Wringing the Swans Neck

In ancient Greece, myths tell us, the legendary Zeus was always on the prowl for females, sometimes disguised as a swan to attract women with his white plumage which, according to sages and poets, symbolized beauty and purity. Two thousand years later, Romantic poets, who saw the world as a place of tragic chaos, and who loved myths and legends, again looked to the swan as the symbol of beauty and purity. Charles Baudelaire (1821—1867), who hated the new Paris created by 19th century technology, turned the swan into a ridiculous prisoner of modernity. However, Latin American Modernists, from newly-independent countries that did not experience the Industrial Revolution, feared technology AND the United States and looked to France for inspiration; they would keep the swan alive as a symbol of purity and beauty until the early 20th century. Then in 1911, a Mexican poet named Enrique González Martínez (1871—1952), would finally wring the swan’s beautiful neck in a poem.

Wring the swan’s neck, with its deceptive plumage,

a white note on its blue forehead;

no more strolls the swan with grace, nor does not feel

the soul of anything, nor is it the countryside’s voice.

5 It flees all form and language

that does not move according to the latent rhythm

of its profound life…intensely adoring its life,

a life that understands it homage.

Look at how the wise owl stretches its wings

10 from Olympus, it leaves your lap in Palas

and poses in that tree after its taciturn flight…

It has not the grace of the swan, but it has unquiet

pupils that drive nails into the shadows, that interpret

the mysterious book of nocturnal silence.

For González Martínez, who survived a long, brutal dictatorship and a long violent revolution in a country where 90% of the population was illiterate, the owl, which spends its nights hunting and killing its prey by driving its talons and beak into its prey’s flesh like nails (and hooting), its days sleeping in the trees, would become the symbol of wisdom, and wisdom became more important than purity or beauty, which seems entirely reasonable: Owls as symbols of wisdom goes back to the ancient Greeks that worshipped the swan. But this change is striking because in African, Asian and Native American traditions, the wise owl announce a person’s death. It is also notable because Mexico is the land where Europeans, who considered themselves the descendants of the ancient Greeks, clashed violently with Native Americans. In fact Porfirio Díaz, who helped free Mexico from France on the day known as el Cinco de Mayo, and the first Mexican leader born a Mexican (Mexico’s president López de Santa Ana, defeated by Texas, and Juárez, humiliated by France, were born as Spaniards), was be the first Mexican leader to claim descent from an Aztec emperor. 

Then in 1914, the Latin American Modernist’s love affair with France will die a painful and eternal death in the trenches under clouds of poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction. Soon, Latin American poets would look to themselves for their myths and legends, and Magical Realism would be born. Ironically, Porifio Díaz’s body still lies in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, where Charles Baudelaire also rests in peace; tourists to the City of Lights often visit the graves of famous people. And more than a century later, Mexico still refuses to let Díaz’s corpse come home to roost. Yet strangely, the remains of the legendary Hernán Cortés, whose conquest of the Aztecs is no myth, are in Mexico, though no one knows where, and the legend of Ambrose Bierce would be created. A U.S. Civil War veteran who endured bloody combat multiple times to become a writer and journalist, who knew Mark Twain in California, said “Truth is stranger than fiction,” and truth is stranger than myth OR legend. In 1914 at the age of 72, Bierce left his wife and retirement on his peaceful California vineyard to travel to Mexico and he was never known heard from again; we will never know why. But we can read the legend of the Old Gringo written by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes.