 . |
In the traditional songs which form their only record of the past the Germans celebrate an earth-born god called Tuisto. His son Mannus is supposed to be the fountain-head of their race and himself to have begotten three sons who gave their names to three groups of tribes--the Ingaevones, nearest the sea; the Herminones, in the interior; and the Istaevones, who comprise all the rest.
Tacitus, Germania, 3
I, the universe, re
member as a star; I
recollect as a planet, I re
call as a human being.
I, the all, have no memory of before my being; none before the world cooled down, when land and air and water came; before human thought and its arts I am not...though I see the trace of such pasts within me. I think, and hope, that someday they will lead me to their source.
I, the man, remember the
earth, from its belt to its North; I recall my dark skin in South,
the cold lightening that struck it white. I recollect my caves, the
beasts I loved to kill and eat and skin for dear life,
the images I made, the sounds and the meanings.
I, the hunter, the walker and stalker, the hider and hidden recall the one time spanning lifetimes, every death and birth; I riddle myself with "their" thoughts and dreams, make them "its;" I, the one time, riddle its self with my many.
For example, these two...
I, Manu, black Adam of the whites, met my grand son Heffley1 in the woods near Vienna.
I initiated communion (only I could) and exChange; he walks in my body now as my new
man soul, and I walk in his, his primal one.
It is night,
but he/I can see the way and all around very well by the light of stars and a full moon.
Walking, sleepwalking--no, better, walksleeping,
all around the country in this big old body renewed, in the flow of its null.
The night is cool, I am warm in my fur; the
woods are unmarked by newman trails, but my way is clear to me
at every step. I have stepped it so many times. I am big and strong,
the world I walk and its time are my small and humble place, its every smallest part
I know and carry in me as I cover and recover the parts I've come to
know the best.
I've been moving for some nights, hiding and resting
mostly by day. I follow some plan, my plan, some plan:
Bear Due East (against the planet's spin, its magnet's pull directly left),
walk as moon runs its round from full to null to full, to get back home
from this western summer walk to be
gin the winter rest...
...walksleeping, because my body doesn't Move some
Sleeping self aRound--rather my self's aWake, this motion's its Trance, I
Step where I've Stepped before, as I've Stepped before, in the same
river a trillion times. With every new step, all the old ones Come
Back to constitute my moment, my null, my plan, myself:
out of the hot South, first steps North, toward the Magnet's Pull;
through cooler midlands, next steps north; up to
far north mountains, where home finally Became.
Bodies Change to fit the earth; they must
stay in a place to live in it, make it home.
We left the South; we stay in the North, where the trees of our life stand rooted far more, be
cause more brittly (in cold and rock), than in our first hot home. But we
walk the earth, we in I, as memory walks thought, as we
had to for so long, following the game onto the treeless open lands, with the
weather's short and long ups and downs; we re
trace steps to re
call routes, revisit that first-hour hot home
(south to the pull of the world-true spin), those long-habitable
midlands (between full spin out at fattest earth and
still spin in of magnet north), always on the
move away from, in Spring, then back to, in Fall, high mountain winter's
long, white sleepskin.
It feels good to be going home again, with rather than against
the world's turn, my own way neither with nor against
its pull. The trek back east always seems shorter than the
same one west. I had not gone so far as beyond the middle sea to the
first hot homeland, this time; I wandered the midlands idly, summered there to
relive the glory days of my kind, near Düsseldorf (and Wuppertal, Neandertal, where the
newmen first discovered our traces; the newman in me now is
surprised to see my view of Europe not as the youngest but as the
oldest surviving culture in the world, stretching back 50,000 years to the
paintings on our cave walls and our flutes of bone), in
France, Spain, Italy (all newman names: since my Change they
flood my mind): old haunts, timestoppers and slowers, places that turned
hours into as many lifetimes as I cared to recall.
My newman presence tunes me to the
newman lore of some of those haunts so close to me:
Wetzlar, on the Lahn near Weilburg, where
Goethe pined futilely for Charlotte Buff then went off and wrote The
Sorrows of Young Werther; Marburg, where the
Grimm brothers started writing down the folk tales of the region. I also walked the
woods of Baden-Württemberg, where my
newman's ancestor, Johan Carl Haffalee--his name derived from the word for "potter," his family's
traditional trade--set sail in 1735, all of twenty years old, on the Ship Williams to
America, almost half a century before the Revolution there. Württemberg was then the
state just south of Hessen, and Johan Carl had lived on the line I walk now, almost
due east from his home near the Black Forest to mine in the
Caucasus Mountains.2
It is not that difficult to Make one's Way through
Earth and Time without Being Seen--bothered--by
Newmen, even where they Live most numerously. My people are
masters at it. We mostly aVoid; sometimes we enCounter, often we're mis
Taken for something else, in conFusion; occasionally we
Show ourselves, or are Caught Off Guard...but even then, Half the Time the ob
Server Is too shocked, afraid, or even, surprisingly, inDifferent--as if s/he
didn't want To Be bothered by us--to disRupt more than a moment before we're
gone again. And, of course, all such moments Are the ex
ceptions to the rule of our lives, which mostly unfold unhindered in places no newmen Go.
Newmen, newmen, newmen--I ponder the word for all the meanings it has, the
memories it brings. I said I was in the woods near Vienna...
not so near, now, a few restful days and walking nights already behind me; I am
somewhere between the Danube and Neusiedler See...I am
settling into my own new memories, and my old, to collect myself, to
bring them all together in the path I know as one through these trees, these mountains, this land.
Newmen, newmen--every time I made a Change, I had to recalibrate it all: the new
men we once were to the oldmen who once were...in Africa; the newmen those old
men became to us, through time and climate, the oldmen we then became to them...in
Europe; the fightings and wars between us, and the love and families; the disappearance of
old and new both in that mix, except for here and there, the margins of the mix (my roots, my lines);
the waxing of the mix, the waning of the unmixed (my wane, and the waxing of the mind down my
line's peculiar way), the northern mountains where we hid at last, so few in numbers, intent on our
ways away from newmen. The Himalayas, the Rockies...the Caucasus.
The waxing mix around us then, who hid from no one but sought to wax still greater, to
take and rule the folk and worlds throughout the world, always restless, never still in one place.
Even as I and mine walked and moved to reMember and enVision our time as one place, so did these
Indo-Europeans Run and Ride to forget theirs, Seeking always in their motion a moment, never
Finding it until their minds had settled Space--this world, all worlds--the way our Mind was settling Time as space.
Newman--in me now, he made it all so fresh again, alive at every turn, a
Live both to my and with his own perceptions, memories, knowledge...but also terrifying, alien,
overwhelming; my every breath and stride fills him with awe and wonder, but little control. I must
override him throughout most of those first few days, keen though he makes me feel, simply to
function with normal grace, without hysteria. But now he is getting the hang of it, and I can
defer to his presence in my life, attend to my own in his--which I prefer increasingly as I
get the hang of it: the loss of physicality in nature, the gain of mental maps and other displays, the
abstractions that so materialize the mind, the fellowship with others so refined, so cultured.
It is all an exciting, fresh plateau for me, and I plunge into it lustily.)3
To leave the statically fertile mull of my one but Sevenfold Null, to begin the One-and-Twelve
Moments of the Crossland Flow (that would make it momentous, rather than mere motion).4
This balance was itself something New to me. Had I ever been so present, so aware and active as
Double Agent in One moment? Neither of us thought so...
To my left north, the Danube; to my right south, the Neusiedler See, the shallowest lake in the evening lands; its salt rides the air to my nose and mouth. I recall when it was vast, a sea indeed, after
sun burned ice's moment into water's movement, everywhere; I recall when we
moved above the floods to start our life in mountains, in the caves nearby here,
neighbors to the bears we worshiped.
This sea here, from deep and wide to shallow and small in time, like the
womb swollen then shrunken by birth; the smell of brine, feel of fish deep in the brain and loin of me,
feel of saltsea coursing blood, feel of woman as the sea I swam from; the riot of smells and lives of so
many different birds and beasts and plants around this lake, more than anywhere on this landmass,
in these reeds (the feel of birth, of life and land first coming up from water, of the safety of mountains
risen from sea, of caves).
More recent: the newman smells of grapes, wine, corn, bread to garnish the fish; the
fish then not only essence but also symbol, token of the man, the newman as the One, his churches
born here and from here (the road from the Prussian quarries to Rome, the
quarry stones for St. Stephens, the ancient Frauenkirche, where the baskets the women wove
when we still knew them
would sometimes be left full of bread, fish, and wine for
me and my then-only-half-mythical kind on our walks through the night; the
Empress Maria at her summer home)...all of this stirs and mingles in me, in the
blossom of the Now and the newman's Knowing, to rouse again my
deepest, oldest memories, countless lives...yet all, in the new life of my Change, as
child with mother, noticing self as child more than as boy or girl.
This first moment ends by the freshwater flow of the Danube, as it bears me a
cross out of mother Austria to Slovakia, near Bratislava. Nearer still to Chicago!)5
I had stayed to high ground throughout Austria to Vienna, coming down only for my
Change; I've been walking lowlands since that Change, and now I am eager to climb again.
To my left north, Carpathians--they call to me, but also away from my way home. To my right now,
Bratislava, a place to skirt. Like Vienna, it is close to Danube's waters; it is less charming, more ugly,
the communist dream gone nightmare; yet its Western neighbor, while less grim, more winning, is also culture curdled, capital counted as culture. Both dreams are nothing more than the waking gaze of
lizard brains, eating or enslaving their young, starving their old and others, all those for whom their
lizard life unquestioned, overruling, is nothing but a bad idea.
I hold the twoness of these capital cities in me, feeling the West as my left, East as my right eye, hand, leg, brain...the static Two of Symmetry, a Two whose peace is insufferable and whose war is simply a
moment of lifepain leading to more such, or death...I walk like a child, just born, aware of myself as
both boy and girl, black and whiteday and nightlife and death, Twinned One, no hope. I find my hope
by making the boy look at the girl as woman he must swim to (my memories run to lifetimes alone, no
mother, no family, no lover--Eros abstracted). I push this static Two, I deem it just another
One, and myself its being-born Second One. Full of ancient guilt at leaving
good-enough homes to search for better ones, I make a beeline through my
now dynamic Two from that static, balanced One to my next, a better birth, in the waters of the Váh,
across the sunbaked Danube plain. I make this Two dynamic by relating it to
the One before it, and thus the Three to come. I make that plain my defenseless land in the middle,
from all beginning to all end, feeling in the fire in my belly the deathly comfort of lizard sun's
moment giving way to the colder air of animal flow in motion, belly sailing against the wind, in
restless, growling, howling runs for harsher life.
I can't be sure, but I think I was glimpsed once or twice. Surely I was heard...
With my second birth in slaking and bathing in the waters of the Váh, I come up in the Three--the
end of my beginning and my middle, beginning of my end, dialect completing--and look back within
my Third over the One and Two in me. Mother One and Father Two--so time's dreaming have
named them. The child I made myself from them is still
an infant, still exposed, but real enough to sound its Thirdness in me, to give me a sail
beyond my flesh to spread to my wind.
Points and lines subsumed, I have another plain to sail now: the Váh Valley
peopled scant, an easier walk, though barren. Loneliness is gone; I recall my times in family, as
father/son, mother/daughter, and wholly spirit, One again anew. Animal brain reigns at ease, unstraining, surveys its domain.
Ahead lies the Four. The rise of its mountains (again, the Carpathians, but now they are
on my way home) pulls me upward like a gravity in the sky, like the northern vortex
pulled my ancestors, from the force of equatorial spin outwards toward sun, to the
magnetic pole, inward, away from that outflowing, heedless force, to the secrets of the stiller earth
frozen beneath its white ice cap.
The excitement in me grows as the wind against my psyche's sail grows now yet colder, swifter,
whispering from the mountains I do now call home.)
As I move into the Four, at evening in the foothills after a good day's sleep, I am aware
with new keenness of my own embodiment of it, and of the numbers within it. My
Oneness, the unity of all my parts, undivided; my Twoness, all divisions, all
mirrors--symmetry of feet, legs, testes, lungs, arms, hands, eyes ears nostrils brains left and right,
rows of teeth, hinged jaws, body/mind--all at odds in their very evenness; my
Threeness: full genitalia; inner, outer, both; birth, life, death; fish-mammal-man brain.
But mostly I feel now my Fourness, symmetry of frame, of the skeleton in me: the thing that
makes me feel the other three so. How? why? no time to know that...but time to feel its truth, in the
four limbs of the frame, in the cross my two arms make against my standing trunk, the two sets of
four fingers opposite my thumbs. They feel themselves a field, a structure, a way to sense, engage, en
gender the fire, water, air, and earth--especially the earth of this mountain, rising through the air like
something burning cooled (so much more immediate than the
Great Pyramids, or St. Stephens cathedral),
frozen, wetted, toward skyfire and water. A field in time, too, from spring to winter through summer
and fall.
I stand there at the foot of my climb; the memories that flood me now are of community, a
person among the people, a life from family beyond family to clan, tribe, kindred creatures like and unlike other such, with history, momentum of present to future, possibilites concrete. One in
Four, Two in Four, Three in Four, Four in Four--all pictures in frames, each a celebratory icon of
those things its numbers image, carved in time (metered).
These mountains--newmen call them Tatras, or tetraktys,6 something like that--they
loom before me now like the finish of my starts, the spine of my instrument, the sum of the parts I
have to play, the beginning of my end in sight. I hurl myself, slouch and lurch and stride, all
muscle music,
up their slope.)
I can't help but laugh at the memory of my poor attempts at newman speech; it rises in me now
as if for my sheer amusement on the long trek home.
For several days and nights I lose myself in the
twists and turns and vistas of the Four and then the Five, stretching through the
mountains at the top of Hungary. Now that I am in these
less peopled heights I can relax my guard
and savor the joy of their feel and their silence and sights. It is
here that the oldman in me gives way to his own new life in
Heffley, and wakes me up even more to Manu as newmanned.
Mostly I'm riding my body like a horse who knows its own way home. My bliss seems to
wake up in my four limbs doing their work of moving my trunk through the
five spins of the world, my five senses engaging it, my five digits on each of the four limbs gripping
and releasing it. I am shocked at one point to watch myself dart at the
sight of a wild boar, catch it and kill it and eat of it raw, all without planning or thinking a thing.7
In the back of my mind lies the next water ahead, the Tisza River beyond the
mountains. My "memories" of lives I had "visited" are not so present now--I
had to spend so much psychic energy in our trip's first legs,
balancing my new union at the very time of one of its most de
manding, stressful parts (through populous lowlands). What I do notice is an a
wareness of the history of this area as it resonates with
things now fresh in my newman mind:
the German jazz king's recording of Es sungen drei Engel
resonated so with the thousands of "barbaric" Magyar warriors from this land who
heard King Otto's "civilized" Christian Germans sing it in the
battle at Lechfeld, some thousand years ago, when "white" Christians were
fighting so many such battles with "white" pagans so decisively throughout the West;
Keith Jarrett's solo concerts in Köln, from where some of those Christians came to
Lechfeld to confront his own Magyar forefathers;
the German free-jazz king's use of the Hungarian taragato, brought here by the
Turks from farther east, which he found so apt in his band with African-
American drummer Hamid Drake and African
guembri player Mahmoud Gania; and Hungary's first (and Christian) king
that millennium ago, Stephen, the namesake for the cathedral in Vienna.
Most delightful of all, I swear I heard "Pannonica," the piece Thelonious Monk wrote
for his dear Hungarian baroness (de Koenigswarter), in the very air of this land
after whose earlier name, Pannonia, she herself was named by her Hungarian father).
Generally, "West" as distinct from "East" is blurring in my mind
in this place where history is still thick in the present rumblings in the Balkans, and where
"the West's" arts and letters have been as brilliant as the passions that ignited its
wars and weapons, to fire up the globe.
As the Four moves into the Five, my newman awareness seems to move
up from the center of my body--my beating heart, my belly--to the top, my face and head. Like a
star whose five points form eyes, mouth, and wideflaring nostrils, the awareness of new
rises up over old, or out of it, an ascendancy to control and command, and awareness. I am more and more glad to be here, less and less in need of oldman intervention.
By the time I get through that stretch of mountains, I've gotten what I needed from them. The new
man in me is completely at home, at ease, ready for the challenge coming up. The Six and Seven loom a
head like a reiteration of the Two and Three, in that they are de
scents into lowland plains cut through by rivers; as the
Danube and the Váh defined my One and Two, the
Hernad and the Tisza do my Six and Seven. 8
Not far from Miskolc, south to my right a few miles, I can feel the newmen minds
and industries (mostly mines, still graves to the Scythians who started digging them
two-and-a-half millennia past) grouped together in force. Something in me tells me I am
at a mean here, that the Six and Seven mark the middle legs of my journey, that there
is in them some sort of dance of perfection and holy, virgin sacrifice--
no, not sacrifice...more like
timing, something to do with these numbers, with showing up at a certain place at a certain time to
do a certain number, simply that, something I'd been trained for and had alerted, committed my
self to--after which my time, my life would be my own to spend and live as I pleased. Well,
at least to spend and live so in the rest of this walk, through the Eighth to the Thirteenth mo(ve)ments.
In the mountains again, through Ukraine and into Kazakhstan, over Black Sea; then a
round the Caspian, back to womb of my Caucasus cave between that water west and Aral east,
Russia just north, China the next land over east. My safest, surest place high and deep in the
middle (in spite of the newman world's recent upsurge of attention to it for its oil reserves).
Miskolc. Staying in the dark of moonless night, still in the last bit of mountain
woods before the valley below, I find my mind tends to wander more to its past than in its
current moments...though again, through those of the latter that have preoccupied me most
recently as Heffley. I hear Sainkho's9 music breathing in the lives of her Mongol ancestors,
who almost wiped this city out around the time St. Stephen's was built; I recall the
Japanese players and dancers10 as related more closely, through both genes and memes, to the
Mongolians than to the Chinese or Koreans; I hear Bach's music,
hear it yet unheeded by the Germans who lived next to it as it first sounded, five hundred years
later, who rather left it behind them at home to come and invade this city, about the time
Johan Carl Haffalee, some thirty years younger than his not-too-distant neighbor
Johann Sebastian Bach, left it behind to make his ocean crossing. Miskolc.
Finally, I hear "Con Alma," the Dizzy Gillespie tune quoted twice on record by the
Globe Unity Orchestra, and I remember suddenly the name my newmen neighbors
around this land have for my kind: Alma, which means soul, because for them we are
humanity's soul.11 I grin my big hairy head, roll its eyes back in delight, and give a
whinnying squeal of pleasure, a sound like the horses that carried my own erstwhile neighbors and
distant mutant cousins down from these steppes to the rest of the world as its
conquerors and lords, before I lope down into the valley.)
I will not speak more of the Six and Seven, except to say that I feel anything
but reflective, or receptive to the newman history around me at this point. I am completely en
gaged, every orifice of sense in my head, every surface of hide and pelt, in
moving through this stretch without
being seen. I need to prove I can do it, can practice it, can move through such parts
of my world not as places to linger but rather to speed through with dis
patch, as flat and fluid in mind and spirit as they are in terrain, and as de
void of awareness and care for the newfolk there as they are of me and mine. I've already
lingered and cared so, near Vienna; it is enough, I need to be in my mountains now, in my
cave and its heavy dark.
I will say that I wonder at the feel of these memories of invasions--by Mongols,
distant cousins of Heffley's first wife's Native American tribes,
or the Germans, those of his second--
because now I'm so newly sensitive to the goal of remaining invisible, of
finding my own private place coveted by no one, remarked by no one, certainly held by no one.
I don't mind the idea of sharing...but, at least at this point, sharing's only modes look
like coercive force, or persuasive seduction, cheap and easy dealing:
distant concepts, nothing to readily trust.
Maybe later, after I've slept off this Change for a season, I'll wake up to some new modes.
Maybe.
And now I will say that I did get through it all right, as I set out to do. And that I am
back in those mountains, entering Ukraine, and the Eight.
The entrance to the Eight is a rush of profusion. Ukraine, a homecoming made new, a
land full of glaciers melted to rivers, a little birth for every leg of the walk (up to the last,
Thirteen). The Prut, the Southern Buh, the Dnieper, the Volga, the rooted, angstvoll forests
of mountain and steppe. How did I know, recall all this? My body brought me to it. The
word for "white" (as in White Russian) is the very symbol of the West here, in this
farthest east before the Asian East. I glory, weaken, quicken to its call. I swear I can still
feel the shifting of the earth that pushed up the Crimean, Carpathian, my Caucasus mountains,
not really so long ago. My four limbs, each hinged into eight, my four fingers, each set thriced
against its one thumb; these mountains are one with these knuckles that climb them.
I am near home, I relax into the profusion's luxurious tension.
The mountains descend soon to steppes and plains, but the forest remains thick,
mostly, and still peopled only thinly. I go where best to avoid them, as always, but here I can re
lax my guard with that more than westerly; these people have always had more brushes with,
awareness of our kind than most, living so close to our homes. They have more stories about the
devil than most, and those stories depict him/us as a harmless, comic figure bound by the om
nipotent mother earth, as much as a frightening, dangerous one out to capture and devour
newmen souls.
Gullies, ravines, waters and trees, steppes; the open lands I walk at night, the others sometimes in
late or early sun, with some care. Soon the grasslands will stretch away from all forest
for several days before I finally veer from my straight line east into mountains south, to home.
Those steppes stretch from the Danube to Dong-Bei (Manchuria); out of the tangle of trees and their
roots, my mind wanders easily to the lives of my own kind scattered far through time and space,
from Africa through Germany and Ukraine, where newmen have unearthed remains of our
ancient dead, to Tibet, where they've formed some of their closest living links with us.
But I am not there yet, and I savor the last bit of unpeopled forest before I get there. The
oaks, the pine, the maples, ash, and linden, the birch and aspen, the willows, all growing down the
high, right bank of the rivers, mostly. I savor their spirits and smells with the re
newal of my own new thoughts: Heffley had been drawn to wander and rest in his
own Pacific forests for much of his life, forests of the same family as this one.
His knowledge of the newfolk here highlights mine, too: pianist Bill Evans' mother was
born and raised nearby, in Charma, a village at the foot of the Carpathians; the old
capital, Hlukhiv, boasted the finest school of music in the Russian Empire, a source of
many imperial court musicians; Chopin and Liszt can't have been be too far away...
The Ten...sum of the One, Two, Three, and Four, of the All and the Null.
I had long stopped marking and counting consciously the flowing moments of the
thirteen legs of my Walk, but the Ten was so distinctive that I recognized it immediately. The pro
fusion, the plenum of the earth around me, of its own memories it carried to me and I to and in it;
the keenness of my double mind, the way my new and old selves melded
and saw things, knew things; the ten-pronged hands that worked together to seize, touch, eat
from this place, and to reach for the sky, the ten-pronged feet that ran the world and made it
go around.
There were times, when the ice was not, when this land was not that
different from our African tropical first-home, its plants, its game; other times, when the
ice had made us better hunters, we stalked the mammoth and rhino to death
here. Some of our number were from Africa, some from Asia, some from God
knows where, groups always coming and going, following the game. People
always felt themselves as old to the earth, new to each of its times and places.
It was when they really did take it into their hands--plant their own forests, of food;
raise their own game, creatures born to go nowhere but into their bellies--that their
feet too were planted in place, their toes rooted. Their nomad flows became momentous
deeds; they changed the world for the rest of us, their fields and settlements and numbers
locked up what were once free lands and waters, razed plant life that used to support our
bands and enough bison and other big game to feed us. What they left was only enough
to support small game, including us. We died off like the meat we'd hunted, the spirits that
drove it, or survived by narrowing in every way, catching our rabitts, black grouse, occasional
deer. Mostly we hid, raided these people a bit, were poor and powerless. We turned inward, our
minds grew in dreamtime as our lives shrank in the world.
By that time their world had changed enough to serve as game and garden not
for its makers and keepers but for a new kind of hunter-gatherer: clans of their own kind who yet
counted them prey, their held fields of food as free grazing, as all men had taken freely from the
wild earth of beasts and plants forever: the warlords, come in on horses from north of God
knows where, starting over with the One (the sun they invoked, as, surprisingly, female, for its
white-hot power and light and rule), the Two (the cross they put on its circle, to map and name that
circle's force), the Three (the embodiment in clans that fathered that force, through generations in
time), the Four (their shining of that force through space and time).
This new kind of hunter-gatherer is the shock still rocking the earth; I feel it, its hor
rific dread, as if it hit only a moment ago. The memory of its firstness here, of its spread from here throughout the world--still in memory as recent as the power axis running from
Russia to Prussia to Vienna, acted out through Hitler and Stalin, perhaps too America, then and to
come--floods me as the waters from the ice had done. It is not only a shock of dread and horror,
it is also one of shame and guilt; these new people are partly my kin, we are all human.
How could this have happened?
In the run of time I can recall through my body, through this place, that move--to seize, imprison,
rape and milk the earth so, then to kill and die over its fruits so--is truly just a moment ago, a
moment in progress; a moment too much, too soon. The new things these monsters brought, a mere
four millennia ago: their wheels, those circled crosses, bearing them in chariots behind horses, like
little suns and worlds rolling through the sky; their silver tongues, their tongue so strong and hungry for all tongues to speak it, to bind their bodies (all bodies) to act as one body under mind, to do
every mighty thing possible.
Indo-Europeans...their newman name comes fresh to my newmanned mind; the image that lingers
here arcs from those first bodies down their generations to the first people known as "Slavic,"
and down their other lines to the first called "Germanic;" the Varangians (Vikings) who swept in
to this land and usurped the usurpers, built Kiev, founded the first Russian dynasty, took so
many living Slav bodies down Dnieper and across Black Sea to Constantinople to trade for
spices and glass and silver coins that their very tribal name became the word for "slave,"
as recently as a mill ago, when Christians started to win the Western-Northern fields.12
I can see my old clan still now as I look around me, as clearly as the newman in me sees the
shocking other. How do I say this? The strangeness, then violence of that newman clan--its
farmers, miners, and ranchers, its warlords, rulers, and slaves--colors how I see its
oldman counterpart; I don't have the luxury of ignoring it because it overwhelms and alienates me.
But the ground of the new lies in that of the old, not the other way around, and I have to
deal with that too. I am a parent who has to search his soul for clues about
why his son is a murderer, and I am the son who has to see what in his father and mother
led him to murder.
What exactly is the shock these Indo-Europeans embody? Most immediately, I want to say
the death, the killing--but death and killing have always been part of the old clan too.
The old clan: life in its place, around me now as it was when yet unshocked; every tree, stone,
waterway, every creature, large and small, is a member. Time is not a sword of death and loss with
some agenda of its own, it is a Moment in which the whole clan shares, living and dead, coming and
going through it. Death is not a moment to fear or inflict, it is the way to come and go, the other end of birth...
Stop right there. (I do stop my strolling body; it had been slowing with its thoughts. I spot
a rocky place a bit above the ravine I'd come to, a place both overlooking and overlooked
enough to rest secure for the day. The sun is coming up; I amble up myself and perch to con
template this old clan trickling along with me; I can see trees, water, rocks, any other creatures
who might come and go here through the rising sun's light.)
My description of it is right, I remember knowing its rightness...but now I must see it as a
naïve view, must examine what was assumed, and see if its rightness renews. Start with birth,
move through life, end with death.
Is birth something to fear, to inflict as violence? The child doesn't exist to see it so, the parents do.
It starts with the drive to mate. What makes that the freedom of life and joy rather than a
shock of pain and horror? The art of it, the way it takes place between the parents.
The man can aggress, assert, take, hurt, the woman can suffer at his hands;
the woman can seduce, use, dismiss, even kill the man, take only his seed and whatever else
she might want. Bad artists. The art of mating brings each mate to as much sacrifice as joy,
as much death as life, but each as a way to come and go in the moment of the clan, to help the
new life come and go so. Man sees the shock and stranger he is to woman, lets her see he sees it,
helps her find her own way to turn the shock to pleasure, to purpose, the stranger to friend and ally; woman sees the tangle she is to man, the danger, helps him see her good will and respect, her
care for him. Sex, birth, family--life--are nothing to fear if the art they require takes place; otherwise, they are the most fearful things.
From mating, we can picture so all transactions between neighbors in the clan: the man or beast
who uses force to rip his food out by the roots is full today and starves tomorrow;
the thief is a bad artist, the trader a good one, if the trade is good for both parties, and the clan;
in short, every relationship, between every creature and thing on the earth, must have this art
that brings out the greatest good in mating, birth, and family. And why not? The old clan is just
such a family...
The new life comes, and life must kill to live; some lives must die for the whole clan to live.
Is this a thing of horror and shock, terror and pain, or the way of life and joy coming and going?
There is an art to killing and dying, as to mating (at least so it always seemed to me without
thinking about it, something too obvious to question; now I am questioning).
Is that true, or have I been naïve, deluded by self-interest, to think so? I don't know...but I can
make the case for the truth, if it be true.
My people were not arrogant hunters; we considered our success and survival to be due
to the generosity of the creatures who gave us their lives. Naïvete, self-interest's delusion, or insight?
Again, I don't know, but if such generosity from prey and gratitude for it from hunter is a truth,
I've seen it more than once.
I learned about the art of the kill from walking for a time with a lynx; he was a friend,
or what you might call a pet, as I was to him. He was
curious, sharp, inquisitive, an exceptional cat, and I felt honored by our rapport and bond.
We hunted together and shared our food, and many deep communions.
Once he chased down an ibex, a buck in his prime, frisky and strong. They were out on the plain,
they'd run to exhaustion, and the cat had bitten the prey's leg enough to ensure his eventual capture.
The ibex knew he couldn't run, that it was only a matter of time, and he seemed beyond fear, into
resignation...but he didn't just lay down and wait to die, he limped back and forth,
almost seemed to do a little dance, snorting, lowering his horns and making futile gestures
of defense and attack. I knew the lynx was hungry, and the blood smell was strong;
he could have rushed in and finished in a flash.
Instead, he paced back and forth with the ibex, swiping his paws at the thrusting horns
almost playfully, darting his head forward as if to bite, then back away from the horns.
He was playing him, cat and mouse; but I saw clearly that it was not cruelty, was rather seduction,
care for the prey's experience, his path through death.
Then he did the most artful thing: he backed off and lay down, on haunches and belly, then
rolled onto his side, and raised his front leg, waving his paw inward toward his face, for all the world
like a woman lying down for a man, and beckoning him to come.
The wounded, fated prey stopped moving, lowered his gaze to lock on the cat's strange move, as if
stunned and puzzled by it, even entranced. When the paw beckoned, along with soft, sweet growls, the
ibex charged, weak but determined, as if to impale with his horns. The cat avoided them with a lazy
rolling motion, then a lightning swift one of his mouth to the neck, turning living to dying in a flash.
The ibex jerked and stiffened, flailed, then relaxed. His eyes rolled back into his head, he seemed to be in
ecstasy; the cat bit and clawed into him more like he was making love, kissing passionately, than
feeding; whatever he was doing, however he was doing it, seemed to bring pleasure, not pain: death
as life's orgasm here. When it was over, he did get very matter-of-fact again, and
tore into his meal with gusto.
Many times I've relived this event, moving my mindsight deep
into the cat's, then the ibex's role in it. Both were true artists of the kill and the death,
each arranging gracefully the passage allotted the other.
Indeed, my mindsight could go into each only as a way into both, because in the art of their dance
each did feel the other as much as himself: cat would not kill until ibex gave it up, ibex would not
do so until he had prepared himself, like the woman prepares for the man, to know and even seek it as
pleasure rather than pain; cat would make sure it was pleasure, feeling as the ibex felt, feeling its
brain's endorphins making it so, massaging tooth and claw into its flesh and blood like a
lover worthy of the name and the act, making ibex come shudder orgasmically out with
blood's final spurt.
After this image, I'm suddenly overcome with a barrage of others, from my
own similar transaction (no, not the wild boar--the meeting in Vienna, the Change:
a little death, a little life, a negotiation that could easily have been artless outrage).
Apparently this meditation of mine is activating Heffley's own about the music
as an issue of Eros and War.
"Play or Die!" was his mentor's motto; it strikes me more as choice than imperative now,
and certainly no metaphor. Sometimes one must play, sometimes not; one learns this,
feels it, in the music, in the life, as it's making. One starts, if one's smart, only when one has
prepared oneself and is ready; one brings at least as much to give as one takes--
and one runs and lets run, plays and lets play, lives and lets live...until one simply must
seize the lead, set the tone, lead the pack, or yield to or support the move of someone else to do so. There are no "others" here, only selves in Self, and conditions must be artfully set
to make all flows of "play" and "die" unfold to the benefit of all.
Because, being no metaphor, the life is true to the music here in this old clan:
just as we blaze with the life force when we play, when we mate, then wane with it as we fall
to silence, or old age, so do we stand behind its flux, behind both silence and sound,
life and death, engaging, deciding, wondering, with our awareness, picking our moments
to flow and to ebb, to start and stop. This is a matter of faith for newmen, but it is our
experience, and I've lived it far longer and deeper than I have the life of this Mann.
I try to think of other newmen examples of
artful kills, good deaths; I can think of many of both in the music, but mostly only good deaths--
peaceful surrenders to time and age, heroic ones in defense of others--in the life.
Many bad kills, of course--by no means all of which caused bad deaths. Why is this?
what does it mean? what would a good kill look like there?
Leave out the obvious--self-defense, or defense of others, against a bad kill;
mercy killing, defined and sought so by the killed;
even, perhaps, closest to oldclan reality, a kill for food, in some extreme situation
where the starvation of two would otherwise occur, and a choice is made, lots are drawn,
all assent (such as actually happened here in Ukraine when Stalin starved the peasants
by taking their harvest). Go instead for the fantasy closest to the reality newmen have made.
A good kill would look to all like what a bad kill must look like only to the killer who thinks it good,
a thing to be done with that same erotic art of mating.
Take an ideal soldier, one who really sees the war he wages as the clan's (his God's) way
of deciding the course of the future life, akin to the chase between hunter and prey,
only with the roles and outcome yet to be determined in the chase, the art.
He is ready to accept either role, life or death; he respects the process, and his opponent;
if he loses, his death will be a good one, honorable, to him;
if he wins, his kill will be a good one, executed without cruelty, with dispatch,
with respect for the good death he brings.
I know these goods exist so, my mindsight lets me live and know them as
directly as I've lived the good kill and death of the lynx and the ibex.
Now make it concrete. What would the kill by a Nazi of a Jew in the gas chamber look like
if it were a good kill? of a rebellious African slave by a white American master?
of a peasant or an intellectual by Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot? of an Albanian by Milosevic,
or a Serb by NATO?
These examples come naturally to my mind; this land around me still clamors and howls,
echoing the music Heffley brought to me, with the ghosts and the very sons and daughters
of just those people, still enfleshed, like a huge tree of blood and bones and meat for fruit
rising from the Indo-European ground I've brought him to. I feel him recoil in me
at the idea of seeing these deaths and kills as good in any way--but then he could hardly bear
to see me kill and eat my own game, or be aware of the kills and deaths behind the meat
he ate himself before our Change. He needs me for the answers to these questions, as I, I see now,
needed him to make me ask them. He doesn't see a thing that's plain to me--that if he sees the kills
and deaths around him, in his own history and mind, as evils removed from him,
as no part of his soul, he will be the first to commit or fall to them if they ever challenge
his own sheltered life. The blind eye he turns to them now will simply turn in another direction,
as it did with his German and Russian kin, with their Asian neighbors.
I can see instantly how such kills would look if they were good ones.
I can move with my mindsight to a place not far fom here, not long ago (a thousand years or so),
when the Viking traders moved up and down the Volga with their slaves.
A chieftain died, and their way was to stock his boat with worldly goods and riches and
push it off down the river bearing his body, as they would have pushed it out to sea
in their own northern lands. Custom dictated that his wife be so brokenhearted without him
that she would kill herself, or have her kinsmen kill her, to float off with him out of this world.
Custom also allowed her slave girls to offer themselves up in her place. When they were asked,
"Who will die with him?" they--not those newly captured, but those who had become fixed
in the family for long, perhaps generations--vied with each other for the honor.
It was an act that took a slave and her descendants out of bondage, made her death a
dignified, even glorious thing. Newman history is as full of such stories as of the
savagery of human sacrifice: victims who embrace, killers who inflict, death as
glory and honor for some greater good in the clan.
I can see clearly how such kills are the ultimate fantasy of the killers crowded around me now
in this time and place: "Thank you for your knife, your poison, your fire," they would hear their
victims say, "for you are the Angel of Death delivering me from my life gone wrong,
to right and improve it. I had the cruel misfortune to be born a woman, a foreigner, a slave,
a criminal drag or block on the clan's true life, the God's true way, and you are
correcting the mistake that I am, o greater brother! Please, let my children die with me too,
and share my glory in the peace of mind and bounty our deaths will bring to you..."
Like the lynx with the ibex, like my clan in its hunt, they long to see their prey line up and
file before their guns, into their killing fields, like beasts offering up their meat in a
gesture of friendship and love of the clan. (Like my new man Heffley would like to see the
killers lay down what they know as life, and take up the peace they see as death...)
It is time to get up again and move. I've gotten through birth, the Two made One in
sex and its fruit; I've gotten through the land in the middle between birth and death, the
land of the Two made One in death (eaters and eaten); I'm satisfied with my understanding
of the old clan's way with both, of the art there to both mating and hunting that
binds all parties into the same self and its process; without that art, there is rape, murder,
not Twoness united but Oneness divided, into selves and others, in power plays to
fix the flux of the old clan's tangled, nested hierarchies.
I've whiled away the day with these thoughts; I've seen wild game and fowl pass below me,
flying birds fish the water, trees drop their fruits to the ground. I'm hungry, but not inclined to eat,
certainly not to kill to eat, in my mood. I recall my words to myself--
"death is not a moment to fear or inflict." Am I then ready to die, rather than fear or inflict?
have I been prey, as much as hunter, enough to recognize and embrace the moment myself,
when it is time? That is the real point my vision of the good kill and the happy prey has
brought me to--through good birth, through good life, to good death. And what are those new
folk who tolerate their world's slaveries and kills and deaths in this very moment if not happy prey?
Is it time for my own such death? Is tonight not a good night to die?)
To look the good death in the face is, for me, more than staring down the moment of my own death.
As you surely understand by now, that is a good I can know easily as part of the oldclan's life.
It is simply the falling of a leaf from the tree, and I simply move my consciousness, my self, from
leaf to tree, to any part of it in its time, from its archaic roots to its now-budding fruits, from any
yesterdays to all tomorrows.
No, the death I must see as good is that of the tree itself, and that as a result of the rise
of the newman tree into the sunlight mine needs to live. I must consider my oldclan a
happy prey to the fruit of its own seeds, those that have blossomed from the wildness and
truths of the hunt and the garden untamed into a rigid domination of the earth, the sun, the stars,
by people, and of people by other people in the service of that domination's progress. I must
consider this evil to my good as rather good to my evil, consider bowing to it by giving it my life.
And, since considering is not deciding, I must also consider how to make it, rather, my happy prey.
This is the landscape of the Twelve, that revealed by the moon's times around the earth's time a
round the sun, by the stars housed differently in the sky with each lunar loop, by the bars and the
beats of the blues, by the twelve men Jesus turned into his band of the fragile, harried few against the
harrying, mighty, impossibly many. (Revealed, too, of course, by chromaticism's twelve-step
program of sound.) This is the very border, these Ukraine grasslands, forests behind me now,
between the subjugating West and the rapacious East. I feel myself move palpably away from the
one toward the other. The riches of the oldclan--waters, ores, game and food plants, all those
stakes of subjugation, of structures to build and command and serve--move me from intro
version to the extroversion of this grassland's just-enough-to-live, and plenty of it.
If those riches in the West were the stakes in the game of kill-or-be-killed, rule-or-be-ruled,
these steppes stretching from the Danube through China to the Pacific were the
training ground for the game's killers, the very launching pad off this world, where the
vastness of freedom came with a poverty that let live only those who were soulmates to
wild horses, yet whose teeth could also tear and eat those soulmates' flesh--a marriage of un
equals from the start. I exult in my first steps here, raise my own teeth and arms in a
grinning growl toward the moon, stretch deliciously and set off on a run I know will meet no walls.
Joining me there soon were the spirits of Kozaks, Ukraine's warrior-knights whose tastes of both
this land's contested goods and its open poverties had forged in them--much like the Germans--a
harsh nobility informed by the roles of both hunter and prey. Prey, because their people here were
mostly peasants, keepers of plantfoods and livestock, self-ruling in nature when left alone;
hunter, because they had to stand up to so many warlords from every part of Eurasia,
become like them, and fight for that self-ruled life, usually to their deaths.
I find these cossack spirits in their current flesh and forms throughout my Caucasian nests,
and have mindseen many parts of their lives over my years. There are things I've seen in their souls
(in me, Heffley calls to mind his readings of Gogol, a son of these parts) that I now find useful
as I search my own for the eyes to see my death.
First, they learned to live without a thing, because the things they held in joy--
the life of the land, family, the fruits of their labors--were ripped from their hands
or simply destroyed so often by the warlords from every direction. They came to despise
money and the things it bought; they learned to live in aloof detachment and distance from life itself,
as from a land too fragile to trust. They sank to deepest shame over being unhappy prey for so long,
then rose to the fiercest arrogance of the hunter--the best horsemen, the most ruthless warriors--
but, at their best, not for booty and bloodlust, not even for defense of the land and way of life
they'd renounced...rather, for something they held in the abstract, for their faith, their freedom,
their honor, their authority to define those things, and for the hope of a better world as an i
deal they counted enough to kill and die for, not as a reality they expected ever to see
the world embrace.
I find this fatalism comforting now. Is my way, my oldclan, draining away its final dregs
in newman history? Very well, I would let it go, and go with it peacefully.
It was a turn I wouldn't have taken, but the idea that it was a turn that could be taken,
and could take root and grow and prevail so teaches me something I can take to my darkness:
if we humans had it in us to take such a turn for the worse, so radically and thoroughly,
the same power to change our nature, all nature, could also take us in the other direction.
If it was the good kill that led to the bad kill, we could walk away from both.
We could survive on plants; we could survive as equals, with each other and the earth,
we could have universal peace and prosperity and renewal of the oldclan therein
as surely as we could have the world the newmen made.
Whether we--they--choose to or not, no one can doubt in their bodies that their bodies are
capable of that. Our evils are not necessary ones.
In accepting my death as a happy prey, I open the door to the "hunter's" fate as same.
Something has to die here, something come to life; the equation between Old and New
seems to indicate which will do what...but, in fact, the very identity of each--what is Old
and what is New--along with the fate of each, remains to be seen here.)
From sea to sea, Neusiedler to Caspian, I have walked. My run through the steppes
shook away the thoughts of life and death, new and old, it had begun by calling forth.
New and old so finely, fitly balanced in my own Changed body, I run to relish its power
and freedom, the surprise it is again to me. As I run around the northshore of the Caspian,
then south to the Caucasus, I stop running, walk rather with greatest glee at reaching home.
When I feel myself to be due east from Lake Constance, I know my cave is near.
I scour the landscape obsessively, even as my body continues to find its own way,
just to be completely present to this return.
I find my cave. It is cold, dark, quiet in the world, indescribably beautiful and warm in me.
In sheer ecstasy at finally being home, knowing I can stay as long as I wish, undisturbed, can
fast and sleep or feed and nurture as I choose, with all that I've seen and done and been
and known and said and thought, I tilt my head and raise my hands to the full moon
and hit the highest, most piercing sound my voice can make. I let it hang with the stars in the black
and blue of my whitegold world, then glide like a hawk down to the same sound in midrange,
arms falling and spreading straight out from me in wide embrace of the horizon--
of my horizon, of all I can sense with senses--then to the same sound again, to ground,
deep in my chest as the earth within my cave, arms dropped to hang straight down.
Satisfied, winded, I pat my thick belly and crawl into that sweet dark, to join it.
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NOTES
1. I, Heffley, was there for a music conference. My account of this meeting imparts the fact essential here: relict humans, ancestors of Neandertals, roam the earth unseen by homo sapiens (except when sighted as "Bigfoot" or some variation thereof). Their material culture is nearly as primitive as that of nonhuman animals, but they are far more advanced than humans ("newmen," to them) in their psychic lives. They sometimes link with a human they encounter to in essence share "souls" with the latter (join their consciousness to the human's life, and take the latter's being so into their own); they also "mind-travel" down generational lines from their own bodies to those of their ancestors, to link with those past lives.
2. This bit of news demolished generations of family lore that our American ancestors were Hessians. It pleased me.
3. Actually, from my perspective, Manu's entrance into my human life changed it in a different way. He did invigorate and stimulate it on one level, but on another he turned it inward, reclusive, dark.
4. "As the closely related momentum suggests, 'movement' is the etymological notion underlying moment. It comes via the Old French moment from Latin momentum. This was a contraction of an assumed earlier movimentum, a derivative of movère 'move'...and it had a wide range of meanings: from the literal 'movement'...developed the metaphorical 'instant of time' (which arose from the notion of a particle so small as only just to 'move' the pointer of a scale) and 'important'--both preserved in English moment" (Ayto 1990: 352). Manu's "Moments" are the geographical divisions, legs of the trip, he had formed in his mind after walking it so many times: temporalized space.
The word for "zero" in the ancient Breton language is "mann." The word for "I" in Hebrew consists of the same letters as the word for "nothing."
5. The most easterly settlement west of the old Iron Curtain, Chicago is a small village founded by Slovakians whose relatives emigrated to the American city in large numbers around the turn of the century. They used their American dollars to buy up land here to return to and develop, and when they did so they named their community after the city.
6. Manu imperfectly recalls Pythagoras' tetraktys, the seminal figure at the core of his mathematical-musical mysteries:
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7. It dawns on me in the middle of this meal that Manu has acted so already, several times since our joining, but kept it shielded from my awareness. Apparently I'm ready to live with this part of me...
8. I marvel at this, at the actual power, energy and purpose it brings. I would always have thought it aesthetically pleasing, this synchronicity of world and mindplay; I had spent much of my life as Heffley marking and counting not stretches of space, as Manu did now, but durations of time, hundreds of thousands or more, day after day for some forty years, mostly between one and four, layering them into longer durations to also count (ONE-two-three-four, TWO-two-three-four), bringing them to music's life and meaning in sound. Long after numbers and counting had become unconscious, I still did it and felt it, without trying to will it, when I did everything else, from speak to whisper to scream to sigh to live to love, until it was impossible to tell whether the impulse came from a body programmed or one welling with its essence.
But this body of Manu is playing far more than mentally. I now feel trained only partially by those human engagements with music; much deeper and clearer (and quicker) was the training of my walk thus far, through these moments of those numbers marking time as motion through space, to help me think, and see, and be the way I am now. The challenge coming up is to handle myself through the more peopled lowlands, to move as discreetly as I/he had through and out of Vienna, and before he/I was so thoroughly Changed by that walk.
9. Siberian singer Sainkho Namtchlyak has expanded into the World Music/New Age market, with her CD Tearing Down Borders (Musicworks CD68, 1997). Peter Kowald wrote on her FMP debut recording's liner notes (Lost Rivers, 1991)--themselves his own meaty little ethnography of Tuvan music and culture--"in the cultural history of the Occident (from Heraklitos to Fluxus, the exceptions prove the tendency), the image of floating and letting go is rather unpopular; instead, there is an attitude of taking apart, cutting into pieces, separating, analysing, specialising. I consider it good and right that there is room in us for waiving feeling and willing thinking. I find it essential that there is proper (and not properly at all) floating between these two."
10. The butoh dancer movement emerged as a gesture against American cultural and military hegemony; it was characterized by a rejection of Western aesthetic standards, and a commitment of the body to ancient Japanese archetypes, dance thick with images of animality, death and horror, raw sex--the 'primitive' personalized, then worked to more refined statements from there.
11. I remember the way I got here, in my own midlife Middle Passage reversed, in my transatlantic flight away from, with the support of, my alma mater.
12. But Manu in me turns away from that jarring, grating image; still too much too soon, this white clan. I need, with Manu, to reclaim my ground in the clan that was here for so long before it, has endured it right along, will surely remain as it passes.)