The association that comes to mind is The Plumed Serpent. In South American lore, however, the winged snake is virtually an alias of Viracocha and imbued with positive connotations. The relief I am looking at now gives quite a different impression. The right hand is swung up to chin height; the left dangles next to the groin, palm facing outwards. From the knees downwards, the legs swell out into bulbs out of proportion with the rest of the body. It looks to be stepping forth with a finned left foot.
Depicted with far more dynamism and realism than the other images, off color and not about to harmonize with its surroundings, it looks almost alive.
I realize only when it is pointed out to me that this plumed serpent probably isn’t an abstract creation but rather incorporates a faithful rendering of some actual person’s face and features. No wonder it’s so raw and at the same time repulsive.
The document ended there.
For a moment Saeko just sat, unable to think clearly, barely registering the fact that she had finished.
Images of the Tiwanaku relics cluttered her mind. She tried to focus, to think about why her father might have been writing this. She wondered if it was a journal intended to record the daily events of his trips through these ancient relics. Or was it more an attempt to interpret the mysteries shrouding these ancient civilizations, particularly why they sometimes appeared to possess technology and knowledge beyond their time? He had also written about the sudden decline of such cultures, how many had just disappeared overnight; perhaps the text was an attempt to map out his initial thoughts on group disappearances.
The text read as though it were a rough draft, as though her father had been jotting down his experiences in journal form while brainstorming through thoughts that came to him at the time. Saeko decided that, most likely, he was planning to use this as a base to work from, henceforth focusing on a single theme and rewriting his notes accordingly. Saeko knew her father’s work patterns of old. Towards the end he’d begun to discuss his own interpretations of the emergence of life and evolution. Saeko realized that the postcard she had received from him had contained a summary of the keywords, the key concepts, of this part.
Her father theorized that the collapse of a black hole 4 billion years ago had been the defining factor in the beginning of cellular life on earth. Life had then evolved based on a relationship with light that eventually resulted in the development of a brain capable of describing its environment through language, including that of numbers. He identified a causal link between the developments of sight and language and touched on the causes of mass extinction, first with regard to the dinosaurs, and then the Neanderthals. His arguments deliberately strayed from conventional ideas that evolution was a blind process, that it was governed by chance, and went out of the way to claim that the process was purposive. Saeko recalled his detailing of the extraordinary idea that the universe (or god) had granted the power of language to life to satisfy its desire to be put down in the language of numbers. The interrelationship between life and matter deepened via the medium of light and information and enabled further evolution of the universe.
Saeko recalled a conversation she’d had with Toshiya about the relationship between black holes and informational theory. He had given her a copy of a recently published paper that held that the power of entropy weakens near the event horizon of a vanishing black hole. The weakening of entropy, by extension, could give rise to the formation of structure, and this could suffice to furnish the unique conditions necessary for the emergence of life.
Saeko wanted to believe her father’s arguments, but the subtext of his writing scared her. Throughout, he seemed to be warning that the collapse of the relationship he outlined could bring about a heretofore unheard-of catastrophe. Her father had conceived the universe as a network of phenomena where everything was caught in a continual flux of becoming and perishing. Anything that pushed too hard against the flow of progress would be naturally de-selected. Saeko couldn’t help but agree with his depiction of the world as unstable, uncertain — fleeting and full of hypotheses — but the rest? The one thing she would never doubt, of course, was her father’s love. Saeko found herself able to clearly imagine her father writing this, all of eighteen years ago. She could almost hear the soft whisper of his voice.
At the same time, something about the way her father came across in the text jarred. The more she thought of the man she knew, the more she began to feel that something was odd with the way he came across in the document. She was sure he had written it, but she had felt a vague dissonance here and there.
She turned back to the first page and began to scan the text to try to work out what was causing this impression. As she read through again she began to realize that the odd feeling she got came from the journal-like passages; somehow they didn’t match the image of the man she remembered. There was the one where he stood before the carving of Viracocha, describing a sense of déjà vu or nostalgia. She remembered how he recounted shedding a tear. Saeko had never known her father to cry — to the day he disappeared eighteen years ago she had never seen him shed a tear. Moreover, the way he wiped away his tears — she had never known her father to carry a handkerchief. The image just didn’t fit; Saeko couldn’t picture her father standing there wiping away tears with a handkerchief. She wondered if her father had simply never revealed this side of himself to her. It was completely possible that he had kept some habits hidden, not wanting to show any weakness in front of his daughter. Of course Saeko knew that people often learned things about their parents after their death, from old friends and such — there was nothing too odd about that. She back-burnered the thought and continued to skim the text.
She stopped once more. Here it was again in the scene where he picked up the hitchhiker. It had been early evening, and on his way back from Tiwanaku her father had come across a young Japanese hitchhiker and decided to give him a lift back to La Paz. She came to the part where he described their conversation:
… he leant forwards, his head poking out between the front seats as he spoke excitedly about his own theories about the ancient civilizations.
She hadn’t picked up on it during her first reading, but her father had clearly written that the hitchhiker had leant forward between the seats. Saeko couldn’t quite reconcile the description. She knew from reading his other works that images in her father’s descriptions were usually clear and flowing, easily recreating whatever he wanted to describe. What was it about this one sentence that made it so hard for her to picture the scene?
She went back to the beginning of the passage. Her father had seen the hitchhiker and given him a lift. She’d naturally assumed that the hitchhiker would have sat in the front passenger seat. That was why the description felt strange: if he’d been in the front seat he wouldn’t have had to lean forward to talk with her father. It would only make him hit the windshield, so he must have been sitting somewhere else. He hadn’t been riding shotgun at all but had been in the back of the jeep. With that realization, the description immediately made sense.
But why did her father ask him to sit in the rear seat? Saeko had never known him to do that; she’d always sat next to him in the front. When she’d sat in the back there had always been some reason.
Maybe he just had luggage piled up in the front?
But no, he had already checked into the hotel and would have left his suitcases and any heavy luggage in the room. If he had anything with him at all it would be a light daypack. Saeko dismissed the possibility of excess baggage.