The first strike of the first bell was impossibly low and rumbling. It seemed to shake the air and even the table at which I was sitting. I was eating a late breakfast on the sixth floor of the building next door to the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City, the oldest and biggest in the whole of the Americas.
I looked up in alarm and saw the size of the bell ringing. I couldn’t imagine how anything could hold it up, much less a many hundreds-year-old tower.
Before that first bell, the main sounds that could be heard were the rattles and drums of the Mayan and Aztec priests below, where they set up their wares outside the cathedral to provide blessings for those who want the best possible odds in Pascal’s wager.
It was noon and the Angelus—the Catholic noon prayer—was beginning. Everyone else expected it, but it was new for me. The lowest and largest bell in the left tower began the series—more of a noise than a pitch, probably owing to the materials, age, and the limits of the human ear. The Cathedral itself was 250 years in the making, so that no master craftsman nor their children saw the work from early to late stages.
They toiled to build, not complete.
The bell rang again, then again, and then with increasing frequency, then joined by a smaller bell, similarly noisy but with a distinctly higher pitch that remained so replete with overtones that it could never be placed on a scale. The pace of ringing grew as the bells warmed, and then other bells joined from lower in the tower and then across to the second tower. This went on for an incredible 10 minutes, eventually involving all 25 of the bells hundreds of years old, during which time the only way to carry on conversation was with elevated volume.
I wonder how all of this was accomplished. For that matter, I wondered how in the heck the entire machinery still worked. I looked as closely as I could and thought I was seeing an illusion at first. I saw men high in the towers, going here and there passing from one place to another and appearing and disappearing. Only then did I fully realize that every bell was being rung by a person assigned to it, and being rung by hand with large ropes. The skill of timing is surely something years in training.
At the peak at perhaps 7 minutes, when all 25 bells were ringing in close succession and rapidly, the overtones of strikes, groans, bongs, and rings created an amazing sound that seemed to combine cacophony and symphony, beauty and ferocity, chaos and order.
It was impossible not to be awestruck by the entire experience. Then at 8 and 9 minutes, they calmed down again, leaving at the end the one lone large bell ringing with ever less frequency, enticing everyone to wonder when the last one would sound. One couldn’t know but the human ear could not stop listening for it even when it stopped completely, which might have been the whole point.
When the bells stopped, we could again hear the drums and rattles of the native rituals below as communicants left the cathedral for their blessing with the Aztec priest with incense and freshly picked herbs. In the distance, you could hear the organ grinders on the streets of Centro, where their hand-cranked players pumped out music that was only listenable once one becomes cognizant that their entire experience was as acoustic today as it was in the 19th century.
These are all sounds of centuries, continuing today, likely with very little change, forming a soundtrack of the ages, connecting generations and experiences back in time. An audible liturgy of life.
The central part of Mexico City was made famous by the James Bond film “Spectre,” which opens with a celebration of Día de los Muertos, complete with crazy skeletons and skulls, loud bands and parades, and seeming lunacy all around. It’s a religious holiday rooted in the old faith before the Spaniards brought Christianity to the country, but easily folded into the new faith through the doctrine of Purgatory, on which the faithful are instructed to reflect and pray so that their ancestors will enter Heaven. The celebrations took place coincident with All Souls Day in the Christian calendar, which directly connects with the decidedly secular celebration of Halloween.
The remnants of the celebration, which lasts a full week, were everywhere in evidence.
This isn’t a country that tears down monuments and erases traditions. The people revel in them, if anything intensifying them with more exuberance and love as time goes on. The Bond movie riveted the entire country with joy that their own traditions had become an international phenomenon. The holidays became even more intense, with gigantic and colorful skulls put out on the sidewalks along the streets in the main city center.
It’s strange what visiting a new country does to the mind of a person raised entirely in one country his entire life. We think we are going somewhere else to see something new. What it actually achieves is to focus the mind on seeing one’s own country perhaps for the first time.
Nothing is so invisible as that which surrounds us. That’s especially true in living through times of decline, as all Americans are doing today. Do we even see it anymore? It’s happening very quickly over time but slow enough for all of us to get used to the new order of things in real time, enough to believe that whatever we experience is normal even when it is not.
The very first evidence I saw of the huge difference between America and Mexico concerns the hunger and passion for real work. Barely leaving the airport and traveling the streets to downtown, I was overwhelmed by the sheer busyness of everyone and everything. The streets were teeming with enterprise of the sort I have not seen in years.
Yes, it is a much poorer country but this isn’t owing to a lack of enterprise, entrepreneurship, and work ethic. The only “homeless people” I’ve seen—and this was true of my last trip—were very obviously disabled to an incapacitated state. Otherwise, every able-bodied person is expected to do something to earn whatever pesos they have.
The second evidence is the fascinating layers of Mexico culture, the way mariachi music seamlessly integrates with modern dance pop, and how old and new clothing styles mix side by side.
It’s even true with religion: the old faith is still here alongside the new, and sometimes it is hard to tell when one ends and the other begins. The city is busy restoring the ruins of the old Aztec temple on the same lands as the Cathedral now stands. It’s not that anyone is seeking converts from one to the other. It’s simply a matter of showing piety for the past without which a culture and people are lost.
And here we see the major difference between Mexico and the United States. In the United States, activists are demanding we tear down all the monuments. It began with the hated Confederate war memorials and generals, as if we citizens are unable to see evidence of the past with a critical mind.
No, we have to wipe it out as if we are all snowflakes, too weak and shallow to come to terms with the good, bad, and complex mixtures of both that form the main line of the long historical narrative. Of course, it didn’t stop with the Confederates: it moved on to the Founding Fathers, then the American Revolution, and now extends all the way to Lincoln and Wilson. Everything is today on the chopping block.
It shouldn’t matter whether we like these historical figures or not. We can’t even consider them? They must be entirely expunged from the public mind? It appears so. The great reset means resetting everything from all time. There is no past. The future is endlessly up for grabs. We can’t hardly plant roots or find meaning when the roots are ripped up again and our sense of clarity and meaning is denounced in bitter terms.
Back to the bells of the cathedral. These are the sounds of a nation, a people, a ritual, and a tradition, and people cling to them for meaning, sparing no expense in keeping them in full operation every day. I cannot say for sure but I’m guessing that the bell ringers themselves feel enormous pride in their craft.
Where is our meaning? Where is our pride? The commanding heights of American culture are mainly now engaged in acts of destruction against everything civilized.
But what is the sound and aesthetic of woke postmodernism? No doubt that myriad social media “influencers” would be happy to lay it all out for me, but I think I would rather not know. The soundtrack of our time is the sound of nothing pious toward the past or responsible to the future. It’s only what artificial intelligence (AI) can generate on the spot.
