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“I’ve always been crazy, but it’s kept me from going insane.”
-Waylon Jennings, early ‘Country’ singer
When you get right down to it, the essential ingredients for magic and
madness are much the same— hence a lot of the confusion. In combination they
helped explain why Abel was committed to four years of institutionalized
“reconstruction,” instead of being elevated into some secret order by the
learned precepts of ancient traditions.
The same intense openness to the
sensations and solicitations of the sentient world, the same sensitivity fed
the roots of insanity as fed the roots of magic. The criteria in either case
was, “how deep can you feel?” Bear the pain well enough, long enough, and it’s
a promise: ecstasy will follow. But not just yet. First one must learn
patience. First one must prove worthy of their awakeness.
Abel came
through that first door during the uniquely challenged period that came to be
called the “Second Milenium.” He was conceived in a test tube, carried to term
by his socialite mother, and hatched with the kinds of inborn skills and
preordained assignments that would make contentment a long shot. Already by age
four Abel felt incurably different— from his parents, from his peers, and from
those models of practiced insincerity gesticulating across the bright TV
screen. No matter what channel he tried, every program had an air of science
fiction, every announcer strangely menacing in their sprayed hair pieces. Even
in a city of millions, the child felt alone. In his increasing alienation Abel
was unknowingly obeying the first tenet of any authentic shamanic practice:
estrangement from the inauthentic and superficial. He experienced this
aloneness to the very depths of his being and he blossomed, like a cliff-rose,
on the dangerous edge. Anyone could go to the places of power to access the
supersensate world, or enter it through the passageways that opened up in the
twilight of dawn or dusk. But only a tormented few carried the opening around
with them everywhere they went, forever poised to fall or to fly. Abel was born
an astronaut of the inner abyss, connected by the slightest tether to the world
of his parents and friends, ever tugging on its distant other end.
Growing
up he’d sit in the back of the classrooms drawing or daydreaming, never seeming
to pay any attention to his teachers yet always getting an “A” on his tests.
They in turn marked “Unsatisfactory” on the back of the report cards, on the
lines System Controllers looked at for signs of instability, and the factors
relevant to eventual career placement: “Cooperation.” “Conformity.”
“Diligence.” “Obedience.” Every line was awarded the big red “U,” except for
“Neatness.” As much as he tried to live it down, the kid was inarguably, even
neurotically neat.
The child behaviorists all came back with the same
diagnosis: Abel’s emotional development continuously failed to keep up with his
bodily, biological maturity, which in turn lagged behind a frighteningly clever
mind. A mind, the reports would note, that exercised its options by learning
how to open the locks leading into the science lab, and concocting stink bombs
for the biannual coed picnics. He paid any resulting fines by employing a sonic
transceiver to trick those old fashioned digital pay phones into releasing their
silver booty, expelling coinage like the spitting jackpot of a Las Vegas slot
machine. The attempts at therapy and a “cure” began with his early enrollment
in a church-run academy, to the great distress of the nuns, followed by a
military boarding school once it became obvious that he enjoyed sitting in the
corner. A stint in the Juvenile Behavioral Institute showcased the ways in
which applied physics could settle a dayroom billiard game, and how quickly one
inmate could read all the materials on the library’s microfilm. The intake
counselors were the last English speaking people to hear him tell about the
“voices”.... at least, for a long, long time.
You see, Abel’s family always
followed their psych’s advice. For summer vacation they sent him on an
ethnographic study trip around the world.
For graduation they had him
committed.
“They” were his parents, but “they” were also all those others
whose remarks and deeds made little sense to him, those he could never catch
laughing and who always seemed to be telling him what to do. He’d come to think
of them as the “aliens,” and they were simply everywhere. They were instructors
and counselors, psychologists and controllers, policeman and judges, congressmen
and generals. They were always calling him out of the miraculous playgrounds of
the mind, those undeveloped fields of inquiry, for a ration of flavor-enhanced
meals. They called him to attention at military school, to the lines at the
stores, and “to his senses” when he insisted on practicing his magic tricks by
candlelight.
The perception of being constantly assaulted from every angle
resulted in some interesting defensive tactics. As a baby Abel learned he could
blur the shapes of things he didn’t want to see by squinting his eyes, and
white-out their words by focusing on a single tone. The more the counselors
upbraided him, the more he took refuge in the deliberate restructuring of
reality. By age eight he could roll pennies from knuckle to knuckle, or make
them seem to appear from inside his ear. By ten he’d developed the ability to
bring his nighttime dreams to class with him, instead of his homework. In the
Institute he perfected a dozen original card tricks, and figured out how to rig
the sensors to make them think he was in his room. He quickly became an adept
sleight-of-hand magician, like the sorcerers he stayed with in his travels,
making a religion out of the manipulation of malleable perception. He was
demonstrably good at it, but in his own eyes, never good enough. There was,
after all, that one trick he couldn’t pull of: he couldn’t make them go away.
Here was magic that neither the dukuns of the Indonesian archipelago, the
dzankris of Nepal, the traditional shamans of the Penan and Hourani or this
introvert from upstate New York would have much success with.
At least, not
without the most extraordinary assistance.
***
“If you want the kernel you must break the shell. And therefore if
you want to discover nature’s nakedness you must destroy its symbols, and the
farther you get in the nearer you come to its essence. When you come to the One
that gathers all things up into itself, there you must stay.” -Meister
Eckhart
Kiva talked about her home as if it were the very center of the world.
That’s certainly how it felt to her now. And up until a thousand years ago, it
was how it had felt to the Sweet Medicine People as well. The Center could be
defined by its energetic border, a palpable yet permeable membrane encompassing
several miles of Cañon de Espiritu. Walking in from any direction, the seeker
would become suddenly aware of the brilliant details of the terrain rooting and
leafing, moving and leaping around them— of the quick quieting of the mind and
the beat of racing hearts. Succumbing to the desire to look back, one could
see the things of the world-left-behind as though through the translucent walls
of a holy womb. To the returning young woman with the flaming red hair, the
“outer world” would appear to shimmer and fade, first in believability, and then
in relevance, like some cinematic illusion.
The edge was a particular point
in place and time where reality regularly shifted, where a fold of unseen skin
seemed to open up and then close behind one like the protective arms of a
mother. This was the perimeter, a most-certain circle drawn through the pulsing
river and up and over the volcanic ridge tops, inscribing a gentle, invisible
arc around the outside of the Kachina cliffs to the west, and then lapping the
dark mountain to the east where the one called “the Coyote” had gone to live
alone, purging and incanting. The mountain and the canyon, and everything in
the circle was on that edge— pressed upon from all sides by something made
foreign and dangerous through its own design.
Everything outside of the
Center seemed slightly less than real to this rewilding woman, making the plunge
into the full sensation of unabridged reality, esconsed in the relative safety
and sanity of her river canyon. The world by this time was largely the product
of the creative minds of humankind, collectively bound to what appeared to some
a dismal and undistinguished fate. “Out there” seemed to be full of discussions
about, facsimiles of and symbols for what was real, while inside the circle
everything glowed, moved, vibrated with an intensified authenticity, with a
magnification and densification of reality. Those that entered, entered in
trust, led to the center like blindfolded children— “warmer, warmer!”...and
then you’re there.
The Hispanic curanderas from the village called it a
columné— literally a circular column of sanctified ground extending from the
molten center of the Earth, reaching upwards to the sky. It served as a conduit
for the great energies passing through its terrestrial channel, and for the
instructions of a living Earth passed from its depths to those given to
listening on the planet’s surface. Kiva thought of it as a portal, an opening
for the free transit of spirits that today, as in millenniums past, were drawn
to the intersection of the worlds. They liked to loiter around this canyon
doorway, as around all others leading to Gaia’s magic kitchen.
For the lady
of the canyon, as for all those listeners who had preceded her, the columné
formed the actual axis around which an entire universe spun. It seemed the only
truly still place, like the calm eye of the tornado. And as with any wheel, the
further out on the rim one was, the faster it seemed to spin. The Center was
connected to everything else by golden rays of power, rays tightly stretched
from the Center to eternity, rays that threshed the air in their wildly
spinning passage. She was forever scared of leaving the Center, afraid of
getting caught in the spokes.
A wiggly line ran down the middle of the
circle, fed by the drainages of Montaña Negra , winding serpent-like from one
side to the other: the Sweet Medicine River. It was later christened the San
Francisco by invading Spanish patriarchs, noting in their journals how like the
historical St. Francis of Assisi, it granted refuge and sustenance to creatures
both big and small. The water within the circle seemed to never really leave
it, while the same river above and below went on with its journey towards a
distant sea. Seen through the clear minds of the immortal, it was a river of
turquoise and lapis where stone-eyed fish rested in mineral currents. Its
crystalline wetness was birthed in the bogs of Alpine meadows, squeezed out of
peat and soil into pebble lined channels, gathering for the downhill race to the
company of Negrito Creek and the Tularosa, dropping between a funneling brace of
stalwart trees, shooting through the granite crotch of Luna gap. It was, and
remains to this day, a river of power.
There were places where the Sweet
Medicine lingered in eddies like a heavy scent. Come a good Spring snowmelt,
the waters would rise and darken, with veteran catfish working their way back
upstream through the cold of the deepest channels, dipping under limestone
overhangs and down through secret passageways beneath sheets of bedrock,
feasting on a banquet of smells and tastes, stirring the muck of fertile decay
in the Sweet’s unlit bowels. At such times, whole trees could be seen bouncing
and grinding down its course. Mountain fluids back-peddled and paced along the
arrested surface, while the depths heaved and sighed like great aquatic bellows
to suit the fancy of some high-country downpour. The water would be tinted with
green and brown, so full of nutrients that plants could grow bereft of soil,
anchoring themselves to this ever-transient medium. The algae figured out a
plan for the long run, clumping in communal pods, ingesting nourishment direct
from the moving flow. The watercress seemed little affected by either recurrent
relocation or the caprice of wind-swept waves. But at other times, the
mountain rains would fail to replace the moisture sapped away by irrigation
ditches or sucked into the clouds by the relentless sun, and the Rio Frisco
would thin out into a knee-deep reflection of the cliffs towering above it—
narrowing at certain spots until a coyote could jump across without getting its
paws wet.
Kiva knew these waters intimately. Like some ultimate aquamarine
lover, the river of sweet medicine touched, at once, each inch of her sensitized
skin. It casually if purposefully entered every opening of her body. The river
was alive and amorous still, but its nature had been changed by the often
callous hand of “civilized man.” It was no longer wedded to its beds,
meandering from canyon wall to canyon wall at the whim of each season’s tide.
She met her river a scant century after the first cattle were introduced from
Texas, but in that time it had flattened out like a snake against the sand.
With the hills stripped of grass and no longer able to hold the rain, increasing
floods had swept away the giant cottonwoods and groves of red willow. And with
the cows eating every new cottonwood and willow as fast as they sprouted, there
were no young trees to replace the old. It was shallower when she first touched
its glistening sides, and much warmer as a result— too warm for the Gila trout
that once danced within its frame. The trout knew the river when it ran cold
and deep, surging through deep channels with steep banks, held fast by the roots
of twenty-foot tall bushes and tons of purple-crested bee-weed. For millions of
years they swam from beaver dam to beaver dam beneath a cooling, unbroken canopy
of branches, a blazing blue sky blinking between. But by the time she arrived
most of the alamos were gone, those majestic trees beneath whose arbors the
ancient ones courted, and where their children once splashed about
unmolested....
....And splashed about still. Call them ghosts if you must,
these spirits of the Sweet Medicine people who opted to stay when the tribe
moved on, over a thousand years before. They continued to infect the air with
the sounds of their drums, the ground with the feel of their yucca-fiber
sandals. The freckled laughter of womenfolk often drew a contemplative Kiva out
of her busied mind, alerting her to the play of lights up in the rocks, to the
joy of turning back to the present moment from circuitous cognitive laps, and to
the effervescent magic infusing every given moment. She was an apprentice to
these ghosts of the past, a student of family and tribe and social cohesion, of
acceptance and purpose, of the regenerative capacity of the land and the
revealed will of living Spirit. She seldom feared their unannounced appearance,
and often sought them out in their favored haunts. Here was as clear a message
as bells ringing out from an empty sky, instant and indisputable verification of
the miraculous, crucial affirmation for her decision to listen to the voices
inside her instead of the instructions and dictates of the dominant society,
affirmation of her choice to follow the wilderness sirens into this canyon....
and cause.
Even so, every sighting, every experience left her with a
nagging ache. She felt uneasy with the century she was born in, the paleness of
her skin, and the loneliness she willfully shouldered in her quest for
uncompromised truth. She seemed painfully nostalgic for a lifestyle she’d never
known, for the sense of belonging that was lost during her
great-great-grandmother’s solemn boat ride to this continent, and her own mother
dragging her from one rental after another, one town to the next. She was in
America because of an archaic potato famine, an early tragedy of the growing
dependency on monocultural crops and exploitation by the English monarchy. But
the fact remained that here was a continent that awakened ancient memories in
her— landed visions as real as those of her Celtic ancestors, as real as the
green rocks lining the Irish sea.
***
"'And a bird cage, Sir,' says Sam. 'Veels vithin veels, a prison in a
prison'."
-Charles Dickens
Before Black Mountain, before love and prison and hope and hopelessness,
there had always been the dream— a nightmare that inevitably left him cold and
clammy, shuddering against his sheets the way a wino or mugging victim shuddered
against alleyway pavement. Blue was a loyal subject to his dream world, the
sweet, forested visions and the anxious skin-dreams penetrating a deeper source,
boiling the blood, squeezing out erotic fluids like froth from a covered rice
pot. Dreams gave him his names, announced his alternatives, chided him for
indulging in sadness or remorse, and startled him into recognition of his
greater self, the encompassing "all," the delicate dance of destiny.
This
nightmare was different. It repeated itself without stuttering: the icy metal
boxcars of a freight-train headed, inexorably, towards the soot-covered grand
central station of some industrial Hell. It waited for the man-coyote like a
giant robot with the transplanted mind of a psychopath, like a heavy ceiling
poised in ambush, or a bevy of bully boys with brutal foreheads and razor eyes.
It was a nightmare that waited for him in the dark back streets of his fitful
sleep.
Check it out if you want to. No one says you have to live there,
and unlike Blue, you can leave anytime you want to. Come on then, dream this:
You’re inside a massive building, every voluminous room coated with white latex
paint and white formica, dressed up with obese, institutional clocks and
oversized calendars. All rooms connect to one another, either directly through
doors, or via an extensive system of vacuous hallways. Each room differs only
slightly in size and shape, one set up as a school, with pink plastic desks, the
next with duplicate machinery awaiting the arrival of workers. Teachers at the
blackboard turn in annoyance at your interruption. Shop foremen ignore you,
lost in a flurry of work, polyurethane dust clouds, welding sparks, molds
filling with polyvinyl chloride, fumes seeking lungs to harden in.
Ever
more furiously, you rush from room to room, into a warehouse of toys, leaping
out their bathroom window into the back room of a supermarket, exiting the
automatically sliding doors into a new car showroom. Busting out the
twenty-foot display windows only to drop into a social service office. An
insurance company. An AA meeting. A protestant church. An army barracks. The
booking room of a jail....
At long last— lungs screaming, your heart
pounding against your ribs with iron gloves— you leap past incredulous eyes out
onto grass. Grass! Trees and singing birds, instead of potted plastic plants
and humming, mindless machines. Trees, that are oddly marked by little signs,
their Latin names laser-carved an eighth of an inch into baby blue plexiglass.
It's always at this point, terror-stricken, that you notice a glint on the mylar
ceiling, a hundred feet above you. You spot the green door on the far side,
many yards ahead, and the oddly mechanical movements of the feathered
warblers—feathered warblers—feathered warblers—feathered warblers....
"No!," Blue screamed, his words kitchen knives thrown in desperation.
"No! No!" The sentences cannibalized themselves. They turned on their owner,
ate him from the inside out, devoured his nightmare, his sleep and his
contentment— their echoes lingering to gnaw the bones of his grating certainty.
***
“...a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void (her) luminous
wings.”
-Mathew Arnold
“It’s all this smell of cooped-up angels
Worries me.”
-Christopher Frye
While a paranoid magician might think of them as “aliens,” to Llyn they were
just regular people who happened to be wearing rubber masks. Mostly smiling
masks, some tight fitting, others hanging down in folds around the cheeks.
Latex eyelids flapped up and down in beat with the tempo of their respective
conversations, always on the same facile topics. For the folks with the rubber
faces, it was sports and money, fashion and infidelity. She was curious how
they could stand to share a common toothbrush holder, and which of them got the
worst of the deal from their relationships. After dropping dentures into
glasses of water and contact lenses into their little plastic boxes, did they
take off their faces for the night? Drape them over a bed post, perhaps,
popping out the nose and cheeks so they’re ready to go in the morning?
Llyn
saw that under those pinched smiles were faces drained of all emotion. She saw
down to their real expressions, what was once a child’s nose turned-up at the
smell of spinach, grimaces frozen forever beneath those too-white latex faces.
When she asked, “Is everything all right?,” they always nodded “yes” between
gulped bites and incomplete sentences. But what they meant, she realized, was:
“Actually, lady, the potato chips are stale, the hamburger overdone, my spouse
is an inconsiderate slob, and my shoes are killing me.”
She felt no less
hypocritical— a definite job requirement in the burgeoning service industry.
“Nice to see you” slipped out occasionally, and she always left the check with a
“Thank you, come again,” while what she often ached to say was “You again?,” or
“If you’re not going to slow down and taste your food, I’m taking it back.” Of
course you couldn’t talk that way if you wanted to keep a check coming in. And
besides, Llyn was simply too nice for her own good. Most often she said little
except, “Whadya’ have?,” waving the coffee pot in front of their eyes. She
made up for fading friendliness with incontestable competence. The cup was
never less than half full before she was back with more. This, along with those
thin legs that spirited her across the floor, were the source of tips in excess
of the others’.
As it was, customers had to tip, or face imagined
consequences the next time they came back. There was an implied threat in every
meal, wondering if a slighted waitress had stirred the milkshake with her
fingers, or horror of horrors, spit in the turkey gravy. The cafe owners of
America, from the smallest greasy spoon to the most posh establishments, were
all in on the scam. Pay the employees slave wages and lay the burden of
covering their home heating bills on the customers. What began as a voluntary
bonus to reward exemplary service, ended up a customary twenty percent to be
thrown in by everyone regardless of their level of satisfaction. While some
days could be good, on others with too few diners spread between too many
waitresses, one could have made more money selling lemonade by the roadside.
Researchers studied the anxiety levels inherent in various types of
careers. The results made it look real good to be a piano tuner, and made
waitressing look like a sentence from a Chilean military court. Besides the
everyday hazards of cigarette smell in the hair and cramped feet, there were
also those chronic ailments specific to any job. Truck drivers worked up a case
of hemorrhoids . Lifer waitresses often ended up with varicose veins on their
legs, blood vessels that couldn’t handle all the tension of constantly pumping
calves and opted to hang out on the outskirts instead, lolling around just under
the skin like purple snakes at the beach.
But it was only temporary, Llyn
assured herself. Just until she paid off the car, or another position opened up
at the preschool. She preferred little kids, creatures who left their masks at
home and pouted or snarled in accordance with how they really felt. Kids who
knew better than to trust appearances, grabbing at her cheeks to see if they,
like their mothers’, would come off at the first pull.
And indeed, once
back in the kitchen the waitresses would bitch and scream, laugh and joke,
talking about their customers the way whores spoke about their “Johns.” But, as
Llyn noted, whores made a lot more money.
She didn’t really dislike these
people, retirees from the mines sitting next to nuevo artistes and presumptuous
tourists. She didn’t really dislike anybody. She was a pasta priestess,
forgiving them all their unconfessed sins. At worst she felt sorry for them,
sorry about their powerlessness, their confusion, and their unmet needs. It
frightened Llyn how distant they seemed at times, with lightyears between
waitress with coffee and diner with empty cup. Scarier still was seeing in them
mirrors of those parts of herself she was most uncomfortable with. Beneath the
washroom complaints she harbored a troubling acceptance. She shared communion
with every person who came in, joined not in prayer but acceptance— of their
fates, of their feelings of resignation, of the desire for love and attention
and purpose, and of the world spinning outside their collective ability to
affect it.
Nearing the end of her shift, the long legged woman with the
big heart hustled between loaded tables with an impossible pile of dirty dishes
balanced on her forearms, porcelain vessels stacked next to those dreams she wore
on her sleeve for any and all to read. Any, that is, not glued to the
newspaper, or to the cafe’s famous whole wheat pancakes. Once behind the
swinging doors, she shifted her load to the sink, and then swept the floor from
one end to the other before something made her stop and smile. A pretty smile.
A smile informed by possibility.
The angel in the apron bent over,
picking a feather out of the dust pan before emptying it in its place.
Just
a little feather. And perhaps, a portent of something big.
Jesse Wolf Hardin teaches Earth-centered magickal/spiritual practice
in the Gila Wildlands of SW New Mexico. He’s the author of numerous magazine
articles and seven books including Kindred Spirits (SwanRaven 2001) and
Gaia Eros: Reconnecting To The Magic & Spirit of Nature (New Page
2004). He also works his words and invocations into world beat music on the
GaiaTribe CD “The Enchantment” http://www.cdbaby.com/gaiatribe. For
retreats, quests, apprenticeships or one-on-one counsel contact: The Earthen
Spirituality Project & Sweet Medicine Women’s Center, Box 820, Reserve, NM
87830 http://www.earthenspirituality.org
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