Having Been Named

Bennett's realignment of this fabulous text is divided into 26 somewhat brief, but incredibly beautiful, dense, unpunctuated and asyntactic sections, each with its own title. The overall effect reading these passages is that of a sublime but often disturbing dream, that requires its own rules and sets of margins or lack thereof. The relentless run-on flow of words as enactments of sounds dredged from an archaic distance has affinities with not just earth's surface but more precisely what lies underneath, an inherent chthonic Hell. Bennett's oneiric vision plunges the reader into a shadowy, indefinable alternate reality, an aphasia of the senses. Things more often unnamed--murders, children, cries, vengeances pass through a misty lens, light transmogrified by language into a tenuous dark other-world. The text is short enough to be read in one sitting and should be in order to get its full effect, a powerfully mesmerizing excursion through this telescoped concise language into a turbulent epic scenario, not unlike the constantly shifting nuances of the Mahabharata, except that here we are in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. - Iván Argüelles