Resistance (9 page)

I didn’t think I would ever marry again after that. The emotional devastation was complex and enormous. Like any wounded animal I sought refuge and, predictably, I had several short-lived romances while I moved steadily toward a deeper need. That need was to seek out a particular set of circumstances I had been considering for many years and then think them through carefully.

In my twenties I’d read a book about the concept of wind—the movement of air—in Navajo philosophy. I’d made some notes and then put the book aside with the idea of returning to it one day. I treated it as a marker in the sort of future I was trying to imagine for myself.

According to Navajo belief, winds exist all around and also within a person. Together these winds constitute an invisible entity, and the entity is understood as something holy. Other native North American peoples have refined similar ideas; but the Navajo conception is particularly successful in relating the idea of the individual to the concept of a stable society. “The wind standing within one,” as the Navajo express it in English, is in constant motion, in two ways: in respiration, the breathing in and out of air, and also by continuously passing through skin whorls on the fingers and toes. A Navajo adult moving gracefully through the world—someone who signifies harmony through his behavior and emotions, and so, in the Navajo mind, beauty—is seen as someone steadied by wind moving between the toes and the ground, between the fingertips and the sky.

The Navajo believe that through nítch′i (Holy Wind), individuals participate in graces or powers that surpass those of the individual, and that those graces or powers keep one secure in the world and confirm one’s indispensability, one’s necessity in the world. The most dreadful thing imaginable would be for nítch′i to withdraw its support from a human being. Nítch′i is seen as the primary source of the breath, thought, speech, and light that, together, create beneficence around us.

Like every people, the Navajo are trying with this metaphor to provide a name and imagery for some force invisible but essential to life. And for them, not incidentally, this metaphor is not a metaphor, as we have it. It is the truth.

For many years, as the Navajo might say if they cared to, the wind was a pathetic breeze in me, or even a stillness sometimes, I suppose. Occasionally during that time I actually imagined my confusions and disaffections as the state of being “out of breath.” If I could only get my breath back, I would think, I might be able to view the misfortune of my divorce and the estrangement from my father as microcosms of what I was trying to understand, on a much larger scale, about the wayward nature of my culture. (So much of it for me came down, one way or another, to the failure to love.)

Nítch′i hwii′sizíinii, “the Wind within one,” is not conceivable as discrete in the sense of being an individual soul. This makes our vexing question of how one fits into the world meaningless. A person can’t not fit. Nor is one able to achieve the distance from life necessary to experience existential loneliness. Instead, all one’s efforts are bent toward enhancing and balancing the experience of feeling included in life.

The notion of my now going somewhere to consult with Navajo singers about these matters seems more than just naive. It would be impertinent. In any case, traditional Navajo would be apt to deny they could help. It’s the wind, they’d say, that’s the teacher. I can’t be satisfied at this juncture of my life, however, with just passively accepting the idea that the wind is a kind of world soul. I need the wind itself, the actual being outside my control, as a teacher, in the same way I required as a young man the real ground from which to learn, the empirical event over the imaginary thought.

Therefore, with the knowledge and blessing of my former wife and the children, whom I still honor, still need, I will now go away for a while. As with my similar, earlier immersions in books—histories, academic and popular studies, novels— which always preceded the working out of any formal, considered statement I wanted to make, I will now search out the longest-known and most dependable of the earth’s winds. The harmattan of Algeria, I will find that. The sirocco of Calabria, I will encounter it. The trades of Martinique, the katabatics of Antarctica, the simoon of Iran, the onshores of the Atacama and the Namib. I will stay with them.

I’ve no illusions about being Navajo or even understanding fully what they know. I am Caucasian. I was raised to be a member of the upper class of New England and am comfortable accepting that history. It is specifically to that group of people, moreover, the hardest for me to accept, that I wish to return. I have to find a language they can accept, an experience they will trust. But I believe this too will be there when I put my face into these winds. I believe there is more here than the Navajo idea with which I begin.

I hope I do not make a fool of myself.

Marion Taylor, alternative energy
consultant, producer,
Changing
Woman’s Sons,
on leaving Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania

Flight from Berlin

The morning of the spring equinox I watched first light wash over the jungled hills above the Utala River. I leaned into the brace of my hands splayed against the red granite wall, absorbing the needle mist of warm water between my shoulder blades and peering sideways at the flush of golden light. With the light’s bloom, the chill air began to dissipate and the steam of life to rise: slow fog skimming the clear Utala, cloud banners drifting in the green canopy of the jungle forest, my breath billowing, condensation misting the shower glass.

I am going to move on soon, maybe as soon as tomorrow. I’ve sensed disappearing may be necessary now—I’ve been on the Web quite a bit, following news of my country in the national and foreign press. But I’ll be moving on because it’s the right thing for me. I’ve been restored here. I’m finished.

I’ve brought my coffee to the veranda and set it steaming on the solawood table, together with sharpened pencils and a few sheets of pulpuna paper. At this early hour, in this latitude at this season, sunlight pries from shadows on the riverbank below a life that cannot at other times be seen. I’ve been recording facets of it, as far as my skills go. Together with my notes on these animals and descriptions of the physical setting, I’ve been forwarding the drawings to scientific journals, where their occasional publication—I’m speaking here of the most marginal of journals—has stirred some objection and criticism. Not an accomplished-enough naturalist, they say. Not a skilled-enough illustrator.

Already the equatorial light has cast the wood grain of my drawing board into a pattern of razor-edged shadows, isolating them between planes of light grading from matte to glare. Can I get this same depth into my drawing, this same suggestion of life?

It’s not sunlight drowning darkness in my room that awakens me but the sonic shift from night to day. The distant, headlong tones of the plunging river at this time of year are pierced, first, by the ripple calls of paladin birds and the shriek and bark of magimbas, small primates that live on fruit alone, in the uppermost branches of the jungle forest’s trees, and that never descend to the jungle floor. Then come the extended trills—twenty seconds sometimes—of clarindas, and the grating cough notes of gotts. Flocks of dits prattle-chirping. The morning quickly effervesces into a rarified chorus no one can easily separate. It’s all one water.

I’m sitting several hundred feet above the Utala, on an outcrop of metamorphic rock black after a night rain but with broad veins of gleaming lapis lazuli running through it, on a platform of cedar planks which some Tukano boys put together for me, shortly after I came here. I shut my eyes now for minutes at a time, to concentrate more deeply on the perfume of orchids and ridisses braided through the current of night air still falling down the valley. As soon as I understood from the Tukano that the fragrances released by particular flowers alleviated certain kinds of pain, I began growing these flowers near the house. I’d always assumed we smelled flowers for pleasure, but the Tukano say that the habit of putting the face to a flower is actually founded in a need for palliatives. The pleasure comes from the overall sensation of interacting with the plant.

I experience pleasure in the first inhalation from an unfamiliar orchid, they tell me, because I am retrieving the memory of a conversation from long ago, one that left me feeling exhilarated. Similarly, if a first inhalation makes me snort and turn away, that is from a conversation that went bad.

I play a sort of game with the sweet-smelling ridisses. Early in the morning I try to pry out of the stream of air at least half a dozen species of this lily, inhaling slowly from the standing wave of turbulent air running over the rock outcrop on which the house sits. I’ll recognize
Ridis paloma,
forest dove ridiss.
Ridis uxoris. Ridis conlacrimis. Ridis stygis.
One morning I teased out twelve. A friend, a woman named Aweseela, can get more, but she says with a tolerant laugh like your grandmother’s that I am coming along.

I dissect the riverbank with binoculars now, alert for the movement of yatira and ohimba, and watching for spenamores, which I know will emerge in the coming hour. (My sketches, my notes on the wafting landscape of the jungle’s smell, my reports on animal behavior, my phonic renditions of birdcalls—all this goes into the house’s
liberdomus
for the next occupant.)

Most of my life, I’ve been one to say, “I wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen it.” Not long after I had come to Dowilda the thought reversed itself. It became, “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it.” This was the step: I trusted Aweseela and the other Tukano people. They didn’t attempt to turn me against my own culture, and they nursed me through a deadly bout of fever. They taught me how to live “quietly” in their part of the Curiouriari River country. In time I came to doubt nothing they said, even if my reasoning gave them nowhere to stand.

I quickly lay in head profiles of a couple of yatiras. I’ve had to develop an unfamiliar confidence in order to work this fast, no hesitation in my line, no pondering between strokes. Once, I might have described this as drawing by instinct, but it’s quite different. The “object” to be drawn is not an object, in the sense that an artist is able to impose his scrutiny on it. The only way this will work—the quick study that seems so exactly right, a rendering inexplicably beyond the artist’s technical skill—is if the artist is in conversation with the “object.” Drawing by dialogue, you might call it. The artist engages the subject of the drawing as his equal and, through some shared faculty, it contributes.

My understanding—say in this instance this morning—is that one of the yatiras is responding to my interest and the drawing is a visible record of our exchange. Also, as it becomes apparent that a drawing will be no better than the quality of the conversation, you learn to bear down. Early on, my mind would wander. I’d feel a twinge of embarrassment, see the drawing as a failure, and try to start over. Most often I could, but occasionally the opportunity would simply vanish. However, once I gained an awareness of what the Tukano call “quiet” life, an ability to discern the half-visible life of the forest, once I became capable of working on that level, I never again lost the power to relocate the conversation—with a stone, the river, a tree, one of the “quiet” animals, or one of the creatures—a macaw or ocelot—most everyone would notice. I could always defeat the distraction.

I got down three very nice sketches of the yatiras’ profiles while the pair ambulated over tree roots and an ohimba dittered away close by with a groundnut. More, of course, always waits to be done. Years of such mornings and I’ll have gotten down a lot of conversation, say the Tukano, but nothing definitive.

Aweseela tells me, from what I’ve explained to her, that my people have mostly “written down” only the “loud” conversation with things in the world. When I asked her once to be more specific, she took my drawing paper and with only eight or ten strokes rendered the character of my house. She revealed it as conspicuous and forward, a bullying presence, despite the efforts I’d made to get it to blend in with the line and color of the rock and jungle around it.

When I finally put the pulpuna sheets aside, I recalled something from the time I felt, like many others, that my life served no purpose. Do you remember any such days? It was as though we all lived in tunnels then, crowded in with some stranger’s furniture, with more furniture arriving all the time. For me, the terrifying part was the ease with which you could lose your imagination—just abandon it, like a gadget. Everything was supplied, even if you had to pay for it all. We were told things would run more smoothly—less crime, less disease, less unhappiness, less trouble—if everyone stuck to the same plan, pursued identical goals. What made me want to run was the ease with which people gave in.

In every quarter of life, it seemed then, we were retreating into fundamentalism. The yes/no of belief, the in/out of fashion, the down/up of pharmaceuticals, the on/off of music, the hot/cold of commitment, the dead/live of electricity, the forward/backward of machinery, the give/take of a deal. Anyone not polarized became an inconvenience for management and its legions of loyal employees. People endorsed the identification of enemies and their eradication, just to be rid of some of the inevitable blurring.

We didn’t hear enough then about making the enemy irrelevant. No one said, loud enough to be heard over the din of pacification, Let’s make something beautiful, so the enemy will have one less place to stand.

The year before I came to South America I went to Berlin with my family. I met with seventeen like-minded friends and acquaintances. With a half-dozen translators, without whom we would never have gotten our information sorted, our complex emotions conveyed, our promises made, we persevered. We couldn’t get anywhere deep, however. We were like agitated bees, all hovering around the same flower, looking for a way in.

I had no answers in Berlin. I couldn’t identify that flower. I was tired of trying. I didn’t want to save anyone or anything anymore. Lebensraum was what I wanted, please forgive me, freedom from the suffocating interlock of venal desire, dire warning, Teutonic competition, extreme overreach, and sophisticated oblivion that had become, in the dim tunnels back home, everyday life.

I remember I had a book with me in my hotel room,
The Season of the Catapult.
The author had created an impoverished futuristic world in which the violent action of a Roman military machine, the catapult, symbolized political forces at work in the culture. To operate the catapult, men winched down a pivoted arm with a windlass mounted on a wheeled carriage, locking it under spring tension. With the device now cocked, they loaded a basket at the far end of the arm with an array of debris—tree stumps, boulders, dead animals, shrapnel iron, broken pipe, bottles of oil stoppered with lit fuses. When the arm was cut loose, the debris was hurled with terrific force toward the target—a street jammed with people, the walls of a shrine, a loaded granary, livestock pens.

In the author’s fictional world, those who owned and managed the catapults conquered and ruled; those who loaded and operated the catapults, who pulled them hither and yon in harness, earned a provisional safety; all the rest of society lived at risk. The catapult was an instrument of terror. For some who followed its wanderings, the catapult’s regular deployment against people, the carnage it created, was a form of entertainment. From the rubbish it scattered, those fleeing its destruction often rigged part of their living.

Sitting there in the hotel room in Berlin, the book finished, I wished the invincible catapult masters of the book had agreed to leave some quarter of the world untouched, so, projecting myself into the book, I might go there with my family and never again have to think about scenarios of enforcement. I wished I could see a way—I was pushing far beyond the author’s intentions here, I suppose, but for me her allegory spoke directly to the drama of that time—see a way to suggest to the catapult masters of my own time that it was the catapult, not its owners, that was now writing our history. The masters were pursuing lebensraum not for themselves but for the machines. The machines were living for the attention they got. They lived to disrupt. They fed on corruption. You could see that they hated anything beyond their control, like beauty.

But, the masters would counter, it is too simple a device to take so seriously. They would argue they could unrig the catapult whenever they wished, render it useless. But then, I might have asked, what would the masters do with their lives? Without the machine, what would be their calling?

I could have been a catapult master, in a trice. When you are worn out, dictatorial powers—it makes no difference whether you are the victim or the perpetrator—exert an attraction. Giving in is so much more appealing than going on. Like the catapult masters, I had confused possessing something with being in control of it; and I had underestimated the power of what I had created. I was part of the juggernaut against which I was fighting.

If there was an answer to the riddle of life, I remember thinking that afternoon, I was no longer interested in what it might be. If the plan to reduce everyone’s suffering was to define their needs without consulting them and then serve those needs, I did not want to be around. If to serve was to be free, I was gone.

That was the last meeting, the last international gathering for me of whatever it was we were— artists, writers, philosophers, theologians, historians. It was with a feeling of being released from long confinement that I gathered up Lora and our children and that we headed home. We stopped to see my parents in Amsterdam and Lora took the children on to St.-Denis to see their grandparents there. Once back in Detroit we sorted through all our belongings. In less than a week we reduced it all to six steamer trunks and some hand luggage.

Lora and I had thought about this a dozen times. When would we go? And where? She’d waited patiently for me to run the string out, to see we had to give our life and hope some different shape.