by Ian Watson
“. . . Their Bruxo is practising with amazing skill that deep embedding of language — that Rousselian embedding which we talked about so long ago in Africa as the most freakish of possibilities.
“To do this, he makes use of some psychedelic drug. I haven't yet pinned down the origin of it. Every night he chants the complex myths of the tribe — and the structure of these myths is reflected directly in the structure of the embedded language, which the drug enables him to understand.
“This embedded speech keeps the soul of the tribe, their myths, secret. But it also permits the Xemahoa to participate in their myth life as a direct experience during the dance chant. The daily vernacular (Xemahoa A) passes through an extremely sophisticated receding process, which breaks down the linear features of normal language and returns the Xemahoa people to the space-time unity which we other human beings have blinded ourselves to. For our languages all set a barrier — a great filter — up for us between Reality and our Idea of Reality.
“In some ways Xemahoa B is the truest language I have ever come across. In other respects, of course — for all practical purposes of daily life — it directs crippling blows at our straightforward logical vision of the world. It is a lunatic language, like Roussel's, only worse. The unaided mind has no hope of holding on to it. But in their hallucinations these Indians have found the vital elixir of understanding!”
And now Sole sat up and really took notice. Reaching overhead, he directed the cool-air nozzle on to his face to sharpen his attention. He felt a surge of excitement — of dark doorways opening — as though it was the whole outside world he was breathing through the lungs of the plane, as he read on:
“. . . The old Bruxo snorts this drug through a cane tube into his bleeding, rotting nostrils — and he aims for no less than a total statement of Reality uttered in the eternal present of the drug trance. And by achieving a total statement of reality, to be able to control and manipulate that reality. The age-old dream of the wizard!
“But what wizard has set himself up against such dragons? The whole weight of American imperialist technology. The Brazilian military dictatorship. Imposing their will on this jungle from afar, while the Indians within it are trapped as casually as flies are trapped on a fly-strip, whilst the making of the meal goes on — the great feasting of the giants on the Amazon's wealth: the meal of spectacular consumption.
“The Bruxo is killing himself in the process. No shaman has ever dared stay high on this drug so long before — except for some myth figure, the world-creating culture hero Xemahawo, who vanished on the day of creation of the world, dissolving into the environment like a flock of birds scattering in the forest.
“For the Bruxo and for the Xemahoa, knowledge isn't an abstract thing, but something coded in terms of the birds and beasts, and rocks and plants, of the jungle — in terms of the clouds and stars above the jungle — in terms of the concrete actuality of the world. Therefore total description of this knowledge is no abstract thing — but a taking-hold of the actual reality about them. And to take hold of reality is to control it — to manipulate it. So he hopes!
“Soon, he will hold a giant embedded statement of all the coded myths of the tribe in his present consciousness. Day by day, in the drug dance, he adds more material to this statement of a totality of meaning — all the while maintaining his awareness of past days and past material as something ever-present by means of the maka-i drug — despite the terrible overload on brain and body.
“Soon, he may achieve total consciousness of Being. Soon, the total scheme underlying symbolic thought may be clear to him.
“If this is true? That would be incredible indeed. In such a place! Such a ‘primitive’ backwater!
“Incredible — and damnable. For just as this occurs, the genius-fly is about to be drowned, poxed out, poisoned — on that orange fly-strip of a dam! If only some of its poison might fall into the gluttonous feast of the exploiters . . .
“I take the opportunity of sending this cry of rage out by way of a halfcaste who is passing through. He should reach that bloody dam in about a week, and get the letter posted. He's cagey about why he's making the journey. Maybe he's found some diamonds — who knows? After all, this mess is supposed to contain El Dorado!
“I at least suspect I've found my own El Dorado of the human mind here — at the moment it is due to be swept away.
“They embed the Amazon in a sea you can see from the Moon — and drown the human mind in the process.
“To yourself and Eileen, my useless love.
—Pierre Darriand.”
On the way over Utah, Station KSL announced the launch of the spectacular new Russian transpolar satellite.
“—Reports say it's brighter than the planet Venus. Only, you folks won't be able to see it unless you're an eskimo or a headhunter in the South Seas. Other news at this late-night news hour. NASA has quashed speculation that this week's launch from Cape Kennedy to Skylab Orbiting Laboratory carried a Russian scientist on board—”
Zwingler had woken up by now and was listening intently on his own seat's earphones.
“You hear that, Chris? The Globe's in the right orbit—”
Sole had been half-attending to the news, the rest of his mind still on that other amazing news contained in the letter, and the irritating suspicion that Pierre had pipped him at the post again — first his wife, now his work . . .
“Apparently folks are ‘speculating’,” he sneered.
Zwingler laughed.
“Phooey. That's no sweat, Chris. A little bit of speculating? I tell you, the thing's going okay.”
EIGHT
THE DAY AFTER he snorted the fungus powder and finally met maka-i, Pierre left the Xemahoa village, filled with a consciousness of what he must do that was as urgent as it was ill-defined.
Kayapi went along with him — he flourished no knives this time, made no threats. All the Indian said was:
“Pee-air, we got to be back before maka-i is born, okay?”
Pierre nodded absently. He was still caught up in the experience. It was like the first sex experience, but a first sex experience of the whole consciousness. Overwhelmingly so — to the point of ecstasy and terror. He could concentrate on little else.
He had to rely on Kayapi to locate the dugout they'd arrived in. To empty out the rain slops. Clean the outboard. Pile Pierre's things under some plastic sheeting.
Kayapi assisted without any complaints. He seemed to appreciate this irrational purpose that was urging Pierre to make the journey north to the dam.
He navigated the dugout, while Pierre stared out through the rain into the flooded maze of trees.
The bunches of epiphytic and parasitic plants crowding the terraces of the branches triggered a memory of a city far away — and highrise flats that he vaguely remembered being crowded with people all facing north during some disaster — a planecrash or a fire. Where had it been? Paris? London? Or was it just an image from a movie, that had suddenly woken to life? Saiiba ants, driven off the forest floor, made tracks along low branches with leaf segments held over their bodies like columns of refugees protecting themselves with parasols. Macaws fired tracer messages of feather-numbers through the high leaves — numbers that he couldn't count.
When the pium flies descended on them in bloodsucking, stinging clouds, Kayapi rummaged through Pierre's things till he found a tube of insect repellent to smear on the Frenchman's skin, so that his flesh wouldn't swell up with the dropsy these flies left as their calling card.
At midday, it was Kayapi who pressed dried fish into Pierre's hand and urged him to eat.
Pierre stared for hours into the dull green chaos of the forest that periodically came aflame with birds and butterflies and blooms.
There was chaos there, to a foreigner's eyes — but there was no chaos in his mind.
There was a dawn of understanding.
Or rather, it was a memory of the dawn of understanding — which he struggled to hold on to.
His nostrils itched with the memory of maka-i, as though they'd been bitten raw by pium flies.
The day seemed endlessly, timelessly, long, like a long track rising over bleak, lonely mountains from the valley of the previous night, which a mist drifted up from now, to veil — yet without there being any clear line of demarcation between the two zones. He must have emerged from the experience at some particular time, he reasoned. Yet the boundary wasn't definable. The greater could not be bounded by the lesser. The perception of last night could not be imprisoned in terms of today's perception, when it was a vaster, more devastating mode of perception. Thus its bounds could not be set. How could a two-dimensional being who had been able to experience three dimensions set up a frontier post anywhere in his flat territory — and say beyond this point lies the Other? For the Other would be everywhere — and nowhere, to him. And as for clock-time, Pierre had let his watch run down and wore it only as a bracelet now. Time seemed like a useless ornament — a distraction. The sense of time he'd possessed the night before hadn't been time by the calendar or time by the clock. It hadn't been historic time, but a sense of the spatio-temporal unity out of which space and time are normally separated into an illusory contrast with one another.
In this three-dimensional flatland of ours, words flow forward and only hang fire of their meaning so pitiably short a time, while memories flow hindwards with such a pitiably feeble capacity to hold themselves in full present awareness. Our illusion of the present is like a single dot on a graph we can never get to see the whole of. It is a pingpong ball dancing on a jet of water, unaware of the jet. The jagged inkdrip of a thought recorded by the electroencephalograph pen.
Last night he had understood Roussel's poem easily, effortlessly, and entirely. He held its embeddings in the forefront of his head. Held and held and continued to hold, while subprogramme after subprogramme started in, deferred to the next subprogramme, and sub-deferred again — and everything fitted together. Visual images of the embedded poem flowed within one another, all held together in a wheeling zodiac that spun round the deepest self-embedded axis in his mind.
Yet there had been terrible danger. He still sweated at the thought of it.
He had tamed the poem — and therefore the experience — only because he knew it so well already in its separate parts. Just as the Xemahoa already knew the separate elements of their coded myths, from childhood.
Throughout the Xemahoa chant-song, that many-part fugue of the Xemahoa B language, he felt his mind was splitting, flying apart, fluttering to pieces. He had feared the birds were all flying out of his head and near to losing their way in endless jungle.
It was Kayapi who netted his birds and herded them together. Kayapi saw what was happening to him and dragged him by the hand to the tape recorder, switched the poem on.
Kayapi knew the track of his lost flock of words.
Now — with the same competence — he piloted Pierre through the drowning jungle where ants fled like refugees, and wild pigs splashed and grunted, where butterflies made clouds of colour, and pium flies descended in searing fogs, while the snouts of caymans nuzzled the waves of their wake.
All these creatures were the tools of Xemahoa thinking. Today, the jungle seemed to be one vast beating brain.
Destroy these tools, and you would destroy the Xemahoa. For then they could not think anymore. They would become Caraiba, foreigners, to themselves.
Through the afternoon the fugue of thoughts faded in Pierre's head, as he stared at the wet trees. By nightfall, the rainclouds had moved away from moon and stars. The dugout continued on its way through broader and broader channels by moonlight. It passed over flooded acres, through lagoons bristling with drowning vegetation. Pierre knew he would have got the outboard propeller tangled before many miles were up. But Kayapi piloted them through effortlessly and untiringly, sensing the right channels with a dexterity that shamed the Frenchman. Yet, for Kayapi, wasn't it his own drowning mind that he was navigating?
Finally, hours after nightfall, the Indian did get tired. Abruptly he beached the dugout on an isle of rotten logs, stretched himself out and slept.
Pierre also fell asleep eventually; yet slept more fitfully, haunted by dying images of the embedding dance. In his dream birdfeathers formed into a giant roulette wheel. He rolled round this, his body bunched up into a ball, until the circle of numbered feathers flew apart, took wing in all directions, and lost themselves in the greater wheel of the zodiac of stars — shocked out of interstellar darkness into sunlight only by the dawn booming of a band of howler monkeys migrating through trees across the lagoon.
Kayapi immediately sat up, grinned, and set the boat on course again before producing some more dry piraracu and some pulp cakes.
“Kayapi—”
“Pee-air?”
“When we get there—”
“Yes, Pee-air?”
“When we reach the dam—”
But what? What! He didn't know!
“Kayapi, how soon is maka-i to be born?”
“When we get back.”
“Tell me what tree maka-i lives with in the jungle?”
“The tree called xe-wo-i.”
“What's that in Portuguese?”
“The Caraiba have no word.”
“Can you point one out to me?”
“Here? No. I said, Pee-air, there are kai-kai places only.” He flourished the fingers of one hand.
“Can't you describe the tree?”
He shrugged.
“It's small. Has a rough skin like the cayman. You remember eating some soil? The tree was just beside there.”
“What? But I didn't see any fungus there.”
“Maka-i was asleep. When the waters come and go, he wakes.”
“Oh, I see — the fungus only grows after the ground's been covered with water. Is that right?”
Kayapi nodded.
Why hadn't he thought of taking a sample of the soil that day to run a chemical analysis on, instead of just eating it! Why hadn't Kayapi told him then that that's where maka-i grew! Instead of just asking him to eat some earth without explaining. But of course the Indian couldn't have conceived of taking a soil sample to a laboratory. His body was his own laboratory.
Now that Pierre saw the soil-eating incident in perspective, it all seemed like part of a carefully scripted initiation course. Maybe eating the soil had been some sort of necessary biochemical preparation, before the fungus drug could act on him?
The intricacy of the links that held the mental and social life of these people together! Links between tree and soil and fungus; shit and sperm and laughter. Between floodwater and language, myth and incest. Where was the boundary between reality and myth? Between ecology and metaphor? Which elements could safely be left out of the picture? The eating of a handful of soil? The spilling of sperm on the soil? The counting by significant feathers (in whatever way these were ‘significant’)? The tree that the maka-i grew on?
The scientific answer was to take soil samples and specimens of the fungus, and blood samples from the Xemahoa. To analyse, to synthesize, ultimately to market the results in a neat round pill. Twenty-five milligrams of ‘X’. What would they call the drug? ‘Embedol’ or some such name! First the scientific journals, then the dope marker.
Undoubtedly some measurable biochemical change took place within the brain — in its ability to process information, to hold vastly greater amounts before the attention than usual. Might it not even be possible that maka-i actually did convey power over Nature — power to intervene and change the world? For what was nature, what was the whole physical world, except information chemically and physically coded — and he who held access to the information symbols in their totality held direct access to reality, held the magician's legendary powers in his grasp. Even this did not seem totally impossible to Pierre, in the aftermath of his experience — though Logic and Reason fought against this fantastic dream.
At the very least the X
emahoa had a marketable ‘high’ to set beside mescaline and psilocybin and LSD. Their high was more specific in its function than those other psychedelic drugs. Still, it could be made into another commodity for purchase by the freaked-out pissed-off playboys of the Western World!
Twenty-five milligrams of maka-i. Of embedol. With all its messy appurtenances lopped off. The eating of soil. The rotting of the nostrils. It would be one hell of a commodity.
Yet for the Indians it was that very complex of physical and metaphorical events — the soil and sperm and shit and bloody nostrils — that made up life and meaning and existence.
In the tin refugee camp beyond the orange fly-paper set up to trap them they would be shadows, not substances. Shadows whispering bastard Caraiba words as they faded. The birds would have flown out of their heads over a featurless waste of water with no way home . . .
When Kayapi and he got to the dam, he must — What? What!
The sun shone again for a while. They passed through clouds of butterflies. Through swarms of flies.
At midday they chewed more of the dry fish and pulp cake. More rain clouds started massing overhead and soon began trailing a grey curtain of water through the drowning forest.
• • •
The problem of what he would do when he got to the dam was snatched from his hands in late afternoon.
Their dugout was passing through rainmists between steel woods, mahoganies and rubber trees — grist to the future timber dredges — when a flat-bottom boat with a powerful outboard came abreast of the dugout. Two men and one woman were sitting in it. Pierre found himself staring at the muzzle of a submachinegun . . .
“Put your boat over there under cover,” the woman ordered. Her eyes burned into them distrustfully and feverishly. Beneath the smeared dirt and fly bites puffing her flesh she was maybe young and beautiful. Her companions looked tired and on edge, in their dirty grey slacks and shirts. They had a fervent hunted look about them.
