Bomba the Jungle Boy and the Moving Mountain

Bomba listened. Off in the distance he heard the drumming of an ancient evil. Nascanora and his head hunters were beating on drums, preparing for the blood feast. Bomba twitched his ear. His hearing was much more precise than that of a civilized boy. It was more like the hearing of the jaguar. Much closer he heard the sounds of a new evil. The white men who explored the jungle had brought it in their metal bird. Poison gas, in canisters, that blinded, and caused retching and death? Which would prevail: the ancient evil or the new evil? Bomba wondered, unsettled in his mind. It was a tangled labyrinth of thorns. Every hair on his body stood erect, as if he were the jungle cat in truth. He leapt down from his hiding place and headed down the trail. His mind was made up!

He would consult with Cody Carlson — the Old Naturalist!

Simple Story

This is a really simple story, but it’s hard to understand. I don’t just write whatever comes into my head. I ask myself if it is likely to bring harm or healing, confusion or clarity. And if it seems like something, even if it comes into my head is likely to confuse people or hurt their feelings, I don’t write it. Usually. Sometimes I just really want to write something, so I figure — what the fuck? — and I go for it.

So, before my father died he gave me this figurine from his office and he told me that when I hold it I will be able to know whether to trust.

And then when I was studying at the spiritual school (don’t worry it wasn’t called “the spiritual school” and don’t hope to find it anywhere cause you can’t) my teacher told me, when you see the mystical guardian who makes you doubt yourself, you have to know that he is your enemy. Don’t be afraid of him. Don’t believe what he has to tell you. Just balls out through whatever boundary he is policing. Do it.

When I met the guardian he said “We are not enemies.”

And I thought — hang on. Teacher says — if he says we are not enemies and I don’t believe anything he says, it means we are enemies.

But then I consulted my father’s figurine and it told me — don’t trust your teacher.

So then I thought — hang on! Why do I trust this statue?

And it told me. Don’t trust me.

And I thought — why should I trust my father?

And it told me — you shouldn’t.

And I thought — hang on. If the statue tells me not to trust it, and it also tells me not to trust my father — should I trust my father or not?

So I asked the statue — that thought I just thought — should I trust it?

And it said: No.

So I asked it: should I trust me?

And it said:No. And I smashed it into not a million pieces but about forty.

By this point the spiritual guardian that I was contending with had not just pushed me back against the gate I was trying to transverse, it had not just pushed me back into the spiritual school, and then back to Brooklyn and then back to elementary school, and back into the changing table I was on when I was one years old, I was one inch from going back into my mother’s vagina.

And I said — hang on! Something has gone wrong here.

And I pushed back and back and back against the guardian, got past his boundary, got into his bed chamber and stole the magic egg, which I took back to my room. And I have it. And it’s great.

So that’s what happened to me today!

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Vikram and the Ubshapti

Do you know the story of Vikram? Of Vikram and Ubshapti?

Vikram was clubbing in New York. The club was the Palladium.

Vikram would stay till 4 am. To watch the woman dancing.

Vikram loved the woman. But the woman belonged to Santosh.

Santosh brought Althea from Montgomery. Althea was the name of the woman.

Vikram waited to talk to her. He waited in the alley behind the club.

He said if you don’t love me, I don’t know how I’ll live. I’ll die.

Althea was amazed but afraid of Santosh. Althea told Santosh.

Santosh was a connosieur of mockery. At mockery, Santosh excelled.

Santosh was a genius at mockery. Imagine a Shakespeare of mockery.

Imagine a Bach. Imagine Von Neumann.

Santosh mocked Vikram’s approach to Althea. He mocked his pudgy body.

Face, character, soul, way of speaking way of acting. Santosh mocked them all.

Vikram was ashamed. He fled Palladium.

He went to Tony’s Italian kitchen on Mott street. He drank wine and ate pasta.

Every day for a month he ate and gained. Vikram became obese.

Finally Tony asked him to unload his heart. Vikram told Tony.

Tony said you need a father. You need a message from a father.

You need to fight back against Santosh. You need to get Althea.

I have no father, said Vikram. I as good as have no father.

All I have is an ancient Egyptian ubshabti figurine. It dates to the Middle Kingdom.

It was a gift to me from my father. But truly I have no father.

Fine said Tony. Use that.

Use that. Use the Ubshabti.

Use the Ubshabti, Vikram. Use the Ubshabti from the Middle Kingdom.

So you have no father. You have Ubshabti.

Use that, use that. Use that.

Vikram went home. He unwrapped Ubshapti.

He told Ubshapti the mockery. The mockery administered by Santosh to him.

The Ubshapti had a spell on him. It was in hieroglyphics.

The Ubshapti was to help souls in the afterlife. Now he was in New York City.

He did the best he could. He said “Vikram.

The first rule of mockery is be honest. The second rule is be fearless.

Obey the first rule, Vikram. Vikram obey the second.

Avoid fear, Vikram in your pursuit. Also avoid deception.”

Vikram heeded Ushabti. He went the Palladium.

He strode to the booth of the DJ. He grabbed from the DJ the microphone.

He unleashed mockery upon Santosh. His tongue was true and fearless.

He said his nose was risible. Like giant fans his ears.

He called his look ingratiating. Like an ad for something no one wants to buy.

The crowd laughed at Santosh. He fled from the Palladium.

Vikram found her in the alley. He invited her out for coffee.

They were at a Ukrainian place in the village. Althea was eating kasha.

She didn’t know what would happen. Althea was waiting for anything.

“I must be with you, Althea. My love for you will kill me.

I won’t know who I am without you. My life to me will be worthless.

A life without you Althea is not a life. My life to me is death.”

But Althea had heard Vikram truthful. And she had heard Vikram fearless.

When Vikram mocked Santosh as a dj. She knew how Vikram sounded.

Althea said he was lying. And Althea said he was fearful.

Althea left the city. She returned to Alabama.

Vikram remained in the restaurant. He paid for the left-over kasha.

Vikram went home on the subway. He crumbled dried leaves on the staircase.

Did Vikram blame the Ubshapti? He did not because he was fearless.

He took off the clothes of the old man. He put on the clothes of the new man.

Ah me, said Vikram’s Ubshapti. Praise be to Horus.

Praise to Thoth. Praise to Isis.

Praise be to Horus. To Horus.

In this world and the next. Praise Horus.

Sand Dollar

After his wife died Louis decided to fill his empty life a little by connecting to the children, the children who lived in the neighborhood. He would give them little gifts from his collection of souvenirs. When Eric came by after school he gave him a sand dollar and told him to shake it. Inside through the opening Eric could see the brittle figures. “People used to think they were angels.” said Louis. “But they are not. Can you guess what they are?”

I could. They were teeth.

My Mother gave Louis a good talking to and I never went over to his house again. But I didn’t have to. He taught me an important lesson about myself. If I were part of something dead, like the angel in the sand dollar, that’s what I would be. A tooth mistaken for an angel.

But was I part of something dead? That was a question it took me many years to discover. As long as I didn’t know the answer to the question I struggled with that fight, the fight between angel and tooth. Because if you are part of something dead, like the tooth of a sand dollar, can you really bite anybody? Can you actually eat?

You can dream of eating and biting. But if you are going to dream of eating and biting, why not dream of something else? You could dream of streaming your love down from the heavens onto all the sad and pained people on Earth. You could dream in other words of healing your own mother. You could dream of being an angel! And if it is all just dreams, why not? And if you’re not sure if you’re alive or dead, what does it matter?

It wasn’t until I reaized how to figure out if I was alive or dead that I decided once and for all I was not a tooth mistaken for an angel.

It took a long time to figure out if I was alive or dead, and strangely it was the simplest thing in the world to figure it out. Once I figured out that it was up to me whether to be alive or dead, I realized that I could be alive if I wanted to. And what other definition of life is there than that? To be alive is for it to up to you whether to be alive or dead. And I chose life.

My mother didn’t, and Louis didn’t.

One of them was a tooth, the other, an angel.

Adul and Tassa

Adul’s mother had to focus on finding someone who could help take care of her and the others, so Adul learned early not to ask for help from her. He went out into the world and worked for a traveling library. When he met Tassa she knew that he needed someone to love him, and she needed someone who would need her, because when Tassa grew up that had not been available. So she said to Adul that she would help him, and Adul said he needed her.

Adul liked to be helped. He liked that someone cared if he lived or died. He liked that someone wanted him to be happy. The books in the mobile library about love made sense to him. And Tassa liked to be told she was like the beloved people in those books, the people who saw someone who needed them, as Adul had, and fulfilled that need. But although Adul liked help completely, Tassa did not like being needed completely. It felt to her like a prison. She would try to escape from the prison — she would leave the mobile library in a new town or neighborhood and try to get lost in the crowd. But Adul would cry and pursue her and read to her from a book that mirrored their story completely. He would tell her the story of Elihu and the Leopard and say she was the Cinnamon Maid. He would tell her the story of Tom and the Well God and say she was the ghost of the drowned woman, drawn from the Dragon Realms. Tassa would listen to the story, hesitating between fleeing and staying and — she would stay. And Adul would promise her to make her life like that story, or to tell a story that would be like her life, but what it really meant was that he needed her even more deeply than he had ever expressed before. And Tassa needed to be needed, so the possibility that Adul needed her even more deeply kept her with him, sharing the pedaling in the moving library. Sometimes as they pedaled Tassa would ask herself if she needed more than to be needed by Adul and she would answer of course I do, yes everyone does, but what? A person. A job? An idea? She didn’t know, and since she didn’t know she decided that being needed by Adul was enough.

Until it was not enough, and after a year Tassa moved on. Adul read the books at night at the RV parks and he thought — what lies. These books were written by people like me who wanted somebody like Tassa, but never got her, or never got to keep her, never got that help. Maybe they wrote them to convince somebody like Tassa to stay with them. But that doesn’t mean the real people were like the people in the books. Tassa was right to leave me. To leave me and my books.

For a while Adul hated the books and then he felt neither love nor hate for them, he had contempt. And then when they took his library and beat him, he wondered who he was other than the books? Just a man whose mother had not loved him — at least not enough — who Tassa had not loved — at least not enough — and who had thought he should be treated differently from all the crowds of people who he passed on the road because he was like the people in books. But he was not like the people in books. He was not Elihu of Elihu and the Leopard, or Tom of Tom and The Well God. Nobody was. He wasn’t.

Adul couldn’t walk very well. He would sometimes catch himself seeing faces in clouds and faces in puddles of water, and laugh at himself. Here you are, seeing people where there are no people. He would catch a glimpse of his face in a puddle and think — no wonder mother and Tass and who knows who else didn’t want you and didn’t love you. You’re not a person at all. You’re a cat!

Adul was a cat and he got the sort of jobs cats get with a Cat Master. It was hard to tell sometimes if Cat Master was a man or a cat. He had a coach and four an boxes full of cats like Adul and the cats would come to the homes of rich people and sing their songs and do their dances and sometimes when the mood struck him Adul would prophecy. Nobody took the prophecies of cats seriously — it was more of a joke than a real thing — but they loved to hear them, because for just a moment when they listened to the prophecy — one among you is a king! the slave will become a master! a storm will come from the East! the bread will have jam and the pond will have fish! you will be completely changed and you will know what weeping is as you never did until now — they would feel that they were needed. They would feel that they were loved. The wife trapped in a marriage without love, the son who dreamed of his father dying and inheriting his house — they would hear in his prophecies their own dreams. They would hear their own real lives. The Cat Master kept most of the money but he never did fire Adul. He threatened and pulled his tail, but he never removed from Adul the place to sleep by the fire,or his dish of cream.

They came to Tassa’s father’s house one night and first Adul hid, and then he came out and got ready to tell a prophecy that was meant for Tassa. Tassa said “Father I used to own that cat. Can we buy him from the traveling man.” But Adul looked at her and she was not the Tassa who he had loved. She was another one of those people who did not need to be needed, at least not by him, but just wanted to feel special listening to silly stories. He leaped up on top of the Cat Master’s coach and said “There will be a time and it is soon when there will be no difference between need and no need, no difference between cat and man, no difference between stories and not stories, but we will all have to carry our own burden without anyone to share it with us. And for those who have been asking others to carry their burdens it will feel like being crushed, while for those who have been carrying the burdens of others it will for the first time in life feel like they are flying.” Tassa’s father and Tassa asked the Cat Master to hand Adul over to them so they could beat him for saying such an awful prophecy and they offered him money and Cat Master said yes, but Adul hissed at them and arched his back and showed his claws, and leaped off the top of the coach and ran into the woods.

Adul hunts by night these days. His wife is a leopard, and their children have eyes like — well to be honest if you never meet the eyes of those children you can count yourself lucky, and not being able to describe what their eyes are like is a small price to pay for that kind of luck. He tells his leopard wife stories that leopards like, about coming into the homes of people and taking their due, especially from those cruel people who hunt leopards. Every single one of these stories is true. Adul and his wife never ate Tassa or her father, and they didn’t have to, because the world is full of tigers and lions and worse. But when they did have a hunt that was successful they knew they needed each other, and their children needed them, and they gave a portion to the well god, and also to the moon.

Ah, The People I Don’t Know

We are pressed in by the warm, physical presence of people. It’s like a crowd forming on a cold December night in New York City. We take the subway from our different homes — apartments mostly, some single family dwellings — and are crushed together. Through the winter coats we feel the bodies and experience their warmth.

I was one of those people. I glimpsed the woman at fourteenth street union square. She was too tall for her coat, had light yellow hair and her face was flushed with cold. She left the subway at forty-second street and I felt impelled to follow her. For one block, then she was part of the crowd. Then I followed the crowd believing that it contained her and I might see her again. Whatever it was I had seen in her — a glimpse of recognition maybe or a long lost fragment of myself, or perhaps the whole of which I was the fragment — or maybe something simpler – excitement or fun or sex or danger — it submerged into the quality of the crowd and then I lost it.

Soon I was part of the crowd. The crowd became a slush, the crowd became a non-Newtonian fluid. I had a choice whether to walk where the crowd flowed — I could fall and let the crowd trample me. Is that a choice?

My friend Remy used to torment his mother by threatening suicide. He made her life hell! Why did you have me if you don’t want me? I will just kill myself. He was doing it to punish her but –also! He didn’t want to be alive. His life was just too painful.

In that crowd that I was a part of were women whose sons were torturing them with threats of suicide, were young men who wanted to kill themselves because the pain of the shame of being unwanted was too much. And a woman who I had some business with — cosmic? psychological? if the inner and the outer are just two sides of a single membrane is there a difference — and we were all entirely unkown to each other. If you were an incredibly sensitive bodhisattva I think a single taste of the crowd would let you know the components — the lonely, the intimate, those who mistook their loneliness for intimacy and the reverse.

But I was no bodhisattva.

Three hours later I was home on my bed asleep. All the people whose bodies had crushed against mine, on the subway, on the street, on the subway home, all those people had touched me although my mind had no idea who or how. The rough why bruised my dreams and in the morning of the new year I was a new me.

I Have Been Spoken To

I have been spoken to variously

But heard little.

My inward witness is dismayed

By my unguarded mouth.

I have taken, too often, the dangerous path,

The vague, the arid,

Neither in nor out of this life.

-Theodore Roethke

A Certain Man Sitting Outside in Front of a Wooden Table

Let me do all I can to make it clear, knowing that I will fail, because some things are not clear.

A man is sitting outside in front of a wooden table. The sun has set but the air still glows with its light, a purple glow, with trees drawing flat pictures of themselves against it. There are mosquitos biting his feet and arms.

On the table are three objects. He is not praying to them, nor would it be quite correct to say he is using them to perform a magic spell.

The first is a small hand mirror, the second is a candle, the third is a small stick made of hard, polished wood. It could be teak, or it could be mahogany. A hard, light tropical wood that takes centuries to grow. Or rosewood. The kind of tree does not matter, so long as is hard and from the tropics.

The man’s head is bowed down. He is concentrating. His eyes are half closed although sometimes he will look up to see the progress of the evening, and the brightness of the moon.

When the time is right he takes his left hand and holds it over his right to find the precise point on his body where the energy of creation is gathered, and into this point in the palm of his right hand between the second and third finger he presses the wooden stick until he feels pain.

Then he stops.

He strikes a match on the edge of the box of wooden matches and lights the candle. He holds the hand mirror in his two hands so he can see both his face and the moon in the mirror. Then he positions it so he can see only the moon the candle light and not his face. He begins, neither rushing nor dawdling to switch the mirror within his hand from position 1 to position 2. In the first position he beholds his face and the moon. In the second he beholds the moon and his candle, but not his face. He switches them back and forth, back and forth, the two images, as if he is taking a piece of stiff leather and working it until it is supple. Supple enough to make a shirt that a man could wear.

He puts the mirror down and emits a low growl and then a roar. HA!

He blows out the candle. The Work is complete.

There is now a community between two relationships — the relationship between his image of his own consciousness and his image of how he projects himself to others and is perceived by them — and the relationship between his understanding and the cosmos. The community between these two relationships — call it a relationship between two relationships — is what he had set out to accomplish. A word to use for this is “Co-Creation.”

We renew continually the work of creation.

In the work we find ourselves and we find others, and we feel the stream of energy in which we are all coursing.

We neither reflect nor enact, we neither make nor discover, but accomplish some third thing.

And yet this system of counting is only one of many systems of counting.

I know as I know my hand in front of my face or the pressure of a stick on my palm that this man and his table sit on a table as magical instruments in front of a Great Man. And he in turn is on a table in front of a man Greater Still. And so on. And that within the mirror within the candle within the table within the stick are countless men, countless tables, countless worlds, countless creations. And that endless series of ever larger ever smaller men and tables and ritual implements is only one such series. The number of series is not just infinite, it is transfinite. The space of possibilities is dense. In between every image in my story you can insert another image which was there all along if you only had eyes to see it (and you do!) and this is the focal point of another story, another series, another Sun.

If

If you can fill the unforgiving cup

With one quarter of a quart of water

Yours is the world from East to West and Down to Up

And what is more you are a Mensch, my Daughter!