* * *

 

 

            Subcommander Marcos, of the aforementioned EZLN, burst simultaneously onto the Mexican and international scene with all the suddenness and astonishing grace of Athena stepping forth from the head of Zeus. In the Zapatistas’ conflict with the government, as quoted in California state senator and activist Tom Hayden’s The Zapatista Reader (2002), the conservative Mexican poet and statesman Octavio Paz aknowledges that Marcos’s “imaginative and lively prose ... had easily won the war of opinions”; while to French intellectual Régis Debray, he was simply (in paraphrase) “the greatest living writer in Latin America.” Marcos’s prose, like that of the post-Darwinian metafictional school, can be ironic and wildly experimental, riddled with deliberate postscripts and postmodernist digressions. Since this mysterious poet-rebel’s public name was clearly a pseudonym, in any case, his previous biography remains obscure. While he was identified more than a year later by the Mexican authorities (as reported by Alma Guillermoprieto in an article for The New Yorker) as Rafael Sebastián Guillén, a former philosophy student and activist professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UNAM) in Mexico City, Marcos neither affirmed nor categorically denied the revelation, instead toying with his enemy in another of his familiar communiqués, “rabidly applaud[ing] this new ‘success’ of the government police: I heard they found another ‘Marcos,’ and that he’s from Tampico” (the italics are Marcos’s); then he asks the tantalizing question: “Is this new Subcomandante Marcos good-looking? Because lately they’ve been assigning me really ugly ones and my feminine correspondence gets ruined.”

 

            His assumed revolutionary name, in any case, was meant to symbolize the centuries’-long invisibility of the mostly indigenous forces for whom he spoke. “The name ‘Marcos,’ they say” (so writes the Mexican journalist Elena Poniatowska in her essay “Voices from the Jungle: Subcomandante Marcos and Culture”), “is made up of the initials of the towns in Chiapas that the Zapatistas took on January 1”: Margaritas, Altamirano, La Realidad, Chanal, Ocosingo, and San Cristóbal.”

 

            The early-morning assault of Poniatowska’s reference took place at the earliest dawn of 1994, the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was set to go into effect. It was, prior to the government’s brutal response and the ensuing twelve-day war, an almost entirely peaceful affair. “The operation itself,” Hayden writes in the introduction to one section of his book, “carried out by 600 Indians in the predawn hours, occurred without death or injury. The Zapatistas seized the city hall, destroyed land deeds in the registrar’s office, and proclaimed their existence from the balcony over the central square.” This was in the state capital, San Cristóbal. “At the same time,” Hayden writes, “they occupied five other municipalities across Chiapas.” Only in Ocosingo were there any losses: “two dead and two wounded and four prisoners on their side,” according to Marcos’s first-day tally.

 

            Poniatowska adds that the coup was conducted with remarkable courteousness. “They took over the Plaza de Armas in San Cristóbal de las Casas without frightening the tourists on their Christmas holidays,” she writes – “this was so much the case that Marcos told some tourists who were going to the beach at Cancún to have a good time, and he told some others who planned to go to the archaeological site at Palenque that the road was closed and, not without humor, added: ‘Excuse the inconvenience, but this is a revolution.’” Though these were “armed men in ski masks, wearing crossed bandoliers, and even carrying submachine guns,” she says, “from the first moment, Subcomandante Marcos’s style was not to kill whoever stood in his way. His guerilla warfare was distinguished by being more political than military.”

 

            This is the most sympathetic view of the uprising. Clearly there are others. The government’s view is inherently suspect, given the weight of repression that it was quick to unleash, and by its habitual disingenuousness and intransigence during peace talks. “The army deployed 10,000 soldiers in the first days of the conflict” (writes Paco Ignacio Taibo II in his essay “Zapatistas! The Phoenix Rises”), “and the figure slowly rose to 17,000, one-third of the Mexican Army. Jeeps with machine guns, tanks, helicopters, German G-3 rifles, Saber planes.” One of the most sophisticated critiques, Enrique Krauze’s lengthy review and commentary which first appeared in December 1999 in The New York Review of Books, does contain essential context regarding the complexities of the revolutionary milieu of the time and place, and a brief account of some of the pre-uprising Marcos’s more Marxist-tinged and incendiary statements about religion and society. But in laying that foundation, Krauze leaves out vital detail which is confirmed and re-confirmed in various places. For his part, in the essay “The Last Glow of the Mexican Revolution,” Adolfo Gilly concludes that, while one hopes to find additional corroborating sources, “particularly the memories of the Indian participants,” Marcos’s nuanced account of the events leading up to that day has “the ring of truth.”

 

            In any case, what seems most significant to me is to observe, on one hand, Marcos’s brilliant use of the word (in preference to the sword) – and of what E. O. Wilson might call the “seminality” of the ideas those words contain – as a means of engineering the EZLN’s survival in the face of an otherwise certain extinction; and, on the other hand, the steady evolution of the old-school Marxist elements of the EZLN’s early message (brought by the small core of lighter-skinned, urban intellectuals of which Marcos was a member) into a rich, adaptive web of activist and reformist tendencies that would galvanize Mexican and international sentiment into a broad coalition of diverse-minded but mutually sympathetic voices in an open-ended quest for a more livable world for all: “A world,” to use Marcos’s words, “in which there is room for many worlds. A world capable of containing all worlds.” In this same vein, in a letter to Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Marcos writes:

           

Following different paths you and I both find ourselves dealing with the themes that you raise in your articles: globalization, the death throes of the nation state, the social development of Europe, the Europe of the financiers, the nature of the left in this period, etc. This nightmare (which they’re trying to sell us as the best of all possible worlds, and which is both the same and different whether it’s in America or Europe) threatens us with the most terrible destruction: the destruction of historical memory.

 

 

He adds: “There must be a better way. We are fighting in order to find it, and we are sure that you are doing the same.”

 

            The first words, which Marcos read from that balcony in San Cristóbal, were unadorned and direct: “We are the product of 500 years of struggle: first against slavery, then during the War of Independence from Spain led by insurgents, then to avoid being absorbed by North American imperialism, then to promulgate our constitution and expel the French empire from our soil.” He went on to enumerate the nation’s suffering under the modernizing dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the rebellion of men like Emiliano Zapata (for whom the present rebellion is named). “We have been denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country,” he continued.

 

 

They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads – no land, no work, no health care, no food, no education. Nor are we able to freely and democratically elect our political representatives, nor is there independence from foreigners, nor is there peace or justice for ourselves and our children.

 

 

And at this point, speaking through him their mouthpiece, these Maya rebels from Chiapas shouted, in this their first official declaration from the Lacandón jungle (I quote directly now from the first volume of Antonio García de León’s EZLN: Documentos y comunicados, México City: Ediciones Era,1995): “BASTA!”: in other words: “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!” (or simply: “ENOUGH!”).

 

            In the remainder of the document, continuing in the first-person plural, Marcos refers to the rebels as “the inheritors of the true builders of our nation,” as “the dispossessed,” and calls on the nation, “so that we will not die of hunger due to the insatiable ambition of a 70-year dictatorship led by a group of traitors,” to join the struggle. He appeals to Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution, which says that all

sovereignty and political power “emanates from the people” and is intended to serve them. “The people have, at all times,” it reads, “the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government.” Consequently, the EZLN declares “to the Mexican federal Army, the pillar of the Mexican dictatorship that we suffer from, monopolized by a one-party system and led by Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the maximum and illegitimate federal executive who holds power today,” that by means of this declaration of war they are asking for “other powers of the nation” to advocate for change and for international organizations like the Red Cross to “watch over and regulate [their] battles, so that [the Zapatistas’] efforts are carried out while still protecting [their] civilian population.” They commit themselves to the terms of the Geneva Accord and renounce any connection to drug trafficking and other illegalities. The revolutionary forces are authorized to advance on the capital, protecting civilian lives and respecting the lives and welfare of all prisoners; to “initiate summary judgments against all soldiers of the Mexican federal Army and the political police ... and against all those who have repressed the civil population”; to accept into their troops all Mexicans who wish to join their struggle. Finally – and all of this as “a last resort,” in answer to the government’s “undeclared war against [their] people” – they offer to accept the “unconditional surrender of the enemy’s headquarters” (in order “to avoid any loss of lives”) before the EZLN itself should launch further combat. At the same time they declare an end to the continued exploitation of natural resources in the EZLN-controlled territories.

 

            The rashness of such orders, in the face of the government’s massive military might, seems at best Quixotic, at worst suicidal, but perhaps in their wildest dreams they did anticipate an ever-expanding mass of soldiers, their ranks joined by a civil society exhausted from decades of corruption which had culminated in the rather blatant theft of the last Presidential election from the populist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas: “had the vote-counting computer system not inexplicably crashed just as the final votes were in,” writes Mike Gonzalez in an essay re-printed (from the journal International Socialism) in Hayden’s book, “he would almost certainly have won.” In any case, they never made it out of Chiapas, and one can’t help wondering if Marcos didn’t (at least in the back of his mind) anticipate this more likely reality. In that case, the declarations and communiqués that immediately sped out (via Internet) to a variety of newspapers and encircled the globe, arousing intense national and international pressure on the Mexican government not to proceed with what otherwise would almost certainly have been the movement’s utter annihilation, are the central piece of a pre-conceived master plan that would assure its immediate survival and enable its future evolution.

 

            The evolution of the movement runs something like this: from Marxist to indigenous to national to international. Although the allusion in this first document to five hundred years of struggle (not to mention the black hair and Indian features obscured by scarves and ski caps) does imply an indigenous root to the struggle, many observers have pointed out that it is nowhere explicit in the early statements. “I suspect that Subcommander Marcos is sincerely appalled at the government’s indifference to the Mayans’ plight,” writes Andres Oppenheimer in an essay that first appeared in New Republic. “But, before the 1994 uprising, Indian rights had never been central to his organization’s rhetoric.” He contends that, “like other Marxist groups,” the EZLN preferred the rhetoric of class struggle to those of racial or cultural exploitation.

 

The Mexican Awakener, the group’s first known official publication, virtually ignored the particular concerns of Indians as an ethnic group. The Zapatista revolution, it said, was a struggle by “the poor, the exploited, and the miserable of Mexico” against “the oppressive government and the big national and foreign exploiters of the people.”

 

Only after the first week of fighting, when the Zapatista rebels had made headlines worldwide, would Subcommander Marcos begin to deemphasize class struggle and focus on the Indian aspects of the rebellion. ... Somebody – perhaps Zapatista friends in the Roman Catholic Church or rebel sympathizers in the United States or Europe – had seen the international reaction to the uprising and had given Marcos a precious piece of advice: Forget the socialist mumbo-jumbo and play the Indian card. That was what was drawing attention in New York, Paris, Madrid, and Mexico City, and what helped turn the Chiapas rebels into media stars.

 

 

            It is true enough that the editorial in El Despertador Mexicano, dated December 1993, does have a distinctly Marxist-Socialist ring to it. “Mexicans, workers, countrymen, students, honest professionals, Chicanos, progressives from other countries,” it begins (in my own translation from De León’s Spanish-language text), “we have begun the fight that we need in order to achieve the demands that the Mexican State has never satisfied: work, land, roof, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace.” Also interesting is Marcos’s “Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds, a Storm, and a Prophecy” (also in my translation), a polemical revolutionary treatise that he drafted in 1992 and sent out, in January 1994, to his international audience. The whole document is full of biting irony and horrendous instances and statistics of capitalist depradations in Chiapas. Mocking the inviting brochures of the travel industry, he invites his interlocutors to lovely Chiapas where “Chiapanecan blood flows through the thousand and one fangs of looting that are sunk into the neck of the Mexican Southeast.” Such vampiric imagery is not uncommon in Marcos’s prose, and here it is explicitly linked to the capitalist (later: neoliberal) conspiracy of traditional Marxist rhetorics.

 

            Yet the Despertador Mexicano editorial also contains the text (among many others) of the “Revolutionary Law of Women,” which emerged quite remarkably from the Maya communities themselves. “Mexican women still struggle for respect,” writes Poniatowska in an article that originally appeared in The Los Angeles Times. “Even the guerilla women in Chiapas are victims of their men’s macho attitudes.” She goes on to assert that “the first uprising of the EZLN” occurred in March 1993, when “Major Susana” was authorized “to canvas women in dozens of communities about the revolutionary laws they wanted.” Among other things, they demanded freedom over their reproductive choices and not to be forced into marriages against their will. “This is the truth,” Poniatowska writes: “The first uprising of the EZLN ... was headed by women Zapatistas. No one disagreed with them, and as expected, they won.”

 

            It is hardly necessary here to relate a detailed history of how that evolution from Marxist ideology to Maya poetics and mythology took place, but what is clear is that this transformation was very much underway well before the uprising of January 1994. At first the urban guerrillas were not so well received, but eventually close relations and trust were established. The Indians, as Saul Landau writes in his essay for Hayden’s book, learned only the lessons that they wanted to learn, and in turn taught other lessons to Marcos and his tiny band of Marxist comrades, in particular, “to convert their latent guerrilla foco into the vanguard of a people’s army.” In fact, as Gilly recounts in his above-cited essay, it was the indigenous population more than the professional Marxist warriors who decided – after the government’s reckless repeal of Article 27 of the Constitution, which (at least on paper) gave hope of the Indians’ right to someday own their own land; and despite an international situation that left Marcos and others uneasy about the prospects of armed revolt – that (by a vote of “several tens of thousands”) “the war would have to start”: that “the people want to fight.” This version of things, supplied by Marcos, rings true because, “first of all,”

 

the sequence of the decisions has not been disputed by opposed official versions, or by any other for that matter. Second, the form of the decision making process corresponds, in effect, to the modes developed in agrarian communities when facing similar circumstances, as is corroborated by history, anthropology, and the accounts and life stories of those who at one time or another have taken part in the concrete organization of rebellions in subaltern communities, especially of miners and peasants. One of the finest studies of these processes of collective reflection may be found in Trotsky’s history of the Russian Revolution.

 

 

            Marcos himself, elaborating on the EZLN’s continuing transformation (in a communiqué, which I have translated from volume two of De León’s text, dated 25 August 1995), refers to the emergence in Mexican society of “new historical actors” who, “independently of Zapatism,” have often gone further than the EZLN’s own proposals.” “We are products,” Marcos writes, “of the encounter of indigenous wisdom and resistence with the valor of the generation of dignity [read: Marcos and his Marxist comrades] who lit up with their blood the dark night of the decades of the seventies and eighties.” But that larger Mexican society has taught them, he writes, “that we are not alone, that our truth cannot be imposed as absolute truth. ... As we learn, we are forming and making ourselves new.” This transformed EZLN is no longer what it was in December of 1993, he adds, but is rather, “now and forever, a hope,” represented by the common struggle of large (and formerly disconnected) segments of Mexican society: “We are by now the product of all of you, of your word and your strength. Today there is no longer ‘you’ and ‘we’. We are the same.”

 

            The Marxism of Marcos’s beginnings, then, might well have been that failed 19^th-century utopianism, that secular religion of the inevitability of human progress, that Randall calls “the last of the great Romantic faiths, lingering on in a scientific world.” The EZLN that has emerged post-NAFTA, on the other hand, is quite another animal. It is here that the connection to Darwin becomes most clear: an evolved neo-Zapatism as one more practitioner of what Dewey calls the “new mode of thinking” that is the essence of Darwinian influence on philosophy – “the shifting of interest,” in Randall’s paraphrase of Dewey, “to a different set of problems.” The result of this shifting to new problems and questions, as Randall points out, is an altered worldview (certainly not incompatible with the earthy religious cosmology of the Maya) of man’s relation to nature. “The nature in which we live is a world with man in it,” Randall writes. “It cannot be taken as a world from which man and all his works have been carefully eliminated.” And Marxist theory, in its purest state, is in fact an isolation of economic man from all other aspects of his nature, not only mythical or religious but even biological. It is to that most marvelous realm of biology, after all, that Wilson turns in Consilience as he attempts “to trace a magician’s dream [of serpents] all the way down to an atom.”

 

            One of the most beautiful of Marcos’s evocations of that communitarian and democratic indigenous spirit which would, within an evolved EZLN, come to largely supplant the exhausted rhetorics of purely Marxist revolution, is contained in his oft-repeated phrase “to command, obeying” (mandar obedeciendo). “When the EZLN was no more than a shadow dragging itself between the mist and the darkness of the mountain,” Marcos writes in a communiqué dated 26 February 1994 (again in my translation from De León), “when the words justice, liberty, and democracy were just that: words ..., the true men spoke, those faceless ones, those who walk about in the night, those who are mountain, and they spoke like this: ‘It is according to reason and the will of good men and women that they look for and find the best means of governing and being governed; what’s good for the most is good for all. But may the voices of the least,’” they add,

 

never be silenced but continue in their place, hoping that thought and heart might become common in that which is the will of  the most and the seeming of the least . . .Our path was always that the will of the most would become common in the heart of men and women who command. It was in that majoritarian will that the steps of him who commanded should walk. If his steps departed from what the people thought to be right, the heart who commanded should be changed for another who would obey. Thus was born our strength in the mountain. He who commands, if he is true, obeys; he who obeys, commands by the common heart of true men and women.

 

Later, Marcos writes, another word was invented to give that ancient indigenous practice the name that it more commonly bears: “democracy.” Yet in this world, as his wise old faceless ones observe, in Mexico and in the world beyond, power has fallen into the hands of a ruthless minority who, having taken possession of all the earth’s natural resources, command by brute force and without regard for the legitimate will of the far more numerous majority.

 

            This is the world of anti-democracy, anti-dialogue, that Marcos and his Chiapan rebels confront and that Marcos addresses more directly in his essay “The Fourth World War Has Begun,” which first appeared in September 1997 in Le Monde Diplomatique. Hayden calls this “Marcos’s most cogent, straightforward analysis of neoliberalism” – in other words: of globalization, of the “new world mercantilism” (Hayden’s phrase) which has emerged in the wake of the Cold War (World War III, in Marcos’s conception). It is by the machinations of neoliberalism, Marcos argues, that nation states are co-opted by corporations and banks, while politicians are reduced to “company managers” and the “disposable” peoples on society’s bottom rungs are incorporated into the service industries, otherwise pushed aside, or simply discarded. The resistance that Marcos calls for, and which is mirrored in such international phenomena as the Seattle WTO protests, if “handled properly,” Hayden writes, “is [therefore] not protectionism ... but a defense of global democratic processes against corporate seizure and usurpation.” As it is, Marcos writes, “the son (neoliberalism) is devouring the father (national capital), and in the process, is destroying the lies of capitalist ideology: In the new world order there is neither democracy nor freedom, neither equality nor fraternity. The planetary stage is transformed into a new battlefield in which chaos reigns.”

 

            What might seem in this essay merely a reversion to tired Marxist rhetorics is informed by a present global reality that Marcos’s opponents are hard-pressed to explain away: “a two-fold absurdity of accumulation: an accumulation of wealth for the few, and an accumulation of poverty for millions of others. The earth has 5 billion human inhabitants: of these only 500 million live comfortably ... The total wealth owned by the 358 richest people in the world ... is greater than the annual income of almost half the world’s poorest inhabitants – about 2.6 billion people.”

 

            In any case, anti-capitalist or anti-neoliberal rhetoric aside, Marcos returns at essay’s end to the indigenous wisdom of old Antonio, part-historical, part-mythical inhabitant of Marcos’s profusion of Maya mythology and poetics. “If you cannot have both reason and strength,” Antonio writes in Marcos’s notebook, “always choose reason, and leave strength to the enemy. In many battles, it is force that makes it possible to win a victory, but the struggle as a whole can only be won by reason. The strong man will never be able to draw reason from his strength, whereas we can always draw strength from our reason.”

 

            This is the survivor’s hope, the undying spirit of Steinbeck’s unextinguishable Joads in their Californian diaspora, which has kept this neo-Zapatism alive even into the twenty-first century. Surely one reason for their survivability is, in Darwinian terms, what Marcos says to Mexican writer Carlos Monsivaís, as recently as February 24, 2001 as the Caravan for Peace (or “Zapatour”) is about to pull out of San Cristóbal enroute for Mexico City: that the EZLN’s proposals have evolved while the government’s have not. Ignacio Ramonet, writing for Le Monde Diplomatique, quotes Monsivaís as saying that the Zapatistas’ march, in the wake of the remarkably untainted election of Vicente Fox as Mexico’s new President, “was a stroke of genius. The government will have to work to a timetable set by Marcos. That gives him the initiative. And Fox has to accept it” – which he did; and an indigenous woman named Esther addressed the halls of Congress, where she told Mexico’s political leaders in unadorned language “how we Zapatistas want Mexico to be”: a place where “indigenous will be indigenous and Mexican”; where “respect for difference is balanced with respect for what makes us equals”; where “difference is not a reason for death, jail, persecution, mockery, humiliation, racism”; where, “formed by differences, ours is a sovereign and independent nation, and not a colony where lootings, unfairness and shame abound”; where, “in the defining moments of our history, all of us rise above our differences to realize what we have in common: being Mexican.”

 

            Fox, Hayden writes in his “Brief Historical Timeline” of Maya-Zapatista history, “assumes the presidency on November 30 [2000] with promises to ‘resolve the problems in Chiapas in 15 minutes,” and on December 5 introduces legislation granting indigenous communities “autonomy, control over their natural resources, and respect for their traditional customs.” But later “it becomes clear that Fox introduced the reforms with a series of secret commentaries encouraging Congress to modify the ... proposals in significant ways.” By June 2001, proposals for reform rejected by Congress and the Zapatistas back in their jungle, Hayden writes (in the introduction to his anthology) that Fox “even declared that there was no longer a conflict in Chiapas, and that ‘we shouldn’t give any more space or situations of power to the Zapatista movement.’” His words, though, so much less powerful than those of either Marcos or Esther, do not make it so.

 

            This essay’s original question was whether or not, in the “fallen” reality initiated by Darwin’s by-now thoroughly vetted hypothesis of natural selection, we might like willful Don Quixotes or Emiliano Zapatas or Subcomandantes Marcos “storm heaven” and become, if not strictly born of the gods, born “toward” them. William James, influenced by his reading of the Essais de critique générale of French philosopher Charles Renouvier, came to believe “that philosophy is not a path to certainty, only a method of coping, and second, that what makes beliefs true is not logic but results. To James this meant,” as Menand writes in the passage alluded to earlier, “that human beings are active agents – that they get a vote – in the evolving constitution of the universe: when we choose a belief and act on it, we change the way things are.” Much in the same vein, Nicholas St. John Green, another member of the so-called “Metaphysical Club,” suggests (in Menand’s words) that any notion’s “truth value is a function of its usefulness in sorting out the facts in the case at hand, much as Darwin had argued that the term ‘species’ doesn’t refer to anything definitive in nature, but is nevertheless a useful way of lumping organisms together.”

 

            If these notions are valid, if (as in Dewey’s contemporary Jane Addams’s conception) ideas are somewhat like forks, tools that we use in the shaping of our reality, the world of our perceptions should indeed be malleable (within the biological constraints that Don Quixote ultimately came up against) to the sort of idealistic yet pragmatic dialogue along the frontiers of our human destiny that E. O. Wilson’s dreamed-of “new era of existentialism” potentially opens to our experience on this earth. Yet not as Kierkegaard’s isolated “Single One,” but within Buber’s sense of community, within the vastly widened cyber-community of Marcos’s rhetorics of resistance. As for any of our diverse experiences of faith in or toward God, surely rational men and women must (in these days of warring religious absolutisms) admit that humankind’s unquestioned allegiance to absolutist and contradictory visions of truth is an almost certain recipe for destruction (at the very least of our much-touted freedoms and democracy) on an increasingly global scale. We can’t any of us be absolutely right about every one of our most passionately held opinions. As Menand reminds us, in paraphrase this time of the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: “We do not ... permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity.”

  

            All of this said, and while it does seem evident to me that Martin Buber and Subcommander Marcos have graced the world with complementary and potentially healing methods toward the existentialist utopia of Wilson’s most ecstatic dreaming, I by no means intend to overstate those complementarities or to underestimate their differences. It is true, for instance, that Marcos, in contradiction to Buber’s firm grounding in Hasidic religious teaching, started from a position of revolutionary and even militant atheism, a position that, as far as I know, he may still privately entertain; but I am much more interested in his evolution toward countless other perspectives, and by his magnificent transformation of Maya mythology into word pictures and evocations that appeal to a universal sense of spirituality. As for Buber, he stated clearly enough his antipathy for proselyting or ecstatic, otherworldly religious experience. The crucial point here, to my way of thinking, is that their thought and action, however divergent in their particularities, are united by a common trust in whole-hearted communion or dialogue with the omnipresent Other, dialogue that I can only hope might prove fruitful in humankind’s continuing struggle (whose harsher aspects can be mitigated by the exercise of our common moral consciousness and reason) toward the further survival of our gravely troubled species.