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“We must remember the chemical connections between our cells and the stars,
between the beginning and now. We must remember and reactivate the primal
consciousness of oneness between all living things. We must return to that
time, in our genetic memory, in our dreams, when we were one species born to
live together on earth as her magic children.”
-Barbara Mor
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
-Viktor Frankl
Kiva had loved Llyn a long time, in the ways that only women can love one
another. From childhood friendships and slumber parties to the gatherings of
wise womyn and crones, they exhibited an intimacy that men found hard to equal.
Compared to the spontaneous combustion of the feminine gender whenever they came
together, even those therapeutic “Men’s Groups” seemed superficial and forced.
No one ever had to tell a cluster of girls to “get in touch with their inner
feelings,” or remind them of the importance of hugs. Hugs between females were
something that happened naturally, with neither effort nor forethought. Kiva
was sure that most women were bisexual, whether they acted on their inclinations
or not. And even the most adamantly heterosexual of them would think nothing of
telling another gal how sexy she looked, our how well she filled her clothes.
They made a good match. One woman provided temperance— and the other,
license. Kiva was Huckleberry Finn, persuading the Tom Sawyer in Llyn to ditch
the chores and run away on a barely floating raft. In turn, Llyn was the
practical sister in “Little House On The Prairie,” making sure there was food on
the table before they ran to the river to play. All of Kiva’s women friends
were visitors from the city who needed not only her deep friendship, but the
medicine of that sacred place. And none needed it more than Llyn.
When it
came time for Kiva’s first quest, it was Llyn she wanted there, and Healing
Woman agreed. She was assigned the dismantling of the old sweat lodge at the
base of the cliffs, and the job of making a new one large enough for all three.
She was instructed to take only a few red-willow branches from each area of the
riverbanks, to ask permission first from the bush to be pruned, and then to give
thanks for their contribution to our restoration and rebirth. The elder showed
her how to leave the foliage on them and plant each stalk upright, pushed into
the earth a good eight inches, creating a circular grove aligned to the four
sacred directions. An opening was planned to the east, and the saplings bent
over and lashed to each other with their own slender branches, forming a
still-living dome support for canvas covers that were left off when not in use.
The result was that the willows would often take root in the damp, sandy soil,
continuing to sprout new leaves for many subsequent summers. Llyn learned how
to make the firepit, and the hole in the center of the lodge ground for the
blistering rocks to come.
The night was long, with few words spoken.
Dressed only in blankets and seated around the fire, they impressed their
intentions into every stick added to the fire of prayer. The sky had barely
begun to lighten with the dawn when, following the motion of the elder's glance,
the two women picked up the forked sticks and began transporting the crimson
stones. Trip after trip they braved temperatures that seared their eyelids,
poked out rocks glowing with the
passions that once reduced frontier forts
to smoldering ashes, that drove dreamers and lovers to acts of both great magic
and unrivaled lunacy. Periodically they would thrust the smoldering sticks into
the wet sand to stave their burning.
The sweat lodge was a tool as old as
the very first people, older than history. It was a concept that had been
expressed in Viking masonry, Filipino bamboo thatch, and the willow domes of the
AmerIndian. It was the womb where one breathed the water of the Great Mother
again, surrendered all deliberation again, sweat and cleansed and purged
themselves of the trivial.... again.
When Llyn asked about the particulars
of the Hopi traditional sweat, Healing Woman scowled. Cultural appropriation
was a sore spot for her, and while she started out teaching the Hopi way to
people outside the tribe, she no longer believed in the validity of any
tradition exercised outside of its cultural, regional, and environmental
context. She no longer participated in the Lakota Sun Dance atop of Big
Mountain, because it was not the way of her people, or her home. She wanted
everyone to “get a life, get a culture, or start a new one if you don’t already
have one!” Just don’t steal, adopt, or try to purchase cultural traditions
separate from one’s personal experience, revelation, and place. But the old
woman knew it was a sore spot for Llyn already, and that she might bolt at the
first discouraging words.
“We’re not going to do a Hopi sweat,” the elder
began, and then opted to confuse the situation. Whenever she wanted to derail a
conversation, she’d fall back on inscrutable humor, so that everyone wondered if
she was serious or not. “Let me tell you a little story,” she continued, “There
was a man I knew who took a new bride, and he watched every Sunday as she pulled
a ham out of the cooler and lovingly prepared their meal. He watched as she did
it exactly the same way every time, always pulling the meat out with her right
hand, and tossing the plastic wrapping with her left, always rotating it on the
cutting board so that the longest side faced her, and then cutting off both
perfectly-good ends of the ham before dropping it into the preheated pan. When
he asked her why it was that she always prepared the ham in this way, she said
to him ‘It’s a tradition.’ My friend thought about this for awhile, knowing the
value of such things, but then he decided to ask the mother of his bride to tell
him more. ‘I don’t know’ was her answer, ‘It’s the way my mother always did
it’. This seemed to convince my friend that he was treading on sacred ground,
and he thought no more about it until one day when he ran into the old
grandmother of his bride. Hoping to discover some spiritual secret, he ventured
to ask her, ‘If you would, please tell me, why did you always cut off and throw
away both ends of a good ham?’ The grandmother laughed. ‘Why? Because my pan
was too small!’ ”
Llyn gave Healing Woman a puzzled look, and then went
over to put more wood on top of the seething coals. She was taught, as much as
anything else, that the sweat had to be really hot. According to the Healing
Woman, “Anything less is a sauna.”
Kiva stood off to the side, gazing at
the changing sky, lost in the reverie of the Ancients. Like her earthen
namesake, she was a song out of the past as well as an echo of the future, and
her heart had housed many a dancing Eagle-Head, many a mischievous Kachina. She
took them with her everywhere she went, and now she would take them again to the
sweltering world of no-comment, the dizzy rapture of the inner deep where
Kachinas get their feathers wet. Where a certain human finally learned the
difficult lesson of quiet.
Kiva tried to picture Healing Woman disrobing in
the thinning blackness, as at home in the body of a crone as she once was in the
body of a little girl, an elder still playing, still splashing about in the
waters of life. While Llyn winced in the cold, Kiva’s heavy breasts mirrored
the shape and shade of the moon, their taut nipples gesturing confidently in the
dawn air.
"Do you pray for answers, Grandmother?" Kiva asked.
"You
are the answer. We sweat to forget the question."
The old woman slid into
the warming nest, followed by pilgrims determined to be worthy. Worthy of their
strength and health, worthy of disquieting awareness and unbending will,
privileged tutelage and .... sweat! It burst upon them in waves, water dashed
upon the simmering granite in sequences of four, eight, twelve! Slapped by this
steamy sirocco, the nose and ears on fire, their rational minds made a panicky
departure, leaving them nauseous and spent. The blackness seemed to swallow
their breath, growing shorter and faster, punctuated by explosive little gasps.
Unable to find the doorway and its canvas flaps, Llyn yanked the tarps up from
one side, scrambling out from under them in a fit of bitter panic. She stumbled
to the relief of the river, only to stop at its edge. She hung in indecision,
played up to her fears, indulged in reluctance.
“Running from the heat of
the Sweat is retreat from darkness, from surrender and personal death,” the old
one had warned. One had to die in order to be reborn. Then, and only then, did
one dare to really live. Llyn knew that in resisting the cold water she was
resisting her own body, resisting the extremes of feeling. “Why refuse it?” she
asked herself. “Jump in! Jump in the water, in your body, in your woman-ness”
It seemed she’d spent most of her life waiting for the painless birth and
easy changes her mother had promised her so long ago, while a heavier reality
than she’d ever imagined leaned on her with pointy elbows. She froze at the
riverside, lost in the patterns of the swirling water, stunned by the first rays
of the sun. It was if she were still a teenager poised to run from the
precarious edge of the county pool, self-conscious about the way the bathing
suit her mother bought her drew attention to her body, unsure of her
attractiveness, afraid of the deep-end with its beckoning blue bottom.
Kiva
was the last out of the lodge. With a leap she was on top of Llyn, tumbling
with her into the frigid currents of the Rio Frisco, splashing and sputtering,
gasping inside a bubble of suspended time. Unable to get a foothold in the
shifting sand, they fell back to their knees, in submission to sensation, in wet
prayer to the spirits of the living Earth.
All the while a bare Healing
Woman ran up and down the bank, cackling and snorting in unrestrained delight!
Her laughter filled the night sky with southbound geese. They flew on the wings
of her song, towards a warmer place. Llyn never really felt like an angel, but
she did feel the feathering of her animal body.
It was true. “When the
world finally stops spinning, the chills subside— and it’s the wings that take
over.”
They left Kiva to sweat by herself for the last round. It was
important for the quester to learn to pour the water on the rocks for herself,
to turn up the heat on her own already inflamed body, and thus to exceed her
imagined limitations and feel her power. She would exit the lodge for the last
time with no one in attendance, to be reborn alone.
The old woman led Lynn
along the base of the cliffs that Kiva would soon be climbing, and then started
slowing examining the deeper caves and fissures in the rock faces along her
route. She entered each one she could, carrying a small, select feather from a
rare bald eagle. Finally, Healing Woman gave out an audible grunt indicating
she’d found just the right opening. Its mouth was only a foot taller than the
old woman, and a so narrow she had to turn at a slight angle in order to squeeze
through. Once inside, the ceiling gave way to a high opening, capped with open
sky. Wherever there are vertical chimneys convection sends the hot air
starwards, so that there is always a breeze running through them even when there
are no winds outside. On the gravel at its bottom, she carefully placed the
largest of the small white rocks into a circle a foot and a half across. She
placed the eagle feather on one ledge and then another, each time going out and
reentering.
When she was fully satisfied, she arranged a trail of three pieces
of broken, ancient pottery leading up to it, then motioned for Llyn to go inside
for a look. When she did so, her body sealing and then opening the vent, the
plume was dislodged from its carefully selected perch, landing remarkably near
the middle of the rock medicine wheel. It was set to appear suddenly, dropping
out of its place of concealment at the passage of the curious initiate through
the narrow sandstone corridor.
“But Grandmother!” Llyn blurted out. “If
Kiva steps in here, she’s going to think she’s seen an omen from the gods!”
“If the sun lands on your altar, and that way draws your attention to your
spirit, does it matter if it was you who opened the curtain?” the elder
smiled. “It’s all right, little one— It’s good to leave omens from the gods.”
Sometimes when the steam was hot enough, a certain grayness could nuzzle in
on all sides of a person at once. It would be followed in succession by an
emptiness, then a fullness, then a resolute blackness. In the end all that
would remain was smell. For Kiva’s final round, this meant a pervasive odor
with a sweet body of its own, full and heavy, an odor produced by the leafy
herbs sprinkled on the rocks by a young woman in need of cleansing: sage!
"Sage is for troubled funerals and haunted houses, to drive away the
negative energy. Use copal for prayer," she’d been told. But then, there
were so many demons to expel, so many fears to expunge.
More steam! Her
lungs ached for air. She drowned in remorse, wallowed in self-pity, cried over
parental rejection, over lost loves and failed dreams.... Then she laughed at
the pure intensity of this, the beginning of her rite of passage: medicine time
alone on the sacred Kachina Cliffs. Hotter, and hotter! Kiva coiled like a
rattler, sprawled out like a sunning otter, kicked like a fetus at the gateway
to awesome life. Then she burst out head first— headlong into the cold canyon
wind.
Kiva hurried, heedless of the stickers clawing at her feet, stumbling
the last few yards across wet sand marked with the tracks of raccoons and deer,
collapsing into the Frisco's frigid flow. She stood shaking on a sand bar,
gaping wide-eyed at the pink and purple cliffs immediately to the West. They
were suddenly gold, licked shiny by direct sunlight, brazen bastions of the
medicine ways. All the pain and ecstasy of an entire planet welled up inside,
threatening to scatter her like photons to the four directions. She breathed
into herself the river, the cottonwoods, the beckoning cliffs— and she cried.
She cried out like a panther in heat, like the desert ground wrenched open in an
earthquake, like trees driven through the sawmill's soulless blades.
Some
called it "eerie," some called it "thrilling," the way wind could distort the
sound of running water, or the way the heat from a campfire disfigured the faces
of those just beyond. Then there was the way one's voice could be tossed into
the air pockets behind the river's plunges and cascades, quavering as it bounced
back through the opalescent sheets.
She relieved herself of every tearful
cry, every repressed whine, every forbidden orgasmic outburst, every rebellious,
raging roar in an extended dream scale. Her voice made the sounds of glistening
blood and angry wings, of a child's unanswered scream in the middle of the night
and the cooing of one dove to another, one lover to another. It was the
laughter of the ancients, erupting out of the distant Pleistocene. It poured,
liquid, from her anguished yet joyous soul, in a melody that could enliven the
world! It was her song, catapulting back out charged, chatouyant, amplified
across the pine-laden mountains. It shimmied. It refracted like light through
a crystal. It harmonized with itself in a higher octave. It warbled like a
bird, and all the birds listened! So did the squirrels. The forest was rapt.
The air tensed for the next quick pass of seamless stanzas. Her song rose and
then fell, sheared petals from the flowers, rose and fell like love.
More
than divine emotions fueled its spell, cast from a place outside the framework
of time. A place where the ancient ones join in the song, where their intent is
ours, and they are in us. The place of the spirits. Frenzied. Hallucinatory.
Melodic.
Her song was the sound.... of Mother Earth unleashed.
“...multitudes of Negroes of either sex make their barbaric beats and the
sound of many and horrible congas, dancing dishonestly, immorally and singing
gentile songs...”
-Bernardo Vilhena
Recopilacáo de Noticias
Soteropolinas e brasilicas
“Drummer" was what Blue usually wrote in the spaces marked “occupation” on
various questionnaires, voter registration cards and multiple arrest forms. It
was his deadpan response anytime somebody pressed him with “What do you do?,” as
if he only did one thing, as if he could be identified and characterized by a
single interest or skill. “A drummer,” he would tell them, taking great pains
to avoid self-promotion in front of his ample critics. He wasn’t a “writer,”
after all, so they needn’t expect perfect syntax. Since he laid no claim to
being a great artiste, they could lay off about his surreal pigments lavished on
stretched canvas. By no means a boxer, he could be forgiven of any unofficial
moves delivered to the joints of the overzealous. “A drummer,” he would answer,
but he made it sound like “Just a drummer, that’s all I’ll ever be.” Just a
drummer, pure and simple, administering percussion to the cranial cavities of
unbelievers in the church of rock n’ roll.
Maybe it wasn’t the only thing
he had ever done in his life, but like breathing, it was something he’d always
done. The Kid Coyote kept beat with his poor mother’s heart, marking the bass
line with swift kicks to the uterus. He came out moving his arms and legs to
compositions beyond his parents ken, banged toys on the bars of his crib similar
to the way an inmate runs a cup across the iron ribs of his cell door, only with
something more like the rhythms of a balafon master!
When he learned to talk it
came out on a roll, with balanced phrasings and measured spacing. It was said
his Visigoth grandfather favored him until the day he was caught using the poor
man’s dentures for castanets. Blue’s mom spent most of his first ten years
trying to isolate and muffle the everyday household items that he so liked to
beat for affect. Now as a certifiable adult, he could demonstrate three hundred
individual tones, teased and milked and rattled out of the various pots, stove
tops and utensils of his cluttered kitchen (with incalculable variations based
on the use of finger or palm, fork’s handle or tongs, struck once or allowed to
vibrate into a snare roll, left hanging loose and ringing open like Buddha’s
crystal wok in thin Tibetan air). He used the dash of his old truck for the
slap of the high drum, while filling the downbeat with the low buzz caused by a
smack to an unheld steering wheel. The trick was in making sharp turns, or
passing semi-trucks without ever losing that perfect tempo.
Everything he
did, he did with rhythm. The Coyote walked rhythmically, with just the
suggestion of a tail swishing behind. He fought with a rhythm, laughed with a
rhythm, and made love with a rhythm. His knees kept time on the cabinets while
he cooked. His foot marked cadence during those long stints beneath the lean-to
that served as a primitive outhouse. He chewed to the beat of whatever music
he’d heard last, played the ten minute solo from the 1960’s cult hit
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on a lover’s back, did Ginger Baker and Sandy Denny
imitations on his bared thighs, and tossed the mixed salad the way Baba Olatunji
pitched his gourd shekere’. He worked arresting sounds out of disposable
lighters, the turning of pages, and the crumpling and uncrumpling of paper. A
manual typewriter could be coaxed to perform the intricate layerings of
seemingly dissimilar beats known as polyrhythms, once considered beyond the
purveyance of anyone not born and raised in Mother Africa.
Africa. The
racist stereotype held that blacks were born with rhythm, while white folk
needed two years of Arthur Murray dance lessons before they could squeeze-out a
wiggle. But it was more than that— Africa was the source. Most if not all of
the world’s musical traditions and styles evolved from this get-down continent,
the exact syncopation changing as it migrated far and wide, but never losing the
down beat, the bottom. Literally rock bottom, the essential preeminent
vibration rising out of caverns, ringing off boulders, emanating from the master
metronome itself: the heartbeat of the sacred Mother Earth.
Everywhere he
went he could hear it. It was appreciably louder at the foot of the Kachina
Cliffs, and really echoed immediately after making love— but it was audible to
the attentive, even beneath the metallic clamor of the contemporary urban
crunch. It comforted him in strange restaurants with white table-cloths, where
everyone seemed to be looking at him. It gave him a practiced measure for the
million things he was moved to do each and every day. Like the sounds an
anxious baby hears when pressed to its parent’s chest it would eventually lull
him to sleep, even on a cold metal bunk next to flushing toilets and the sliding
back and forth of eight hundred pound cell doors. Thump thump. Thump thump.
The sound of the Mother. The sound of the Earth.
Blue tried to make
everything he did in life as perfect as the one true downbeat. It existed for
him, unforgiving, now, right there and nowhere else. The downbeat was the one
that made you lift your foot off the floor, the one that made you dance. And
the dance, after all, was everything.
The bear that once inhabited the
meadow— she had it. The chipmunks had it. Thunder only came in occasionally
like the kettle drums of an orchestra, but it always came in right on top of
it. It pounded from deep in the river where rounded rocks rolled, while the
whoosh of its surface waters laid down a supportive sustain. Even trimmed and
manicured dogs still had it, as did those guerrilla sparrows illegally squatting
in hollow street signs. Every living creature passed the audition for the
global ensemble— except for mechanized man-kind. There was only one spot for
the downbeat, and taxi meters never found it. Nor did voice-command watches,
robotized jackhammers or factory clocks. While the rest of life moved like
reggae, like tango, like samba— humanity increasingly marched, oblivious to the
Earth, the heart, the beat.
The beat served not so much as a quantitative
measure of time, as a lubricant of perception. When every rhythmic cog slid
together, an aural bridge was formed, propelling the traveler on a journey
through the interconnecting roots of the “Tree of Life” and the courseways of
molten rock, thundering off mountains, pounding down the arteries of
hairy-chested mammals. As with the mind-less rapture of orgasm, the drumming
trance submerged one in the real world, where the self was diffuse, illuminated:
an interwoven strand of consciousness exceeding the restraints of logic and
language. Under its influence all borders would seem to dissolve, the skin
would no longer hold the guts in, and the blood of each would mingle with the
blood of Gaia, the breath of the drummer at one with the sacred breath of the
world.
The drum was a vehicle of transport, a spirit catcher, a door to
access the universal All. It had always been a most-special tool, a thing of
power, with each composite of tree muscle and animal skin a still-living
reminder of the biological basis of all music, and all meaning. The drum was
also a common, shared denominator, a means to acceptance among most primal
cultures. Blue overcame the mistrust of his Native American friends by sitting
up with them for days and nights at Pow-Wows, he and up to a dozen Pueblo
“Bloods” locking into the precision of something greater than themselves. The
Coyote disarmed confrontational dreadlock Rude Boys in Jamaica by talking to
them through the drum.
The drum was always the great interpreter. To the
left of his trap set were a couple of African dun-dun, known as “talking drums”
because of the way the lacings between the heads could be squeezed under the
arm, bending the notes into specific, expressive passages with inflections that
were adamantly linguistic. But then, they were all talking drums, whether
ceramic dumbek or carnival surdo, conga or bhodran. That is, they all talked to
Spirit, to each other, and to the wild places deep within the drummer. But to
be either vehicle or interpreter, the drum had to be played. Untouched, it was
but a hollow vessel of potential awaiting the coaxing and collaboration of a
musician. Like life, it required hands-on participation to resonate, to sing,
to impel. Blue played to entertain angels and exorcise demons, to purge the
reservoirs of pain filled by the storms raging inside. When a drum was new, he
squeezed out each fresh sound with respect, as if milking a cobra. He
definitely “played” the drums, enticing good humor from them and himself. He
also “worked” them, “loved” them, “ran” them, “badgered” them, and “dealt” them
to a universe waiting and watching. And he found a way to use his sticks like
twin mason’s trowels, erecting a wall of soulful noise against any weakening of
his determination to live alone, a "sound barrier" against all those things that
hurt.
***
"She would come suddenly, rising from the clouds— a spectral Grandmother
telling the stories we wished we’d heard as a child.” -Loba G.
Hardin
Kiva exited the water, then slowly began the walk towards an awakened
destiny. Lightened by the attentions of the early morning moon, her steps were
brisk and weightless. Her every move reflected a renewed sense of commitment
and purpose, and yet her rational mind still panicked at the swelling mineral
face leaning out and over her. The Cliffs loomed closer, larger, with every
step she took. They were livid purple at the impassioned touch of the moon. Now
they seemed reproachful, admonishing her with the force of their heaving
presence. They were an open hand with the weight of a mountain, raised as if to
hush a fussing child. Earthen jaws seized her. Granular arms enveloped her.
Kiva appeared smaller and smaller, as she walked with determination towards the
sacred cliffs ahead. Then it was as if the mammoth stone waves had swallowed
her, absorbed her, and either destroyed her or set her free.
Kiva stopped
for long minutes at base of the incline, facing towards that brilliant rock so
long ago torn from the mother planet, gracing a New Mexico sky. She felt
informed by its presence, engaged in some wordless primordial connection: full
moon, fulfilled woman.
And she'd always thought of herself as a
moon-child. Daughter of the moon. She was both offspring and intimate of the
lunar body. Whereas her human mother demonstrated her love by restraining the
precocious Kiva, her lunar mom cut her loose, inspiring a willful frivolity!
One had cautioned her not to stay out late, get dirty, or make too much noise.
The other joined Kiva as she whirled madly in the rain-soaked meadow,
illuminating and encouraging her delinquent dance 'til dawn. She’d heard both
of them say that they loved her. But while one had given her life, it was the
other that gave her spirit.
Indeed, the lunar cycles were hers. She could
read the comings and goings of the moon in the twinges of her abdomen and the
red-black markings of her menses. It was her mother the moon that knew when she
was upset or restless, and it was to her that Kiva cried. From childhood on,
when all else slept, she would steal away and bury her face in the white-aproned
lap of moonlight.
While some never saw it as such, others would say they
could trace the features of a face on the moon. Kiva recognized every detail of
a bittersweet smile, the understanding eyes and slow movement of a tear parting
from the corners.
The moon was there for her varied rites of passage. She
looked proudly on her daughter as the baby Kiva experimented with her first baby
words, and then later oversaw those peak experiences that made words obsolete.
When she had her first orgasm, the moon swelled to new brilliance.... and then
again, on this— her first quest.
Kiva recalled the words dribbled out like
water from the cracked well formed by Healing Woman's pursing lips. They'd wet
her parched European soul, excited her thirsty Druidic roots, gifted her with
visions of singing waterfalls and colored rain for her to forever play in.
"Go open like a prayer. Open like a child. Like the rock that neither
dreads or yearns for the rays of Father Sun. Your job up there is to soak up
spirit the way that rock soaks up sunlight. Expecting nothing. Accepting
everything. Go silent and you will finally hear. You will hear the intent of
Mother Earth, when you remember you are the Mother Earth. Go, and remember."
Healing Woman called it "crying for a vision," but in keeping with her
mixed blood and contemporary purpose, Kiva thought of it as a rite of passage.
It was the momentous ritual event by which diverse primal cultures had always
marked important personal transitions, and the move into conscious, responsible
adulthood. The tribal ancestors of virtually every race practiced some form of
quest, a time to leave the comforting familiarity of the village, the reassuring
proximity of friends and family, and the trappings of language. A time to
eschew the book for the story, to pass over the medicine people and engage the
medicine itself.
For most a quest was more realization than hallucination.
Hungry and dreamlike from fasting, purified in the heat of the sweat lodge, the
seeker established intent— and then pursued that vision with unswerving effort.
Once situated in a place of power, the questers would come to know every natural
thing around them as the actual substance of their vision, the terra firma , the
body and the basis of their enchantment. The weeks or years of preparation
always culminated in a ritual return to home and self. Kiva did not go to "have
a vision." Instead, it was the vision that had her.
***
“This Disneyland megatechnology vision of modern industrial society is
‘hyper reality’: the shadows we have been socially manipulated to accept as
reality as they flicker on the back wall of Plato’s cave, our TV’s and movie
screens.”
-George Sessions
Blue had moved from the forced socialization of prison to the isolation of a
mystic mountain top.... and still the journal grew. It grew out of his
voracious reading of news magazines, the occasional Sunday paper, and the
constant reports on the TransOceanic receiver. The British Broadcasting System
proved far more incisive than the domestic networks, at least when reporting on
American rather than English affairs. Canada was to their credit more
self-critical, with regular features on the many ways of getting shortchanged by
one’s own government. With the spin of the dial, shortwave allowed him to zoom
in on stations as far away as Australia, keeping the man-coyote in constant
touch with the ironies, the injustices, and even the beauty of the civilization
he chose to leave behind.
Global Report: The rate of extinctions of all species, including
invertebrates, was found to be up from an earlier high of one per day, to an
average of one per hour.
Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona and
Genetrix Worldwide signed and agreement today to enter into a partnership with
the government in the completion of the largest genetic engineering laboratory
ever constructed. Together, they hold the patents on over seven hundred distinct
new species, from microbes to food grains. Funding for the project was made
possible thanks to the recent relaxing of regulations governing the
introduction of new life forms. Both U of A and Genetrix stock rose
substantially after the news reached the financial markets on Friday."
U.S.A.: "The average American watches approximately 21,000 commercials per
year, 75 percent of which are paid for by the top ten corporate conglomerates."
Battle Creek, Michigan: "Developers were forced to close the immense theme
park, 'Auto World.' The operation, complete with displays glorifying mining and
manufacturing and automated robots singing 'We love our job,' was met with
customer skepticism in a city bankrupted by the pull-out of General Motors."
Kyushu, Japan: "Indoor 'Pleasure Domes' are on the rise, some housing
entire artificial mountains for year-round skiing. One, called 'Seagaia,' draws
Japanese who prefer the self-contained environment to the real ocean, 440 yards
away. It includes a salt-free, dechlorinated 'sea' and a beach an exact and
unchanging 280 ft. long, composed of 600 tons of crushed and polished pebbles,
the sound of chirping birds played through speakers hidden in plastic palm trees
fluttering in an artificial breeze, all under a 660 ft. retractable roof."
World Health Organization: "Cases of AIDS are increasing astronomically,
with the most number of cases in Southeast Asia and the ex-Soviet Republics.
Scientists are concerned over the virus' seeming ability to mutate faster than
drugs can be developed to counteract its lethal effects."
New York City:
"The American Civil Liberties Union reports that of the over 400 new federal,
state and county ordinances passed into law each and every day, 380 restrict in
some way the constitutional rights of the citizenry, and a majority address
so-called 'victimless crimes'."
Washington D.C.: "The official annual list
of crime statistics, as first gathered by the F.B.I. in its heyday, indicates a
15% reduction in violent crimes from the rate 10 years ago."
Washington
D.C.: "Recent polls indicate that 97 per cent of Americans surveyed consider
violent crime their number one concern, ahead of health care and the economy."
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: "Students from the state university were
arrested and later release for distributing and promoting 'seditious
materials.' It seems they had spent several fruitless days appealing for
passer-byes to sign a document calling for the enactment of a 'Bill of
Freedoms.' Charges were dropped when the mostly unsigned petition was
determined to be a clever paraphrasing of the United States Bill of Rights."
Houston, Texas: The Home Entertainment Guild reports that sales of
interactive features with animal or nature themes are up 70% from 5 years
earlier. Most popular for two seasons in a row was the educational thriller
'Journeys Through The Rainforest'."
Quito, Ecuador: The rate of destruction
of tropical rainforests has increased from 200 hectares per day, to over 800
hectares per day, over a 5 year period.
Ten Palms, Florida: "A bird
dropped a snake over a power station, short-circuiting a line and causing a
two-hour blackout. More than four thousand homes in the Morongo Basin were
without power Wednesday, while Edison crews removed what remained of the four
foot long rosy boa. Of particular concern was the effect on the nearby Army
Special Intelligence headquarters, whose computers were down for most of the
day."
Washington DC: "Department of Corrections officials today released
the latest figures on prison recidivism. With an almost ninety percent rate of
released convicts returning to the penitentiary for committing new crimes,
critics of the expensive rehabilitation programs are jumping on what they see as
proof of the coddling of the criminal element."
***
“A ritual really is any kind of intentional act we create that deepens our
sense of value.”
-Starhawk
Llyn’s days at the Edgewater Cafe seemed to get busier with each passing
year. No small town was safe, with an increasing portion of the population on
the road in search of the “wild west.” The “frontier,” if there ever was such
a thing, was no longer a vertical line drawn through the map. It donned
sunglasses and hid out in tiny enclaves like the Mogollon, sidestepping the
uncounted vacationers flocking to the National Parks, the Preserves and the
public beaches. Not even a desert— with its rattlesnakes, burrs and booby-trap
cactus— was safe from death-by-affection. And the once sleepy Copper City, with
its sparkling mountains and distant vistas, didn’t stand a chance. They came in
gas saving transports, with bicycles ludicrously strapped on top. In giant
SUV’s, with dogs hanging out every window. On tour buses, and on motorcycle
runs. They came on vacation, and on business trips. To visit, and shop. To
look for work, and to retire. And increasingly, they came to stay. Ranch after
ranch was being subdivided to make room for the latest pod of mobile, tract or
luxury homes.
Llyn’s favorite season was the off-season. It started the
day after Christmas, continued through income tax time, and concluded with the
mid-March thaw. Her favorite day was Sunday, the only time anybody seemed to
stay home. And her favorite work schedule was the morning shift, when the
smallest percentage of people were up and about. This wasn’t conducive to tips,
needless to say, but money was hardly her priority. She was what some called an
“Earthie”— the alternative, back-to-the-land type who put quality of life and
free time ahead of medical insurance and stock options. She enjoyed those
relatively quiet mornings at work, when she could chat with the other
waitresses, and read a few lines in the personality and art sections of the
paper.
Although only in her mid-twenties, Llyn already felt a sense of
urgency about personal relationships. She stood close to the front window of
the cafe, her eyes tightly closed, in the heat and glare of the sun. As the
transports whooshed through the snow outside, she thought about old affairs.
About riding horseback without a saddle, children pulling her around by her
fingers.... and what her ideal love might look like.
Opening her eyes, Llyn
was startled by a man’s face a mere foot away from hers. His eyes were fixed
uncomfortably on hers, with nothing but a quarter inch of fogged-up glass
between. She blushed and then smiled nervously, before heading for the kitchen
and the coffee. She jumped a bit at the sound of the door opening and closing
behind her, picturing the man watching her as she walked.
She thought he
looked a little like an aging Shakespearean actor, perhaps having played but a
single role his entire life, but having played it well. The black cape tossed
around his shoulders added to the effect, spotted with flecks of snow and topped
with the wool hat of an eighteenth century Cossack. Stepping back out with pot
in hand, she was struck by the figure he cut in baggy pants, black riding boots
worn over the pants legs, and a tattered silk vest with a gold chain and fob
pinned to a button hole.
“Please sit anywhere,” she said to the stranger,
gesturing to a handful of empty tables.
“Yes, of course,” he answered,
lowering his eyes at last, and moving over to a spot in the furthest, darkest
corner. The man slipped off his cloak, shook its melting snowflakes on to the
wood floor, and then took the seat with a back to the wall.
“To drink?”
“Water. Lots of water. And a double mocha cappuccino.”
First she
wondered how men with long moustaches like his could deal with whip cream
topping. Next she wondered how he could make the salt shaker stand on its edge,
and then how he seemed to procure the rose he presented her from beneath an
inverted ashtray.
“So, are you from around here or what? What do you do
for a livin’?”
He smiled and handed her a card. It said “Abel: Magician
For Hire,” and featured the curious hump-backed flute player that was again the
rage of the gift shops. She took it and smiled broadly, causing him to look
down at his hands. For a few awkward seconds there was silence, and then he
began to move them like furtive mammals with lives of their own. Utensils
vanished and then reappeared. Items she’d never seen before were spun on the
tip of a finger, and coins moved from one knuckle to the next like water over
river-rock.
Instantly every child in the room was at the table, grabbing at
his sleeves, squealing with delight at his every move. As far as they were
concerned, he couldn’t do anything that wasn’t amazing. It got so that even a
sneeze or a quick looking away sent them into hysterics. Finally even the most
stoic adults made there way to his table, pushing their cowboy hats onto the
back of their heads as they pondered his various tricks, breaking out into
sweats trying to follow with their eyes the quick exchanges of his hands.
As if the attention were suddenly too much for him, Abel jumped up to
leave. He handed one little boy a tin whistle he pulled from behind his ear,
and then bolted for the door. He left a green velvet bag on the counter on his
way out, faced Llyn just long enough for a most ritualistic gesture, and then
dashed out into the cold air. Llyn dumped out nearly fifty dollars in shiny
quarters, covering the bill five times over. Picking up the check, she spotted
a note written on the back.
Llyn waited until the end of her shift to pull
it back out of her apron. It said:
“Magic is the hormonal thrust of the
Earth’s superconscious. I acknowledge your specialness. It’s time to live your
dream!”
She suddenly recalled his scent, strong, but not unpleasant. She
couldn’t remember ever thinking about a man’s smell before. Live your dream,
huh? What made him think she wasn’t doing just that?
She opened her purse
to put away the unusual business card with the Santa Fe address. One never
knew how soon they might need the services of a qualified magician. Abel had
signed it with a hand-drawn spiral, beneath the admonition, “Expect a Miracle.”
She did, and she would.... humming all the way.
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