John Campion
John Campion’s work explores different aspects of the intra-relationship between the environment and the co-extensive elements of human culture. With this aim, he has published over 1,000 pages of poetry and created additional related works in fine art, fiction, essays, philosophy, and translation (including the first translation in English of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’ magnum opus, Primero Sueño. As a medium for these concerns, Campion started the nonprofit groups The Open Theatre (1975), Ecotropic Works (1990), and World a Tuning Fork (2005)—publishing, among many others, essays by the great biologist Lynn Margulis, anthropologist Steven Feld, and archaeologist Solveig Turpin.
In the 1980s, Campion’s work on The Road to Xibalba emerged after one of the annual conferences on Maya glyphs and culture at UT Austin—where he became friends with the preeminent Maya epigrapher, Linda Schele (she illustrated the cover of his book, Tongue Stones). Now that she has passed, all across the Mayan speaking world, you will see monuments expressing gratitude for her helping to bring the Maya histories to light, and for helping native peoples learn to read and write about the ancient Maya glyphs, a lost skill that had been forbidden to them. At one of these occasions, Campion met the poet and translator, Dennis Tedlock (given the title and great honor of Daykeeper by the K’iche’ Maya), whose translation of The Popol Vuh initiated Campion’s love and appreciation for this great myth and guided the way towards his own English translation, from which he produced his libretto for The Road to Xibalba.
Campion recalls an evening after one of the conferences, when Linda Schele told him that our Western culture has not only tried to destroy the Maya people along with so many other Native Americans, but has shut itself off from any receptivity to their deep knowledge, wisdom, and beauty. Throughout The Road to Xibalba project (now ongoing for decades), John Campion has been seeking what Schele spoke of—discovering in this extraordinary myth the environmental virtues so necessary for the future health of this shared and endangered Earth—if we have the wisdom to receive them.