Getting to Grey Owl

by Kurt Caswell

  In the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly clear that while technology has forced everything to move faster, it has failed to save us time, fix our problems, and make us happier. Once in India, a young student said to me: “Sir! Sir! Americans are very rich. They have everything in the world. But are they truly happy?” The answer is certainly no. But it is not technology itself that is the problem. It is our reliance on it, and our resulting disappointment in it. When it comes to technology, what seemed like magic yesterday is empty and mundane today. Our hunger can never be sated. Technology has not failed us; we have failed it.

  In his book The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade writes that “it is only in the modern societies of the West, that nonreligious man [Eliade also uses the term “profane man”] has developed fully.” In this world, it is not the universe that makes man, but “man [who] makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world.” For the modern man, and so for modernity, the “sacred is the prime obstacle to . . . freedom.” As this is so, it follows that the modern Spanish bullfight, a highly ritualized ceremony that follows from the religious iconography of Lascaux through the Mithraic mysteries and into the Maestranza here in Seville, should have long ago fallen from popularity and settled into a story of who we used to be. But it has not. The bullfight is alive and well in Spain and in other countries. Why? Eliade goes on to assert that “profane man cannot help preserving some vestiges of the behavior of religious man, though they are emptied of religious meaning. . . . He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied.” Though profane man has desacralized the world of his ancestors, Eliade writes, he holds the sacred in waiting, “ready to be reactualized in his deepest being.”

  Modern art is an expression not only of the modern world but also of its failure. Think on the fragmentation and confusion of Picasso’s cubism, the dark nihilism of Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Nietzsche’s terrifying realization that God is dead. As a modernist himself, Hemingway registers his discontent with the world in his lifelong devotion to bullfighting. He does not consider the bullfight an empty ritual that preserves only vestiges of the sacred; instead he sees it as fully sacred, as an antidote to modernism. When Nietzsche writes, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves. . . . Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?” Hemingway answers: the sacred ritual of the killing of fighting bulls in the ring.

  I am not cruel or titillated by suffering and death. In fact, I was surprised how little the bull suffers and how quickly it dies. But like many people, I have lived much of my life protected from death, insulated from the sight and experience of living beings in their final moments. Engaging it in the ring helped me know in my own body how fragile I am, how fragile my friends and family are, how fragile is the thin envelope of air and water on the earth’s surface where life is possible. Life is not possible anywhere else within reach of a human lifespan. We cannot go to another place to live. We have only this one place. And what a beautiful and mysterious place it is.

  And if you wish to tell me that there are other ways to learn this lesson, consider this: most livestock these days live short, abject lives covered in their own shit in, say, feedlots in eastern Colorado and West Texas. I consider it more dignified to live free in the Spanish countryside and die in the ring. Or not to live at all. And for my part, I’d rather eat the meat of a bull so killed in the ring than the packaged flesh of a feedlot cow whose life was itself a living death.

  Antonio Barrera stepped into the ring for his second bull, the fourth bull of the day. The sun was lower in the sky, about halfway from where it was to where it would be. John and I sat with our strange sun hats on, the heat coming in hard against us, an oppressive force that would not let up for another hour. Through Hemingway, I had imagined a more festive atmosphere: a wool beret, a bota of wine I sprayed expertly and joyously into my mouth, the energy and unity of the crowd in support of the bull and the bullfighter. But Hemingway was Hemingway. Here in Seville, I was nobody, we were all nobody, even as we were about to witness this final moment of the bull’s life. The tragedy of the bullfight was unfolding again before me, for this, the fourth time, and I was missing it with inattention, the way you miss parts of a football game buying a hot dog or talking with your friends as I talked with John. I felt lazy and soporific, dulled and emblazoned by the sun. I wanted the whole affair to end so I could find relief from this terrible heat. And then the sword went in.

  Aside from the graceful way Barrera moved—he seemed not quite planted on the ground as the muleta whirled about him like a dancer’s skirt—he was barely interesting. With Bautista, something was at least stirring in the crowd: some measure of discontent. Like the others, Bautista (perhaps I have done him wrong) is a professional killer of bulls. He faces the bull and his fear each time in the ring, the way Hemingway faced the blank page. I don’t think it is a fear of dying but a fear of failing to face fear, of disappointing the crowd, of not killing cleanly and so causing the bull to suffer, of losing a place among his brothers, of not finding the moment, the perfect moment when the universe coalesces and everything falls into place like tumblers in a lock, and knowing that moment as the moment, and thus not missing it. Yet even missing it in the ring feels better than not going into the ring at all. In Seville, Bautista was raw, so the audience experienced something of the rough edges that prove a matador is also a man. We could see part of his process, the working out of the problems of the bull, as though we were part of the working out of it, like holding up Hemingway’s drafts next to the final story.

  What woke me from my strange lethargy was that Barrera’s sharp calls to the bull, which echoed in the ring as if he were in some far-off place, stopped. I came to attention to watch him ready for the kill. He stood sidelong to the bull with his feet together, sighted down the blade, stood up on his toes, went back down onto his heels, and then turned to face the bull with his chest bared, his one knee bent in an arc. And when the sword went in, it went in. First it was in Barrera’s hand, and then it was inside the bull. That bull was so black and muscled, so powerful and hard, it looked impossible to penetrate, but the sword went right in.

  The bull swung his great head, hooking one way and then the other as Barrera’s toreros came in fast with the capes to draw him out and away, out and away, as Barrera himself, exposed now and vulnerable to those deadly horns, made himself a target, but an impenetrable target impervious to the bull’s violent tosses of his head, hooking and working the air to clear off the two and half feet of steel deep in his body. He went down. The bull went down onto his belly, panting hard, huffing, the men moving variously in front of him, waiting, the blood now pooling up over his back where it rushed up the hollow along the blade and came red to the surface to pour over his back, sticky and wet, and his head went down too. The crowd gave a rousing cheer and the clapping rose and settled and it was over.

  We waited a moment, a little space of silence in honor of the bull’s life. The toreros moved in. The dead bull lifted his head. And then the bull came up undead onto his hind legs, his head still down in his death near the yellow sand red with his blood, and he stood that way like a dog at play as a tremolo of voices rose in the crowd as the bull now rose too, onto his feet, standing again on his four feet, swaying a little, the blood pouring out from the muerte, the place the sword went in, and we all felt something then; we all became someone in the low murmuring of our voices that became gasps and then heroic cheers rising and rising as the bull’s power and desire to live crested as its life was leaving it. Here was that moment for the bull, as it was for Barrera and for us, the sharing of the art between the man and the bull, the resacralizing of the world. Was he a hero? The bull was walking blind, blood now pouring from its nose and mouth, its
soul wandering back and forth between worlds as its feet seemed no longer attached to the ground, swaying from side to side in a lightness, a heaviness, a tree in the wind. He took a few steps forward, then a few steps to the side, and died on his feet, the ground coming away from him as he lifted to go, and then fell over dead.

  The people cheered.

  BUYING A RUG

  Morocco, 1993

  In those days, what you knew was different from what you know now. The world was a soft place with many pillows, and people were kind and generous and looked after strangers and rescued kittens from the trees. The rivers coming out of the mountains brought down the great snowfalls of winter and watered the plains in spring, softly, happily, bright running waters all fevered with the organic materials of life, the star stuff to make the wild wildebeest and the elephants and baboons and the birds of migration and the first woman and the first man who walked among them and gave them names. Grasses, long and green and wonderful, grew up over the shining hills that rolled on across an Eden born out of a green mind. A tender mind. A virginal mind. If you travel innocently at first, even blindly, the traveling will change that, because it is only by traveling that you can awaken, that you can learn to love. The passing country through a train window south from Cordoba to Algeciras reflects those essential questions—what? why? who?—until finally you see the image of your own face, your lips and mouth, your nose and ears, your sideburns long to your jawline, your eyes, not a reflection in the window only, mind you, but the eyes of who you used to be. It’s easy to wonder, so you ask. Is that me? Or, rather, was this me? And then the “you” that is you becomes “I,” so you call it out, remembering that line from e. e. cummings that everyone remembers in moments like this, the line that I would one day know but did not know just then:

  (now the ears of my ears awake and

  now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

  I came to leave the shelter of friendship in Cordoba on March 16, 1993. My friend, an old pal from the second grade in southern Oregon, had taken up house with a Cordoban woman. They would eventually marry and shuck out a little boy, who would then waddle across the kitchen floor and stare at his own reflection in the sliding door leading out into the back yard. That boy will have his moment soon enough; this one is mine.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I have to make the crossing into Morocco. Have a look around. I want to be able to say I’ve been to the continent where man was born.”

  I asked my old friend, why not come along? But no, he had English classes to teach, a choir to sing in, a woman to love. I didn’t, so I went alone, intending to return very soon. So long, friends. So long, great river, Guadalquivir. So long to the beauty of the Mezquita, and so long to the gaudy cathedral stuffed inside. So long to the oranges of Andalucía along the city streets leading to the Avenida de America, where a train, like a great basilisk, lay in wait for me. And running out from under the cavern of the station, the train rode me south toward the sea.

  At twenty-three, I had yet to find a rhythm for my life, a pattern on which I could write my story. I went looking for it, indeed, and these trains through landscapes I did not know, these ferries across foreign waters frightened me, and comforted me too. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to keep moving, and whenever I came to a stop, I began to feel a little off. A modest agitation rose up, an annoyance that grew into an urgency until I found myself either rearranging all the furniture in my rooms or packing my bags for the road.

  “Stay on the road,” advises the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Yunus Emre, “until you arrive.”

  At the port in Algeciras, I met Bob and his lover, Ron. Bob wore a gray felt bowler and a smart wool sports coat with black jeans. Bespectacled and slight, he was thin to almost underfed, and he was stiff, though he spoke with a pleasingly soft voice: “Hi. I’m Bob.” Ron was shorter, more businesslike, even a little preppy. He also wore a jacket but without the squared shoulders, along with black jeans, dress shoes with those little leather tassels, a red scarf. His hair was neatly arranged, though cut so short there wasn’t much arranging to be done. Handsome boys, both of them. Think of them as Talking Heads meets Vampire Weekend.

  “Headed to Ceuta today, or on down to Tetouan?” Bob asked as we stood at the rail looking out on the strait. “Or are you headed farther on?”

  “I don’t know. Just going. Should I go to Tetouan?”

  “Yeah, you should definitely not stop in Ceuta. Cross the border. Get into Morocco proper.” At the edge of his hat, the breeze off the sea tousled his curls. Then he said, “Why don’t you travel with us? We can share a taxi.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Bob said.

  Ron nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “Thank you. That would be most helpful.”

  “Safety in numbers, you know,” Bob said. “We’re headed into Morocco for about a month.”

  “I’ll be only a day, maybe two,” I said. “Friends in Spain are waiting for me, and I’d really like to travel up north. Just need to pop over for a look.”

  “Well, we can travel together for a day then,” Bob said.

  I suppose another reason I was crossing into Morocco, if even for a day, was that one of my heroes, British novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin, had traveled in these parts, had sought out nomadic peoples during a journey he made into Sudan (OK, really far away, but same continent), and into Mauritania (a bit closer, but a stretch all the same), where on February 20, 1970, he wrote in his notebook, “One of the worst nights I have ever spent anywhere at any time,” and then a few days later rallied with, “The happiness that is to be found sleeping under tents is unbelievable.” And since Chatwin himself had followed in the footsteps of his own hero, travel writer Robert Byron, whose book The Road to Oxiana is widely considered the crown jewel among travel books, I had taken it upon myself to carry on the tradition and follow in Chatwin’s footsteps, if only in my small, private way. Chatwin’s story into Africa, as he tells it, began one morning in his early twenties, when he was working as an art expert at Sotheby’s. He woke up blind. His doctor told him it was from looking too closely at paintings. He decided to look at some “long horizons” and chose Africa. Traveling in the Sudan with a camel driver named Mahmoud, who makes Bear Grylls look like a JV cheerleader, he went on a hunt for rock art in the desert. On finding it, “red ochre pin men scrawled on the overhang of a rock,” he understood his former convictions to be true: that the cities of the West are “sad and alien” and the “pretensions of the ‘art world’ idiotic.” So he quit his job to wander in the desert. Among the Nemadi in Mauritania, an ancient, toothless woman smiled at him, and he then came to believe that human nature is fundamentally good and that this goodness will arise not in the city but in a return to our original state, a nomadic life in the desert, or, if you will, to Adam and Eve in the garden.

  I didn’t bother to explain all this to my new friends, Bob and Ron. Instead I watched the sun ascending over a sparkling sea. The day was breaking cleanly. It was good, standing this way at the railing without concerns for anything, and Bob and Ron alongside me for companionship and protection as we had agreed, and so we passed together into the unknown. A little door opened in that moment, and Bob offered a bit more of himself.

  “We’re performance artists.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly,” he said. “In Chicago.”

  “What does that mean exactly? What kind of performance?”

  “Well. Let me describe one of our shows,” he said. “We do this one show where the stage is black. Everything is black, really, except us. As the piece opens, the curtain is down. Some low music plays, something ominous. We like to change it from show to show. But instrumental only. As the curtain comes up, the audience sees Ron hanging from a rope by his feet. He’s naked. And upside down, of course. So you can see his white body against the black backdrop. He can’t hang there for too long, you know, so the next part moves along pretty quickly.”r />
  “Uh-huh.”

  “At this point, the audience hears the music shift, change. You know that piece by Neil Diamond, ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’?”

  It just so happens that instead of church, I grew up with the music of Neil Diamond playing on Sundays, especially his 1972 album Hot August Night, recorded live at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. It played on the Panasonic reel-to-reel stereo my dad bought when he was in Vietnam. So, yes, I did know that song. And I’m not too proud to admit that I rather liked it, especially as a recall of my childhood spiritual training.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know that song.”

  “It’s a schmaltzy song,” he said. “Very schmaltzy. Anyway, that song comes up and up and up as Ron hangs there. Then, when the volume is near its fullest expression, I step onto the stage. I’m naked too, except I wear a gold chain around my waist. And I carry a long feather duster. But it’s more like a giant leaf you’d see a slave fanning a pharaoh or something, or like a peacock’s tail feathers. More like a giant peacock’s tail. The male peacock with its feathers standing in for an exaggerated phallus. You see what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “So I walk across the stage very slowly, almost like I’m performing a dance. I was trained in ballet . . . Anyway, as the song plays, ‘Girl, you’ll be a woman soon / Please come take my hand . . . Soon you’ll need a man,’ I start to beat Ron with the feathers. I swing them against him, beating him as hard as I can with the feathers, only they’re feathers and so no matter how hard I swing he isn’t hurt. And I’m screaming while I do this, really screaming as loud as I can to challenge that song, ‘Girl, you’ll be a woman soon . . .’ and eventually the feathers, from the force of my swings, break somewhere at the base above my hands.”