In discussing Mayan Letters it's worth remembering that they were in fact
correspondence, and that Creeley chose to bring them out, with Olson's
approval, not because they broke new ground in mesoamerican studies but
because of the implications for practice. And I'll add that anthropologists
and archaeologists of all nationalities were equally clueless about the
Mayans until the epigraphic revolution of the last 20 years, imagining for
themselves well-managed city-states ruled by pacifist philosopher-kings.
Imaginary pasts have been potent cultural forces for as long as we have
humsn record. The Romans reinvented the Greeks, all of Europe reinvented
the Romans, and the Americas were the seat of Messianic or mercenary
fantasy from the earliest European contact. Imaginary science has played
its part, too. That Freud, Jung and Fraser now begin to appear quaint
doesn't lessen the value of work that assumed theory as fact. Nor does it
discredit the renaissance to know that their version of antiquity never
existed: on the fantasy was built much that's good, and a lot that's awful,
about our own culture.
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