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the idea of the moths in the high darkness, straining upward, filled him with longing, and at these times he would know that he had not found what he was looking for, nor come closer to discovering what it was.
So long as he kept moving he would be all right. For men like himself the ends of the earth had this great allure: that one was never asked about a past or future but could live as freely as an animal, close to the gut, and day by day by day.
seemed to her that her husband, in the past years at the Sioux mission, had grown more and more indecisive, masking a loss of evangelical zeal with his “respect” for the Indian culture; how was he ever to redeem a people whose religion seemed to him so beautiful?
“These greasers run a lousy jail, Lewis, and how about the aircraft? And also, these Neo-rooneys ain’t real Indians, Lewis. They ain’t like Blackfoots or Apaches or Cheyennes or nothin. They’re just a bunch of starvin jungle rats, just like you told me. This is South America, remember? It ain’t like they was your own people or nothin. So maybe you could kind of think of it like a mercy killin, huh, Lewis?”
a large wine bottle full of the thick brown fluid called ayahuasca,
Did you earn your faith, or were you stuffed with it, like a big turkey?”
“You forgot the part about robbing the Indians of their own culture and then abandoning them”—he raised his voice in mock outrage, as if he were making a speech—“leaving them with nothing strong enough, neither their old culture nor a new one, to support them against the next group to come along.” “Oh yeah,” Wolfie said, “that’s right. Neither their old culture or a new one,” he yelled angrily at Quarrier, “and then you come runnin to us about our business. Well, all I can say is, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ ”
Lewis, I told him after, like make it with pot, Lewis, or hash, man, or peyote, you can even shoot it if you wanna, jam the needle right inta your miserable brain, Lewis, only just lay off this jungle junk, this Hiawatha. I mean, who needs some kind of a loo-natic around, who needs it? And you know what he says to me? Lewis, I mean, this crazy Lewis says, I need it; it allows me to see. You’re outa your fuckin mind, I told him.”
Well, if I had bombs and time enough, I’d bomb this miserable jungle from end to end. I mean it. It gives me the creeps, I don’t even like to look at it even.”
Before the great victory at the Greasy Grass Creek, they had numbered fifteen hundred lodges, and the smoke of their fires had shrouded the blue sky of the high plains. That was the boy’s regret: the loss of this vast triumphant sight, the thousands of campfires and ponies galloping and colors and buffalo meat and smoky smells and wolf howls and wild yelling.
The bright shimmer of the arrow, the lone naked figure howling at the sky—it had been years since he had grinned like that, with all his lungs and heart; he actually yipped in sheer delight. Now he had sensed something unnamable and always known, something glimpsed, hinted at, withheld by sun and wind, by the enormous sky …
For the first time that Moon could remember, his partner did not feel like talking, and as his own head began to clear, he realized that Wolfie’s terror in the plane had been fed less by fear of death than by bewilderment at Moon’s contempt for both their lives, by the threat of a totally meaningless end.
He remained on the rock a second day and a second night, just out of stubbornness, and because he was proud of the rifle that Alvin Moon had laid beside him. No bear nor cougar came—the animals would not bother him, his father said, if he sat still—and on the third morning he did not feel hungry any more and sat there motionless, letting the sun and wind blow through him. He was as firmly rooted in the ground as the young pine. By afternoon he was growing weak and became filled with apprehension: something was happening. The jays and squirrels had lost all fear of him, flicking over and about
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B. caapi, which is named for the caapi of certain Brazilian Indians, is also the camorampi of the Campa, the natema of the Jivaro, the ayahuasca or haya-huasca of the Quechua-speaking peoples, the yage of Ecuador, the soga de muerte of most Spanish South Americans, names variously translated as “Vine of the Devil,” “Vine of the Soul,” “Vine of Death”: the Spanish term means literally “vine rope of death,” the soga referring to the jungle lianas used commonly as canoe lines, lashings, ropes, etc. In addition to certain medical properties, the vine can induce visions, telepathic states,
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There is a lost reality, a reality lost long ago. Are you in touch with it: can you tell me—did you see?—
On the wall of the room, over the door, he saw a huge moth with a large white spot on each wing.
the large white eyes of the moth observed him;
He had flung himself away from life, from the very last realities, had strayed to the cold windy reaches of insanity. This perception was so clear and final that he moaned; he would not find his way back. You’ve gone too far this time, you’ve gone too far …
Death came as a huge bounteous quiet, in the bosom of a high white cloud. The wood of his body softened, the knots loosened; he opened up, lay back, exhausted, mouth slack, eyes wide like the bald eyes of a corpse. He glimpsed a hard light lucid region of his mind like a lone comet, wandering far out across the long night of the universe.
“That’s the only way to do it—go. When there’s a jungle waiting, you go through it and come out clean on the far side. Because if you struggle to back out, you get all snarled, and afterwards the jungle is still there, still waiting.
“I’m at play in the fields of the Lord,” Moon said; he removed his earphones. “Repeat, at play in the fields of the Lord.”
Through the prism of the mist, the heat of the low jungle sky seemed to focus on this wretched spot, where tarantulas and scorpions and stinging ants accompanied the mosquito and the biting fly into the huts, where the vampire bats, defecating even as they fed, would fasten on exposed toes at night, where one could never be certain that a bushmaster or fer-de-lance had not formed its cold coil in a dark corner.
He thought about his reservation Sioux, the terrible apathy of hopelessness that the white man preferred to call laziness and stupidity.
the jungle seemed a kind of Eden.
Then the rains came crashing down, and in the humid spells between, Quarrier knew what Hazel dreaded: the oppression of the jungle, the poisonous green flesh and weight of it. Its latent violence crawled on his skin like fever, causing him to shake and sweat.
Taweeda said that the white man’s Kisu invited the spirits of good Indians to drink masato with him in his Sky House, and sent the spirits of bad Indians to live down in the mud like frogs.
Though he moved much faster and more quietly than in the early days, he had to struggle to keep up with the Niaruna. He had never envied anything so much as the identity of these people with their surroundings, nor realized quite so painfully how displaced he had always been. He simply did not belong, not here, not anywhere.
he laughed at the extraordinary experience which had befallen him—the perceiving, through the Indians, of a wilderness which heretofore had seemed to him a malevolent nether world, poisonous and stagnated, miasmal.
This is key.
Their suspense and fear were made still worse by Hazel, who spoke wildly of the jungle and could talk of nothing else, describing obscenely the obscenity of the flowering and rot, the pale phallic trunks and dark soft caverns, the rampant hair, the slime and infestations.
Peering closer, he could smell the jungle flesh, sense the snip and clicking of a million pincers, the red-toothed struggle for food and space and light, the strangler figs and probing root, the silent hunters and devourers, the broadcasting of cells and seeds and energy in mindless waste. And he saw for a moment what his deranged wife had seen in her agony of the day before, that in this place they were forsaken; then there swept over him the significance of the snake, and he groaned aloud and sank to his knees and prayed.
“Oh, you’re just like Leslie! That’s why I didn’t tell Leslie, because he’d be so angry, just like you are!” When Quarrier only grunted miserably and dropped his eyes, she said bitterly, “I’ll tell you something else. I was naked, and I wasn’t ashamed. Am I a sinner, Martin? Am I a sinner then?” More quietly she said, “Maybe it was because he was naked too, because he belonged there where he was, with the fish and leaves and sun, with that emerald bird. For the first time the jungle seemed like paradise, bugs, heat, mud, and all, and he was part of the jungle, he was beautiful. And I was
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reminding him as it did how far his long experience as a white man, as a white soldier, had removed him from the Old Ways.
Moon asked the People why they were so careful to go painted. Tukanu said, “It protects me from the heat and Insect People.” And Pindi said, “I wear it so that I may know Pindi in the river’s face.” But Aeore said passionately, “We are naked and have nothing! Therefore we must decorate ourselves, for if we did not, how are we to be told from animals?” There it was. The unbearable thing was not the fear that the Great Spirit had forsaken man, nor even that in granting awareness of death, He had made man’s hope ridiculous, but that from the beginning He had made no real distinction between the
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the true dignity of the Old Ways—
In the shuddering light, in the groan and fume and pant of breath of sprawled brown bodies, he smelled something infernal, like the stench of dying moths lying burned at the base of a lantern. But the smell was no smell of evil but only of mortal exhaustion, of the renewed and endless and irremediable failure of the Niaruna to escape their doomed flesh, as their legend promised, and dance away into the sky.
The Indian was the Spirit of all Life—was he not born, and born again, in everything upon the Earth?—and the white man was the Spirit of the Dead. But now the white man was among them, and must be driven out.
Boronai spoke sadly, in simplicity. It was this enviable simplicity which in those bright green early days he had thought within his grasp that Moon felt himself on the point of losing. Even the sense of the universe he had glimpsed under ayahuasca had slipped away from him; was that because he had not really earned it? He was sick to death of thinking, of words. One knew the jungle best when one no longer struggled, when one flowed with its rains and wind, breathed with its creatures, drank from its rivers out of green-leaf cups, took shelter from it in the common warmth of the night fires.
key
He fell to his knees on the rank ground and began to pray, but instantly jumped up again. He had wandered into a cathedral of Satan where all prayer was abomination, a place without a sky, a stench of death, vast somber naves and clerestories, the lost cries of savage birds—he whooped and called, but no voice answered.
“Oh, shit,” Moon said, losing his temper. “Your hypocrisy stinks worse than his, and you haven’t got the excuse of being stupid! At least he admits it’s not the Indians’ lives he cares about, only their souls.” He pointed at his Indian companion, who was urinating. “Do you love him?” He spat angrily on the ground. “The hell you do! Beneath all this phony love you people preach, you have no respect for Indian ways. You tell him his superstitions are ridiculous, and when he has nothing left, you ask him to believe instead that Jesus walked on water.
“I think I was searching for something more important than my own life. That’s what we’re all after, isn’t it?”
Once I instructed my flock that our Creator was not to be confused with their own. But one man said, ‘How do you know?’ and I could not answer.”
“Our Christian—that is, Western—outlook is rather lugubrious, do you not think? We have persuaded ourselves that abnegation”—and he touched his cassock, not without irony—“and self-sacrifice are superior to joyous self-expression, to the emotions—to simple being? Now … if we could just take time from our teaching of our poor Indians, we might learn something from them. After all, the Indians come out of Asia, theirs is essentially an Eastern culture; they do not seek for meaning: they are. They are not heavy the way we are, they are light as the air; their being is a mere particle of the
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all of them were pinned like butterflies to the frame of their own morality, and that was that.
“You see … a man like me, a cautious man, has his life all figured out according to a pattern, and then the pattern flies apart. You run around for quite a while trying to repair it, until one day you straighten up again with an armful of broken pieces, and you see that the world has gone on without you and you can never catch up with your old life, and you must begin all over again.”
She longed to say, I admired him most because he had lost his faith and did nothing, even under duress, to weaken mine.
“Leavin this jungle is like tryin to leave quicksand—you fight like hell, but you don’t go no place.”
You want to go somewheres in life, then you got to commit yourself, you got to burn all the bridges behind you, man.”
