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“In totemic culture the animal world was not a mirror, but a set of
communications about a universe not made by man. We will be lost without them,
because wild mammals and birds are a magic monkey paw, a wishbone, a rabbit’s
foot, they can enable us to love our own kind.”
-Paul Shepard
There was never a more ominous sound than the quieting of their croaks, the
silencing of the frogs’ deep throated plea.
With the end of their
murmurings, came the end to their lessons of metamorphosis and change, and the
glad tidings of the wetlands world. In the diseased quiet one could discern a
portent of doom, for with their porous skins and exposure to both water and air,
the amphibians made a reliable gauge of the health of an ecosystem. Like the
proverbial “miner’s canary,” carried down the coal shafts to detect the presence
of noxious but odorless gases, the intolerance of Amphibios to increased
exposure to ultraviolet light and environmental toxins made them the perfect
bellwether of danger. With frogs, like those sacrificial canaries, the end of
the song was a portent of danger, and sure indication of dire straits ahead. A
hushed warning hung like smog where the croaks of leapers once hailed the
passing poet, once attended the riverside love making of nature-clad youths.
Like everything in life, Abel took the extinction of the amphibians
personally. It was as if someone had stolen away both his childhood and his
future, leaving him with nothing but an intolerable present. They outlawed
risk, made the rivers unswimmable, made him wear shoes... and now they had
killed off all the frogs. He knew “they” hadn’t done it on purpose, but they
shouldn’t pretend to care. It was willful disregard. It was “business as
usual,” with all decisions made for the good of the “people”— meaning the
comforts of an ever growing, ever spending populous. They considered the loss
of the Everglades a small price to pay for more temperate housing, and everyone
seemed to enjoy boating on the Grand Dam as much as they enjoyed gawking down
into the canyon below it’s spinning turbines. Grizzly bears “had to go” in the
nineteen hundreds, to make room for people and livestock. In the early part of
the twenty-first century, one could hardly quibble over the loss of something as
uncuddly and unappetizing as a frog. But why didn’t anyone else seem to
experience the anguish of species banished forever into the black hole of
oblivion, feel the pain of forests as they were being cut, or hear the screams
of seeds smothered beneath oppressive asphalt? Why couldn’t they hear the
muddied quiet where the songs of Amphibios once echoed, warning of their own
potential fate?
The death of the hundreds of species of frogs, salamanders
and toads went down as another one of his “stages of disillusionment,” critical
elements of what some would later call his “practiced disorder.” Like an
anthropologist’s first sighting of a previously unknown tribe of cannibals, or a
runner diagnosed with degenerative knees, these were a series of undesired
discoveries with unforetold consequences. These included the realization that
while a wagging tail was a pretty good sign that a dog won’t bite, a smile
seldom meant a person was happy. That even the most serious cultural icons made
baby noises in the bathtub. That rabbits didn’t hatch from painted eggs, and
were eaten or gassed in mass soon after their annual Easter novelty-rating
dropped off. His eyes had been opened, no lie escaped unexposed. While he’d
come to believe the truths of magic, he no longer believed his people. No
longer believed in careers, money, insurance, “national competitiveness,”
politics, revolution, revision, history as written or future as perceived,
graphed, and often enforced. No longer believed that the police were there to
“serve and protect.” That true love never left. That all they “ever really
wanted” was his happiness.
As any artist would have told you,
disillusionment led to a tormented soul— but not all of his agony was
internalized. While some of it nailed him to a cross of his own making, more
was deflected back at its source. These, had any researcher looked for a
“positive” side, could have been named the “stages of come-uppance.” Take for
example the inevitable disappointment that followed uncovering the identity of a
shopping mall Santa Claus, immediately followed with the enraged snapping of his
nylon beard, and the resultant delight of the rest of the kids still waiting
their turn in line.
To Abel, everything in the world of Nature was magic,
and seemed to spiral, while the things of the System were usually arranged in
unnaturally straight lines. This was evident in the ordering of products on the
shelves and the people ushering in to buy them, ninety-degree angles juxtaposed
on the circuit boards at the heart of most “technological wonders,” defining the
form of the houses and the lots they sat on, the shape of the vehicles and the
roads they commuted on. In military school he overdosed on lines, gagged on the
very concept of straight, collapsed into a dysfunctional coma rather than sit in
lines, stand in lines, and march back and forth in lines. When the rest of his
class marched, he’d take up the rear, wait until the just the right moment, and
then dash up the only tree in the yard. It was a giant avocado, its brethren
looking skyways from a different continent altogether, its fruits left to fall
on the ground and stick to the shined shoes of adolescents marking time with
raised knees. “About face! Right face! Forward march! Company halt! Line
up, men!”
They called them “men” long before they had any hair on their
scrotums— eighth graders giving orders to fifth graders, third graders exhorting
their first-grade underlings with “At ease, men!”
At ease he was, safely
out of sight in the thick foliage, draped over its gnarled boughs, following the
maneuvers of lady bugs across the ridgetops and ravines of its bark. He’d
secret himself a full twenty feet above their shaved skulls, but it could just
as well have been inches, as unlikely as they were to look up or otherwise move
their heads away from the direction they’d been pointed.
Abel faced a
different direction, towards the field on the other side of the wall.
The
wall was three times the height of the tallest cadet, and towered over them with
grave demeanor. Only the avocado tree was taller, affording a view over its
parapets. On one side was the marching field, with yellowed grass laboring
under the pounding of polished wingtips, perfectly level, lined with
square-trimmed hedges but otherwise unmarked by rock, lifeform, or other
distinguishing feature. On the other side was what may well have been the last
undeveloped lot in Schenectady. As yet ungraded, it was characterized by its
unevenness, with dips and rises and gullies virtually hidden by a hegemony of
chest-high weeds. It was a haven for out-of-control adolescents ditching
classes at the nearby public school. This was before electronic student I.D.
that monitored their every move, at a time when even the shrewdest of investors
were opting to develop their valuable real estate. From one side came the
sounds of regimentation, every step counted out aloud, the clanking industrial
fans atop the single story classrooms, buzzers going off on the hour and the
half hour, and a recorded bugle announcing both the beginning and ending of the
measured day through bulbous megaphones on the security light posts. There was
no crying, for they were kids taught it was cool to “bite the bullet,” and no
laughter, except the snickers of children at recess, taught too young to be
adults. From the other side arose a great tempest, a potpourri of sounds so
thick with emotion they could be touched and tasted on the air that carried them
to his perch. There were whistles and hollers, screeches and howls, bear-like
grunts and mispronounced swear words. There were raucous laughs emanating from
little bellies that obviously knew no shame. There were the mournful, unabashed
cries of someone really hurt, followed at once by further demonstrations of
ecstasy. Sometimes after “lights out” he would stuff the covers of his bunk to
look like he was in it, then steal up that tree and drop over to the forbidden
other side. In the cover of darkness, he would make his way through the tunnels
in the grasses packed down by busy, chubby knees. He would pick up their
discarded toys, and imagine that he could feel their energy from when they’d
held them. He imagined he had friends who were wild....
The day the
bulldozers finally came he found himself trapped in an obligatory “dress
parade,” fixed by the attention of the academy hierarchy and the rigid gaze of
his parents in the bleachers. The band played on, like the minstrels of an
earthen Titanic, their flourishes underscored by the rumbling of tractor treads
and the grating screech of metal buckets scraping the fleshy soil off the
bedrock next door. A crash of symbols found counterpoint in the bursting of
hesitant boulders, trailed by the staccato tap-tap-tap of a hinged lid banging
open and closed on the top of a vertical exhaust pipe. All the while the
machines were pacing back and forth, making run after run at the childrens’
coveted hideaway, as Abel was being marched first one direction, and then back
the other. He could place every sound erupting from beyond the wall, picturing
in excruciating detail the sights that attended each crash and grind as the
orders kept coming. “Eyes right! Eyes forward! Parade rest!“
Abel didn’t
know the meaning of the word rest, neither inside the walls of the schools, or
pacing between the walls of his mind. And, it should be noted, his parading
days were numbered.
It was said by the followers of the magic arts that
“spirit takes many forms, and works in many ways.” The kids who weren’t afraid
to cry when they were sad, or to laugh out loud without embarrassment, had yet
to learn that they ought to be ashamed for demonstrating their anger. An office
complex that was planned to go up in a few months took more than three years to
complete, and the investors had difficulty filing its spaces long after that.
Rumor credited unusually high rents resulting from an exorbitant insurance
policy, issued, it seemed, to cover its numerous thermal windows. “The spirit
takes many forms,” it was said. Sometimes it took the form of angry little kids
with homemade slingshots.
From that day on, Abel dedicated himself to the
dissolution of all walls. How ironic, then, that at age eighteen he should end
up trapped behind them again— not for punishment, but for “help.” He felt the
rules and forms of language breaking down, incarcerated “for his own good,” the
hours he sat drugged and drooling in front of the old television set falling
under the category of “rehabilitation,” lies passed as “truth in government,”
and everything going according to the rules of “benign” technology and the good
Lord, while the orderly calls him a “bad” dude. The System managers classified
Abel as “disoriented,” when it was they that made no “sense:” no use of the
senses, no sensation of the death of the frogs.
And apparently, no ear for
the music.
***
"We belong to the ground,
It is our power and we
must stay close
to it or maybe,
we will get lost.”
-Yirralla, Australian Aborigine
They called her “Kiva,” a name given in recognition of her penchant to seek
out and live in the bottoms of canyons, the depths of caves, and those
subterranean wombs peculiar to the Pueblo nations, the Hopi and the Zuni, and
the their ancestors the "Sweet Medicine People"
Where once the tribes all
dwelled in pit-houses, close to the steadfast beating of the Earth Mother's
heart, now only the underground kiva remained, reserved for ceremony, dug in
deep out of respect for the past and the future, for source and destination. A
cedar ladder would extend down through the ceiling, lashed together with
rawhide, polished smooth by the touch of furred and feathered Kachinas ushering
in the cycles of Spring and Summer. The earthen structures were human-made
circles of life housing the spirits of deer and squash, mountain and grape.
Pleiades and gourd plant, rain, yucca and thunder. Always thunder.
It rose
up from the Earth, it did not fall upon it. It filled the ceremonial kivas with
the spinning, liquid vibrations of the Thunder Spirit, quaking, then
overflowing. It spilled out like terror upon an apprehensive land, and rumbled
down the sheer sides of the sacred mesas, demanding the attention of any
two-leggeds daring to ascend.
Kiva shook loose her socialization, distanced
herself from what she considered her fellow pallid slaves, those continuing to
cling like ivory soot to those vertical structures of deteriorating
megalopolises. Everywhere she went, she either pleased or terrorized her kind
by being all that humanity had once been, and all it would some day be again—
feeling creatures. Instinctual animals. Critters wild and free. Kiva was a
glad demonstration of Nature's force, a storm blown in to awaken society from
its worsening coma.
If she was thunder to her people, it was still the
lightening that sent her. It stirred her primal juices, stirred the magic
cauldron of her soul. Lightening thrust its sharp fingers into her heart, threw
back the curtain of her mind and flashed through the opening of the earthen
chamber, illuminating the bone structure of a planet she knew to be alive.
Breathing, sighing, and talking to her. It talked without letters or
paragraphs, unconcerned with proper grammar, unhindered by studious syntax, a
linguistic plane above the circular tracks of busied audience. Rather, we
should say that the Earth spoke through her.
"You can't speak for the
dying forests. The forest speaks you," the elder had corrected. The old
woman's face was like a mosaic of definitive cracks in sun-baked clay. Her face
was an ancient plea for rain. Over fifty winters had passed since she was
Kiva's age, full of the same questions, yet she experienced little
frustration. Patience was the quality by which one recognized immortal spirits,
even when aging bodies seemed to tell a different story. Kiva thought Healing
Woman wore her age the way she did her long shiny braids, with an unpretentious
dignity and grace. In fact, she wore her age the way that rocks do,
unashamedly, in the sun. Many tears had filled their deepening cracks, the wind
arranging her hair like tufted grass, and the laughter of the sky marking the
corners of her mouth.
She liked Kiva Rose right off. She admired the
spunk, and enjoyed the thick red hair that laughed when she touched it. The
elder found nothing unnatural about a wild young woman, her head shining like
bleeding sunlight, traipsing across an America first populated by those with an
umber sheath and midnight tresses. To Healing Woman the world appeared,
obviously and graphically, to be a contiguous entity. What were called
continents, she explained, were "nothing more than where the planet body lifts
her knees out of the shallow bath, the sacred waters." She was tickled that
someone named
"Kiva," more likely to have a Welsh witch than a Pueblo Indian for
an ancestor, was willing to be silent for the lessons of the "Rock People." And
willing to be slammed, mauled and felt-up by the police, then cuffed with
plastic wrist ties in an effort to halt the forced relocation of the elder's
people.
Healing Woman eased over next to a tree and squatted to relieve
herself. "Mama always said we were so poor we didn't have a pot to piss in.
But that was all right, 'cause Mama always peed on the ground."
Together
the two of them built a fire outdoors, and suspended a mammoth pot of lamb stew
over it on a wrought iron tripod. Cooking was a good thing, "not to be put
down," the elder held. It brought women together where they could share energy
and stories, and put them in intimate physical contact with the diverse organic
forms that sustained them and their families. With the men excluded from the
area of food preparation, the repetitive aspects of cooking functioned as
feminine ritual— good smelling and good tasting ritual. No chore was tedious
when accompanied by movement and song. The act of stirring, in particular, was
a way to stroke the Rosaries, of spinning prayer into motion, of mixing the
elements of the creation cauldron, of investing the cooks' selves into the
sacred fuel for the tribe. In the stirring came silence, and with the silence,
a great listening.
"I can't hardly sleep anymore, Grandmother," Kiva
finally spoke. "I feel the pain of the clear-cut forest, of sister lion, and
this sacred mountain. I feel called to figure out how to save them," she said,
all the while continuing to stir the live oak coals, pulsing with radiant
energy, blinking their molten eyes. She would always recall Healing Woman's
response with a smile.
"Thoughts can be often a useless movie, a movie that
costs us precious time. It's like that woman commentator on the morning radio
from Windowrock. You know, cluck, cluck, cluck, Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, Ford,
cluck, cluck, cluck. You are the forest and the mountain. That's why they had
such a hard time moving you when you were busted." Healing Woman made teasing
sounds with her tongue, eyes twinkling like those giddy stars overhead. And
like those licentious coals, intoxicated with their own heat. "Thoughts," she
continued ever-so-slowly, "are echoes of something that has already happened.
They steal the moment, distract from the feeling. Who you really are, is who
you are before thinking about it. Words can only describe the world. There are
no words in the real world, only songs. The heart beats without thinking about
itself. This will be the source of your freedom, and your power. And be
careful!." she grinned, sliding over with the ladle, "Congratulating yourself
for being quiet breaks the silence!"
Her movements were usually as slow as
her words, a soft glide like wind over water. Every step was unhurried, every
walk through the arroyos without a discernible beginning or end. Each motion
of the hand was an exercise in grace, every contact made with finger or toe was
savored like a stew bone, the surfaces of the textured world licked and mouthed
by the nerve endings of an old woman's skin.
She was quicker getting the
hot cast-iron pot back into the baby-blue clapboard house, making mad dashes
after the short-haired Mexican dogs digging in the garden, or in the determined
pursuit of the real estate agent as his car kicked up gravel in hasty retreat.
With her long skirt hoisted around her knees, the feet at the end of those
short legs cranked like tiny wild cattle, obscured by a cloud of rising dust,
eagerly participating in a well-directed stampede towards the front-porch steps.
But the quickest movement Kiva ever saw was done with the hand, a mercuric
thrust at mid-air apparitions. What might have appeared to be the spastic
actions of a crazy lady or the deft strokes of a martial artist, were in fact a
demonstration of Healing Woman's own brand of “spiritual ecology. After each
slash at the air, she would move over to the tiny kitchen window, ease it open
with one hand, and release a bothersome fly from the other. It was a testament
to her capacity to move both fast and slow, both trickle and flood like the Rio
Frisco. It was her testament to life.
Kiva was pretty good about insects
herself. A portion of the compost went to feed the anthill bustling just
outside her doorstep. Flies had the green light to use the various parts of her
body as landing pads, refueling on what must have been intoxicating sweat before
rubbing their faces with their forelegs in anticipation of flight.
While
one measure of the depth of one's environmental consciousness could be how much
one tolerated from other species, Kiva nonetheless drew the line on anything
taking bites out of her tender hide. If all species were intrinsically equal,
then she claimed an equal right to bite back. She never got over her pet skunk
being hollowed out by ferrets right inside the yurt, but considered it karmic if
a pampered poodle was chainsawed by a barracuda after jumping off an ocean
pier. Equal rights for grizzly bears, but not in her tent, if you please. Ants
were allowed to pillage portions of a lunch, when the picnic was in their yard.
She considered it a matter of territory. In the sanctuary of her own space,
she'd refuse to donate blood to visiting mosquitoes. She had no moral qualms
about flattening the six legged addicts attaching themselves to her arm, rocking
from side to side in exaggerated bliss, hanging over their subcutaneous straws,
stoned on her special serum. Nor did she surrender to the grinding jaws of the
horseflies on her porch without a fight.
"Why do they call them
'horseflies' and 'deerflies," she wondered, "when they're only in the canyon
when the cows are here?" She viewed these gray beasts the cowboys called
horseflies, and the bovines they subsisted on, as codependent plagues. They
inflicted misery, but no one could say that was their intention. She recognized
that both these wild canyon plants and this wild canyon woman were approached
not as enemies, but as legitimate food sources. Nonetheless, she could see no
reason in calling these gray bombers and the smaller golden-winged versions
anything but "Cowflies." "Cowfly Type One." "Cowfly Type Two."
It may
have been that Healing Woman merely tolerated them, but Kiva never saw them land
on her weathered brown skin. She was either immune, or else they were
bewitched, seduced by her ancient charms. Perhaps Healing Woman and the
cowflies had entered into some mutually advantageous pact in which only the
lightest colored people were bitten, only the cockiest tormented.
It may
have been that Kiva simply needed the challenge, and they— buzzing Buddhas with
a thousand eyes— were there to serve an increase in patience, humility and
growth. She, like her closest human cohorts, prayed for the extremes of
sensation, the unpredictability of the untamed. Whether through catastrophe or
design, they would come to see the results of their prayers— forever freed from
desolate ease by stark travail.
***
"...as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude
began."
-John Dryden
“Perhaps on occasion we participate in the original dream of the earth.
Perhaps there are times when this primordial design becomes visible, when we
remove the latter imposition.”
-Thomas Berry
Years later, he could still remember the day. It distinguished itself, the
way a red road sign might stand out against a blue desert sky.
Freedom.
Liberation. Da me liberated! He hit the streets hard and uncomprehending,
giddy with excitement. His legs carried him uneasily through the gathering
dusk, with the legs of a sailor, or a seeker long becalmed on a sea of
concrete. The many sights of the non-prison world splashed against his sides,
as he tore the anchor free.
Blue started to jog, slowly picking up speed,
having forgotten the twenty dollars in cab fare that came with his release. He
swerved to dodge the memory of the Official's good-luck wishes cast his way like
barbed hooks on steel lines, from the "we’ll be seeing you" smiles of sharks
circling his inflatable raft. He ran to feel his atrophied muscles again,
uncontrollably raising his arms in front of himself, bracing every few yards or
so for the impact of non-existent obstacles. He tried valiantly but
unsuccessfully to stay off the pavement, delicately springboarding on the small
tufts of grass erupting from the sidewalk cracks, luxuriating on the soft
stretches of well-tended lawns. He pretended the stilled rivers of asphalt
were certain death: steamy, molten lava on an urban sojourn, tongues of liquid
flame over which he executed the most dramatic leaps. By dark he was running
through the suburbs, heading towards the outskirts of the city, looking behind
for imagined pursuers, and looking ahead for potential traps.
The
government "dress-out" oxfords were the quickest to go, their nylon heels
knocked out like a fighter's mouthpiece in the first round. Still within sight
of the correction buildings, his feet flew bare. One piece at a time, from the
starched short-sleeved shirt to the long out-of-style pants with loops too
narrow for a decent belt. By last light, Blue was at the edge of town, and
fiercely naked. Here, where street lights were rationed among scattered
farmsteads and the moon slid behind giant grain silos, he shoved the final piece
of state-issued clothing into a stenciled mailbox. Under the flannel covers of
night, an outdoor clothesline surrendered its contents to a nude malcontent — a
little more than a hundred and seventy unrehabilitated pounds, and more than a
little happy.
No more taking orders, washing the hair with bar soap,
crapping on a stainless toilet with no seat or swallowing cold canned string
beans. No more blaring tube sucking at his brains, infecting the soundscapes of
his dreams with their witless buzz and blather.
No more walls.
Coyote
Blue's was a mind that would never forget the day it was released. It now
crouched in ambush, poised beneath a pile of black feathered hair. His head
nestled on a spongy pillow of rotting wood, the ebony strands tensing like
hair-triggers, nested follicles resembling the dark foliage concealing the
surface of land mines. It was a mind that tossed and turned, tossing to the
fury of unseen winds— while turning clockwise into itself. It was a mind beset
by dreams.
And they weren't always nightmares.
He also dreamed the
world into awakeness. He dreamed falcons plucking the alligator monograms off
of trendy sweaters. He dreamed color back into the small towns of the U.S.
gutted from the invasion of discount malls. He dreamed freedom and love,
children playing without fear in vacant lots not yet, or no longer covered over
with asphalt parking places for the latest stylish transports. He dreamed
castles made out of the giggles of his daughters, out of Knight-gobbling
monsters, mud, maple trees and maypoles.
Blue dreamt where censors feared
to tread, dreamt light into the hairy recesses of hidden pleasures. His dreams
filled the sails of mystery with haughty winds, stretching the tender moments of
love making into an eternity full of the sweet smells of sex. He dreamed the
world where sighs and gestures told every story, and smiles replaced words in
the transmission of meaning.
Some of these, too, repeated themselves. The
one where he was a coyote running down frightened rabbits on four graceful legs,
chancing the interstate, a dream of rolling, scratching, and the wetted fur of
love bites. Or the one where he could fly, if with difficulty and without
feathers, as though rising from the far bottom of a pool.
The choicest
dream of all came no less than once a month, usually lit up by the blue touch of
the full moon. La Luna pulled images forth from the damp folds of his fertile
mind, the way she pulled the ocean's tides to swelling. It always seemed a
surprise, no matter how frequent its visits. Something about the dream kept it
fresh and new, an urgent preview, first run. No rational mind could anticipate
it, approve it, or process it through its Bureau of Customs. It snuck in
instead, disguised as a whisper in his ear. It flew in at night, under the
radar, a heartbeat above the white-capped waves. It broke through cerebral
roadblocks in a burst of silent gunfire. In the end, it slid into Blue's
conscious being like a naked body into the covers.
Blue dreamed it in
color, and in smells. It was painted with the aromas of jasmine and raspberry,
first rains and estrus, dusty fur and greens fried in sesame oil. He dreamed it
in the hot of cave fires and the cold of cavern granite against loin-clouted
thighs. Neither were the sounds in black and white. He heard the white
flapping of eagle feathers tied to coup sticks in the ground, but also the brown
neighing of horses, the golden howls of wolves, the red finger-snapping of
flames, the purple moans of pleasure. Women laughing in violet and blue.
In Blue’s dream world, women laughed lightly, like pinecone bells on
pine-needle covered earth. They laughed children's secrets, butterflies
departing their cocoons, summer rain on unclad backs, and the scurrying of fuzzy
little creatures. They laughed the sound the moon makes when she sings.
Laughter: the only sound to compete with the way a waterfall feels.
You
only have to silence the mind to enter the dream of the man-coyote, diving into
a labyrinth of sycamore roots, squeezing through the brush covered openings of
the caves of our adolescence. Bend over to enter its lodge. Step in, in order
to find yourself outdoors like you’ve never been before.
Notice how the
mirror skin of a river stretches out in the sun, the mountains rising up and
touching their faces to the sky in an Eskimo kiss, the grass so green it defies
reason. The bushes generate, exude, amplify and project green. The giant
belled blossoms of belladonna— datura— busy with the ministrations of unnamed
insects, party-hearty bugs ingesting the alkaloids that the Inquisitors so
feared. A hard-worked garden responds like an eager child to tribal care,
unabashedly exposing those parts most desirous of attention. Pregnant melons
swell with the promise of the future, while Anasazi beans wrap themselves around
a simple trellis, defying adversity. There are extra patches planted as
offerings to mule deer and hungry beetles, herbs grown for their medicinal
effects, and flowers encouraged because of that special thing that only flowers
can do.
Blue’s memories were a daytime version of his dreams, and in this
way day and night were allies in the task of deepening his sense of purpose.
Memories could be like a receding wagon train, getting smaller as they get
further away, but the Coyote’s memories stayed close. They were like the
alarmed ponies of Spanish caballeros, keeping to the side of the trail. At the
approach of strangers he held a hand over their nose, as if to quiet the sounds
that memories can make. Few suffered the hot breath of memories on their palm,
let alone rode sweaty memories to the rhythms of their cutting hooves. Clearly,
his memories not only attended him but carried him, galloping full speed towards
an unseen edge.
Memories teased and toyed with him. They nuzzled and
nipped him. They didn't know how to behave, and they wouldn’t leave him alone.
It was more than a matter of recalling, of summoning up some blurry images of
the past needed for reference. The past accompanied Blue, unrequested, as clear
as touch, as immediate as love. Poignant childhood, the lovers who left him,
and every sinuous detail of the struggles in his life. He was driven, too, by
recollections of those rich historical ages long before he was born, of a Wolf
Clan of Nordic Earth-lovers, of a Celtic nation, and the black-haired ones who
tended the squash gardens of his dreams. He’d find himself looking up from
chopping wood, to feel the spirits of wild and gladdened canines running circles
around his cabin. He cried for these brethren of his past, and their ghosts
thirstily lapped at his tears.
Was it something more than nostalgia for a
life he never knew, perhaps the dallying vibrations of times gone by, or a
remembrance of past and future lives? Framed in the tenuousness of the present
moment, was it a calling or a yearning that alternately brought him to his knees
and jerked him to his feet? Or were the dreams and memories meant to bring to
life the cryptic demands of a determined destiny? Blue the joker, the maverick
coyote, the archetypal loner didn't dare accept the dream as prophecy. It was
as if acknowledging the future might break the spell, making the miraculous
inaccessible again.
It could be hard sometimes to tell the difference
between fact and fable, between the shenanigans of stars and true UFO's, between
the silk flowers planted in Disney plots and real ones growing in the humus of
his mind. The time in prison no longer felt real to him.. Once he was in, he
realized he'd known all along he'd take the “fall,” and knew in that same
immortal moment that he would get out again, that the very real months of
confinement would spill into the nightmares haunting him the rest of his life,
and the portentous calling that would both eat and feed his soul.
It left
him forever on the verge of laughing or crying, the tittering brink from which
he hoped to see more, and feel more. The key term is "on the verge," the
clinical criteria for madness, evidence on which to commit the "crazies," the
insane (in-same). One could easily imagine Blue's poems tagged as evidence, a
tape of his torrid drumming disquieting the board hearing his case, some frigid
male psychoanalyst dissecting the "morbidity and underlying tension" of his
creations, exposing their lewd abandonment with a perverse blend of indignation
and delight.
The ultraconservatives were quite right: there was no
rehabilitating his type.
One could have asked the "Ol' Man" about this, or
any of the others who ever stalked the streets not for survival (that comes easy
to the barbarically clever), but for a proud testing. For a challenge they
couldn't surmount, for the struggle that would affirm their lives even as it
overcame them, consumed them, and spit them out as rusty nails, starving
mongrels, and those glistening pools of motor oil found everywhere once you
began to look. One could ask the Ol' Man, then read the lips on his tattoos,
watching for the taut bowstring tendons set like the springs of the #4 Oneidas
that trapped out those other wild wolves of this continent. One looked, not for
smoke signals, but for sweat signals, eye twitches, the body language of
primates in any tree or cave anywhere. The language was universal and pure. It
was written in violence but also in hugs, food gathering, and the building of
shelter. It was an unreformed language, unaffected by the ever-more refined
systems of control. The language, like those whose bodies spoke it, contained
no notion of reform. It was the language of the real world, and one would do
well to pay attention to its message and meaning.
What Blue wanted to do—
needed to do— was to reinhabit. To inhabit his sentient body again, inhabit a
home worth living and even dying for. In place, in-tense: living fully in
present-tense. Not Fourth Avenue, not even the Chiracauhuas. Nowhere but Black
Mountain, adjacent to the still-protected Mogollon Preserve. Once home to
those the archaeologists called the Anasazi, it was later the sacred hunting
grounds of the Apache, a mere handful of whom once made monkeys out of the
entire U.S. Cavalry.
Blue had returned to this place of origin, immersed
himself in the protocols of a vanished peoples. It was here the nightmares
first subsided. Slowly his dreams became the echoes of stones crushing grain in
the depression of rock metatés, rendering the most immediate and experiential
nourishment from the gifted seeds.
***
“Set against this long galactic, terrestrial, and human time
of knowing our oneness, the past four thousand years of patriarchy’s
institutional and doctrinal denial of our oneness, once we see it for what it
was, will appear a mere aberration. Just a brief forgetting.”
-Barbara Mor
Sometimes when an angel alights, nobody even hears. Her touch could be so
soft as to go unacknowledged and unappreciated. A mind too busy, too
self-involved, often failed to notice the slight gusts of air pressing against
the cheeks, the wind-within-calm marking a helper’s landing, and the slow
closing of her wings.
Llyn’s regular weekend visits continued well into
adulthood, but if her Dad ever noticed, he never let on. No one remarked about
how strange it was when she showed up every Friday night just before dinner
time, while other young women were out with their boyfriends. It was nothing
special, only what “good daughters” did, continuing to help in the abode of her
parents. Seated in the leather easy chair (the big brown one that made her
think of a bear’s lap), her father would lose himself in crossword puzzles, or
squint through thick plastic-framed glasses at the humor pages of a Reader’s
Digest... without so much as a snicker. When the TV was on, his features failed
to indicate any change in his level of interest or attention from one program to
the next, or between the feature shows and the commercials. The only evidence
that he knew Llyn was in the house was a cursory grunt when she first arrived,
and his retreat to the bedroom when she ran the vacuum cleaner in the den.
Every week, like a pilgrimage, like penance, like the ultimate gift of love— the
angel landed to dust the picture frames where her mother couldn’t reach, braved
the demons beneath the refrigerator to clean where no one sees, and served as a
shoulder to cry on for the woman of the house.
For Mom, life was nonstop
trauma, every problem looming, preparing to invalidate existence itself. Every
mishap was a tragedy, testing the strength of family and country, the resolve of
love, and the mettle of womanhood. If there were a thousand things right— paid
for and blessed— she would nevertheless focus on the rare malady. She took a
strange and twisted comfort in the little imperfections that, by inspiring her
to confront them, gave meaning to her life. She was forever pointing out the
flaws in every movie plot, lambasting some detail of her finest
strawberry-rhubarb cake. She ranted against dirt, government, noisy crickets
and the privatized post office, worrying the world the way that a puppy
“worries” a slipper in its mouth.
But her man never heard any of it. It
had always been difficult for him to express himself, and paying compliments was
for some reason exceptionally uncomfortable for him. For the first twenty
years of their marriage he worked a few “I love you’s” between his directions
and orders, but as the kids grew up he seemed to find less and less reason to
talk. His sentences grew shorter and shorter until entire thoughts no longer
made it out of his mouth. Sometimes he’d be thinking how good his wife looked
in an apron with her hair all messed up, but there was no way she could have
known. Soon there were only the briefest eruptions, one word summaries like
“Yeah,” “Hmmm,” and “Shit.” His brain increasingly became an echo chamber for
the pronouncements of others, a foreign movie minus the essential subtitles.
Mom “told her a hundred times if she told her once,” that she didn’t need
to clean-up, didn’t need to wash her father’s boxer shorts or do all the
figuring on their State, Federal, and World Federation tax forms. But not even
Mom knew how painful it was for Llyn, how the gaudy floral wallpaper oppressed
and tormented her, vibrating so fast she couldn’t focus on their patterns. Or
how the plastic-handled silverware and bright overhead lights assaulted her
senses.
Llyn wanted more for them. She wanted Dad to take Mom dancing, and
for Mom to tell him she adored him like she used to do when Angel was small.
She wanted Dad to notice that the programs on the “Interactive” were terrible,
that the world existed just outside the door, that a certain grown up child came
to find something as much as she came to give.
Mom blamed Dad’s
inattentiveness on physical problems, and a series of “experts” tried various
“non-invasive” drugs and techniques, first to enlarge his blood vessels, then to
stimulate certain hormones more prevalent in the teenage male. In time the
doctors at the Veteran’s Hospital diagnosed his condition as Alzheimer’s
Disease, relegated with a stroke of the master surgeon’s pen to the uncurable
ranks of the aged, his loss of memory and interest attributed to some undefined
physiological misstep. Mom felt better just knowing it had a name. Just
knowing the doctors would agree— that the problem lay with him, and not her.
Then again, the malady could have a much simpler cause than that.
“Primitives” probably died with their memories intact. They lived, after all,
in an aluminum-free world.
The generation of Llyn’s parents drank corrosive
citric beverages from aluminum cans, and ate food cooked in trendy aluminum
pots, or aluminum pans scraped with aluminum utensils. Some said the metal
affected the storage and transmission of information within the human brain.
Since it was stored in the body rather than excreted, the effects could be
accumulative, and it was worried it was resulting in the mental incapacitation
of an entire generation of elders. Elders who, as young consumers, may have
actively poisoned themselves with a culinary fad. Then again, what they called
Alzheimer’s may not have been a disease at all, but rather, Nature’s narcosis: a
purposeful and positive way for bodies to deal with the existential angst of
aging and death, freeing them from the painful recognition of their peers and
family ever dying around them. It could have been a natural morphine for the
emotional system, serving the decrepit with a return to the ways and world-view
of the child they once were. Those who had it the “worst” floated through the
happy-go-lucky dream-sleep of shot-up soldiers, unaware that their extremities
had been left back on the battlefield, but sure that everything would be all
right— sure that every nurse was an angel....
Others may have been free of
the disease, but still benefited from its reputation. Only Llyn figured out the
truth: that Dad heard more than he wanted to acknowledge, and remembered more
than he could bear.
She knew that when his eyes glassed over staring at the
screen, those pupils had inverted, and stared deep inside. She sensed the world
where he existed, so far apart from outer reality, and apart from the
complaints. Dad seemed detached, but no more so than a Buddhist monk turning
his face from the “ways of the many.” He’d figured out an effective technique
for survival, a redemptive spiritual practice the significance and value of
which was often lost on others.
While Llyn gave her life over to the work
of remembering, her father became a master— at the time-honored discipline of
forgetting.
***
“Sure, I’m crazy, mad as a hatter. What difference does it make? You know,
a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy.”
-Charles Manson
He was sure, after all, that they really were aliens. Long before the
brain chemicals and depressants that they forced him to drink with every meal,
he could hear the distinctive whirring noise coming from somewhere inside them.
Long before the adjustment chemicals robbed him of the distinction between the
imploring of the spirit and the muffled voices of his keepers— he could hear the
tape loops spinning in their minds, switching to fast forward when he indulged
in a song or poem, and rewinding if he repeated a question. He would listen to
the discomforting sounds of their plumbing, and the crackling of their most
frequently used circuits. Only those closest to him had ever turned their heads
to listen, and they had been programmed to project and deny, to obfuscate and
justify. They came with the equivalent of computer virus detection, software
installed to filter out invasive truth. He found himself always looking for the
plug or switch, the means to turn them off before they could do any more harm as
a result of this endemic failure to feel.
Contrary to multiple books and
cults of the time, these were not visitors from another planet, neither
extraterrestrial saviors nor evil starseeds of impending calamity. Instead,
they were robots of their own making: aliens by choice. Whether born or cloned,
naturally or en vitro, they were made alien by their own perceptions and
practices. They orbited not on spaceships, but in their own insulated solar
systems, revolving around the glowing power structure and its unbending
dictates. They cultivated estrangement from life and death, from sensation and
emotion, water and soil. They were aliens in their own bodies, alien in their
bioregions, made alien to the Earth.
To Abel’s way of thinking, the natural
world was clearly being destroyed by these rapidly replicating robots. And
what’s worse, they made those intolerable noises in passing. When the
attendants walked him to the bathroom he’d come close to losing it. He was
never able to urinate while the aliens watched, forcing him to pee his nightgown
later in the night. It was in the resulting warm dampness that he dreamt of
smashing their heads, using such technological elementals as a hammer or a
rock. But he never imagined the feel of a solid bludgeon against a collapsing
cranium. There were no wet gooshing sounds, and no blood splattered the
too-white walls. In his dreams the rock would always bust into an extruded
metal head, flattening its microprocessors, cracking the twin monitors that
passed for eyes on the thirty second video close-ups of these: his duly elected
representatives, his guards, his teachers, his bosses.... and his parents.
They’d always end up putting him back in, back into white gowns and white
rooms, beneath those glaring white lights. On his eighteenth birthday. His
thirty-second. His forty-ninth.... Two elements remained the same throughout:
the cake they served was always white as the walls, with “Dewey the Drooler”
always getting his hands in the icing.
Abel had only been out again for a
couple of weeks when Kiva discovered him. He’d found his way on the electrified
freight trains to the one continental state that looked and functioned like a
“third world” country. It was nick-named, appropriately enough, the “Land of
Enchantment”: Nuevo Mexico. In his wanderings he’d feasted on all the wafers
stored in the church of Santa Fe, sucked the raw yolk out of uniform eggs
dropped into delivery chutes at a Las Cruces chicken factory, and shared apricot
brandy and stale jerky with a three-fingered, unemployed logger while hitching
through a tourist mecca called Copper City. He’d walked over a hundred shoeless
roadside miles before stumbling into the tiny hamlet of Frisco, population eight
hundred and thirty-five.
It may have been the lot of magicians to have a
hard time dealing. But if so, they were characteristically fortunate as well.
Abel proved particularly blessed, discovered by a red-haired witch, rather than
the depressingly humorless authorities.
Whatever the reason for his great
despair, it was obviously unrelated to his financial condition. Kiva found him
on the cold floor of the village’s only payphone, with a homemade transceiver
extending from his grip like a magic wand— a modern Mage curled up in the fetal
position, collapsed atop a shivering bed of pilfered change.
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