from The Toe Bone and Tooth

lengthy selection from Martin Prechtel's The Toe Bone and Tooth, this one about the public tribunal of a prospective seminary student, Gaspar Culan, and the prosecution and defense of indigenous beliefs in Guatemala before the Civil War.

from The Toe Bone and the Tooth

Like a big city man on a date with a girl he thought he'd never get, Stan started off the first morning by boring the entire board of examining priests, the Bishop and one hundred and thirty monks and students by talking very slowly for an entire hour about himself and his mission.  As with anything that had poor Stan in it, there was a lot of sleeping going on, but he finally brought it all to a close, raising my blood pressure by introducing me with several derogatory remarks about my mixed heritage, calling my wife my "tortilla-making woman" because we weren't married in the church, while expressing his worries about my poor unbaptized older son, who ironically enough actually was baptized, and commenting on the "secret study" he thought I must be making of what he'd hoped was the dying practice of Mayan shamanism.
I let all his unkindness slide, for my goal was not to be right, but to get Gaspar and I back into the arms of the things he mocked, by which he'd never be held and myself away from this terrifying collective lack of vision.  So I thanked him as a brother and let Gaspar begin his charlanda, his discourse.
After standing like a rector, putting on his horn-rimmed eyeglasses, Padre pulled out a snap-ring binder from his backpack, unlocked a couple of laminated leaves and began speaking in a deep, aggressive, open-jawed, non-mayan voice, not unlike orphan Indians do when raised by Norwegiens or American missionaries; a voice that didn't match his face, a voice I'd never heard before.  Like a pushy socialist church historian, he cited the data of certain anthropologists and the conjectured opinions of some scholars about Mayan ritual, blaring on about the grandness of Mayan spirituality before they had become acquainted with the advantages of the modern Catholic church, which took the better part of an hour.  For the next hour, he expounded unimaginatively but with great detail on why he was disappointed with the Catholicism of the Spanish conquest and how all of what the Oklahoma Catholics were doing to rid the highlands of these vestiges of damaging spiritual superstitions and the people's persistent veneration of idols through their mistaken understanding of the statues of the Spanish catholic saints left over from the sixteenth century was very laudable and slowly having a positive effect, as far as he could see, and of which he was an avid supporter and so on, and so on and so on.
With his coffee cup held on his thigh, the Bishop tried to look as serious as his position demanded, but every hungry monk could tell he was pleased with this clear, positive delivery of his party policy by this prized Indian candidate.
I think there was a great longing for what they knew as God among most of the monks, seminarians and a couple of the priests, but for them God was not in the ground, in the whiskers of jaguars, or in the utterances of mad street women; God was only in the caring that humans had for one another and was therefore a deified institution.
The remainder of old boy curates from the American middle corridor, who were the hierarchy and core of judges here, feared what the others desired; God for them was a stack of rules and rightness, a place for their conquering football instincts to gain territory for the church.
Almost all the seminary students here were young Mayan men from various villages and linguistic tribes, some of the Quiche, Ixil, Mam, Cakchiquel, Kekchi, Pocomchi, Pokoman and Tzutujil and everyone of them spoke their mother tongue.
Made to stand as a crowd behind the seated bishop, Pachito and the old boys embedded in the couches, the only seminarians not present at this welcome flamboyant interruption to their predictable daily routine were the youths assigned that day to bake the bread and cook the meals, who every chance they could get joined the ranks of the wide-eyed, loyal audience, bronze-faced would-be priests with their delantales still tied on, everyone dispersing to eat their lunch when Pachito finally rang his little bell.
But in the afternoon the wrestling began and the first words that were aimed at Swordfighter's grandson came from a known enemy of the Bishop's, who, in tolerable Spanish with a bad Okie twng, matter-of-factly blurted out, "What about this image of San Simon you were out there worshiping?  He's anything but God; isn't he an image of the Devil?"
"I wasn't worshiping this idol," Padre retorted with his strange non-Indian voice still in place, "I was kneeling at its feet, praying to Jesus to help my people to see the way and come away from such things into our holy church.  What better place to do this, as Padre Francisco says," pointing to a very worried-looking Stan, "but in the very places where the people have laid their mistaken faith?"
Though I couldn't endorse either side of such an argument, as far as Christian spiritual wrestling went it seemed that Padre had the edge, but the big guy from Oklahoma who was sitting on the edge of the couch now wasn't about to give in.  "Even if we are to believe that you could keep your eye on Christ surrounded by such a presence of the Devil, isn't it true that the idol at whose feet you knelt is considered by your people to be a God and that anyone who worships him has more than one God, and don't they call this idol the 'horned one'?"
Finally, I found a loose brick in the wall of their mediocre dogma and in an attempt to earn and be a worthy keeper of the story of The Toe Bone and the Tooth, I spoke up not only in defense of Gaspar Culan, the Grandson of Swordfighter, but in defense of Holy Boy.
"This deity you speak about is indeed an ancient God," I finally spoke, my voice also not sounding entirely like my own, "But was never called 'horned one' by anybody until your religion showed up to show the people what to call him.  Before the coming of the Spaniards and the arrival of Catholic Christians he was called the Lord of White or the Clear Unblemished Boy or Holy Boy, all names still used today.  It was before this God of both human frailty and possibility that people had always gone for alleviation of their hard lives, as they still do today, and more importantly for you to recognize, they went to this Clear Youth to be given the blessing of forgiveness, the forgiveness that people are not so good at bestowing."
This large priest who I stopped short of calling Buba was getting fairly excited and, widening and bracing his seat, he severely crowded little Pachito, who sank back involuntarily into the hollow wake of cushions created by Buba's forward lurching.
"You're just trying to whitewash the Devil," he yelled out in his Oklahoma-accented Spanish, the Indian men wide-eyed and open-mouthed, taking it all in.
"Isn't it true," Buba continued, "That the Tzutujil and every other kind of sinner, go before this devil with pagan shamans, zajorines, to which they give all their hard-earned pay and sell their sins to this demon with tobacco and liquor, finery, money and licentious words for which he adopts their sins for them and which they continue making, so they can live in this world, unaccountable, having traded, like Mephistopheles, for an eternity in hell where this devil rules when they die.  Isn't this true?"
In a policy I learned from Chiviliu when he'd been confronted for his habits and understandings, I took up where I'd left off instead of biting on the barb and baited hook of his interruption.
"Before your people came here, I mean white folk from abroad, this God you call the 'horned one' was the Mayan equivalent of Jesus; an unmarried, magical boy whose annual sacrifice caused the world to flower and the earth to provide again; whose disappearance every year, like Jesus' crucifixion, caused the people to grieve and weep; whose tears fertilized the earth, his mother, whose womb brought fourth a new 'clear child,' like Maria does every winter..."
I hadn't wanted to explain the intricacies of how this deity transformed annually thirteen times, and how because there was no verb "to be" in Mayan language there was no issue of one-ness and because of that sometimes he was a woman, and that he was built of lighting thoughts and ropes of two hundred and sixty Gods of deified Time from the Tzututjil versions of the more generally known Mayan calendar, whose knots created a supernatural net of fire who were the stars, which in turn were the spark souls of a million types of life and life to come, but pushed by this angry, not very subtle Oklahoman enemy of the Bishop I proceeded, against my better judgement, to do exactly that.
The hundred nodding heads of young Indian novice priests, who recognized in what I'd said their own spiritual dilemmas, of wanting as Indians to love some part of their people's traditional ritual and faith, but having had it demonized or trivialized by the church who called their beliefs childish, upon hearing the Tzutujil version of the same, explained in terms of its splendor and spiritual depth, allowed little hairs of Indian pride and doubt about the Christians to be planted in their hearts, all of which now terrified the priests.
Buba, though seeming by then to be more of an embarrassing liability than an ally to the other curate's cause, was so wound up by the hatred he felt toward me personally and the ground he'd lost on my account that he now jumped to his feet and forgetting to speak in Spanish so everyone could understand, blurted out accusatorily in English while shaking his mutton-fisted arms my direction, "Then tell us, smart buy, if this manifestation of Satan, that you call 'the clear white child' is so glorious a thing, why is he known far and wide as 'Big Jew'?  Wasn't it the Jews that killed our Jesus?  Huh?"
Unaware that Pachito understood and spoke English as beautifully as he spoke his native Spanish, along with Latin, Greek, Italian and Cakchiquel, and I now listened as he very carefully translated what the American Buba priest had inquired into Spanish for the crowd, his eyes bugged out, eyebrows wrinkled up to his sweating, bald head, staring in horror at the Bishop, whose rising blood pressure was already in heaven and whose fist thumped his jittering thighs.
Padre froze with the rest, his arms folded looking straight down at the plastic desk, while I on the other hand responded before anyone could stop the session or interrupt, starting before the last words of Pachito's translation had dropped from the air.
"When the Spaniards came they were divided between clergy and civil colonial bureaucracy.  While different religious orders were assigned to different districts, here int he southern highlands the Franciscans won the appointment.
"After fifty years of force bullying, proselytizing, saying mass and instigating their cults of saints and cofradias, this more human-sounding Mayan Jesus, 'Clear White Youth,' was still just as difficult for the Franciscians to eradicate as he has been for all of you.
"When the Tzutujil people were increasingly punished and further harried for their veneration of this more visible of their many deties, they started calling him Saint Simon Judas Tadeos, considering him to be Jesus' older brother, which was further confused over time by the Spanish priests with Judas Iscariot, the one who sold your God's son to his persecutors.
"By the time of the Catholic Holy See, the Dominican Inquisition feared by all people far and wide, sent their anemic, sadistic officers to what is now known as Guatemala, they had as their prime directive to rid the Earth of all heretics, Protestants and heathens, all of which were known collectively as Jews.
"The Inquisition could not legally try Indians in their courts for heresy for the greater faith they showed for the 'Clear White Youth,' or San Simon, as his newer manifestation was called.
"This was because in the human ranking system of Europe, the Indians were ranked as a subhuman caste with a status equal to the beasts, which Christians, Protestants and Catholics alike saw as not having a soul and therefore exploitable as dead matter.
"Of course, everybody knew they were people, but they weren't legally people.  To make them into people legally, so the Inquisition could have domain over them all, the Holy See set about proving that Mayans were actually one of the lost tribes of ancient Jews, from the time of Gog and Magog,  before the Jews had a temple, much before they'd lost their temple and adopted Rabbinical Judaism.  If they could convincingly show that Mayans were genetic Jews, then the Inquisition could have them.
"So, like the council and Pilate that judged and sentenced Jesus, the Inquisition, just like you seem to be doing here, tried and sentenced the Mayan Jesus, proclaiming the 'Clean White Youth' to be the 'Gran Judio,' so they could eradicate their God for being a Jew and crucify the Mayans for being Jewish, forgetting of course that the Romans who later became the Roman Catholics crucified their Jesus who died not a Christian but an Aramaic-speaking Jewish Rabbi."
Then finishing up like I thought a lawyer might, I added in conclusion:
"If this council has been called to determine the purity of faith of the prospective priest Gaspar Culan by trying and passing judgement yet once again on another people's God, then I say that even if he had been worshiping what is holy at the foot of the Grand Jew, or the 'Clear White Youth,' or conversely if he was only accompanying his relatives who were, no matter how you cut it, you have all ended up looking a whole lot like a tribunal of jealous, unforgiving people trying Jesus all over again, instead of practicing trying to be like him.  In that light I submit that Gaspar Culan has as good a faith as anyone else in this carpeted room."
Though i was hungry and could have eaten, the dinner was late, for every single cook, monk, novice priest, student, delivery boy and visiting Indian parent had forgotten what they were doing and had converged into the crowd mesmerized by the argument, which at this point was immediately and emphatically halted by the Bishop, whose hierarchical cronies called for a huddle which all the priests jumped up to join, whispering like a football team after their last down who was going to have to punt, throughout which Gaspar and I uninvited, patiently waited.
When the knot of priests unfurled, Pachito loudly announced with his little bell and clipboard in his hand that Padre was exonerated and back in the graces of the Church and that two more days spent discussing what was obvious to everyone would be a waste of precious time away from their parishes and all our work.  Which meant to be, best of all, that tomorrow we could all go back home to our families in Atitlan.
In the months that followed more than sixty percent of the Mayan seminary students would have renounced their ambitions to pursue a catholic priesthood.  What had happened to them all, only they themselves could tell, but not a few of those young men ended up as left-wing guerrillas.

Heavier than Air

Heavier than Air

for Fritz Haber

He tautened, tightened and synched

the air, ratcheted in nitrogen and

found in the space the slow drop of ammonium

nitrate, the fuel that would keep a billion modern people from starving.

His glass of fine wine was lifted among

the highest societies a poor German Jew

from the country could pull himself up to,

but he yearned for higher air than the liquid

that shook life from the earth

to feed his generation of plants.

_________________________He longed for Goddom.

He rallied and lead a field of soldiers, squaring

off in the first big war of the modern

age. While Klimt painted the lovers softly, adoring eachother

in gold and maroon, Fritz Haber gave the order for the chlorine gas,

a similar invention to ammonium nitrate, to be let

loose slowly over the field at Ypres. It was early spring.

There must have been birds singing as the dawn broke.

Fog mixed with fog and heavier than air, gas

dropped into the trenches where men were lifted out of

their skins to the sensation of drowning on dry land, drowning

in their own lungs, heaving, convulsing, retching, tearing at their skin

falling back to the earth to feed the field with their blue bodies.

When he arrived home, his wife, a scientist surrounded

by men, said what he did was wrong. I don't know

what else she said before he left the next morning

to command troops and gas, before she walked into the garden

behind their house, before she rested a pistol to her chest, the

cold iron on the shallow part of her breast, before she aimed

straight for her own heart and fired, before he heard the sound,

found her body and took his pistol back, before he left her there

to get the train, before his young son wandered alone

in the garden, wondering what had happened to his mother,

his son who would years later walk down that same hedgerow

as his mother and end his candle with his own two fingers.

And after Fritz Haber tried and failed

to ransack gold from the saltwater of tides

to pay his part of the colossal debt of the Fatherland

he went toe-to-toe with the Nazi laws of

1934 and resigned rather than sack his

Jewish contemporaries, some of whom were no doubt

present the first time a pesticide was synthesized,

a pesticide easily lethal to humans. The chemists conspicuously

added a smell so farmers could avoid the toxic gas

but a later, more dedicated group of chemists

removed the smell, and updated the recipe name to Xyclon-B.

from The Serpent and the Rainbow ~Wade Davis

Have been studying up on zombies lately, owing to derrick jensen, and this led to a friend recommending The Serpent and the Rainbow, which has been exciting so far in its mix of anthropology and ethnobotany.  Following is when the lead character is close to a group ritual in Haiti.  I feel like scientists get a bit of a bad rap in this one, but i like the examination of the scientific belief system as a whole that ensues.  

~

I woke twice more before dawn, first to a cobalt sky and moonbeams lapping the bushes, heavy with moisture. In the moonlight the roots of the mapou were white, motionless, and seemingly cold. By the next time the stars had faded and light cracked the horizon. Venus had moved all the way across the sky, and now it too dimmed. I followed it until my eyes ached. A gray cloud crossed over its path, and when it was gone so was the planet. I stared and stared until I couldn't even see the sky. But it was hopeless. Venus was gone. It shouldn't have been. Astronomers know the amount of light reflected by the planet, and we should be able to see it, even in broad daylight. Some Indians can. And but a few hundred years ago, sailors from our own civilization navigated by it, following its path as easily by day as they did by night. It is simply a skill that we have lost, and I have often wondered why.

Though we frequently speak of the potential of the brain, in practice our mental capacity seems to be limited. Every human mind has the same latent capabilities, but for reasons that have always intrigued anthropologiests different peoples develop it in different ways, and distinctions, in effect, amount to unconscious cultural choices. There is a small isolated group of seminomadic Indians in the northwest Amazon whose technology is so rudimentary that until quite recently they used stone axes. Yet these same people possess a knowledge of the tropical forest that puts almost any biologist to shame. As children they learn to recognize such complex phenomena as floral pollination and fruit dispersal, to understand and accurately predict animal behavior, to anticipate the fruiting cycles of hundreds of forest trees. As adults their awareness is refined to an uncanny degree; at forty paces, for example, their hunters can smell animal urine and distinguish on the basis of scent alone which out of dozens of possible species left it. Such sensitivity is not an innate attribute of these people, any more than technological prowess is something inevitably and uniquely ours. Both are consequences of adaptive choices that resulted in the development of highly specialized but different mental skills, at the obvious expense of others. Within a culture, change also means choice. In our society, for example, we now think nothing about driving at high speeds down expressways, a task that involves countless rapid, unconscious sensory responses and decisions which, to say the least, would have intimidated our great-grandfathers. Yet in acquiring such dexterity, we have forfeited other skills like the ability to see Venus, to smell animals, to hear the weather change.

Perhaps our biggest choice came four centuries ago when we began to breed scientists. This was not something ancestors aimed for. It was a result of historical circumstances that produced a particular way of thinking that was not necessarily better than what had come before, only different. Every society, including our own, is moved by a fundamental quest for unity; a struggle to create order out of perceived disorder, integrity in the face of diversity, consistency in the face of anomaly. This vital urge to render coherent and intelligible models of the universe is at the root of all religion, philosophy, and, of course, science. What distinguishes scientific thinking from that of traditional and, as it often turns out, nonliterate cultures is the tendency of the latter to seek the shortest possible means to achieve total understanding of their world. The voudoun society, for example, spins a web of belief that is all-inclusive, that generates an illusion of total comprehension. No matter how an outsider might view it, for the individual member of that society the illusion holds, not because of coercive force, but simply because for him there is no other way. And what's more, the belief system works; it gives meaning to the universe.

Scientific thinking is quite the opposite. We explicitly deny such comprehensive visions, and instead deliberately divide our world, our perceptions, and our confusion into however many particles are necessary to achieve understanding according to the rules of our logic. We set things apart from each other, and then what we cannot explain we dismiss with euphemisms. For example, we could ask why a tree fell over in a storm and killed a pedestrian. The scientist might suggest that the trunk was rotten and the velocity of the wind was higher than usual. But when pressed to explain why it happened at the instant when that individual passed, we would undoubtedly hear words such as chance, coinci9dence, and fate; terms which, in and of themselves, are quite meaningless but which conveniently leave the issue open. For the voudounist, each detail in that progression of events would have a total, immediate, and satisfactory explanation within the parameters of his belief system.

For us to doubt the conclusions of the vodounist is expected, but it is nevertheless presumptuous. For one, their system works, at least for them. What's more, for most of us the basis for accepting the models and theories of our scientists is no more solid or objective than that of the vodounist who accepts the metaphysical theology of the houngan (voudoun healer). Few laymen know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we accept the results on faith, and like the peasant we simply defer to the accredited experts of the tradition., Yet we scientists work under the constraints of our own illusions. We assume that somehow we shall be able to divide the universe into enough infinitesimally small pieces, that somehow even according to our own rules we shall be able to comprehend these, and critically we assume that these particles, though extracted from the whole, will render meaningful conclusions about the totality. Perhaps most dangerously, we assume that in doing this, in making this kind of choice, we sacrifice nothing. But we do. I can no longer see Venus.

Zombies - from Dreams by Derrick Jensen

part 2 of a series of excerpts from Derrick Jensen's Dreams.

Zombies

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. 
~Hannah Arendt

What are zombies?
My early knowledge of zombies primarily came from movies like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie.  These encounters seemed to affect me little more than to make me afraid to walk through thickets at night (although i kept telling myself that these movies were set on tropical islands, and that with the exception of late-night statements from such unreliable sources as my older siblings there were no confirmed sightings of zombies in Colorado).  But later I came to see these movies as tales of white supremacy, conquest, empire, Christianity, civilization and slavery.  Lately I've been reading a very interesting collection of essays called Sacred Possession: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Carribean.  In the essay Voudoun, or the Voice of the Gods, Joan Dayan writes, "Born out of the experience of slavery and the sea passage from Africa to the New World, the zombi tells the story of colonization:  the reduction of human into thing for the ends of capital.  For the Haitian no fate is to be more feared.  In a contemporary Carribean of development American style, the zombi phenomenon obviously goes beyond the machination of the local boco.  As [Rene] Depestre puts it, 'This fantastic process of reification and assimilation means the total loss of my identity, the psychological annihilation of my being, my zombification.'  And Laennec Hurbon explains how the zombi stories produce and capitalize on an internalization of slavery and passivity, making the victims of an oppressive economic and social system the cause: 'the phantasm of the zombi...does nothing but attest to the fulfillment of a system that moves the victim to internalize his condition.'  Rene Depestre also stated, "It is not by chance that there exists in Haiti the myth of the zombi, that is, of the living dead, the man whose mind and soul have been stolen and who has been left only the ability to work.  The history of colonization is the process of man's general zombification."
...
In the last few days I've been thinking about this particular evolution of portrayal of zombies and zombification, and although there have been an extraordinary number of academic studies portraying zombies through every type of lens from Marxism to Christianity to anarchism to pop culture to consumerism, ..., I think the pattern I'm seeing, from passive victim to ravenous monster, is real.  As one analysis puts it, and I quote this at length because it feels so right, 'Modern zombies, as portrayed in books, films, games and haunted attractions are quite different from both voodoo zombies and those of folklore.  modern zombies are typically depicted in popular culture as mindless, unfeeling monsters with a hunger for human brains and flesh, a prototype established in the seminal 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.  Typically, these creatures can sustain damage far beyond that of a normal, living human.  Generally these can only be killed by a wound to the head, such as a headshot, or can pass whatever syndrome that causes their condition onto others.
"Usually, zombies are not depicted as thralls to masters, as in the film White Zombie, or the spirit-cult myths.  Rather, modern zombies are depicted in mobs and waves, seeking either flesh to eat or people to kill or infect, and are typically rendered to exhibit signs of physical decomposition such as rotting flesh, discolored eyes, and open wounds, and moving with a slow, shambling gait.  They are generally incapable of communication and show no signs of personality or rationality, though George Romero's zombies appear capable of learning and very basic levels of speech as seen in the films Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead
"Modern zombies are closely tied to the idea of a zombie apocalypse, the collapse of civilization caused by a vast plague of undead.  The ideas are now so strongly linked that zombies are rarely depicted within any other context."
...Remember the primary difference between indigenous and Western ways of being is that indigenous peoples perceive the universe as composed of beings with whom we should enter into relationships, and civilized people perceive the universe as composed of objects to exploit, as dumb matter.

from The Toe Bone & Tooth - Martin Prechtel

the first of what i hope are many selections from the fantastic work of Martin Prechtel.  these two principally
concerning elements and their use, from The Toe Bone & Tooth

--

These particular Gods, the sovereigns of the wild mountains and untouched ravines, truly hated steel.  They hated the steel of plows and axes, the steel of saws and machetes, the steel of hooks, nails, rifles and swords.  They hated the steel of horseshoes and wagon tires, and would come to hate anything that steel could make, cut, carve or contain.  When it came to metal, gold was good enough and silver they could abide, copper was a favorite and about lead they would negotiate, but to the Gods steel was the tooth in the jaws of a consuming monster called comfort to which humans were addicted.  Steel had a soul that was a natural coward and demanded blood and it was the earth it cut.  Because the Gods saw the problems of their grandson as having come from steel and for some other reasons, not all of them clear, Gaspar was to them an ally now.  After several meetings of all the Gods and Spirits of the Mountain, Gaspar was shown to a hall where young extravagantly attired Rain Gods sat waiting for the day when they would armor up in hail and windstorms, hoping to rush forth to wound the annual troops of dryness, whose clear blood was rain, and whom they fought to pierce with their thundering arrows, lightning spears and jade axes.

--

"No, you see, I'm Gustavos Rodas and I go barefoot," holding up his callused feet to show me, "because I hate to see animals killed, eaten or made to suffer.  I don't eat the flesh of any animal and I don't use their leather, even for shoes.  I don't use plastics because it comes from petroleum, which comes from ancient animals as well.  Using gasoline or diesel to me is the same as wearing leather, using plastic or eating meat.  I don't ride horses, drive mules or pack donkeys either because I hate to see them suffer.  I have caballerias of lands, thousands of cuerdas everywhere which I loan out to all the Indians and Ladinos everywhere, who send me little bits of what they grow or make and that's how I live.
"No, i'm Gustavo Rodas and because I'm Gustavo Rodas I love all the people, even those from the Big Cities and other countries, but I don't like at all what they do to animals by the lives they live and of course those people hate me for not allowing any of those rich babosos to build on the land that crowns the holy water of the river that my family owns, who are themselves descendants from Quiche' kings, not Tecun the general, but from the kings themselves from G'umarcah.
"No, I'm Gustavo Rodas and the rich people, though none of these morosos are as rich as I am, have paid off even my children to betray their father and these things that I believe, who now only want me to sell off all my land to these horrible developers and rich folks who are killing this canyon and the entire lakeshore, illegally, for you know only villagers can own the communal holdings and nobody can legally own within two hundred feet of any shoreline, but they find ways around it.
"No, I'm Gustavo Rodas and the rich people here have fingered me to the police, who they have paid off to harass me into selling and giving in, and to whom I refuse to counterpay to keep them off, the police who are supposedly here to protect us from thieves are thieves in the employ of thieves.
"No, the green bottles and broken glass and Sonya and Momon are only there around my house to keep the cowardly paid-off police from entering my little garden while I'm away, because the police persist on trying to transplant marijuana bushes so they can come by with the Gaurdia de Hacienda and haul me off to seven years in prison, so they can confiscate my holdings and auction off my land.
"No, now you know, I'm Gustavo Rodas and that these dogs only bite people who come over the walls.  The entire world comes through the gates and gets all the roses they might need.  Now answer me this next thing, my friend, there are only two reasons for a man to risk his health to jump a wall bristling with razor glass and rushing in front of angry powerful dogs just to steal three roses he could've gotten by walking through the gate.  The first one is a woman and the second one is a girl.  Which one is she?"

from Derrick Jensen's 'Dreams'

Possession

The closest to being in control we will ever be is in that moment we realize that we're not. ~Brian Kessler

The fourth story involves a conversation with a friend.  She came over, asked, "Do you believe that those in power are possessed?"

"By greed, so their possessions actually possess them?"  I asked.

"No."

"By the economic and social system, so that, like Fredrick Winslow Taylor said, "In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first?"

"I don't understand what that has to do with possession."

"The system owns them.  They serve the system, even when it's killing them.  Even when it's killing the planet.  They are owned--possessed--by the system."

"I'm sure that's true, but that's not what I mean."

"Do you mean possession like in The Exorcist, with heads spinning, projectile vomiting, and all that?"

"Yes.  I mean, no."

Now it was my turn not to understand.

She said, "I don't mean Hollywood.  Hollywood lies about everything.  The Exorcist is to possession what The Day After Tomorrow is to global warming: spectacularized to the point of being bullshit.  By possession I mean one being inhabited by another, controlling or at least influencing the other's behavior.  Do you believe those in power are possessed in this way?"

"Absolutely."

She seemed a little surprised.

I told her I think it's very possible that possession is quite common, for better and for worse.  In my book Songs of the Dead I wrote about rabies, a virus passed from creature to creature by saliva.  Once the virus has entered someone's body, the virus makes its way to the spinal column and brain where it reproduces, then spreads to the salivary glands.  I went and got my book, read to her: "At that point symptoms diverge into two distinct classes.  In what's called 'dumb rabies,' the creature retreats steadily and quiety downhill, with some paralysis, to death.  in what's called 'furious rabies'...the creature begins to experience extreme excitement and is hit by painful muscle spasms, sometimes triggered by swallowing saliva or water.  Because of this the creature drools and learns to fear water--thus the frequent references to rabid creatures being hydrophobic...but there's more.  During that final furious phase, the creature may, without provocation, vigorously and viciously bite at anything: sticks, stones, grass, other animals.  This stage lasts only a few days before the creature enteres a coma and dies.  Once infected, death from the disease is almost invariable."

I looked up from my book.  "This leads to the questions: Who's in charge?  Who is actually doing the biting?  Is it the creature, or is it the virus?"

I continued reading, "The virus knows that if it is to survive the death of its host, it needs to find a new host, which means it needs to get [the creature]...to slobber on or bite someone.  Thus the painful spasms on swallowing and the excessive salivation, which combine to led to the drooling.  Thus the furious biting.

"In some ways central to this discussion is the question of whether you perceive the world as full of intelligence, and so do not hesitate at the possibility of viruses knowing, viruses choosing; or whether you believe viruses act entirey unthinkingly, mechanistically, and so at most you'll allow viruses not to know, but to 'know' that they need to find a new host.  But in some ways that question doesn't matter at all, because in either case the viruses cause [the creature]...to change his or her personality...

"The central point in R.D. Laing's extraordinary book The Politics of Experience was that most of us act in ways that make internal sense:  we act according to how we experience the world.  If, for example, I experience the world as full of wildly varied and exciting intelligences with whom I can enter into relationships I will act one way.  If I experience the world as unthinking, mechanistic, and compost of objects for me to use, I will act another.

"Clearly the virus changes its host's experience, at the very least by causing pain and hallucinations.

"Now here's the question...: As Old Yeller [to take the famous fictional account of someone's 'possession' by rabies] snarls and snaps at those he so recently protected, what is he thinking?  if I could ask in language he could understand, and if he could answer in a language that I, too, could understand, what would he say?  is he terrified at this awful pain, and is he, because of that pain, lashing out at everyone around him?  Is he confused?  Is he asking where this pain comes from?

"Or does he have his behavior fully rationalized?  Has he--or the virus--created belief systems to support this behavior?  Is he suddenly furious at the thousand insults large and small he has received from those who call themselves his masters?  Certainly throughout the movie the humans--especially his 'owner' Travis--have treated him as despicably as we would expect within this culture...Does he perceive himself as suddenly seeing things clearly, and as hating these others and all they stand for?

"Or is he delusional, snapping not at Travis standing in front of him, but instead protecting him as he did before and biting at the rabid wolf who gave him the disease?  Is he seeing phantoms dancing before him, just out of reach, so each time he lunges, it is at someone who is not there at all?

"Or maybe Old Yeller fights with every bit of his emotional strength to not lash out at the humans who are his whole world, these humans for whom he has already many times offered his life.  Maybe he feels like he has picked up some sort of addiction, a compulsion, and he just can't help himself.

"Or maybe the virus has insinuated itself into his brain in such a way that Old Yeller now perceives the virus as God.  He hears its commands, and knows he must obey.  maybe this God tells him that he must convert these others to this one true religion, and that in doing so both he and they will achieve everlasting peace and joy--and a release from the torment of this world.  Maybe he perceives himself as thus giving these others a gift.

"We act according to the way we experience the world.  The virus changed Old Yeller's experience of the world.  When Old Yeller acts--or when any of us act--who's in charge?  Who actually makes the decisions?  Why does Old Yeller act as he does?  Why do any of us act as we do?"

I looked at her.  She looked at me.

I said, "This is not uncommon.  In that book I also wrote about lancet liver flukes, who are parasites with three hosts: snails, ants and sheep or cows.  Snails eat shit, which contain fluke eggs.  The flukes develop, emerge in snail slime.  Ants eat this snail slime, and thus flukes.  Now how do flukes get to a place where they get themselves ingested by cows or sheep?  By taking over the ant's brain.  As I wrote, 'The larvae continue their development in the ant's gut, then chew their way out through the ant's exoskeleton.  Because the flukes don't yet want the ant dead, once they're out, they patch up the holes in the ant and cling to the ant's outside.  That is, all but one of them cling there.  One fluke is chosen instead to chew into the ant's brain, where it actually takes over the ant's movement and control of the ant's mandibles.  Come sundown, this fluke guides--convinces?--the ant to climb to the top of a piece of grass and to bite down hard, then cling there, waiting for the third host, a sheep or cow.  If no ungulates shows up that night, the ant climbs down in the morning to resume its normal life, until the next night, when the fluke once again takes the reins and sends the ant back up a blade of grass.  When an ungulate eats the grass to which [to whom, actually] the ant is clinging, it accidentally eats the ant, and therefore all the liver flukes.  The flukes--eventually there can be as many as 50,000 in a mature sheep--make their way to the cow's or sheep's liver by way of the bile ducts, and within a few months begin laying eggs of their own.  The eggs are deposited on the ground in the creature's feces, where they are eaten by snails and the whole story starts over.'

Now she was staring.

I continued reading: "And of course there is single-celled parasite Toxoplasma gondii.  These creatures normally cycle back and forth between rats and cats, as rats eat infected cat feces, and cats eat infected rats. 

The Play

You said the play
  showed Icarus wings
  made of copper by the hands
  of his father to fly his angel/
  son over the sadness of soil
  blown dry and dying over the United
  States.  What year by reckoning?
  Twenty-one hundred summers after
  that one grape was crushed on the cross?

The actor said you could tell no more
of human history than the dirty jokes left by
the greeks, the roman war stories or
the grain yields of the curve of land
between two main rivers.  I say
ask the trees to tell you of loss,
how they missed the kinship of humans,
how many friends they no longer hear
and how they yearn for their dear ones to call their name.

~for krc