Notes from Diogenes’ Tub (2)

Tom at The Middlewesterner has an occasional feature he calls “I may not be very political, but…” which has inspired me to add this, similarly occasional, brief and anti-political (not apolitical!) feature to an otherwise non-political blog. Yesterday, Tom wrote “If I hear too many more people say ‘we have to preserve the sanctity of marriage,’ I just might have to start agitating for a ‘No Divorce’ Amendment.”

Well, don’t think that ain’t what’s in the backs of some folks’ minds. Zealots like Delay and Santorum will tell you, if you ask, that adultery should be punishable by law, for instance. Some members of Congress, I’ve heard, don’t believe any sex outside of procreation should be permitted.

It’s just like murder: the only reason governments don’t like people killing other people is it threatens their monopoly on killing, right? Ditto with screwing.

Swimming to Cambodia

This entry honors the memory of Spalding Gray, whose body was just pulled from the East River. I saw him perform once about ten years ago, thanks to my friend Crazy Dave who had won an extra ticket from the local NPR station.

For a couple hours last night I was plagued by the demon Anxiety. I call it a demon because it exists solely to torment, it can’t be reasoned with or bought off. The only way to neutralize its attacks is to give in, to laugh at its antics until it gets disgusted and goes away. So that’s what I did, and I was dreaming for quite some time before this imaginary being – whose name is oddly identical with my own – caught on and woke me up again.

But by then my sleeping self had gained the upper hand. This “real me” is far more familiar to my readers, I’m sure, than I am in my guise as the self-conscious author. That’s because (I’m guessing) your own “real me” is much the same: an androgynous shapeshifter who can be visible or invisible, single or multiple, who can fly, swim, leap tall buildings at a single bound, even occupy two places at the same time. Best of all, it can disappear. Here’s St. Emily (#255 in the R.F. Franklin edition – the new standard, because it preserves the orthography, spelling etc. favored by the poet herself):

The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea –
Forgets her own locality
As I, in Thee –

She knows herself an incense small –
Yet small, she sighs, if all, is all,
How larger – be?

The Ocean, smiles at her conceit –
But she, forgetting Amphitrite –
Pleads “Me”?

I had to resort to the Encyclopedia Mythica for Amphitrite: in Greek mythology, the queen of the sea. When Poseidon wanted to take her for a wife, she hid from him in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, until betrayed by a dolphin. (Now the poem makes sense!)

I find it oddly comforting that sleep psychologists fail to agree on even the most basic premises: why we dream, why we even need to sleep. Actually, as a semi-professional bullshit artist and the proprietor of this perhaps ironically named weblog, gaps in official knowledge are, for me, something positive: resources to be exploited. Like a Daoist, I believe fervently in the necessity of the not-there, and I place great trust in the usefulness of the useless. Our second text this morning is from A.C. Graham’s translation of Chuang-Tzu, once again.

There is a place in Sung, Ching-shih, where catalpas, cypresses and mulberries thrive. But a tree an arm-length or two around will be chopped down by someone who wants a post to tether his monkey, a tree of three or four spans by someone seeking a ridge-pole for an imposing roof, a tree of seven or eight spans by the family of a noble or rich merchant looking for a sideplank for his coffin. So they do not last out the years Heaven has assigned them, but die in mid-journey under the axe. This is the trouble with being stuff which is good for something. Similarly in the sacrifice to the god of the river it is forbidden to cast into the waters an ox with a white forehead, a pig with a turned-up snout or a man with piles. These are all known to be exempt by shamans and priests, being things they deem bearers of ill-luck. They are the very things which the daemonic man will deem supremely lucky.

Graham uses this archaic word “daemonic” to translate shen, one of the prime attributes of the sage. He points out in the introduction that “Although Chuang-Tzu shares the general tendency of Confucians and Taoists to think of Heaven as an impersonal power rather than as an emperor issuing his decrees up in the sky, his attitude has a strong element of numinous awe . . . It is clear that Chuang-Tzu does not in any simple sense believe in a personal God, but he does think of Heaven and the Way as transcending the distinction between personal and impersonal (which would be as unreal to him as any other dichotomies), and of awe as though for a person as an appropriate attitude to the inscrutable forces wiser than ourselves, throughout the cosmos and in the depths of our own hearts, which he calls ‘daemonic.'”

So this daemon of Graham/Chuang-tzu is quite unlike the demon I was talking about a moment ago. Or so I would like to think. In Spalding Gray fashion I am looking back over my life, particularly the uncomfortable, shameful, and humiliating parts that I would like very much to forget. I am remembering the six years of purgatory beginning with my entry into the seventh grade, in which I suddenly found myself a social outcast. I say purgatory rather than hell because in fact outright tormentors were few, especially after my brother Steve, who was two years ahead of me, beat the shit out of a kid who had been reputed to be tough. Throughout junior and senior high school I was able to maintain a strictly pacifist, turn-the-other-cheek policy, safe under the nuclear umbrella of a big brother who could kick ass.

Well, I shouldn’t say strictly pacifist. I did drum on a mushhead one time, but that almost doesn’t count. Or at least it didn’t seem to at the time.

The mushheads came from a family of highly inbred, semi-retarded, grotesquely misshapen people who were as mean as they were ugly. They had heads shaped like toadstools (hence the moniker) and names out of Snow White: Skippy, Pappy, Happy and a couple younger ones whose handles I forget. When I was in the 11th grade and had long since stopped riding the school bus, one of them – I think it was Happy – took to following me through the town portion of my three-mile route home, heckling all the way. This took the somewhat surreal form of yelling “Heckle! Heckle!” and when he tired of that, “Heckle-Jeckle! Heckle-Jeckle!”

This was almost tolerable and indeed somewhat amusing – or it might’ve been if I hadn’t taken myself so doggone seriously. I would ignore the heckling until stones started to fly. Due to the fact that he and his brothers were born without wingbones (so their pediatrician told my mother one time), Happy couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, much less the rail-thin frame of a bucktoothed wierdo bookworm who preferred walking to riding the bus. (Each of the mushheads had been barred from the bus for life, I think.) But when the stones started coming uncomfortably close I’d turn around and make like I was going to go after him, which was usually all it took to produce panic and an inglorious retreat.

I’m ashamed to admit that one time, in a vain attempt to drive him away for good, I ran back, grabbed him and shoved him to the ground. He lay in the middle of the street groveling and gabbling and thrashing about: think Gollum on a bad hair day. I’d be lying if I told you I felt any pity then. As best I can recall, I felt disgust bordering on active loathing. What a loathsome, self-centered creature I was! No wonder I didn’t have any friends.

To his credit, Happy remained undeterred in his heckling of the Dr. Jeckle Who Could Not Hyde. The daemonic was strong in him. I don’t know where he and his brothers are today, but I doubt they’re off getting mangled or blown up in Iraq. In fact, I’d be surprised if they aren’t living in reasonable comfort on S.S.I. Chuang-tzu again:

Cripple Shu – his chin is buried down in his navel, his shoulders are higher than his crown, the knobbly bone at the base of his neck points toward the sky, the five pipes to the spine are right up on top, his two thighbones make another pair of ribs. By plying the needle and doing laundry he makes enough to feed himself, and when he rattles the sticks telling fortunes for a handful of grain he is making enough to feed ten. If the authorities are press-ganging soldiers the cripple strolls in the middle of them flipping back his sleeves; if they are conscripting work parties he is excused as a chronic invalid; if they are doling out grain to the sick he gets three measures, and ten bundles of firewood besides. Even someone crippled in body manages to support himself and last out the years assigned him by Heaven. If you make a cripple of the Power in you, you can do better still!

Words to live by? Hell no. According to his friend Hui-tzu, these stories of Chuang-tzu’s are nothing but “useless words.” (Ah, to blog as uselessly as that!)

When I was a teenager I tried earnestly to take the words of Jesus to heart: “Turn the other cheek.” I’m afraid I succeeded only in becoming a hypocrite – a creature worthy of exorcism, as my would-be guru Happy undoubtedly perceived. In my twenties I added a corollary: “Turn the other cheek. It’s the best way to piss someone off.” Thus I was able to deform an idealistic piece of advice into something truly useful, the ultimate move in the game of social ju-jitsu. And in middle age I have deformed it still further, so that this once sublime dictum has turned into “Turn the other butt-cheek!” But that’s the best way I’ve found to deal with my inner demons.

Here at Via Negativa, especially, the joke is always on me, folks: drink up! Take yourself too seriously, and the next thing you know you’ll be feeding the fishes. Stay twisted and you won’t be in danger of Poseidon eyeing you up, and the priests at the temple to the river god will turn away in disgust. Even if Heaven ain’t happenin’, God don’t make no junk.

Notes from Diogenes’ Tub (1)

Democracy in action
This just in: the awful truth about NYC traffic buttons, via my bro’ Mark, who observes “This is like, a giant metaphor for something, or something.” Indeed. (See heading.)

Of course, the same is true of those “close door” buttons in elevators. It’s not true to say they serve no purpose. They provide a sense of empowerment. And that’s important.

Memento mori

The Brutal Lovers (Los Amantes Brutales)
translated from the Spanish of Roberto Sosa

Those
strangers came
from other worlds
to this ground that saw our birth.
We are the light they said without mincing words.

They came calculating
body count times betrayal, saying our friends.
They came to eat, ate everything and wouldn’t leave
this ground that saw our birth, men
of metal, of straight edges, they
the brutal lovers of Death.

Death
to that Death!

(El llanto de las cosas, Editorial Guaymantes, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 1995)

***

Prompted by an article in The New Yorker called The Casualty I take my cheap edition of The Works of Wilfred Owen off the shelf and begin to read. My god, what a poet! Contemporary of Rilke and Yeats and every bit their equal, killed in 1918 at the age of 25, one week before the Armistice.

The last poem in the book, “Strange Meeting,” describes a Ulysses-like journey to the underworld. No doubt the editors, by placing it there, had the same banal reaction as I did: this could have been a foreshadowing. It’s all here, the feyness of the poet who accepted his own death as the price for understanding “the pity of war.” Who knew his own poems to be beautiful, bearers of “truths that lie too deep for taint.” One does not dare to speak of sacrifice, but certainly Owen knew better than anyone what was at stake when he re-enlisted in August 1918, leaving the hospital where he had been recovering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Almost all his poems, including I presume “Strange Meeting,” had been written during his year-long convalescence. The slant rhymed AA’BB’ scheme is particularly effective in this context, like the shell and its aftershock, forcing a doubletake. Not quite the rhyme one had expected.

Strange Meeting
by Wilfred Owen

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,-
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision’s face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
‘Strange friend,’ I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’
‘None,’ said that other, ‘save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now….’

***

Anon. 14th century

Erþe toc of erþe, erþe wyþ woh,
Erþe oþer erþe to þe erþe droh,
Erþe leyde erþe in erþene þroh –
þo heuede ere of erþe erþe ynoh.

Earth took of earth, earth with woe,
Earth other earth to the earth drew;
Earth laid earth in earthen trough,
Then had earth of earth enough.

(Additional notes, including a possible interpretation, here.)

The art of living

I strongly suspect that a contemporary art of living can be recovered. I believe in the art of suffering, in the art of dying, in the art of living, and, so long as it is in an austere and clearsighted way, in the art of enjoyment, of living it up.
Ivan Illich, Ivan Illich in Conversation (David Calley, House of Anansi Press, 1992)

People of faith can stand to learn a lot from environmentalism and conservation biology: few would dispute this proposition. But is the opposite also true? Can environmentalists and conservation biologists learn from religious and humanistic traditions? In the past year, the flagship magazines of several large conservation organizations have argued that such a cross-fertilization can and must take place. Articles have referenced the increasing efforts of clerics from many faiths to convince their followers that care for the environment/Creation is a sacred duty, and quoted testimonies from environmental activists for whom some form of spiritual awareness and/or practice is an important motivator.

Thus, two important messages have emerged: 1) an awareness of ecological realities and environmental crises should become a focus for faith-based activities; and 2) environmentalists and conservation organizations can improve their outreach efforts if they take the spiritual dimension into account. I’d like to take a small step further and suggest that if environmentalists really want to learn how to unite individual action with social movements and cultural transformation, they should look South, where the situation is the most desperate – and where some of the most creative solutions are beginning to emerge.

The steel drum culture of Trinidad was cited by the late social philosopher Ivan Illich as a model and an archetype for a new approach to cultural production now widely encountered in the global South. Half a century ago, musicians with welding torches discovered that 55-gallon drums discarded by the petrochemical industry could be drums indeed, and a whole new music was born. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And when this conversion takes place under the sign of a new melange of cultures – call it creolism, call it mestizaje – it can come to possess revelatory, even incarnational power.

By contrast, here in the North we are exhorted to “reduce, reuse, recycle.” This mantra of the waste manager trumpets a reductionist bias in its very first term. Human beings are nothing more than consumers, nodes in an endless cycle of resources. But as the old Anglo-German proverb “waste not, want not” implicitly recognizes, we cannot want without wasting. We cannot waste without wanting. To really understand pollution, we have to understand desire. For that, I believe, we must have recourse to religious and humanistic traditions.

But isn’t economics the true science of human desires? Potentially, yes. But in its most prevalent form, neo-classical and liberal economic theories are burdened by fallacious assumptions that impede a broader understanding. I speak not merely of the habitual externalization of social and environmental costs with which most conservationists are already familiar. According to the usual analysis, this blindness derives from a kind of over-enthusiasm – the cornucopian premise. I would argue (influenced by Illich) that this predilection has deeper roots: in the very notion of environment as Cartesian space through which commodities can circulate with no essential change in quality. The model for this kind of circulation is money – pure medium, with no real content. To reduce the world to commodities or resources is to literally devalue it – ultimately, to equate it with zero.

Recycling is widely viewed as an alternative to waste. But Nature neither wastes nor recycles: she transforms. I believe that humans can and must follow Nature if we are truly to “conserve” our “environment” – inadequate terms that may well be unequal to the task ahead. We need to reinvent the language of use and waste, to begin thinking instead of care and healing. For illustrations of the sorts of directions in which this could lead, I’ll cite just two examples, both from Africa.

“Art from Africa’s junkyards,” an article by Gloria Goodale in the March 21, 2003 Christian Science Monitor, described an exhibition of Senegalese Sufi art that had just opened in Los Angeles.

“Lilting dance music fills the rooms in the first US display of Senegalese Sufi art. But it is not just another piece of radio noise.

“The song, ‘Do You Hear Me, Father Bamba?’ is by the well-known Sufi singer, Youssou N’Dour, singing to his faithful and exhorting them to show their faith in everyday life.

“Indeed, showing the faith might be a good way to describe the intention of ‘A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal,’ at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angeles, through July 27.

“Through various art forms, including murals, glass paintings, and fragile historical documents, the show depicts a community-building vision of Islam that stands in stark contrast to Islamist radicals. ‘This is another, and very important face of Islam,’ says co-curator Allen Roberts, UCLA professor of World Arts and Culture.

“The exhibition, which Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight dubbed as one of L.A.’s top nine art events for 2003, ‘actually began in the junkyards of Senegal,’ says Mary Nooter Roberts, chief curator of the Fowler Museum.

“She and her husband, co- curator Allen Roberts, were in the country nearly 10 years ago and noticed that discarded motor parts were being hammered into sieves. The exhibition explores the impact of one of the most important Sufi movements in the sub-Saharan African nation, known as Mouridism.

“‘There is this thing called the mystique du travail,’ she says, referring to the French phrase ‘the mystique of work,’ that surrounds the Mouridians. ‘They take this dedication to work as a means to salvation to something far beyond even the Protestant work ethic.’

“The Mouridism movement was founded by the Sufi poet and mystic, Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), the spiritual leader of some 4 million Senegalese Muslims, including the country’s current president. The most important tenets of the religion are pacifism and hard work, says Ms. Roberts.

“Mouridians, she says, are known for transforming derelict areas of a community into vibrant, livable centers for commerce and political life, through their devotion to labor. Images of the detritus of industrial life being turned into useful objects abound. One photo shows vast piles of oil barrels that will be flattened into trunks.”

Although this article is no longer available for free on the Internet, another, much longer and more scholarly article is. A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal was authored by the exhibition’s curators, Allen F. and Mary Nooter Roberts, and appeared in African Arts magazine (Winter 2002). Roberts and Roberts identify the Muslim concept of baraka, or blessing, as the catalyst for the Mouride synthesis of life and art. Though others have translated this blessing power as “charisma,” they feel the word “aura” does more justice to its popular Senegalese usage. I like the way they put some fairly abstruse theory into play here:

“‘Aura,’ from the Greek, literally means a ‘breeze’ or ‘breath’ (OED 1982:565), and is extended to refer to the inherence of power and presence within a work of art (Freedberg 1989). ‘In the auratic experience the object becomes human, as it were’ (Foster 1988:197), and possesses the capacity to produce a response, bestow well-being, and protect its viewers. Through the theorizing of Walter Benjamin and the debates his work has engendered, ‘aura’ has also come to be associated with the ‘authenticity of a thing … [and] the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced’ (1988:221). When Benjamin wrote that ‘to perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return’ (1988:188), he might have been speaking of a Mouride sense of how their icons possess baraka. That an image with aura has ‘weight, opacity and substance’ and ‘never quite reveals its secret[s]’ (Baudrillard 1983:22-23) also echoes Mouride sentiments. Above all else, Mourides feel that baraka does things: it works, changes, and helps.”

And as the Monitor passage indicates, this is no fringe movement. In the 1980s, Roberts and Roberts note, “At a moment of dire tensions between urban youth and the Senegalese government over a lack of jobs and the collapse of basic city services, young people took to the streets–not to riot, as had been feared, but to refabulate their neighborhoods. That is, they cleaned, reclaimed, repainted, and renamed alienated spaces by endowing them with icons of their own imaginary [sic]. Instead of reminding people of colonial humiliations, new monuments and murals celebrated soccer stars, musicians, politicians, human-rights heroes, and above all, the saints of Senegalese Sufism. Portraits of Amadou Bamba figured importantly in this vibrant collage, and the Saint emerged as an ‘alternative figure in nationalist memory’ standing for and promoting both ‘a rupture in postcolonial memory’ and a ‘new modernity’ (Mamadou Diouf, personal communication, 1995).”

Given that one out of every three sub-Saharan Africans is a Muslim, and considering the instrumental role of Sufi brotherhoods in spreading this more tolerant form of African Islam from the 18th century onwards, we are not grasping at straws here to glimpse in Mouridism the shape of a new and more civilized future. But the inspiration need not be Muslim – or even explicitly religious. From the other end of the continent, Steve Biko delineated “Some African Cultural Concepts” in an essay later selected for The African Philosophy Reader, edited by P.H. Coetzee and A.P.J. Roux and published by Routledge in 1998.

Biko describes African society as fundamentally humanistic and communalistic. He contrasts this with Europeans, among whom “a visitor to someone’s house, with the exception of friends, is always met with the question ‘What can I do for you?'” Seeing people as instruments, as “agents for some particular function” is foreign to the Bantu worldview, he maintains. “We believe in the inherent goodness of man. We enjoy man for himself. We regard our living together not as an unfortunate mishap warranting endless competition among us but a deliberate act of God to make us a community of brothers and sisters jointly involved in the quest for a composite answer to the varied problems of life.”

While these views may be anathema to those who buy into the cant about an ineluctable conflict between “anthropocentrism” and “biocentrism,” I would merely point out that it is precisely our distaste for each others’ company here in the U.S. that fuels the on-going orgy of road building, SUV manufacturing and suburban and exurban sprawl. If Americans were more like Africans, there’d be a hell of a lot more unfragmented wild habitat left, and the air would be a lot cleaner, too.

This humanistic philosophy is on display in another, more recent article from the Christian Science Monitor (they specialize in this kind of hopeful stuff): “From Rubble to Revival,” by Megan Lindow (Feb. 26, 2004). It details the successful struggle of a South African artist, Mandla Mentoor, to galvanize his neighbors and turn their Soweto neighborhood around. Mentoor began as a local activist focused on unemployment, crime, and environmental degradation. He traces his inspiration to the student protest movement of the 1976, in which Steve Biko had played a leading role.

“At first, he says, he recruited young people and unemployed women to salvage paper, cans, and other waste materials to sell, but he quickly realized this was not the best way to make money. So he developed Amandla Waste Creations and began teaching people to use these materials to make low-cost building materials and crafts such as papier-mí¢ché and wire sculptures to sell to tourists. . . . The organization’s first real grant money came when Mentoor won the World Wilderness Forum’s Green Trust Award in 2002. Mentoor’s group voted to use the prize money ($1,500) to buy rakes and masks needed to clean up ‘the mountain.'”

The neighborhood’s visual focal point, a little hillock topped by a water tower, had been strewn with garbage – the legacy of over a decade of local tax revolts against the Apartheid regime, which led to the cessation of all garbage pick-up services. “Criminals frequented the area, women were raped, and local people sometimes found abandoned babies and dead bodies in the rubble, Mentoor recalls. He had the vision to look past all that: to see, instead of wasted space, a unique and powerful place, the neighborhood’s true heart.

“Today . . . the trash is gone, and patches of dusty hillside have been planted with trees and vegetable gardens. Residents have built makeshift theaters and cooking huts, and walls of rock have been piled up to form ‘dialogue circles’ – spaces for meetings, parties, and performances.

“Projects like this reflect a ‘greening’ movement that is slowly spreading in neglected urban townships and degraded rural settlements, where most South Africans live,” the article continues. Part of Mentoor’s genius was to recognize the importance of creating ties to place through community gardening, art, even renaming: “We call this place Somoho, the Soweto Mountain of Hope.” And though the article focuses largely on his vision, it’s clear that hundreds of people are now involved and employed in enterprises ranging from bakeries and sewing shops to film and recording studios.

“Sydney Cindi, who runs the waste-art section of the program, says he’s trying to get young people involved so they won’t make the mistakes he did. He learned to work with clay in prison, where he served four years for robbery. ‘To me, Somoho is not just a project, it’s a school of learning,’ he says. ‘When we started on the mountain it was a dumping place. Now it’s a place where people sit under the trees.'”

“We reject the power-based society of the Westerner that seems to be ever concerned with perfecting their technological know-how while losing out on their spiritual dimension,” Steve Biko declared. “We believe that in the long run the special contribution to the world by Africa will be in this field of human relationships. The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa – giving the world a more human face.” God grant that it be so!

The joy of fishes

Some came for the pageantry, some for the throat singing, some just to show their support for a Free Tibet. But for me, the whole reason to see the itinerant troupe of Tibetan monks a second time was to watch a three-minute debate in a language that I cannot understand.

Repeat viewers who, like my friend Jo, had been attracted to the interpreter the first time around must’ve been disappointed. In place of the charismatic, 50-something pony-tailed Anglo here was a native Tibetan woodenly reciting his memorized lines, like one of those awful teenage tour guides you get when visiting a local cave during the summer months. “Up-ahead-on-the-left-you-can-see-the-head-of-Abraham-Lincoln-and-right-below-him-is-Pocahontas-both-were-formed-by-natural-geologic-processes-to-resemble-these-symbols-of-our-nation. Now-we-approach-the-most-beautiful-formation-in-the-cave-which-is-the-Potala-Palace.”

What a difference a good interpreter can make, especially with stuff so far outside the normal scope of Middle American life. The pony-tailed dude knew exactly what reactions to anticipate, spoke spontaneously and with charm, and got most everyone enthused about what they were watching. He gave a five-minute tutorial on throat singing, with audience participation, so we could “all go home and practice in the shower.” When it came time for the one unrehearsed item on the program, the demonstration of an Actual Monastic Debate, he set it up in such a fashion that we were all on the edge of our seats.

Debate, in the Gelug order especially, is a spectator sport. The umpire sits on the floor, facing the audience, behind the two debaters. One pitches, the other bats. The batter sits to the umpire’s left (if memory serves) and the pitcher stands to his right. I can’t remember all the details, but I retain a strong impression of total focus and earnest vehemence. The one I call the pitcher makes his points not just with his mouth and hands, but with his whole body. The dance is elemental: little more than an abbreviated version of the Texas two-step. The pitcher’s words are expelled with great force and a kind of throwing-down-the-gauntlet gesture, his pitching arm winding back, swinging around and coming down with emphatic suddenness as he lunges toward his opponent, open hand face-up going THWACK against the palm of his other hand.

The batter is almost unmoved. Cross-legged, hands on his knees, he appears to rock backward just a hair – or is that an illusion, a trick on our suggestible vision, analogous to the overtones that emerge from the weird mingling of voices during throat singing? The batter’s reply is no less vehement but it appears to come straight from the belly – or some other place of great stillness. Hardly a moment elapses before his opponent fires back, and he responds with the same immediacy.

We are mesmerized. It’s like watching the ocean. The waves come in, smash against the rocks, withdraw. What in God’s name makes this so damned interesting?

Then suddenly it’s over. The umpire does something with his eyebrows, murmurs something and they stop. All three laugh, relaxed. The audience laughs, then applauds uproariously.

Who won? Who cares! What were they arguing about? The first time I saw them the interpreter did try and summarize it, but his explanation made little sense – how could it? They might as well have been arguing about how many buddhas can dance on the head of a vajra. Actually, I’m sure it was some matter of life-and-death importance, but the terms used, even if translated into the most vernacular English, would only be comprehensible to those who have spent their lives in that particular garden of the text, the Tibetan Buddhist canon. And perhaps because we didn’t understand them, we are left feeling as if we have witnessed something timeless and universal: a scene from the ancient Athenian agora, the Babylonian Talmud in the making, Chuang-Tzu sparring with the logician Hui Shih. Something almost forgotten in the Christian West since the days of Peter Abelard, who turned public debate into something vicious. In place of the more gentlemanly, ritualized style then in fashion, Abelard – the leading light of the new University of Paris – sought nothing less than to emasculate his opponent as he in turn was emasculated.

Watching the Tibetans reminded us that the exercise of reason need not be a fight to the finish. It can take the form of a kung fu display rather than a boxing match, and at times it can resemble t’ai ch’i more closely than kung fu. Buddhist mediation techniques can train us in the art of detachment, transform us into removed observers of the play of ideas arising spontaneously within our own minds. But what about passion? We live our lives in dialogue, and dialogue – very broadly defined! – is the source of our truest joy. “Humans live in Dao like fish live in water,” says the ancient Chinese text Chuang-Tzu (Zhuangzi).

Chuang-Tzu and Hui Shih were strolling on the bridge above the Hao river.

‘Out swim the minnows, so easy and free,’ said Chuang-tzu. ‘That’s how fish are happy.’

‘You are not a fish. Whence do you know the fish are happy?’

‘You aren’t me, whence do you know that I don’t know the fish are happy?’

‘We’ll grant that not being you I don’t know about you. You’ll grant that you are not a fish, and that completes the case that you don’t know the fish are happy.’

‘Let’s go back to where we started. When you said “Whence do you know the fish are happy?” you asked me the question already knowing that I knew. I knew it from above the Hao.’

– A. C. Graham, trans., Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters (Hackett, 2001)

A page later in the Graham translation (which rearranges the original text according to subject matter) comes Chuang-Tzu’s touching tribute to his friend:

Chuang-Tzu, among the mourners in a funeral procession, was passing by the grave of Hui Shih. He turned round and said to the attendants,

‘There was a man of Ying who, when he got a smear of plaster no thicker than a fly’s wing on the tip of his nose, would make Carpenter Shih slice it off. Carpenter Shih would raise the wind whirling his hatchet, wait for the moment, and slice it; every speck of plaster would be gone without hurt to the nose, while the man of Ying stood there perfectly composed.

‘Lord Yüan of Sung heard about it, summoned Carpenter Shih and said “Let me see you do it.” “As for my side of the act,” said Carpenter Shih, “I did use to be able to slice it off. However, my partner has been dead for a long time.”

‘Since the Master died, I have had no one to use as a partner, no one with whom to talk about things.’
__________

What about women, then? See Feminist aggadah (and the two posts following/above it) for one answer.

Snowmelt

On three sides of my cottage
the creek roars HUSH.
Inside, nothing but this
damn computer!

*

Out on the porch at 4:00 a.m.
to watch the snow melt.
You laugh, but listen:
the fog came and went.
Lifted,
returned. You
can ask the moon.

*

A raccoon thought it was
the only one awake.
“Hey!”
The two of us can’t be alone
on one porch.

*

Before the snow came
to stay, I had visitors.

*

I still remember the hound dog look
on that hound dog’s face
when he squatted to take a shit.

*

When the snow finally recedes, I find
the meadow voles have made off
with half my lawn.

*

Every spring, bigger holes
show a little more of the spring
that runs
under the lawn.
To ease confusion, let’s call the season
sink.

*

Instant poems for immediate post.
My letter to the world, Emily.
A weblog instead of a steamer trunk.

*

Read ’em while they’re fresh.
I’ll make more.

Braided creek

Take the wisdom-in-brevity of The Greek Anthology, combine using the renku verve of The Monkey’s Straw Raincoat, and season with the bloozy spontaneity of Lightnin’ Hopkins. The result should come out quite close to Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2003). I can’t describe it any better than the back cover blurb – which is the only word of explanation:

“Longtime friends, Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser always exchanged poems in their letter writing. After Kooser was diagnosed with cancer several years ago, Harrison found that his friend’s poetry became ‘overwhelmingly vivid,’ and they began a correspondence comprised entirely of brief poems, ‘because that was the essence of what we wanted to say to each other.’

“In these epigrammatic, aphoristic poems, two accomplished poets explore love and friendship and their passionate search for a little wisdom, pausing to celebrate the natural world, aging, everyday things and scenes, and poetry itself. When asked about attributions for the individual poems, one of them replied, ‘Everyone gets tired of this continuing cult of the personality…This book is an assertion in favor of poetry and against credentials.”

I was reminded of this book, which I just acquired last year, by an interchange about Jim Harrison in a comment thread at Tom Montag’s blog. Since two of my most lyrical blogging compatriots think so highly of him, I guess I’d better hie me to the local university library and check out some of his other books.

In the meantime, I’m sure the best way to introduce Braided Creek to you all would be to reproduce a given section of four or more poems in sequence. But as I read around in it this morning, I kept encountering individual verses that reminded me of the blogs and bloggers I follow most faithfully, along with one or two of Via Negativa’s most patient readers.

This, for example, brought to mind a recent post of CB’s:

The one-eyed man must be fearful
of being taken for a birdhouse.

and this another (I’d link to the individual posts, but the links don’t seem to work):

Imagine a gallery
where all the paintings
opened and closed their wings!

For Tom Montag, Marco Polo of the Middlewest:

So the Greeks had amphorae
with friezes of nymphs.
We have coffee mugs with ads
for farm equipment!

Plus this one, surely written by Harrison up in Michigan:

The old Finn (85) walks
twenty-five miles to see his brother.
Why? “I don’t have no car.”

For the Zen dog-walker Lorianne – aside from the mismatched gender, this seemed perfect:

“What would I do for wisdom,”
I cried out as a young man.
Evidently not much. Or so it seems.
Even on walks I follow the dog.

For Helen and Harry, soldiering on through the night and fog at Unknown News:

DNA shows that I’m the Unknown Soldier.
I can’t hear the birds down here,
only politicians shitting out their mouths.

This one reminded me of Beth, the indomitable curator of the Cassandra Pages:

I might have been a welder,
kneeling at a fountain of sparks
in my mask of stars.

For Dale, whose often details the difficulties of precise visualization and other aspects of his Vajrayana practice:

Oh, to write just one poem
that would last as long as that rose
tattooed on her butt!

And in a slightly more serious vein:

The sparrow is not busy,
but hungry.

For Ivy, a real poet who uses emoticons in her comments, and ponders such practical issues as how to conduct oneself at a poetry reading:

The poet holds the podium
in both hands
like a garbage bag full of words.

I have mentioned several times my friend the Voudun initiate. He is also a self-styled wizard and – more to the point – the official archivist of this weblog. His name, too, is Dave. This one’s for you, old hound:

My wife’s lovely dog, Mary, kills
butterflies. They’re easier than birds.
I wonder if Buddha had dog nature.

Then there’s the blithe spirit who reads but rarely leaves a trace, my friend the Sylph. Our conversations sound a bit like this. She admonishes me:

Some days
one needs to hide
from possibility.

And I reply:

Turtle has just one plan
at a time, and every cell
buys into it.

But Caliban always thinks he can be Prospero, I admonish myself.

What prizes and awards will I get for revealing
the location of the human soul? As Nixon said,
I know how to win the war but I’m not telling.

__________

Please support Copper Canyon Press – if you already own Braided Creek, buy some of their other titles. They’re doing it right.

Giving ourselves up

From the AP’s daily dispatch of disinformation comes this puzzling statement:

Without ruling on el Motassadeq’s guilt, the appeals court said the lower court erred because it failed to consider whether the lack of direct evidence from Binalshibh should have influenced its decision.

A lawyer for relatives of Sept. 11 at both trials, Andreas Schulz, said Thursday’s ruling “will certainly be met with incomprehension” by them.

What does it mean to brag about one’s own (or one’s clients’) willful ignorance in this context? Could ignorance be somehow essential to innocence, that sine qua non of victimhood? It certainly inspires more pathos to imagine (say) new prisoners at Auschwitz actually believing the death camp’s motto, “Arbiter Macht Frei” (Work Makes [You] Free). But what about those among the prisoners who were both well aware of the fate that awaited all the camp’s inhabitants, and who were appointed by the Nazis to positions of power over their fellows? Doesn’t the consideration of their fate and motives somewhat muddy the “moral clarity” that neo-conservative nabobs are always nattering about? What does it mean to talk about “victim’s rights” if the right to reconciliation, the right to hold or withhold forgiveness, is routinely overshadowed by the demand for retribution? Should the wronged party in fact be permitted to claim a right to retribution, or should simple recompense suffice?

****

I wonder if the victim of a crime can ever be repaid in the way that retributive justice seems to demand. In Germanic tribal law, blood guilt could only be averted through arbitration, and the victim (or the victim’s next of kin, in the case of murder) agreeing to some settlement, usually monetary. For truly heinous crimes, exile was the severest penalty. By contrast, in our supposedly more enlightened society, most people don’t see anything wrong with making someone pay for murder, say, by depriving them of freedom and dignity and subjecting them to privation and often extreme violence and psychological trauma for the rest of their life. And we consider this more humane than simply executing them, which at least has the advantage of proportionality to the crime.

“Primitive” law codes, written or unwritten, express a tautological truth that many seem now to have lost sight of: that the legal system was developed to avert lawlessness. Lawlessness, in tribal societies such as those of the ancient Germans or Western Semitic peoples, did not mean primarily “lack of obedience to authority,” because authority tended to be fluid and decentralized. Rather, social disorder equated to illegitimate violence: another tautology. Better to say: disproportionate violence, violence that spirals or threatens to spiral out of control. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” may seem vengeful, but in fact it was intended to replace “an arm for an eye and your firstborn’s life for my tooth.”

What is it about the cycle of revenge that tends to send it spiraling out of control? Years ago my father came up with a physical analogy to describe what happens when individuals remain mired in their own points-of-view. “‘I was willing to go halfway, but he was not!’ How many times do we hear this sort of statement advanced as self-evident proof of reasonableness and good intentions?” my father asked rhetorically. “But here: let’s look at each other from a few feet away. Now, I am going to put my finger where I think the halfway point is. You do the same.” Between our fingers a gap of a few inches remained.

His conclusion: we each have to be willing to go more than half-way toward the other, from our own perspective, if harmony is to be preserved. There must be give as well as take. Is this not the root meaning of forgiveness, I wonder: to give in excess of that which strict justice would seem to require?

****

Martin Luther King: “Peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.” In this sort of usage, I think, justice is invested with a broader meaning that encompasses both fairness and harmony. It includes seeing oneself as another and seeing another as oneself. To practice respect, to engage in hospitality. It’s not so difficult, really. As the quote with which we began this inquiry strongly suggests, willful ignorance is essential if we are to cling stubbornly to our own perspectives, insist on our unique and fundamental victimhood. No qualifiers are permitted; nuance is impossible. It is an outrage. The very ground cries out for blood.

But simple hospitality and mutual respect do not suffice to bring about social harmony. For proof, one need look no farther than the perpetually warring tribesmen of northern Yemen, or other parts of the world where the canons of hospitality are strictly observed. A more radical form of hospitality seems to be in order, one that transcends bilateral relationships to perceive the intricate web in which we all move, human and non-human alike, the living and the dead and the generations yet to come.

What might such a perspective entail? What are its preconditions? Does it depend upon religious institutions for its propagation, or might it flourish more readily beyond their reach? These are each huge questions; any answers I propose now or in the future must remain highly tentative.

****

A few angles of approach do suggest themselves. One is the possible centrality of the very kind of unknowing that has been the underlying theme of this weblog. In contrast to willful ignorance, which involves a self-conscious refusing to look/hear/understand, what I call “unknowing” describes a realization of inadequacy to anything approaching full and comprehensive vision/hearing/apprehension. Knowing that one doesn’t know is essential to understanding, both at the mundane and supramundane levels. At the supramundane level, I suppose, one comes acropper of the unknowability of Creation, the way in which the material world exceeds mater/matter at every turn – the way in which “a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” And “more beautiful is the hunt than the pelt,” as the Dutch proverb has it, because when that which is hidden gives itself up for dead, we run the great risk of accepting a diminished role as killer, rather than recipient of a gift which is never fully deserved.

So we can perhaps draw a parallel with the religious concept of faith – not in the usual Christian sense of blind, unwavering belief in absurd propositions, which probably belongs more under the heading of willful ignorance. What I have in mind here is something more universal: the religious person’s sense that they must give themselves up to a higher or deeper power. “No gesture is more significant,” says the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, “than the joined hands of a believer, mutely witnessing that nothing can be done and nothing changed, and that he comes simply to give himself up.” Or in that wonderful phrase of Heschel’s I quoted last week, “Faith is not a product of our will. It occurs without intention, without will. Words expire when uttered, and faith is like the silence that draws lovers near, like a breath that shares in the wind.”

There is a feyness to such faith – a sense of ourselves as hunters no longer, but helpless prey. Lambs of God the great predator. I am reminded of a Vishnavite devotional painting that depicts the petitioner stretched supine across the knees of a multi-armed, multi-headed manifestation of the Godhead, Whose foremost arms end in the razor-clawed forepaws of a lion. The petitioner has been disemboweled; the Divinity’s fangs drip with blood. The petitioner gazes upward, rapt, enraptured.

This sounds horrific until one recalls that god and worshipper are not immutable roles. From the vantage-point of evolution, humans appear as both predator and prey. In the strictly religious realm, one goal in many traditions is personal transcendence through moksa, nirvana, imitatio Christi, etc. God can die within us (in the dark night, in the cloud of unknowing) just as we can die within God. When we partake of the sacrificial lamb or the wafer or the psychadelic mushroom, we are consuming the flesh of God, dissolving it within our own bellies. In these and many other ways, individual human beings are encouraged to strive for a realization that experience and thoughtful reflection tells us is beyond our powers. We need to somehow unite our own inadequate power with what the Pure Land Buddhists call simply Other-Power.

Usually outside the religious realm (at least here in the West) is the self-transcendence experienced during sex. But sex is an interesting case because, at least in its heterosexual form, it contains the implicit promise of a form of literal self-exceeding not possible with other altered states. (The Vajrayanists might argue with me here. I don’t discount at least the possibility of emanation-bodies and the like.) The literature on so-called entheogens – mind-altering drugs used for religious purposes – does suggest that shared visions are possible and even common, at least in some South American traditions. And as Andrew Weil once pointed out, the mind can be trained to do on its own anything that it can be made to do through chemicals. This, incidentally, may reduce the sense of dependence on gods and spirits but, if anything, increases one’s reliance on Other-Power in the form of the guru. Be that as it may, we should be careful not to succumb to the current fashion of treating sex as the standard by which all other self-transcending experiences must be measured. (Western science, too, can breed a form of fundamentalism!)

****

This discussion of self-transcendence brings us back to the subject of my two most recent posts. Recall, first, Tedlock’s comments about the Newekwe transcending all boundaries. Recall too how the Mudheads offered a graphic representation of material or biological being as grotesque. In the medieval European culture of the carnival, we saw the material body celebrated for its self-transcendence. “It is a body in the act of becoming . . . It is continually built, created, and builds another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world,” Bakhtin writes.

This returns us to the dance of predator and prey: “the gaping mouth, the teeth, the swallowing” are central images in the popular-festive system, connecting life and death, the banquet and the underworld. In greater Mesoamerica, of which Zuni was a far-flung part, the swallowing and disgorging underworld merged with the image of the world serpent (roughly analogous to the Sumerian Tiamat, ancestral to the West Semitic Leviathan).

In the Zuni worldview, culture involves a necessary but somehow tragic relinquishing of power: we are literally and figuratively less than our animal selves. Zuni creation myths offer an indigenous analogy to the now-discredited Darwinist myth expressed in the formula “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” The Zuni believe their ancestors emerged from their original home in the dark and watery underworld with webbed fingers and toes, tails and extra sets of genitals on their heads – they were all basically Mudheads. Interestingly, it was a sinister character known as the First Witch who performed the job of civilizing the ancestral Zuni, bringing death into the world at the same time. I am greatly oversimplifying, of course, but this ought to give at least a hint of the kind of deep ambiguity with which the Zuni view our separation from Nature, and the utopian idealism that motivates their efforts to escape the tyranny of death and the dailiness of civilized existence. Levi-Strauss was sufficiently impressed by Zuni theorizing (as recorded originally by Frank Cushing and translated into French) to title one of his influential volumes on structuralist anthropological theory The Raw and the Cooked.

The notion here is of humans as eaters-of-cooked-food who “are what they eat.” Before a newborn can be given a name, shown the sun and welcomed into the world, it must first be “cooked”: placed in a bed of gently heated sand every day for ten days. The originally African practice of circumcision involves a somewhat related realization that to be civilized is to be reduced or refined (the analogy here is with metallurgy and alchemy).

Frank Cushing himself, in his ever-popular monograph Zuni Fetiches, captures the Zuni understanding of their position in the chain of being through a formulation just general enough to permit comparisons with a large number of traditional societies the world over. “The animals, because alike mortal and endowed with similar physical functions and organs, are considered more nearly related to man than are the gods; more nearly related to the gods than is man, because more mysterious, and characterized by specific instincts and powers which man does not of himself possess.”

****

But of course modern science must show these ancient intuitions to be inaccurate, right? I’m not so sure. The capacity of other animals to experience joy and sorrow, to dream, to anticipate, to recognize their own images in mirrors are fairly well attested now. Several years ago, in an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, psychologist Frans B. M. de Waal reviewed the literature on empathy in rats and monkeys and concluded that, if anything, these creatures displayed more empathy than humans might have shown under similar circumstances. “Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the strength of empathy in monkeys came from a group of psychiatrists led by Jules Masserman at Northwestern University. The researchers reported in 1964 in the American Journal of Psychiatry that rhesus monkeys refuse to pull a chain that delivers food to themselves if doing so gives a shock to a companion. One monkey stopped pulling the chain for 12 days after witnessing another monkey receive a shock. Those primates were literally starving themselves to avoid shocking another animal, clearly a stronger reaction than that of the rats in [Russell] Church’s experiments.”

De Waal proposes some possible explanations for the existence of empathy. One is “emotional contagion” – the way in which even human infants will experience distress at the distress of another. De Waal notes that, though many theorists consider emotional contagion a peculiarly human trait, he has observed it quite commonly among infant rhesus monkeys as well.

“In all of those studies, the most likely explanation of the rats’ and monkeys’ behavior seems to be what, in humans, is called personal distress. That means that the acts of apparent kindness are not based on a concern about the other’s welfare but rather are a way of dealing with the distress of seeing the distress of another individual. For example, young children often get teary-eyed and upset – and run back to their mothers for reassurance – when they see another child fall and cry. They cry not because they are concerned about the other child, but because that child’s emotions vicariously overwhelm them. It is only later, when children develop a distinction between self and other, that they learn to fully separate another’s emotions from their own.”

Or to put it another way, animals and young children experience distress at the distress of another because they have not (or not yet) learned to fully distinguish between themselves and others. As cultured animals, human beings differ from the others not so much in our “level of consciousness” – an obnoxious conceit that implies a hierarchical arrangement with guess who at the top – but in our degree of self-consciousness. That is, our alienation. Thus there is, I believe, a trade-off. And rather than exhaust my limited supply of adjectives along with whatever remains of the reader’s patience, I’ll end by quoting from Rilke’s Eighth Elegy (Duino Elegies, translated by Edward Snow, North Point Press, 2000).

With all its eyes the animal world
beholds the Open. Only our eyes
are as if inverted and set all around it
like traps at its portals to freedom.
What’s outside we only know from the animal’s
countenance; for almost from the first we take a child
and twist him round and force him to gaze
backwards and take in structure, not the Open
that lies so deep in an animal’s face. Free from death.
Only
we see death; the free animal has its demise
perpetually behind it and before it always
God, and when it moves, it moves into eternity,
the way brooks and running springs move. . . .

__________

For a Buddhist perspective on what this Open might look like, and how the self might be transcended, see Dale’s discussion of “Ye Emptynesse of Selfe” at Vajrayana Practice

Houston, we have a problem . . .

In yesterday’s post I had wanted to balance Barbara Tedlock’s description of the Mudheads with a quote about Zuni’s other major order of clowns, the Newekwe, but I ran out of room. In any case, so much has been written about the Zuni in the last 130 years, and their society is so unbelievably complex, it would be nearly impossible to do justice to any aspect of their culture in just one or two posts.

I should mention that my familiarity with this literature stems from a project a couple years ago when I was doing research for my book length poem Cibola. Set in the spring of 1539, the poem attempts to re-create the fateful encounter between the Ashiwi (which is what the Zuni call themselves) and the African shaman-conquistador Esteban. Shiwanna (Zuni) then consisted of six or seven separate pueblos that sat astride the main east-west trade route connecting the High Plains with the Pacific – a conduit for goods such as white shell and buffalo hides – and was also at the terminus of a north-south trade route, source of the ritually important scarlet macaw feathers. There is good reason to suppose that the trade in religious ceremonies and spirit beings (call them gods if you wish) was equally brisk. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the Zuni received a new dance from their traditional enemies and trading partners the Navajo which is still performed today. This dance was intended as a remedy for a specific disease outbreak; forgive me if I can’t remember which one (most of the materials I consulted were from the university library). And at the end of the nineteenth century, the Zuni were equally grateful for the assistance of Mormons from a nearby settlement in combating another epidemic, though no new ceremony was gleaned from this experience, as the Mormons relied on faith healing through the laying-on of hands.

Thus, the violent reception of Esteban in 1539 was a mysterious anomaly in Zuni’s history of generally peaceful interchange with its neighbors. (In brief, I believe the Esteban-Marcos expedition was correctly understood as the advance guard for a mission of spiritual conquest, based on a few accidental parallels with other such missions that may have occurred periodically in the region, beginning as far back as the rise of the Chaco/Anasazi culture in the 11th century.) What is most important to understand is the absolute centrality of healing – broadly understood as the proper integration of the individual body and the body politic with the cosmos – to Pueblo religion. Like other religious specialists in Zuni, the clowns are, first and foremost, medicine men.

And as a matter of fact, the Newekwe clowns are regarded as the most powerful among all the myriad religious orders. I believe this relates, once again, to the necessity of laughter, farce and parody as a kind of catalyst for all major transformations. Like Ghede in Haitian religion, the Newekwe command the crossroads between the human and spirit worlds. They resemble our image of a clown or jester much more closely than the Mudheads. They perform between dances in most major festivals, and every performance is a completely original skit. They are permitted to break every taboo, and do so with great glee. Such taboo-breaking very often includes the celebration of the material bodily realm – burlesques of sexual intercourse, non-faked consumption of urine and excrement. Nor is the parody of their more serious brethren off-limits. What Bakhtin described as official and unofficial religious expressions, in the case of medieval Europe, here exist side-by side or in alternation.

Newekwe (the second vowel is long, hence it is sometimes written Neweekwe) means something like Milky Way People, but their “cosmic” nature is anything but ethereal. Bakhtin would have been delighted to hear where they locate the center of the microcosmos: exactly where the carnival locates it, in the belly. “Membership [comes] when a person with a stomach ailment [seeks] help from the society. Neweekwe knowledge not only cures stomach aches but enables clowns to eat any kind, or amount, of food or garbage, including human excrement, and to engage in outrageous public behavior without shame,” Barbara Tedlock writes. By all accounts, even from observers who didn’t understand a word of the language, the Newekwe are extremely funny.

Incidentally, if I quote exclusively from The Beautiful and the Dangerous, that’s only in part because I don’t have many other sources at my elbow. It’s simply one of the best books ever written about the Zuni. It ranks with anything by the justly celebrated Frank Cushing, in fact, whose late 19th-century observations, collected in a number of monographs and anthologies, would be my only other source of corroborating quotes if I had them handy.

Newekwe healing can be seen most clearly in the way they help the tribe to adjust to the shocks of change, acting as interpreters for the often very threatening world that presses in from every side. For example, from the time of the Sputnik launch onward, Newekwe performances began to include burlesques of white men in space. And with the moon landing of Apollo 11, Zunis were faced with a “new threat to their religious beliefs. If what the studio cameras recorded was true and not merely a studio fiction, then the Moon Mother, who together with the Sun Father is the ultimate source of all light and life, had been violated by two crew cuts in a metal space capsule. Not only did these men fail to practice sexual abstinence and make offerings of jeweled cornmeal and prayer feathers before they visited the Moon Mother, but they tramped around on her, planting a TV camera, seismometer, mirror array, solar-wind detector, and a permanently curled plastic American flag in her belly. And then, just before departing, they removed nearly fifty pounds of soil and rock, her sacred flesh, without offering her so much as a prayer.” Tedlock’s informants described the whole space program as Exhibit A to support the general contention that white men are all witches, or spiritual adversaries – “harbingers of the coming of death to the world.”

One afternoon shortly after the disastrous Apollo 13 mission, Tedlock joined the rapt audience as “an astronaut clown climbed up on the tallest building in the Old Pueblo and, making a round ball of himself, was tossed aloft in a blanket by a group of clowns. When he landed on the plaza below, he was surrounded by clowns bearing a stretcher. They hauled him over near the central kiva to a group of nurses and doctors, who examined him carefully with their stethoscopes, pounded him all over with their rubber hammers, took his blood pressure, made him pee into a paper cup, gave him a series of shots in both arms and buttocks with a giant hypodermic syringe, then asked him what it was like on the moon. He reported that there were people, animals, mountains, volcanoes, lakes and watermelons – all to howls of laughter.

“Over and over clowns dressed as satellites, rockets and astronauts ran madly around the village, threw one another into the air, and fell off roofs. Finally, in a wonderfully risqué skit, a clown from Houston Control telephoned the moon to talk with ‘The Man in the Moon Mother.’ Audiences laughed and laughed at the absurdity of space exploration . . . ”

The other Newekwe skits Tedlock describes in detail parodied the annual Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, making fun not just of other Indians but, more incisively, of Indians who play Indians and the white people who love or hate them. Role reversal and travesty abounded: the “Indians” put drunk “Whitemen” in jail; a transvestite sang “Indian Love Call” in a screeching falsetto; make-believe Plains Indian fancydancers rotated on their bellies in the dirt. And to cap things off, the newly elected members of the tribal council were forced to participate in a blasphemous skit mocking their office and parodying their supposed greed.

“Neweekwe clowning, because it revolves around a continuing discovery, or rediscovery, of religious and secular boundaries, provides an anticreed for a religion that lacks any formal creed, or codified body of doctrine. Beyond creeds and anticreeds, the clowns, by their burlesques, display their ultimate detachment from the particulars of religious beliefs of all kinds. . . . In their gluttony the clowns even violate the boundaries of their biological being: not satisfied with saying the unsayable, they eat the inedible.

“Their path is finally that of the Milky Way, arching clear across the night sky. From this perspective, they see boundaries, of whatever sort, as easy hurdles rather than as walls. Which is why they never laugh at their own jokes but, by causing others to laugh at the leaping of a boundary, share a moment of shamanic detachment with the uninitiated.”

Clown societies such as the Newekwe have probably played a central role in the cultural survival of the Pueblo and Din&#233 peoples. As Aldous Huxley seemed to recognize with his portrayal of Zuni in Brave New World, it is quite possible that we will ourselves fall victim to the on-going spiritual conquest of the Americas – and the world, and worlds beyond – long before these wise and good-humored people ever lose their sense of balance – or their bounce.
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Barabara Tedlock’s The Beautiful and the Dangerous remains in print. As a Penguin book, it should be easy to order from your local independent bookstore. But here are the links to Amazon and Powell’s for those who, like me, lack that option.

Unlike the Rio Grande pueblos (which were much more traumatized by Spanish rule), Zuni remains open to tourists during its frequent ritual performances, though photography is strictly forbidden. As the official website of the Zuni Tourism Department says, “there are restrictions in place for non-Zunis wishing to witness our religious activities. We ask that visitors respect our cultural privacy by following the appropriate etiquette and guidelines.” Hiring a guide (necessary for any real exploration of the reservation, including ecotourism) should help visitors avoid giving inadvertent offense. Finally, if you can afford it, please be aware that your support of the Zuni arts is vital to the maintenance of their rich ceremonial life. Cottage-industry production of high-quality arts and crafts helps support around 80% of Zuni households, which allows Zunis to maintain control over the single most endangered resource essential to communal spiritual health: time. Throughout Indian Country, the time-pressures of wage labor have been as much if not more injurious to the practice of native religion than all the efforts of missionaries put together.