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“The function of the artist,” the Navajo answered, “is to provide what life does not.”
“Logic only gives man what he needs,” he stammered. “Magic gives him what he wants.”
Stainslaw's band, the Capitalist Pig, would soon be making a world tour. Amanda would contact foreign naturalists and collectors who, in midnight rendezvous in secret groves or rowdy waterfront bars, would supply Stanislaw
“There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others.”
“Happiness is a learned condition. And since it is learned and self-generating, it does not depend upon external circumstances for its perpetuation.
When I was born, the drums of Kivu beat all night long, the hyenas ate my afterbirth.”
“magician” probably covers his activities as well as any other occupational description. After all, it is indicative of some kind of appropriateness when a CIA agent says of a fugitive as one said yesterday of Ziller, “We'll tear this country apart if necessary to get our hands on that fucking magician.”
Ziller and his baboon were seated on a Nigerian cotton cushion in front of an open window, eating plums and listening to the sounds that bounced in off the streets.
In the mashed banana sunlight of Labor Day morning, Amanda basked on a log in the Sacramento River, talking to her two closest friends in the Indo-Tibetan Circus: Nearly Normal Jimmy and Smokestack Lightning. A burly redhead whose walrus nose and oxblood mustache both drooped wearily as if overpowered by the weight of his ice-cube-thick spectacles, Nearly Normal Jimmy was manager and ringmaster of the circus.
At seventy-three, Smokestack Lightning could still do a dance that lowered the blood temperature of the most urbane and confident white American. In the circus arena, lit only by a dry twig fire, the old Apache would don his Ghost shirt, its blue-dyed buckskin adorned with thunderbirds and fat white stars (a design that had been revealed to the shirt's original owner in a vision). Then he would commence a performance of calculated frenzy, identifying his bodily rhythms with the historical migrations of his people, recalling both their triumphs and their tribulations, insinuating their glories
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“What truly mystifies me,” she confided to her friends, “is the way things are always happening to me during thunderstorms. My oddest experiences, the ones that are most occult or that seem to seep out of the deepest cracks in my psyche, invariably happen just before or in the middle of some storm. I mean it's spooky. As if there's some connection between my innermost karmic structure and violent electrical disturbances. Why do you suppose that is?”
“People's heads are always affected by thunderstorms,” he allowed. “It's the negative particles released in the atmosphere. Ozone gas is released, too. It activates the mind. Makes you feel kinda high, haven't you ever noticed feeling kinda high just before a storm? People dream more, dream more vividly when there's a heavy concentration of ozone in the air.
He reminded her that the monarch's nickname is “storm king.” That it is always most active before a storm. She had seen them, hadn't she? Sailing in the electrified air, beating head-on into the gusty thunderclouds, reveling in the boisterous winds. And did she not know that monarchs usually emerge from their cocoons just prior to thundershowers? The first sound they hear is likely the rumble of thunder. They are literally born of the storm. No other creature is so susceptible to the tense vibrations of a summer squall.
There are certain channels of communication that operate outside the frequencies of the most prying investigators. A hundred blackbirds will evacuate a tree at precisely the same second—without a discernible signal of any kind. A variety of orchid, lacking nectar as an enticement but needing to be pollinated, attracts male bees by emitting odors like that of the female bee. A wasp will bore for an hour into the hard wood of a tree at the exact spot where hides the tiny grub in whose body she lays her eggs: there is no outward sign that the grub is there, yet the wasp never misses. At the
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“We breakfast at the All-Night Sanskrit Clinic and Sunshine Post. Phosphorescent toadstools illuminate the musicians. Ghost cookies sparkle with opium. We learn the language of the Dream Wheel.”
When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.
caldron
In a corner sat a small wedding-gift table of carved quartz, on the top of which were carefully arranged Ziller's compass, sextant, charts, telescope, French ticklers and other navigational instruments. From the ceiling hung a brass saucer in which Nearly Normal had thought to burn incense until he remembered Amanda having once told him that smell was 80 per cent of love. Here, the couple was left—the sounds of the festivities seeping through the walls like some disjointed Musak of Mars. Moonlight pressed in on them like a hungry ghost, feeding on the wholeness of their hearts and brains.
A person's got a right to break his own head if he wants to. It's his head. It's his decision.”
ALONG THEIR MIGRATORY routes, monarch butterflies stay nights in certain trees. The “butterfly trees,” as they are called, are carefully chosen—although the criteria exercised in their selection are not known. Species is unimportant, obviously, for at one stopover the roosting tree may be a eucalyptus, at another a cedar or an elm. But, and this is what is interesting, they are always the same trees. Year after year, whether moving south or returning north, monarchs will paper with their myriad wings at twilight a single tree that has served as a monarch motel a thousand times before. Memory?
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Along that one fifteen-mile section of the Seattle-Vancouver Freeway (between Everett and Mount Vernon), there were scattered gas stations, general stores and restaurants. Not many, however, for this was farming country of almost unequaled lushness and the black juicy soil was far too valuable to be relegated to commerce.
“I am always voyaging back to the source,” Ziller had said. He was a source-rer. Internally, he pursued the bright waters of his origins with whatever vehicles he could command. “In our human cells are recorded every single impulse of energy that has occurred since the beginning of time,” Amanda had said. “The DNA genetic system is the one library in which it is really worthwhile to browse.” Although he never said as much, Ziller seemed to find the key to that library in various mental disciplines, in capsules, powders, symbols, songs, rituals and vials.
Ziller had pilgrimaged several times to Africa, place of his birth. Now, it was time to reassimilate the Pacific Northwest, the rained-on, clam-chawed land where he had lived his childhood.
pint of milk. Good. Food would revive her. The bread slices collapsed like movie-set walls beneath her bite; the mayonnaise squished, the cucumber snapped tartly like the spine of an elf.
On the label there was a picture of a cow in a can, her big mooey head hanging out of one end of the can—another Pet milk can, naturally—and on the label of that can was the same cow in another Pet milk can. And that can also had a cow-in-can design on its label. And those cow cans, one inside the other, just went on, growing progressively smaller, as far as the eye could see. It walloped my little mind.” “They've changed the label,” Amanda pointed out. “Yeah. They have,” sighed Jimmy as he left to return to the show. “To Madison Avenue even infinity is expendable.”
When he ducked into the Ziller tent he found its occupants still abed, although Amanda and Thor were awake playing mommie-baby games in the puffy Christmas of quilts.
Next to making a million in show biz, my greatest desire is to see Tibet. What a catastrophe! For forty centuries Tibet was the seat of world enlightenment, guardian of the universal secrets, and now when we really need it—are capable of using it—invaded, sealed off, despoiled. No line of communication open. If only we could send them singing telegrams, exchange recipes, subscribe to their newspapers, receive some sign that their wisdom has not been snuffed, receive some signal, as to what the next play should be.”
“Jimmy, my ringmaster, do you think it an accident, a mere coincidence, that LSD became available to the public, was thrust into the consciousness of the West, at precisely the time of the invasion of Tibet?”
The Skagit Valley lies between the Cascades and the Sound—sixty miles north of Seattle, an equal distance south of Canada. The Skagit River, which formed the valley, begins up in British Columbia, leaps and splashes southwestward through the high Cascade wilderness, absorbing glaciers and sipping alpine lakes, running two hundred miles in total before all fish-green, driftwood-cluttered and silty, it spreads its double mouth like suckers against the upper body of Puget Sound.
The effect is distinctly Chinese. A visitor experiences the feeling that he has been pulled into a Sung dynasty painting, perhaps before the intense wisps of mineral pigment have dried upon the silk. From almost any vantage point, there are expanses of monochrome worthy of the brushes of Mi Fei or Kuo Hsi.
Even today, after the intrusion of neon signs and supermarkets and aircraft industries and sports cars, a hushed but heavy force hangs in the Northwest air: it defies flamboyance, deflates extroversion and muffles the most exultant cry.
"the mushrooms are rising like loaves. Like hearts they are pulsing and swelling; fungi of many hues, some shaped like trumpets and some like bells and some like parasols and others like pricks; with thick meat white as turkey or yellow as eggs; all reeking of primeval protein; and some contain bitter juices that make men go crazy and talk to God."
With pails and mops and brooms and rags and an alchemicus of detergents, scouring powders and waxes (to which well-paid marketing experts had given names such as Pow, Rid, Thrill, and Zap—carefully chosen for their simple violence), Amanda and John Paul set out to clear all those compartments of dirt, dust and debris.
“He doesn't strike me as an excessively reliable sort,”
Man is not as good as he thinks he is. (Nor as bad, for that matter, but let's not complicate things.) He has certain needs, demands certain services which in reality are probably healthy and natural, but to which in time's passage and as a result of odd quirks in his ethos, he has ascribed (or allowed his religious leaders—often guilt-warped, psychopathic misfits—to ascribe) negative values. In the queerest of paradoxical metamorphoses, honest desires change into taboos.
Man, Purcell has a grin like the beer barrel polka. A ding-dong daddy grin. A Brooklyn Dodger grin. A grin you could wear to a Polish wedding. His smile walks in in woolly socks and suspenders and asks to borrow the funny papers. You could trap rabbits with it. Teeth line up inside it like cartridges in a Mexican bandit's gunbelt. It is the skunk in his rosebush, the crack in his cathedral.
Something in his nature has always been intolerant of authority, especially when it is violently imposed upon those who seem neither to need it nor want it—as is usually the case.
All evening, music or no, an old Negro called the Jelly Man passed among the patrons selling from a tray fresh raspberries, sugar, glass jars and little brown spiders.
They had a baboon, true enough. But under no circumstances would Ziller assign Mon Cul a role in the menagerie. “As long as my friend's body turns on a pivot of crimson buttocks, as long as his eloquent fangs pierce honeydews and melons, as long as he in wisdom and laughter goes on spinning around the sun, he will not be gawked at, gibbered over and goaded by beings less dignified than he.”
As unrefined and basic as an animal's emotional equipment may be, it is not insensitive to freedom. Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.
Any bar, whether concrete or intangible, that stands between a living thing and its liberty is a communicable perversity, dangerous to the sanity of everyone concerned.”
Your correspondent found what he was seeking, however: an English language dictionary. It should be quite useful in the completion of this document and he should have thought of it sooner. Perhaps from here on out the reader will note some improvement in vocabulary, if not in overall what-do-you-call-it.
We'll keep our buns in a steam cabinet the way they did when men were men and the sausage was the backbone of an empire.
“Look,” he said, “the world is overrun with animals, great and small, fanged and feathered, all eating one another in happy harmony. Man is the party pooper. He'll eat pig flesh and pretend it's pork. He'll devour a chicken but not a kitten, a turkey but not a Turk. It isn't that he is principled, particularly. In fact, we all gut somebody every day. But it's sneaky, symbolic, unappetizing, ego-supportive, duty to God and country—never with a good pot roast in mind. No cheerful, honest cannibalism. Alas, alas.”
“Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that's no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it's to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled.”
Meanwhile, Ziller was doing a bit of tasting himself. Amanda was melting from the glory of it. She felt like the frosting left on the spoon that iced the Cake of the World.
You've been close enough to the source to have learned that beings never really go extinct. Their forms may become obsolete but their essential energies are eternal. The only thing that ever disappears is the shape of energy. Long after the visible, recognizable garter snake has vanished, its energy will hang on.
Dinosaurs are still with us in the form of energy. There may be some dinosaur energy in you. There is plenty of saber-toothed tiger energy around. And trilobite energy. I ran into some woolly mammoth energy just the other day.
It's different being alone in the woods, no power saw giving the sky a toothache, no dumb-assed loggers constantly telling me how many miles their Mustangs get to the gallon of gas.
And yours truly, either because I am a genius of the magnitude of John Paul Ziller, or because hereditary brain syphilis (a common malady among Southern aristocrats) has left me an imbecile of indescribable deficiency,
