for success. After dropping out of college and getting expelled from West Point, Poe edited the “Southern Literary Messenger” in Richmond, Virginia; his controversial fiction and scathing book reviews boosted the magazine’s circulation 7 times in 17 months but was fired twice in the process. Ten days before his marriage to a childhood sweetheart (by then a wealthy widow), passing through Baltimore, Maryland, he died en route to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for an editing job. The night before he left Richmond his fiancée told him he looked ill, and his physician advised him to delay his journey a few days. His cousin, whom he was staying with in Baltimore, reported that “where he spent the time he was here, or under what circumstances, I have been unable to ascertain.” Four days before his death he may have been a victim of cooping, a form of voter fraud in which unsuspecting victims were drugged and forced to vote at one polling place after another until being left for dead. In any event, he was found in a gutter outside Gunner’s Hall, a tavern that doubled as a polling place. Instead of wearing his own black wool suit, he had on a cheap gabardine suit and a palm leaf hat. Over the next few days, in the hospital, he passed in and out of consciousness.
His cousins buried him in an unmarked grave in his grandfather’s plot the day after his death, with only 7 people in attendance at his funeral. One of the attendees, his uncle, claimed “I didn’t have anything to do with him when he was alive, and I don’t want to have anything to do with him after his death.” Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s obituary portrayed him as a mad, drunken, womanizing opium addict who based his darkest tales on personal experience.
Voltaire’s 1759 satire “Candide” described a geographically isolated utopia called El Dorado, where the streets are covered with precious stones and all of the king's jokes are funny. By then “El Dorado” was a familiar but fabled land of wealth. But the city was originally a golden man (“El Hombre Dorado”) or king (“El Rey Dorado”). As early as 1531 the Spaniards had heard rumors of a sacred lake in the Cordillera Oriental of the Andes mountains that was associated with native rituals involving gold, but it was not found until 1537 when Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada y Rivera, a distant cousin of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, the conquerors of Mexico and Peru (and possibly Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s model for Don Quixote), led an expedition into the region in search of gold. Though only 166 of his original force of 900 survived the hazards of the jungle, the survivors forced Tisquesus, the zipa of the Muisca, to evacuate his capital Bacatá (Bogotá) before being mortally wounded. (The ceremony may have been related to the Muisca belief that Mnya, the color gold, represented the energy contained in the supreme god Chiminigagua; when the world came into being all was darkness except the light in his gigantic belly, which he opened and then created two large black birds and launched them into space; from their beaks the birds spread the light everywhere; then he created Cuchavira the rainbow, as well as Chía the moon and Sué the sun, who begat the mother goddess Bachué [“the one with the naked breasts”], who emerged from Lago Iguaque with a baby in her arms; the baby was the parrot god, whom she married and begat humanity, and then the couple became snakes and returned to Iguaque.) In 1636-1638 Juan Rodríguez Freyle wrote “El Carnero” (The Sheep), as the “Conquest and discovery of the New Kingdom of Granada of the West Indies sea, and foundation of the city of Holy Faith of Bogota” was colloquially called. Freyle described the zipa’s ceremonial inauguration: “Before taking office, he spent some time secluded in a cave, without women, forbidden to eat salt, or to go out during daylight. The first journey he had to make was to go to the great lagoon of Guatavita, to make offerings and sacrifices to the demon which they worshipped as their god and lord. During the ceremony which took place at the lagoon, they made a raft of rushes, embellishing and decorating it with the most attractive things they had. They put on it four lighted braziers in which they burned much moque, which is the incense of these natives, and also resin and many other perfumes. The lagoon was large and deep, so that a ship with high sides could sail on it, all loaded with an infinity of men and women dressed in fine plumes, golden plaques and crowns.... As soon as those on the raft began to burn incense, they also lit braziers on the shore, so that the smoke hid the light of day. At this time, they stripped the heir to his skin, and anointed him with a sticky earth on which they placed gold dust so that he was completely covered with this metal. They placed him on the raft ... and at his feet they placed a great heap of gold and emeralds for him to offer to his god. In the raft with him went four principal subject chiefs, decked in plumes, crowns, bracelets, pendants and ear rings all of gold. They, too, were naked, and each one carried his offering .... when the raft reached the centre of the lagoon, they raised a banner as a signal for silence. The gilded Indian then ... [threw] out all the pile of gold into the middle of the lake, and the chiefs who had accompanied him did the same on their own accounts. ... After this they lowered the flag, which had remained up during the whole time of offering, and, as the raft moved towards the shore, the shouting began again, with pipes, flutes and large teams of singers and dancers. With this ceremony the new ruler was received, and was recognized as lord and king.” And thus was born the legend of El Dorado.
ReplyDeleteLázaro Fonte and Hernán Perez de Quesada tried unsuccessfully to drain the lake in 1545 using a "bucket chain" of laborers; after 3 months, they lowered the water level by 3 meters but only obtained 3000–4000 pesos worth of gold. In 1580 Antonio de Sepúlveda cut a notch into the rim of the lake and reduced the water level by 20 meters, but after yielding 1about 2,000 pesos worth it collapsed and killed many of his workers. In 1531-1532 Diego de Ordaz, one of Cortés veterans, explored the Orinoco river in search of gold. His captain of munitions Juan Martinez was condemned to death for allowing some of the gunpowder to catch fire, but he escaped. On his deathbed he claimed that natives took him blindfolded to Manõa on Lago Parime in the Guyana highlands ("Manoa" in Arawak and "Parime" in Carib meant "big lake"), where he was welcomed by emperor Inga; neither the city nor the lake was ever seen again, but they became alternative locations for El Dorado and were marked on maps until Alexander von Humboldt disproved their existence during his Latin America expedition of 1799–1804. Between 1583 and 1591 Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada’s nephew Antonio de Berrio made three expeditions in search of El Dorado in the Colombian plains and the Upper Orinoco but was captured by the English poet/explorer Walter Raleigh and then acted as his guide, but after several months they abandoned the search. In 1596 Raleigh sent his lieutenant, Lawrence Kemys, back to Guyana to get more information about El Dorado, and they returned to the area in 1617. While Raleigh remained on Trinidad, Kemys and his son Watt Raleigh led an expedition up the Orinoco. Watt Raleigh was killed in a battle with Spaniards and Kemys committed suicide; when Raleigh returned to England he was beheaded in 1618 for disobeying James I’s orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish.
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