The Desert Nomad
2 July 2008
[Another excerpt from the current draft of the current part and current chapter of The Body’s Long Madness]
Six knees drop into the sand led by the eldest and most weather worn. He takes his hand and brushes slowly and most expertly the sand off of a defined greyish mound. He tunnels his hands, one to each side, bringing up a lumpy grey loaf of bread.
“This is how the man eats,” Malik interprets. “In the morning he buries the dough with coals and by noon or when he is hungry, the bread is ready. It is very good bread.”
The man passes the hot loaf to Malik who rips off a piece for himself and Valerie. Malik does not take too much knowing the man does not have much. Valerie offers up a gesture of thanks and a gesture of tastiness after having taken the first bite.
As the three slowly chew their lunch the two men break off in a low toned conversation allowing Valerie to drift above the guttural sounds of their language and to linger around the sheer pleasantries of this situation. That the old man lived long in the desert, lived and lives and refuses to go away and to give up the one life that is the dearest to him, a life that has made him and is all he knows, is a stubborn simplicity.
Valerie would be very bitter at a world without desert nomads and unseen jungle tribes. These hidden quiet ones are the ones that balance the fast-paced gluttony of our missed virtues. This man has never, will never, desire that which he does not have and that my friends, is the great key to contemporary survival. It may be that this is only because the desert nomad inextricably escapes the bombardment of have-nots that make up each contemporary person’s platform for comparison and that once he gives in and submits to the greater societal life he may be first in line for the brand new Ikea kitchen… but yet, I don’t think so and either does Valerie. It is no magic spell, no instantaneous flash from above that makes one immune to the false base our world has become and others as susceptible as rats are to a flute. It is a procured way of life, a trimmed-down way of looking at things, discipline and a connection with something greater, more powerful and omnipresent than our short human lives. Without these things we are always only what we want and never in fact what we actually are.
What are we? As Valerie sees it, sitting as a point in a small triangle before a patch of grey smoking sand, we are constantly between being lifted up to the sky and lowered down to the bowels of the earth, between some divine presence and base animal behavior, we are an experiment in the chaotic laboratory of Nature and we certainly should not be taking ourselves so seriously.
To ‘enjoy or endure’ as John Cowper Powys puts it, is more than the simple words can convey, for to come face to face with our worst situation is to come face to face with the horror of ourselves and the truth of our being. There is the tendency to cover the ugliness up with want, pouring an identity into stuff owned and labels acquired; but that is only a perpetuation. We can only truly become more when we set down ourselves and walk away from the mirror.
This is all cause for the desert nomad wrenching a place in Valerie’s being; he leaves so much to be desired, for this man’s mind must work like the smooth cog of older, more simpler machines, simply. Hunger: eat; sky: blue, grey-cloudy, beautiful; sand: home. There is still the tendency to call simple stupid even though that was one of the main principles that should have gone out with colonization; simple thoughts are lush with the complexity that is akin to the great flux of nature. The mind of the man who has lived in the desert his whole life is invariably more rich than the mind of any ‘cultured’ genius, anyone trained in universities with degrees, anyone who adds a title to their name. If we really want to learn something we have to go back; back down to life’s original and very simple scale.
When Valerie walks through the primeval forests, which is any forest, she meets up with primeval men and women, soul-people, that reside there. Through these probable personas she is soothed and lulled into an understanding that reality begins only when one dares enough to look deeper; and the deeper one gets the more diffused one becomes, so that the ego becomes a shell waving from up on the surface. To identify with more than just the confined Space of our physical body one jettisons the tangible features of our world back into their true liquid properties. When in the primeval forest of liquescence there is only an unthinking awareness, simpler than simplicity for within it there are not even words.
Valerie goes to the forest. Malik and the desert nomad go to the sand. Where they meet is the same.
Bracciano Italy
July 2008
Eid-ul Adha
30 June 2008
[Taken from the current draft of The Body’s Long Madness. See supplement SEX in this same chapter.]
The Islamic holiday of Eid-ul Adha coincides with the day before Valerie’s planned departure from Nabeul.
Valerie wakes that morning, an outsider to what seems to her like a gruesome holiday. She is the only one staying at the hostel, she has been but for the night a large group of German bikers passed through, and was invited by the family to partake in their festivities. But that morning, waking up to smoking sheep flesh and black sheep head and bloody sheep skin, the darling fluffy sheep seen tied to a stake the day before, Valerie keeps her distance and smiles and waves at the group and again shakes her head, no, she’s not going over there. Anyway, she’s been invited to Fouad’s much later past the killing.
Fouad had warned her the day before that all the cute fuzzy sheep seen in every yard tied to a stake would in the morning be slaughtered by the man of the family, skinned and cooked. But that it would actually happen? If anything, Valerie supposes, it brings the family closer to the food.
She did not expect, after passing some time on the grey-watered beach, walking through the silent daytime streets, that the gutters would flow with blood and that blood would trickle under every doorway to join the larger river of blood stagnant and pungent in the shallow ditch. Valerie tries to imagine Americans pulling this holiday off, the slaughtering of the golden calf let’s say, but the picture deforms on contact: a suburban dad holding a knife to an animal’s throat, a suburban dad wading through a puddle of blood spilled by his own making.
Americans like things neat, they like things tidy; they would rather be poisoned than to gain real knowledge of what is actually going on with the food they eat everyday. Here in Tunisia it is streets rippling with blood, it’s the knife tearing between muscle and skin, the knife severing the head as the family stands on watching, proud, this blood is spilled so that we can eat, from you and for you. Maybe that’s the difference, pride. What pride does the suburban dad have but the gas-guzzling SUV sitting in the driveway and the house at the end of it; mere constructs of false desire that scream out, “I must be saved!”
As Valerie sees it, as the light changes through a thin cloud cover, slowly passing into none, the current of blood so wrought with the sour smell of death, is preferable to any American amenity, microwaves, immaculate autoways, florescent cereals and shiny straight white teeth, aisles and aisles upon aisles of plastic wrapped meat, plastic wrapped sheep and cows and pigs. The blood and the thought of the knife which initially caused the spasm of vomit to rise is preferable to what Valerie believes the ‘American Dream’ to be selling.
Inside Valerie is something like a barometer; in absence of weather conditions to be measured the barometer’s needle jumps to zenith when sensing what is ‘real.’ Real is Valerie’s watchdog, it’s all that she ever expects from herself; real has to do with timelessness and real mercilessly excommunicates that which is not real. Valerie knows what is real and not real by the instinct with which the needle jumps.
Valerie backtracks to the old Arabic coffee shop where Fouad and her had an espresso that first morning and where Fouad is to meet her now. She wonders if part-root to her fervent criticism of The States is the backwash of one’s own country so forcefully disavowed. That she is in an Arabic country at the same pivotal moment in time as another Arabic country feels the horrendous devastation of the younger Bush’s grave politics; that she has met friends and their families similar to other friends and other families that power-mongering country has slaughtered and bled all for the sake of another cliche, freedom? Perhaps this is part cause for her barometer to skip a beat while walking along the blood soaked road… but what if this blood standing in the shallow ditch was Fouad’s blood and the country that had screamed out “War!” was her own? That thought is pain seared by fire as the sheep’s muscle and the sheep’s flesh are seared; and she wonders what it would take to burn off the label of American from her name; she wonders at the limit of pain her sensitive soul can endure.
Bracciano Italy
June 2008
Tree with its Life in the Air
10 June 2008
[Another long excerpt from The Body’s Long Madness]
Valerie begins where she left off, at the crumbling walls of a long ago abandoned paper mill. She ducks into what must have been a window or where someone punched a hole into the weak brick’s side. She moves carefully over to the opposite wall, careful because the decaying debris that make up the floor give the illusion of trapdoors, obscure holes or rabbit holes, like in the old barn, whose rickety wooden floor never failed to engender the foot with a surprise. Looking down there is a creek rushing; the pounding sound feels cool from up here. Between herself and the creek is a strip of thick muddy earth where there winds the roots of sturdy trees, there are big rocks and much green.
The old paper mill, with its orange bricks that are slowly becoming dust, is like getting a glimpse of the earth given back to the trees and the fragile underbrush and the weeds, ferns, flowers, fungus, moss, birds and bugs, back to the natural cycle of life and then decay. Here, at the old paper mill, Nature has regained her control. She penetrates into every weak crack, she fill every forgotten hole as she slowly, so slowly removes the old orange bricks from their place, so that in fifty years time, the small ash tree that has sprouted in the center where the brave shaft of light nurtures it completely, will be all that remains. The ash tree, the ferns and the underbrush, the rabbits and the beetles, the moss and the mushrooms and not one brick, not one sign of the human-will for dominion, for in the forest there is no such thing, there is only the cycle of life and decay.
Valerie moves on and as she walks down the well-trodden path, her mind naturally drifts. It takes her up through the dampness that are the droplets on tall branches, up and above the auburn forest to ‘her forest,’ the forest Valerie knows best. She travels by route of memory, which works mysteriously and slightly by association, back into the silent forest of childhood. There, the creek does not rush as fast as the one she is following nor do the trees tower so stately; it is swamp-like in the springtime, frozen in the winter, humid in the summer and at its best in the fall. It must have been the fall of a shaky adolescence when she would walk down there everyday, sometimes with a book, sometimes without. She would follow deer-paths or her own paths crunching through tall grasses, to sit on the earth near to the slow flow of the shallow creek, to watch and to listen and to sink her whole soul like one might bury one’s hand, into the fecund earth-song around her.
Mostly Valerie went down to the forest for ‘her tree.’ The tree with its life in the air. And for a shaky adolescent the tree became life-symbol, became a real life-force, for absolutely nothing else that she could see in the world around her was as mighty and powerful as that fallen tree with its mass of petrified roots flanked upright and its majestic body laid out broken and prone. She would scramble up the curved side of the trunk, wary of the flaking soft bark, to sit among the bright orange funguses and dull white mushrooms and small shoots and light green moss and bright green moss that had so delicately grew atop and pushed their way through the decaying body of the dead tree. She sat cross legged and engaged herself in a very distant stare that encompassed all of nature in her nearest periphery in very underwater way, for like waves, the vegetive substance came lapping and all of nature seemed so perfect in its residence within her.
Hoping down from the great width of the trunk which was its height, Valerie would go to the wooden roots. Where they had tore themselves from the earth by the greatest weight of the tree’s height, there was now a shallow dingy pool, wide enough. Valerie would get as near to the stoic roots as she could and would trace her fingers along their twisting formations that curled all around each other without any hint to any pattern. She would stand there staring for an hour at least in another blank wonder, “This was it. This was all the magnificent tree had to keep itself alive.” But what roots they were! What girths! What masses! And these roots were only the beginning. Who knew how far their counterparts have withered, now ant food and mole food, in the moist earth. How the dust and dirt still clung, how the smaller and weaker roots still hung like thread now brittle. And she wondered how long ago this catastrophe happened. If she was even alive yet. Were her parents alive? Had anyone heard it crash through other boughs and branches in its great descent to meet with the unbending earth? Was there anyone else who knew of this trees existence? a body of a tree which would eventually disintegrate, meet deeper with the earth in its everlasting union, give back a fair amount from what was taken.
Valerie took upon herself the duty of restoring the tree back to its former vitality, for she saw the purpose the tree now had and that it was equally as vital. Valerie did this by allowing the power of the tree, dead as it was, to pass through into the power she felt like a hard gem within herself; she shared her life-force with its life-force and the tree did the same, only the tree was not something singular, like Valerie had then thought herself to be, the tree was this amazing force, this divine underground-life, as human’s call it: life after death, life everlasting, heaven. The tree with its life in the air.
What Valerie went to that ‘tree with its life in the air’ for was for a different thing each time. The meaning behind the tree grew the more she made the walk to go and visit it, the more she sat on it, the more she explored the full length of its horizontal trunk and the tangled bunch of hard roots. Valerie would stay there for hours, stuck to the visions she was allowed to see, visions that seemed at her to the time to be given to her by the tree itself. Visions and thoughts that caught their roots within her, like the tender white roots of the fresh saplings that had caught themselves up in the dead tree; visions and thoughts that she had no choice but to keep to herself, for Valerie could not explain them, she knew they were much greater than anything she had words to describe, something much greater that throbbed through her as if it were the whole world throbbing through her. Valerie kept her secret and vegetative life in, she let it grow; she shared with the tree what she could.
No one else went down to the forest; no one else knew about the tree. It can still be said that the tree is Valerie’s life-force, for what that tree gave and implanted within her is so much like the tree itself, which has by now at least become a dusty pile of old bark and stronger and much older saplings, fungus food and fertilizer—but still palpable, still living within her.
Along the well-trodden path in the forest behind Amalfi, Valerie takes to a stone that juts into the quick-flowing creek, which is now runs besides the path on which she is walking. The stone is sun-drenched and Valerie situates herself on it without any problem. On this stone Valerie takes a rest and Oh! how she feels! with the sun showering down upon her and the sound of water rushing besides her. She thinks that she probably won’t be walking any further, that she know the value of good spots. She lies herself along the rock as best she can, the surface is angled into the water and she braces herself on its sides; she throws herself out into the water, which must be clear because it looks brown like the color of water moss and water stones and creek bottoms.
The other creek, now in mid-January, has ice skirting its nearest periphery as the water continues through the carved-out center and flows underneaths, flowing and carrying chunks of ice and broken off sticks, flowing oblivious to the deep-freeze. Surrounding the creek is the silence of frozen nature. Bare tree branches balk with the weight of ice-crystals, they make a sharp Creeeak! when the slightest breeze stirs their stiff constitution; piles of snow may fall from high-off and unknown places; the tiny chickadees and blue jays and stately cardinals flutter from slippery branch to slippery branch or fly down to leave paleolithic scratchings in the dusty snow. And when the snow falls, it falls and the air becomes some substance between liquid and solid, between sure and not sure. When passing through the speckled whiteness there is the thought that the whole world has become this lightly falling illimitable substance without definition.
“Funny to be thinking of snow under the melting Mediterranean sun,” Valerie thinks with a slight smile on her lips, with her hair falling back. But the way from ‘her tree’ to the creek in winter is not far at all; the distance between such memories is much more subtle than what can be calculated by usuals of time and space. “Michigan is not very far at all,” she reminds herself. “And if the state of Michigan is not that far than it is equally not as far to come to that vegetable-other that I am, just like that other that I feel I was in Michigan. Because aren’t we all the same ‘I’ anyway?”
As a playful cat pounces on thread, so Valerie’s mind jumps on the question, which gives birth to other questions, which curly-cue around her mind without great efforts to be answered but as questions that whirl because that is what they are. Like this, Valerie sinks into her most oblivious and most blissful nature, without care, without pressure, a floating blissful feeling, like a rock which juts into the water without disturbing the quick-flow but making the current part around it.
When some hikers pass Valerie’s departed body by she barely notices their taupe colored hiking outfits and their fancy hiking sticks; she barely hears their strong shoes breaking leaves and twigs; she hardly realizes when the whole day slips by in this way. When Valerie does stand up on the stone, she fleetingly wonders if she is moving or if it is the creek that is moving around her, so drugged is her state of reality, so languid are her quick thoughts. It actually takes a measurable amount of time to regain the answers to most simple of questions: Where am I? How am I? and Who? Valerie starts off again, now in the opposite direction.
Bracciano, Italy
June 2008