THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
(Fragments from Altre viaggio, a draft on Pacha Kutic Wanka by Martín Bonadeo)
Gustavo Buntinx
[…] Perhaps some hermetic key to the Don Bosco mission is found in one of its least known manifestations. The high altitude shelters.
High: it is also by mystical vocation that the Mato Grosso Organization (OMG) has created, where the glaciers retreat, half a dozen shelters with architecture made of almost always essential materials: stones, wood. Almost always local. It is to the spirit of the place that these residences appeal. To the genius loci. To welcome, in principle, adventurous travelers who travel through these mountain ranges of great beauty and greater mystery. The jobs that are generated in this way provide the immediate residents with additional subsistence, it is true. But also another roots. A new attachment to its most remote and difficult lands.
And more sublime. In direct relationship with the larger hills. Very close to the heavens.
The prima nature. Also the first culture: in the vicinity of the great snow-capped Contrahierbas, the remains of villages and ancestral shrines are scattered. Ruins as unknown as those that bear the suggestive name of Quishuar, alluding to the wild and sacred tree that manages to take root in elevations that are inhospitable to almost all other species.
After building an inviting shelter in the surrounding area, the Salesians implemented a program of archaeological practices for the young people of the area at that site. In its always active search for renewed madness, when bureaucratic obstacles arose to that work, the OMG opted to build a new ruin. Two or three kilometers from the old one. And more than 4000 meters above sea level. Without using techniques that could not be known by the Gentiles.
Everything starts from the experience of religious retreats and work volunteering that in that environment bring together rural youth organized by Don Bosco’s prayer circles. The photographs of these processes, taken by Simone Rota, angelic manager of the shelter, are moving: hundreds of boys ––Andean, Italian–– carrying stones weighing tons on their shoulders. As if you were processions.
Temples and brand new homes, but with a prehistoric appearance, are thus kindly integrated into the landscape. Like a postmodern irruption of the archaic. Or of the eternal. The Practical motivation for all this is blurred. The spiritual is visible everywhere. In the pacha, in the lake, in the ichu.
On the circular, panoramic horizon, of infinite mountain ranges that surround the plateau three hundred and sixty degrees around. In the nearby lagoons that mirror everything. In the strong Andean grasses that give these heights its almost unique vegetation, its rough and wild identity. […]
On a slope close to that vision Pacha Kutiq Wanka installs his most delirious prodigy: lowering the Cross from Heaven to Earth. And return it to the empyrean as a reflection in the waters pooled at the foot of that slope. A spectrum that, however, materializes from the most essential and biblical of matters. The coarse salt of the earth: in an impressive experience, eighty Oratorians joined the project, carrying a ton of primordial matter […] to the Contrahierbas plateau. Three hours of ascent.
In that same puna, Bonadeo wove, with cords and stakes, the criss-cross profile of four enormous heptagrams: four ten-meter stars at the maximum extent of their seven points, alluding to the seven planets of the alchemical mind. Or to the seven chakras of the Hindu body. Or to the seven mansions of the Carmel soul.
With various aids […]the craftsman then spread the salts to fill each of these plots, also infiltrated by sheets of mica that accentuated the mimesis achieved with the snow of the hill. The overall effect replicated, inverted, the Southern Cross that at dawn of night appears over the angular summit of the mountain. The Cross of Heaven on the Ground, in an imaginary line of seventy by fifty meters, visible in its fullness only by Google Earth: the (technological) gaze of God.
An art outside of art, of the art world, of the world itself. And yet, so terrifying. There is in Bonadeo’s notebooks, in his codices, a concise ––beautiful–– drawing of the Contrahierbas mountain range profile, outlined only by minimal strokes that also outline the constellation in the sky. And your salt investment in the earth. And its floating reiteration in the water.
The Southern Cross, one and three.
Or tetra: there is also a vesper hour –––beautiful–– in which the celestial sign is added to the reflection of the earthly sign, as the night falls. In this transition three becomes four, the Christian trinity incorporates the Andean quadripartition. The chakana. […]
[T]hat translation from Heaven to Earth (and vice versa), that transfiguration of the Three into Four (or vice versa), summarizes the spiritual trigonometry that fuses Christian theology and ancestral mysticism. Or even grammatical: the word translation refers to the movement of the stars in space, but also to the displacement of verbal tenses in speech that deliberately disrupts the linguistic modes of the present, the past and the future. And the conditional.
In the broadest sense. The human (in)condition. The stumbling of the soul.
Or the descent and ascent of the soul through beauty: among the most personal revelations of the spiritual exercise that for us continues to be Pacha Kutiq Wanka is the continuous reunion with that altro viaggio (Dante) of Leopoldo Marechal.
That Neoplatonic religare of the most celestial but telluric aesthetic (or the other way around). […] This is what I sensed from my first reflective approaches to Bonadeo’s work and prayer. But it is by sharing the physical experience of Contraherbas that we both literally incorporate that other ethic into the vital praxis of that up and down, that “walking on the hills” that “speaks to you about something beyond”: these are the words of Armando Zappa, the Italian volunteer, now a priest, who gave the main inspiration for the hallucination of the creation of a new ruin. Which is also the inspiration for our madness. […]
Our constellation knocked down on the mountain. An inverted cross, like the one attributed to the martyrdom of Saint Peter, who did not consider himself worthy of dying in the same position as Jesus.
It is precisely on June 29, the Day of Saints Peter and Saint Paul, that Bonadeo culminated his cosmic intervention by activating it through a spontaneous, unthinkable liturgy of radical simplicity.
In the early hours of that morning the architect ascended, accompanied, to the highest of the physical stars, which is the lowest of the symbol. He scattered keys [, another attribute of Saint Peter,] among the salts. He sectioned wachumas. He configured spirals with those cuttings. Crosses, stars. One of his fingers was injured and some blood fell on the offering. […]
Then Martín raised a pututu into the air and towards his lips, that suggestive seashell that is the great ritual instrument of Andean music. From it he extracted with his breaths, with difficulty, a mournful sound that reverberated between natures and cultures. The sound of the ocean on the highest mountain. Another cross, another cross.
Finally we dug, together, a small well under the hopeful protection of one of the several beautiful stones scattered on the hillside. There Martín buried the large conch and inside we surrendered our most intimate keys. […] We then threw coca leaves. And we spilled wine from other, more southern Andes. Above all of this, Martín planted a San Pedro. He said something then, I think, about the takeoff of souls.
And that nothing was all.
A lightness, so arduous. Like the efforts to extract, in the puna, the music trapped by the sea horn. That still resonates in my memory.
Precisely because of its difficulty, the sound of that pututu does not drown out the silence. Activate it.
Activates, does not turn off, to silence.
Activates silence, does not turn it off.
It enlivens it, it turns it on.
Remember the sleeping soul. Awaken the genius loci, the numen of the place trapped in the rarefied air of the high mountains, in their strangely diaphanous light. And in the genius of the breath that breathes it.
Like the “quiet music” of the mystical landscapes of San Juan de la Cruz. Its “sound loneliness.” “Poetry says nothing,” wrote Martín Adán, “poetry is silent / listening to its own voice.” Like the aura. Like darsan, the esoteric name that Sanskrit gives to the fleeting glimpse of the divine appearance. Of the divine that barely allows itself to show itself, for a moment.[1]
A vision that is just a glimpse. Like the one we obtained around midnight on the eve of that Day of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. After dedicating the main part of the day to the stellar inscription on earth, we searched the shelter for some food and rest. But then we ascended, again, to the slopes of Contrahierbas, madly, in the dark, to project the Southern Cross on the ground to its constellation in the sky with laser devices.
Thrown face up, among the ichus, without oxygen, at 4,300 meters above sea level, with temperatures perhaps below zero, we could then see how the Milky Way spilled all its milk.
About us.
About our looks.
The Moradas.
(Saint Teresa of Jesus).
