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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 81

This entry is part 80 of 119 in the series Cibola

 

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)

2. White-Feather Priest

straight along the western edge of the land
I went where the great birds cry
wheeling
alighting on hills of sand
on hills of sea

*

the sun just down
through the waves
a dark road opens
ai ah this pounding in my chest

*

there my guardian comes
with his white cane
there he strikes me
& drags me under

*

four kinds of water
he gives me to drink
a bitter brew I fly
on a bitter wind

*

then I hear then I hear
what the gulls are crying
then I gather
songs

*

at the still
center of the land
something pounds
something threatens to break

__________

This section draws its imagery from translations of O’odham song cycles and speeches associated with the once-annual salt pilgrimage to the Gulf of California. (I am not entirely certain who or what the spirit guardian represents.) It’s impossible to say how much of later, O’odham religious tradition echoes the priestly religion of their ancestors the Hohokam, but I imagine that basic elements of worldview have remained intact, including the notion of water as both dangerous and essential to life, and the conception of the earth as surrounded and underlain by it. This idea is too widespread in the broader Meso-American cultural region to have been derived from similar conceptions in the Hebrew Bible. And in what is now the desert southwest of the United States, such a belief system seems especially apt, given the perils of both floodwater cultivation and irrigation, which the Hohokam perfected to a degree elsewhere matched only by the desert agriculturalists of coastal Peru.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

City of joy

[S]he sold beer by the single bottle alone. She gave you a bottle, you gave her a shilling. She gave you another bottle, you gave her another shilling.
Abdul-Walid

“What am I?” Only asking this question and letting go of the cycle of chasing after outside things means to cut off all our craving. When we do that, what happens?
Ditch the Raft

It was not immediately obvious – least of all to me – that I was a student. My immediate memories were of a bridge over a raging flood and the mountain beyond, which was and was not the mountain I return to every evening. The cliff face had turned to water; how would I get past it? And the man who walked beside me, whom I kept addressing as my friend – imagine my surprise when there in the middle of the bridge he asked for my money at knifepoint. Even as I refused, I felt the sadness and futility of it. Why couldn’t I just hand everything over – my wallet, the shirt off my back – down to my shoes and wristwatch? We tangled; it was no contest. But imagine, I thought, if I could just let the knife pierce and sever as it wished.

He seemed ready for another round, so I fled into the waterfall of glass. Ladders and catwalks, trapdoors and trapezes: up I went. It’s not that my fear of heights ever left me, but that, having escaped from a friend with a knife, it suddenly didn’t matter any more. If I fall, I thought, my bones will break – but wouldn’t that be interesting? There was a view from the top, about which I remember nothing. It was getting late. I should go back, or I’d miss the last bus of the evening.

The P.A. system crackled with my name, repeated once, as is the style with in-store announcements. I heard “Go to -” and the rest was unintelligible. Maybe over here?

I entered a small theater where ashen-faced young men sweated and groaned: a place, I quickly realized, where varying kinds of bodily pain were administered to the occupants of every seat, increasing in intensity as one gravitated toward the empty stage. It seemed odd that there weren’t any women; the room had the ambiance of a video arcade in hell.

I tried one seat after another, watching my limbs twitch with a detachment that surprised me. In one seat I felt myself frozen; in another I was scalded; in a third, currents of electricity made me seize up like an engine with sugar in its crankcase. I remembered how I used to enjoy the electric shock tank in the Japanese public baths, how I would move closer and closer to the metal panel in the side of the tub until, at six inches away, my body refused to obey the commands of my brain any longer. Now I had eliminated that last six inches. It wasn’t so bad, really.

But at length I realized this wasn’t getting me any closer to home. I wandered out into the street and someone wearing a police or military uniform immediately began speaking into his walkie-talkie. “Why did you go in there?” he accosted me. “You weren’t supposed to take that course!” I explained how I hadn’t understood the announcement, and besides, I really just wanted to catch a bus. “No time for that now,” he said.

As I started up a gentle flight of stairs, a strange creature sprouted from the ground behind me. It was humanoid, maybe eighteen inches tall, with bulging eyes and many sharp teeth. Without thinking, I grabbed a halberd from the wall and split it down the middle, then severed it at the waist for good measure. But as I watched, its severed parts rejoined each other and it stuck out its tongue. I stared in awe. Don’t you want to learn how to do this, it seemed to be saying. Well, yes, I did. Then keep moving.

I opened another door – or rather, it grew thin and disappeared as I drew near. Inside, it looked like a literal body shop, or a spare parts warehouse. Animated heads floated in space, legs danced, arms reached out to shake my hand. Over there was the Cheshire cat’s grin. A voice spoke, and for a moment I puzzled over which body or body part it belonged to, before realizing that all questions of belonging and identity were moot. “We’ve never had a student here who also passed the endurance course,” it said. “We had always thought that the two were mutually exclusive.”

“So I guess I get to be the guinea pig,” I heard myself say, realizing all of a sudden just what lay behind that common and innocent-sounding cliché. It would be a relief not to feel tied to one body any longer, I thought. I took a deep breath. The air still smelled of rain.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 80

This entry is part 79 of 119 in the series Cibola

 

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)

1. El Donado Marcos de la Sierra

Day after day
the lizards dance on the sand.
When the sun climbs high
the mountains won’t
sit still. Even the tortoise
toiling as little as he can
moves in time with the maguey’s
sharp-tongued shadow.

Sun. Tree. Stone. Sky.
The will to circle in the wind.
To walk like Lucifer up
& down in the earth
or lope like Coyote, always
one meal from the end.

Let the fullness without
break the drought within–
the way all teeming
prayers & curses seem
to seed the clouds,
go stepping out with feet of rain
on a Galilee of air.

This very day I too
will begin dancing.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Snake in a tree

Mystery does not begin and end with the Big Questions – Why are we here, How can evil exist in a benign universe, How can nirvana include samsara. Mystery is much more particular than that. The core of every being or event is inexpressable; all poets and artists know this. The world eludes our grasp in a manner that is both simple and profound.

How does a snake move without appendages? It seems as unlikely as speech without articulation. It can barely see, yet somehow it manages to find the right branch to take it where it wants to go. At key junctures, you watch it pause and lift its head, opening the mouth a little. The head and first six inches of its five-foot body nod and sway. Clearly it is weighing options, it is thinking – but how? What kind of thoughts? Its keenest senses are attuned to heat and motion. A snake would almost certainly not form mental pictures as we know them. Imagine yourself listening through every bone in your body. You think of Polynesian mariners, able to feel the presence of islands hundreds of miles distant by feeling the subtle shifts in ocean currents.

Like all predators, a snake is a creature that has evolved along with its prey – in the case of a black snake, small mammals such as mice and voles. They are fast-moving, fast-burning, fast breeder reactors. We like to say that mammals are warm-blooded and reptiles cold-blooded, as if the former is an advance over the latter. But nature is fundamentally non-hierarchical. Each strategy has unique advantages and trade-offs. The reptile’s core temperature is usually as high as a mammal’s; it is simply more closely tied to the temperature of its immediate environment. The drawback is that a reptile enjoys less liberty to go wherever and whenever it pleases. The advantage is that it can endure extremes of temperature that would kill a mammal. Also, without the energetic demands of an endotherm, reptiles tend to be on average much longer lived. And they know things no mammal can know, in a way it can never know them.

Members of many species of snakes and turtles live long enough to form intense bonds with their home ground. If transplanted and unable to find their way home, they starve to death. However knowledge is acquired, it must be organized mainly in the form of three-dimensional maps. So-called instinct can code for extraordinarily complex behaviors, but it still can’t tell the snake much about this tree, that branch. In its relatively brief and presumably intense period of juvenile development, it acquires intimate knowledge of territory: here there is shelter, here good hunting. The map consists of temperature patterns, networks of vibrations, felt with the same immediacy needed to maintain a constant body temperature. To borrow an image from Star Trek, the snake forms a mind-meld with its environment.

This suggests further that snakes do not dream. A current theory among evolutionary biologists holds that dreaming evolved as a way to organize and learn from experience. One can see its utility for short-lived creatures with a well-developed visual cortex. We know from the human sphere how well non-dreamers are able to prey on dreamers – usually by inhabiting the dream itself, or taking on something of its character. But such creativity, one suspects, is denied to the snake. What, then, does it have? It has time.

The snake is slow and capable of prolonged periods of apparent trance from which it can “awake” to sudden movement with no apparent transition whatsoever. We like to disparage the oldest parts of our brains as the reptile mind, as if it were some primitive thing. But in natural history, as in anthropology, it is the idea of the primitive that is primitive. The reptile mind responds to stimuli in a manner that is both simple and profound; one can no longer really speak of self and other, self and environment. I am this-climbing, this-eating, this-feeling.

The snake goes a couple feet along the wrong branch and stops. The darkness under the eaves isn’t getting closer this way. Stop and sway for five minutes, ten. Send tremors all through the limb. There, that other one… but the gap is a little too wide to bridge. The part of the brain/spinal cord that’s near the tail says here, and then begins to move so the head can take its place. The snake doubles back on itself like two trains running in opposite directions. By the time the tail gets to where the head had been, the head has reached the intersection and started down the other branch.

You expect the branch to bend down, but the snake knows better. Without the slightest hesitation it descends the increasingly slender branch to the very twig-end and straight out over the eighteen inches of empty space to the drainpipe. With the drainpipe as a support, the head enters the hole under the eaves even as the back half of the snake is still in the tree. It wastes no time, ever. From start to finish the whole climb takes only forty minutes, but to you it seems both brief and endless, a loop of tape you will replay more than once. Snake in a tree, you whisper. It has the unmistakable flavor of a dream.
__________

I hope it almost goes without saying that much of this essay consists of speculation with no basis in science.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 79

This entry is part 78 of 119 in the series Cibola

 

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest

Sated with flatbread & venison,
men & women laughing
in a half dozen languages
fall silent when the chief elder stands up
beside the newly erected cross.
He speaks in a low voice,
just above a whisper–wind
in mesquite leaves, rustle of the first
fat raindrops in the dust. The sound
of power. The crowd stops
being a crowd; listening is a thing
each person does for herself.
Hands lie still in laps. At length
the elder returns to his seat, his last
few words breathed rather than spoken.

Then the town crier–a much
younger man–gets up, wielder
of plain words. His speech takes
half the time, even allowing
for rhythmic pauses. Each phrase
passes from language to language
around the square.

Your coming has honored us.

Here although we are poor
you have made us rich in blessings.
Your god the Always-Present is generous.

Already the medicine people see
great storms approaching with wind
& rain from the east,

the little arroyos running brown,
rivers heavy with silt leaping their banks,
weaving through the fields like a man
too full of pulque.

Already the Corn Mother
bulges in the belly,
Squash & Cotton & Tobacco
make a rumbling sound in the earth.

We wish to offer, besides those
who will share your road for four times
four days & nights, our friendship–
to pledge a covenant between
our medicine & yours.

This cross
is a thing our grandfathers knew,
but we’d almost forgotten it.

When your shaman, the black man, first
approached with all his retinue,
our hearts shrank.
But he gave us this cross & we rejoiced.

Then we knew he saw
beneath its mask of stone & soil
the true face of this Land:

place where the four winds come together,
where the worlds below & above
sprout & blossom from a single stalk.

Now we wish to inquire if, in token
of our friendship, as a mere precipitate
from your overflowing medicine power,
you might favor us with the gift of a Song.

For it is only through songs
that the hearts of all creatures
open fully, flowers for night-
flying moths . . .

With this, the polyglot susurration
swells to a hum: A singing contest.
The rest of the speech is lost
in gathering excitement.

The friar’s party gathers in a knot.
A nobleman from Texcoco
agrees to join the three oblates–one
a half-breed raised in Spain, the other two
donados: given to the Order as children
for what their terrified parents assumed
would be a sacrifice.
They have between them songs enough
to challenge the town’s best.

Meanwhile the women too
have been whispering: now
a grandmother stands up & says
that since none of their number
wishes to compete, they’ll be willing
all together to act as judges,
hold the stakes.

Relieved murmurs sweep the plaza.
This way each side will be able to save face
& munificence alone will shape
the outcome, it seems,
since women have never been able to agree
on a single thing since the world began–
a fortunate thing for men
& all their whims, their roguish heads
aswarm with desires, the lice of envy
itching, itching, grown plump
with the scalp’s own blood.

* * *

Marcos slips off to begin his evening prayers
while all eyes are on the singers
gathering at one end of the plaza.
Six translators sit in a semicircle at the foot
of the cross & pass a reed cigarette.

The smoke spirals to the west:
May your words
strengthen all hearts.

(To be continued.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Confessions of a semi-professional misanthrope

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1. I would’ve liked to be a charlatan, to cure the incurable despite myself & the spooky footlights that would’ve come & gone, turning my cheeks into sudden caverns. I could’ve learned how to capture & breed the small mice of fear. I’d have had a riverboat & floated upstream on the tide, under the sycamores. I’d have told each client to be patient while I made a careful, horizontal incision all around the skin of a pomegranate, then eased it open, revealing who knows what mucilaginous gossip to feed an infinitely malleable appetite for lies.

2. The woman at the cookout says things that no one believes, not even us strangers. She tells us she’s already eaten. She says she & her husband are leaving the United States for some place civilized, some place where more of the people think the way they do, keep their needs within bounds. The campfire makes her young husband’s eyebrows dance like an elf’s; even his smile is eldritch. Her own smile is extremely brief, like an involuntary twitch she has labored to suppress. We talk about music & the pleasures of silence. “I have to have something on all the time when I’m alone,” she says softly. “I guess I don’t like my own company very much.” The night grows cool & the firewood quickly runs out. Everyone gets up to leave, bowing to each other’s silhouette in the darkness & expressing mutual gratitude, warm regards.

3. Call it natural sound if you want, I said, or call it silence: more & more, this is the soundtrack of pleasure for me. I hear music whether I want to or not. Thoughts rise to the surface & burst, pretty little bubbles. I stand outside in the middle of the driveway until my freshly barbered head grows cold. Above, the usual glitter. I try to imagine all the busy little lives going on underground, in the forest litter or in hollow trees. I go back in my house & shut both doors as quietly as I can. If this is loneliness, my friends, it tastes delicious!

4. I do enjoy the company of my fellow misanthropes – preferably one at a time. And on rare occasions when I’m drunk I play loud music to cancel out the unaccustomed roar inside my head.

5. I am still haunted by stories of those child soldiers forced at gunpoint to execute their own parents, then fed a steady diet of drugs & made to rape other children until acts of violence came to seem as natural & urgent as eating, or voiding the bowels. Their leader was a portly, ebullient man who taught them how to cut off the hands of villagers without killing them. At first, the idea was to prevent them from voting or defending themselves, but the children took to it with a special relish – and who am I, said Papa Sankoh, to deny them their pay? From hands they branched out to feet, ears, lips – all of the body’s most delicate instruments. If one cannot go to war against love itself, surely this was the next best thing.

6. Horror movies bore me. They’re like elaborate practical jokes we play upon ourselves. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out – flaccid penises that suck rather than spurt, vaginas with teeth. Big deal. I’d rather hear about the woman who married a bear, or why coyote’s eyes are yellow. Tell me about the time a snake almost swallowed the sun.

7. The brown tree snake in Guam. Kudzu in the American South. Nightcrawlers in the North Woods. These are only the most catastrophic of our slithering doppelgangers. Upon thy belly… Dust thou shalt eat… I will put enmity between thee and the woman. Who are we to deny the Lord His pay?

8. Beetles by the hundreds & the thousands, coming out of the walls. They crawl everywhere. I brush them from my beard, the back of my neck. Sometimes they bite. By the end of the winter, the house reeks of them. In my dreams, the floor heaves & cracks with their huddled masses. In their native Asia they winter in white cliffs; here, a white house or barn draws them like a beacon. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home! But they are far more than just a nuisance. Some entomologists believe that dozens of ladybird beetle species native to the eastern United States have already gone extinct, unable to compete – their numbers too low, their habits insufficiently aggressive.

9. We have met the enemy, and he is us. We have. He is. This is authentic horror, the only kind that will matter in the end.

10. Call me Ishmael, then. I am a charlatan; how could it be otherwise? But better that, I say, than the unconscious & unconscionable sorcery of markets & bosses. Follow me, & we will both be lost – I promise. Salvation exists in the present or it doesn’t exist. We will thirst forever.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Sinking Valley

The accent falls on the first syllable: Sí¬nking Valley. A place of caves and sinkholes, streams that appear & disappear. Remarkable also for what it lacks: no state highway runs through it. Some farms date back over 200 years, to the first Scotch-Irish settlers. Spring plowing turns up arrowheads a thousand years older than that. Or so the Sinking Valley kids on the school bus used to tell me. You walk barefoot through the fields after a rain, they said, & feel for the points.

Our stop was the first of the afternoon, so I never learned which farms the other kids went home to. Our mountain forms the northwest – and lowest – end of the long, V-shaped ridge that surrounds the valley on three sides. We get all the same weather, but these wooded sandstone hills hold water like a sponge. In the valley, rain percolates quickly down through the soil & disappears. The porous bedrock can break the blade of a bulldozer.

A natural stone arch – the remains of a collapsed cave – gives its name to the nearby Arch Spring Presbyterian Church. This is the way all churches should be: surrounded by generations of their dead.

The afternoon sun isn’t right for photographing gravestones, most of which are the old-fashioned, upright kind, resolutely facing the east. Some of the graves from the 19th Century have both headstones and footstones, the latter a third the height of the former, & carrying only the initials of the deceased. I’m reminded of the words of an old Scotch-Irish ballad:


Oh dig my grave both wide & deep,
Place marble stones at my head & feet,
O’er my grave, a turtle dove –
Let the world know that I died for love.

A sobering number of stones memorialize the deaths of infants & children. Some lie flat like quilts under little carved lambs. The sign hanging from the cast-iron gate expresses a sentiment not often heard these days, even in sermons: That Which Is So Universal As Death Must Be A Blessing. The operating assumption seems to be that the universe is essentially benign. It’s not hard to picture the skeletons stretched out under the sod as if for a final operation, the slow drip from God’s own rain dissolving what once had been bones, lime into lime.

we climbed down
to the birthplace of water

bloodroot
wild ginger
sang

roots stretched into crevasses

limestoned voices

inaudible over
the gasp & suck
a scum of flotsam in the gullet

we crouched in the sun
blood-colored flowers

whitewater curling back
& back we prayed
for a rain of calcium

another sky opened
impossibly high & thin