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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 54

This entry is part 53 of 119 in the series Cibola

Shiwanna (2) (conclusion)

The holy warriors of Shiwanna
descend to the slaughter, sparing only
a single pair of children.
They smash the fences, free
the herds of deer & mountain sheep
who need no prompting to escape
back into the wild.

Such a one-sided victory is dangerous.
As long as the Ashiwi live at the Middle Place
they must look after this tribe of ghosts.
They feed & clothe them, sing
their songs word-for-word
& dance their dances. The two
survivors carry their name forward
as a thirteenth clan.

Everywhere a warrior falls
the Earth Mother in gratitude
sprouts a miniature pueblo,
a rainhouse made from sand. Ants
of whatever color will fill
the priestly offices. In the end
very little gets resolved in the way
one might expect. The dream
follows dream-logic, & the roles
with all the romance belong
to the others. But with each reenactment
something vital is restored.
Freed from their wardens
the animals return to the wild, yes,
but the ones with claws & canines
are already there–& there—
& here . . .
__________

a miniature pueblo, a rainhouse: In the stylized art of Pueblo Indians, rain clouds always have a rectilinear and stepped appearance. It struck me as I was studying the literature on the Zuni and their neighbors, for whom so much public religiosity seems focused on bringing rain, that their very architecture represented an attempt to attract the favor of the rain gods through mimesis. The collecting of scalps (in a communal scalp house, in the case of the Zuni) was also connected with rain-bringing magic, as indicated by a quote in the last Reader section. The top of the head was homologized with cloud-covered peaks. Thus, cloud, mountain, pueblo and head were analogous nodes in a dense allusive web. Ants and ant-mounds were seen as microcosms of the human world.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The legacy of March 10

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I spent most of the morning on a re-write of the current section of Cibola, which concerns a heavily mythologized but still probably historical act of genocide against a near neighbor. It turns out to be an appropriate date for such reflections. From the Japan Focus newsletter:

Sixty years ago today, on March 10 1945, the US abandoned the last rules of warfare against civilians when 334 B-29’s dropped close to half a million incendiary bombs on sleeping Tokyo.

The aim was to cause maximum carnage in an overcrowded city of flimsy wooden buildings; an estimated 100,000 people were ‘scorched, boiled and baked to death,’ in the words of the attack’s architect, General Curtis LeMay. It was then the single largest mass killing of World War II, dwarfing even the destruction of the German city of Dresden on Feb. 13, 1945.

B-29 pilot Chester Marshall flew above the destruction, but not far enough: “At 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning,” he later told Australian broadcaster ABC. “I couldn’t eat anything for two or three days. You know it was nauseating, really. We just said ‘What is that I smell?’ And it’s a kind of a sweet smell, and somebody said, ‘Well that’s flesh burning, had to be.'”

Even the city’s rivers were no escape from the firestorm: the jellied petroleum that filled the bombs, a prototype of the napalm that laid waste to much of Vietnam two decades later, stuck to everything and turned water into fire. “Canals boiled, metal melted, and buildings and human beings burst spontaneously into flames,” wrote John Dower in War Without Mercy. People who dived into rivers and canals for relief were boiled to death in the intense heat….

Robert McNamara, a former statistician who helped plan the Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki raids, went on to become US Defense Secretary (1960-68) during the war against Vietnam, where he authorized carpet bombing of vast swathes of the country with incendiaries and Agent Orange. In last year’s documentary The Fog of War, McNamara ponders the morality of victor’s justice, saying: “Was there a rule then to say that you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death one hundred thousand civilians in a single night?”

The legacy of the March 10 raid though is what it bequeathed to the rest of the century: the trumping of political and moral arguments against mass civilian slaughter by military technicians and rationalists. As historian Mark Selden wrote: “Elimination of the distinction between combatant and non-combatant would shape all subsequent wars from Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War and the ethnic conflicts of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, to mention but a few.” It’s a legacy we still live with.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ghost in the machine

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In so many ways, “Garbage in, garbage out” is the mantra of the age. The sheer quantity of garbage – whether measured in spam or disposable diapers – is impressive enough, but what makes garbage seem so all-pervasive is our growing inability to separate it from non-garbage. Technology changes so quickly now that planned obsolescence is itself virtually obsolete. I get e-mails that I delete without reading because I don’t know whether they are truly addressed to me. It’s all just electrons anyway, right? Except that every minute spent reading e-mail is another minute closer to the end of this heavy metal-laden box, this mobile Superfund site. The first time I heard back from a mailer-daemon I was amused. Now sometimes viruses disguise themselves as mailer-daemons, just as con artists concoct sob stories about lost fortunes. In both cases there’s a grain of truth. We do things without knowing why they work, even the experts. Here in Plummer’s Hollow, when the wireless connection suddenly starts to cut in and out, I’ve learned by trial and error how to fix it: turn off the main computer, wait five minutes, turn it back on. Yesterday when I did this, a little message popped up in a cartoon speech balloon that led to nobody. It read: “You have unused desktop icons. Use the desktop cleanup wizard to get rid of them. Click on this balloon.” It’s certainly true in religion: an icon or fetish must be cared for on a regular basis: fed, paraded, incensed, whatever. Computer icons need at least to be double-clicked from time to time, it seems. The desktop display is clearly an altar; we are officients, in charge if rarely in control. Electronic familiars proliferate: browsers, anti-virus programs, pop-up blockers, instant messaging systems, spell checkers, feed readers, audio players. Wheels with wheels. Ghosts in the machine. Most of us use a computer the same way we operate a car or a VCR: as extensions of our minds and bodies, and fully as mysterious and prone to inexplicable failures. Only for the high priests of geekdom – guys like my cousin-in-law Jeff – is this more about power than faith. Who’d have foreseen, back when we studied Basic and Fortran in the more forward-thinking high schools, that computing would come to be dominated by those who best understand how the average person thinks? I remember writing that most basic of Basic programs – “10 Go to 10” – and feeling simultaneously pleased and bored out of my mind. Somehow, that feeling has stuck with me. Boredom and frustration remain closely linked, as in the quintessentially modern experience of sitting in a waiting room and wondering when and if one’s number will ever come up. Sometimes I get nostalgic and double-click on the time – not an icon, but the digital readout down in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. A facsimile of an analog clock pops up, and I find that oddly reassuring. I like to think of it in there – somewhere – with hands merrily turning, even when the computer’s off. My first computer couldn’t do this. Every time I shut it off, its clock went back to Day One. I remember the day when the screen finally failed to light up beyond the cursor’s little green mote. It wasn’t winking – that was the telltale sign that rigor mortis had set in. Now this one – my third computer, a hand-me-down like the others – begins to show signs of senility. Two weeks ago a sudden silence befell it, without affecting any of its functions. At first I was overjoyed; it had been very noisy and was slowly driving me nuts – which is not a very long drive, actually. But then I happened to mention this happy occasion to my aforementioned cousin Jeff, who informed me that it meant that one or both fans had given up the ghost. Since it sits on a cold floor in a cold house, it has yet to overheat – but that’s just a matter of time. On his advice, my dad and I took it apart. There were many, many little screws holding this piece of garbage together and we managed not to lose a one of them. But neither fan was spinning. We were able to nudge the processor fan into making a few squeaky revolutions, but that was all. I was astonished by how little was in the box – and by how thickly the dust lay on everything. Gray windrows of dust filled every corner and crack. I blew it out as hard as I could, then took a vacuum cleaner to it. So that’s what happened to all my gray matter, I said.

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Discussion Thread
Chat Transcript

Yajñavalkya: Hi, my name is Yajñavalkya. How may I help you?
Yajñavalkya: Please provide me information to further assist you.
Shakalya: Hello Yajñavalkya.
Yajñavalkya: Go ahead.
Shakalya: What deity have you in this fixed quarter (zenith)?
Yajñavalkya: The deity, fire.
Shakalya: On what is fire supported?
Yajñavalkya: On speech.
Shakalya: On what is speech supported?
Yajñavalkya: On the heart.
Shakalya: On what is the heart supported?
Yajñavalkya: You ghost, that you think it would be elsewhere than in ourselves! For if it were anywhere else than in itself, the dogs would eat it or the birds tear it to pieces.
Shakalya: On what are you and yourself supported?
Yajñavalkya: On the in-breath.
Shakalya: On what is the in-breath supported?
Yajñavalkya: On the out-breath.
Shakalya: On what is the out-breath supported?
Yajñavalkya: On the diffused breath.
Shakalya: And on what is the diffused breath supported?
Yajñavalkya: On the equalizing or middle breath. That self is not this, not this. It is incomprehensible for it is not comprehended.
Yajñavalkya: Are you still there?
Shakalya: Thank you for your assistance.
Yajñavalkya: Do you have other concerns I can help you with?
Shakalya: Yes. When the garbage goes out, where does it go? Is it all the same garbage?
Yajñavalkya: Have a nice day.
Yajñavalkya: disconnected
Shakalya: disconnected

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 53

This entry is part 52 of 119 in the series Cibola

Shiwanna (2) (cont’d)

Thump unthump the great
      &nbsp clay drum out of time
thump unthump however they stop
      &nbsp their breath or cover
eyes & ears & mouths they can’t
      &nbsp unthump miss
      &nbsp       &nbsp       &nbsp this
UNTHUMP the skipped heart-
beat UNTHUMP the unraveled
tapestry UNTHUMP shapeshifter’s hoop
the twisted spine UN-
THUMP.

The road unwinds clear
to the fontanel, open fist
someone’s sister has anointed
with yucca suds, bloom
unclenching once in
a hundred years. The gods
are forever unfinished.
Always at the Beginning
they are auguring themselves
from the waters above,
below . . .

But what about those dirty-
faced heroes? They are acting
like the rawest of raw recruits.
They make a game of everything,
killing for sport. And on

the fourth day, from
their shrine beside the little lake
within the younger of the cones
inside the Salt, the hero twins
at last unriddle it: where the sorceress
hides her vital spark. A stone
among stones. On this lake-
within-a-lake, they see it
in a literal flash.

Now they are racing each other to the battle scene.

Now the elder brother hurls a rabbit stick & misses.

Now the younger gives it his best gambler’s cast.

Now he scores a hit.

As the stones spill from
the split gourd
the Chakwena topples, the wind
roaring from her chest.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 52

This entry is part 51 of 119 in the series Cibola

Shiwanna (2) (cont’d)

Chakwena Woman,
black-skinned ogre,
runs back & forth in front of her white-
robed warriors, catching the arrows.
Her calabash rattle is in constant motion
like a hive of hornets. When the Ashiwi
advance with their medicine priests
she directs her followers to plug
their nostrils with cotton, breathe
only through a cloth.
By the third day the Kyanakwe
seem invincible, even capturing
four of the Ashiwi gods–
though one escapes, & one remains
so obstreperous they think
he must be part female, put him
to grinding corn. Make him don
the dress the Chakwena scorns.

But what happens then
is a thing of genius:
one half of his hair coils up on his scalp–
squash blossom, hummingbird wing–
while the other half still hangs
straight, like a man’s.
Thus from this contest there emerges
something good: a wholly new part
in the sacred repertoire.
__________

black-skinned ogre: As mentioned elsewhere, black and red represent cosmic polarities for a large swath of native North America. White is also often included as a stand-in for black. Presuming that “red” stands for all animating colors (via the association with blood, ergo heart/breath), the two yin-yang poles might better be thought of as black-and-white vs. color.

Ashiwi: A more neutral term for the Ashiwanni (“priestly people”).

a thing of genius: This incident is indeed the mythological origin of the berdache or third gender in Zuni cosmology. Notice that in this matrilinear, matrifocal society, women are perceived as being just as strong as men, albeit in a different way (they possess innately those qualitites that boys must strive to acquire through initiation into the priesthood). In a sense, the presence of a socially accepted transsexual figure is one very good measure of sexual equality. In the last 150 years, some of the most influential members of the Zuni tribe have been berdaches. Their position between genders appears to make them especially adept at bridging the gap beween White and Indian ways, without feeling that they have to choose between the two.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Converse

ME conversen, fr. MF converser, fr. L conversari to live, keep company with, fr. conversus, pp. of convertere to turn around
(Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary)

They’ve been talking for hours. Their conversation has passed through the usual stages of new acquaintances who find they hold many views in common: first the tenuous feeling out, the cautious groping for just the right word or phrase. As trust builds, the pleasure they feel in each other’s company gathers momentum. Nervous laughs give way to easy laughter, and their faces take on a kind of glow. Constant smiling loosens limbs as well as tongues. Initial motions of the head and hand gradually give way to full-body participation, bending from the hips, shifting slowly about in their seats like two trees in the grip of a single wind. It is a wholly improvised and unselfconscious dance; any audience – the stray eavesdropper or barista – is entirely incidental. They scarcely notice how often they talk over top of each other, how frequently they switch positions as the conversation veers madly from one topic to the next.

As connections are multiplied and reinforced, they draw closer and their conversation slows, deepens. They are listening intently, now, and speaking in turn. Grammatically normative sentence structure atrophies, leaving short-but-potent phrases, even single words buoyed by a laugh or expressive gesture, linguistic fragments swimming free in an ocean of light. They each glimpse apprehension in this new, provisional mirror, a joy that is afraid to speak its own name because how can you affix an identity to something so open, so almost not there?

They hang back as long as they can, reveling – then more than reveling. A kind of awe comes over them. The conversation ceases not because words are inadequate, but because they are no longer necessary. With the labyrinth behind them, why cling to the thread? Such a roundabout way to go to arrive at silence!

Signs
[an old poem]

She set her empty bottle down against mine without looking so they would rock together, ringing–whether with a peal or a toll I couldn’t tell. So that even before the words of welcome & the first fumbling for the right place, well in advance of the mingled cries and blessings, I would feel my skin turn to sky & my bones to living water.

Because her eyes held that exact and painful blue one only encounters over country churches–I mean those clapboard firetraps whose belfries offer sanctuary to the long-limbed owls, pale as Puritan angels, that go about their business at odd hours rarely observed in the modern liturgy. Except when some bored child, slipping under the pews, picks up a white wing feather missed by the custodian’s broom.

Let’s watch him as he waves it over his head, running up to the pulpit to show the startled minister. Whose flock shifts uneasily, the old pews creaking, Adam’s apples trembling on scented necks.

* * *

Isn’t every conversation a potential conversion? In order to truly live together in what is called harmony, don’t we need to be continually turning about, looking at things through the eyes of another, converting strangers into friends?