As if to show they were reading his mind, the entities in the room, which had made themselves felt in the shape of floating glowing green balls of energy, like bubbles rising in champagne, expanded their color range from green to cover the entire rainbow.
And then, one of those balls of energy swooped inside his head.
Ezra was whisked away to… what was this, exactly? The future? Nothing more than a potentiality?
He and Grace were arguing. Ezra sounded disenchanted.
***
“These people spend their livelong days hunting for and procuring food,” Ezra said, “or weaving baskets and clothing.”
“What did you think it was going to be?” Grace, remaining placid, enjoyed the basket taking form in her hands. She eyed the children playing giddily in the central courtyard, collecting treasures off the ground to weave into an elder’s long matted hair, grown for just such purpose of ornate decoration.
“They haven’t climbed in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs beyond base survival!” Judging by his rising tone, disenchantment had turned to betrayal. “There’s no time or energy left for any life of the mind. I can’t take this existence, Grace. I feel like a caged animal denied sufficient chew toys with which to work out his frustrations.”
“I guess it’s all still so new to me,” Grace responded starry-eyed. “It makes it easier to leave my old self behind. It has no place here. No reason for being. No chance of offering advantage. I can do a total personality dump, instead of just chiseling away at myself. I can be free.” Fighting to stitch a branch into the weave of her basket, she added, “Back home, there’s no chance of that. I’m so over-determined by everything and everyone around me. Can’t you see the blessing this is? This whole way of life?”
“You’re just caught up in the whole primitive-is-chic thing.”
“You said you feel like a caged monkey? Look closely at the bars on your cage.” Grace set the basket down on her lap without actually taking her hands off it. “Aren’t they forged by your very judgments? You’re standing at the edge of the water testing the temperature before you’ll jump in. You have to be willing to lose yourself if you want to find yourself.” She returned to her stitching.
“When did you turn into such a sage?”
She sighed. Shook her head. Did that mean she didn’t know, or that she’d lost all patience with him?
“The forest speaks to me,” she said. “I see the faces of their ancestors everywhere, etched into every cloud, every oil-slicked puddle, the shapes of the rocks and hillsides, the grains of the wood they use for this building. I see them in the oversized leaves, the insects gathered on a table in a face like a serendipitous constellation of stars.”
“I suppose these are all benign voices, in keeping with your romantic-savage ideal?” Ezra recognized his voice contained an unlikely combination of condescension and concern.
“No, many are quite disturbing. The next time a thought jumps into your head, you might want to think how it got there. Did your very sour attitude invite it? Did your unwillingness to get any distance on yourself make it easy for one of these spirits to crawl inside your head, ride you around like a marionette on a string for a while, live again through you? All the while you imagined it was you doing the thinking, you performing the actions.”
She gazed up from her basket-weaving with a pensive expression, and stared inwardly. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s these bodies of ours are communal properties, just like the village life here. I am actually a ‘we’—a galaxy of personas of my own creation, all defensive reactions against life, and an even larger constellation of souls only too happy to commune with whatever I want to feel and experience. You want to be free? Start by realizing the fire burning inside you now may have been fanned by one or more of the ghouls about who happen to prefer that mindset to the others. Only too happy to see this side of you steal the spotlight from all the other voices in your head.”
Ezra banged his head in frustration against one of the support posts of their shelter. “I can’t tell anymore if you’re deluded or inspired. Maybe one of the voices in your head is a trickster, fooling you into thinking you’re enlightened. Only too happy to derail you from the quest and invite you to settle in his preferred land of self-contentment, where resides everyone else who is so full of themselves!” He was pacing and gesturing in an agitated manner. Apparently it was no longer enough to spit venom in snidely shifting tones of voice like so many snakes crawling over one another to get at her.
The orb of light that had drifted into his head, lifted him from this scene, and transposed him half way around the world to a flat overlooking Shanghai.
***
Much like before, the man and woman—Asians native to China, from the looks of them—were arguing. This time around, they were fighting over the one thousand Project Hope schools slated for Africa under the auspices of Lu Xingyu. Ezra seemed entirely able to understand their Chinese as if it was his native tongue.
“Project Hope is a farce,” the angry female declared, overlooking Shanghai city through a Titanic-sized window. “How many of our own people live in cages and cardboard boxes on the streets and count themselves lucky over the ones who can’t even boast that?”
“What have you done to help them lately?” said her male companion. “Or do you just draw comfort from complaining?”
They were both dressed formerly, as if biding time before attending a cocktail party. Despite the pretense at deep and meaningful, there was something hauntingly hollow about the two of them; Ezra couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Maybe the view inspired low self-esteem, and fears of how to stand out among such hordes. There were millions within view, looking more anonymous than bees in a beehive.
She shifted her attention to the street immediately below their building. “I know one thing, patriotism starts at home.”
“Who says?” Handsome Beau replied. “We live in a world without boundaries. Why should the starving elsewhere be any less deserving?”
“Did you read that her organization is claiming a ten percent management fee on the one-point-five billion yuan grant? That’s one hundred and fifty million a year. No wonder she doesn’t care about the starving in her own country.”
“You might be right. We’ll never know, considering how much your anger colors everything you see.” He drank the rest of his whiskey on the rocks.
The orb of bright light filling Ezra’s head whisked him back to the Yanomami village.
***
Ezra was standing at the edge of a nearby stream, perched on a rock, spear-fishing. Only, amid his angry flurries, he succeeded simply in stabbing the water, and piercing, finally, the mud beneath. The agitated mud clouded the water and made it still harder to see where the fish were at. For a while he rode the wave of anger, used it to fuel stronger, faster lunges, which worked, only not at retrieving fish. He had simply found a method for exorcising the rage from his body that much faster.
Finally, he calmed. As he grew more tranquil, the fish appeared at the edge of his spear. The quieter he grew, the bigger the fish.
Once again he was whisked away from this scene to one halfway around the world.
***
A child was angrily beating a dog with a stick for chewing on and subsequently destroying one of his toys. The seemingly impregnable Tonka truck had been no match for the pit bull’s jaws. The tires punctured, the wheels would no longer roll. The dump truck hydraulics, which used to go up and down to empty the bay, was now forever frozen in place.
Finally, the dog, impervious to the beating, calmed the child by relentlessly licking his face. He even slobbered up the child’s tears until the crying turned to laughter and hugs.
Ezra could see the boy, no older than seven years, lived in a humble home, and the Tonka truck was probably the only new thing he’d ever owned. It was a bright spot in the drab, dingy interiors whose bric-a-brac looked more like strewn garbage than the toys a child forgets to pick up. E
nough licks had gone by for the child to realize that the true bright spot in his life was the dog, not the truck.
Ezra suddenly understood the lesson his spirit guide was trying to teach him.
He was demonstrating the butterfly effect, how Ezra’s every thought affected the thoughts of others around the world. Until the wave of energy finally crested, and then dissipated. There was no deed too small not to have some kind of ripple effect, not even the choice to send an electrical impulse surging down one of the neurons in his brain over some other.
A part of him had intellectually digested this truth long ago, but only now did he seem able to act on it. As if enough of his mind had now been galvanized into action. The power of intentionality, not just rational understanding, was driving him.
With intentions sufficiently strong, he’d cease to be acted upon by the universal mind, but instead would become one of its active agents.
Wrangling his unruly thoughts seemed less of a Herculean duty now, and more a source of joy. Not because it had gotten any easier, but because he saw how much it empowered him to change the world. More so than the grandiose gestures and the larger-than-life projects he was committed to, which seemed more like the hobby now, and far more secondary.
***
Ezra awoke from his lucid dreaming to find that, outside of an altered state, life among the Yanomami11 was decidedly more mixed.
Their clothing was more decorative than protective. Well-dressed men sported nothing more than a few cotton strings around their wrists, ankles, and waists. They tied the foreskins of their penises to the waist string. Women dressed with the same sense of minimalism.
Much of their daily life revolved around gardening, hunting, collecting wild foods, collecting firewood, fetching water, visiting with each other, gossiping. They made the few material possessions they owned: baskets, hammocks, bows, arrows, and colorful pigments with which they painted their bodies.
Life was relatively easy in the sense that they could ‘earn a living’ with about three hours’ work per day.
Most of what they ate they cultivated in their gardens, and most of that was plantains—a kind of cooking banana that was usually eaten green, either roasted on the coals or boiled in pots. Their meat came from a large variety of game animals, hunted daily by the men. It was usually roasted on coals or smoked, and was always well done.
Because their village was round and open—and very public—one could hear, see, and smell almost everything that went on anywhere in the village. Privacy was rare, but sexual discreetness was possible in the garden or at night while others slept. The villages could be as small, he was informed by Davi, as forty to fifty people or as large as three hundred people, but in all cases there were many more children and babies than there were adults. That owed to ongoing tribal warfare, embarked upon with their neighbors during the dry season. Mercifully, it was the wet season, which kept the sparse villages separate from one another until the waters receded.
“What’s going on over there?” Ezra asked, observing a skirmish between two of the male villagers.
Davi sighed. “To be Yanomami means to be simultaneously great peacemakers and valiant warriors.”
Davi moved like a praying mantis from complete stillness with a burst of power and speed that seemed unlikely from what, just seconds ago, seemed a near lifeless sack of bones.
Ezra divined the nature of the disagreement before Davi had time to intercede. There was a shortage of women due in part to a sex-ratio imbalance in the younger age categories, but also complicated by the fact that some men had multiple wives. It wasn’t much of a stretch to realize most fighting within the village stemmed from sexual affairs or failure to deliver a promised woman—or out-and-out seizure of a married woman by some other man. Unchecked, Ezra realized, this could lead to internal fighting and conflict of such an intensity that the village split up, each group then becoming a new village and, likely, enemies to each other.
Content to hang back for fear of getting his head knocked off, Ezra observed the almost comic pantomime from a distance. Davi moved wives about as if shuffling pieces on a chessboard. He redistributed personal wealth in the same manner, transferred animals, food, jewelry, and clothing from one warring faction to another, all following some complex calculus in his head that didn’t have anyone satisfied until the very end, when all he got for his efforts was a nod of concession from either party, who then politely made off with his booty. Davi’s fast-talking was the most potent part of the equation that restored equanimity.
When Davi returned to Ezra’s side, he no sooner took his seat on the floor than one of the village children popped herself down on his lap. She wanted to play the game he’d made for her of sticking pegs in holes to capture as many of the opponent’s pegs without violating the rules. Davi carved out another hole in the board. “I think you will find the game much more difficult now and more stimulating as well, now that you’ve grown so. You get smarter every day. Soon I will not be able to keep up with you.”
A few rounds into the game, Davi and the little one were interrupted by one of the warriors, who sported a gash on his shoulder. He pointed to the forest. It was Ezra’s guess he’d had a little off-season encounter with one of the neighboring villagers. Davi let the child climb up on his shoulders so she could continue playing the game on his head, by rotating the board to play his side for him, until he could resume with her.
Walking over to his bottled herbs and potions, he whipped up a quick salve for the man. He stitched his wound, coated it with the salve, and handed out his medicinals with explanation on continued care. He also gave instructions on what ancestors to pray to; such primitive people would likely not believe an entirely physical intervention would suffice to heal anything. Maybe Davi was playing to his superstitions, or maybe he shared them. Though Ezra found it difficult to believe someone of his psychological sophistication could be given over to such notions.
Once the warrior departed, Ezra resumed his game with the child, who, judging by her calm composure, was used to such frequent interruptions.
Ezra used his iPad’s translator to help him enjoy their exchange, even as prone to errors as it was. They took turns gloating over every peg taken, and prophesizing doom for the other one.
He was slightly in awe of how readily Davi switched roles, and slipped into whatever character he needed to play.
***
Later, when Ezra met with Grace, he passed on all that he had learned from Davi. Instead of being irked at his doing her job for her, she seemed delighted, since the information helped her plan her day, who she was going to spend more time schmoozing with (her indirect manner of interviewing), which often came down to those she identified as “the greaters among equals.” She was never without her iPad which translated for her between Xirinian and English, and back again, thanks to a special app they had both downloaded prior to embarking on their journey. At least it did so ably enough. When it failed, laughter was often the result, so even that seemed to grease the wheels.
***
On their fourth day, Ezra asked Davi to show him the effects on his people of foreign intruders that were, as of yet, invisible to his untrained eye. Davi explained that the village had had to forcibly relocate numerous times to stay ahead of the colonizers. Even though their land rights were allegedly protected by international treaties, neither Brazil nor Venezuela, who underwrote the treaties, did much to enforce those rights.
With Davi in the lead, they hiked out into the middle of nowhere to a most astonishing sight: a road bull-dozed through the Amazon jungle.
The giant bulldozers, earthmovers, and tree-cutters had all the appearance of an invading alien army from another world. The monstrous mechanical noises, the devastating and effective way in which the jungle folded before them like a house of cards… Ezra grew sick just looking at it. He vomited by the side of the road.
He turned to find Davi with his face covered by cloth. He explained that the foreigners intro
duced diseases against which neither he nor his people had any defenses. That this had been going on since he was a child in the 1940s, then another large wave hit them in the 1970s.12
The Yanomami suffered from the devastating and lasting impacts of the road which brought in colonists, diseases and alcohol. Cattle ranchers and colonists used the road as an access point to invade and deforest the Yanomami area. Ezra listened to Davi’s narration in one ear, and to the cacophony of the colonists in action in the other, his eyes bleeding as much from the horror unfolding before him, as from the dust and debris kicked up by the slash-and-burn techniques.
Davi took Ezra next to see the gold miners working illegally on the Yanomami’s land.
Davi explained that many figures within the Brazilian establishment would like to see the Yanomami area reduced in size and opened up to mining, ranching and colonization.
“To make things even worse,” Davi said, “the Brazilian army has built barracks in the Yanomami heartlands, which has increased tensions. Soldiers have prostituted Yanomami women, some of whom have been infected with sexually transmitted diseases.”
Ezra was keen to see the military barracks next. For now, he contented himself with taking pictures of the miners at work, using tractors and mechanized tree cutters and high-pressure hoses to wash away the forest; to first denude it of trees and undergrowth, and then to erase the mountains as if they were sand castles at the beach.13
A large-scale dredging operation would come later, Davi explained, taking place on exposed river gravel bars, and taking advantage of seasonal low water.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 129
