news about the slaughtered pregnant girl. Stuff is breaking loose, like rock from an eroding cliff, and poor Dolores is hanging on by her fingernails. Jane Doe is yelling from her tomb, Hey, Dolores! I’m all squashed down here, lemme out! Not yet, Jane, says Dolores. Things are still too obscure. A bird calls from the yard outside:
Whit-purr Whit-purr Whit-purr WHIT WHIT
My blood curdles, a fist presses down on my heart. It can’t be, but I know very well that it could. It is the unmistakable call of a honeyguide. I have heard it a thousand times in Africa, but there are no honeyguides in South Florida. We used to say it was calling my husband; that was before we knew what the honeyguide meant, its ways, that it was a kind of sorcerers’ mascot because of its magical powers, how it got men to do its work of busting up beehives, how it was never stung. How it eviscerated the nestlings of other birds with a special scalpel-like tooth on its beak.
I go through the door to the landing and listen. Ordinary twitters and creaks. Imagination. Funk. As sweat dries on my skin, I go back to the hammock. Not a honeyguide, not yet. An auditory hallucination. Speaking of which …
I’m thinking that it must have been just around now, a little earlier perhaps, that I first laid eyes on Marcel Vierchau. It was finals week, and I was in my Barnard room studying French and hating it, wanting to be home, out sailing, at the beach. I am quite good with languages, the speaking part at least, which put me into French lit classes over my head. This was Twentieth-Century French Prose. Colette was fine, but Sartre? Derrida? Not in balmy June. My junior year: so, fourteen years ago. I remember feeling the need to get out of the room, take a walk, get a cold one, maybe lie on the grass or join the perpetual volleyball game in front of Minor Latham for a while. The point is, I was just about to go out, I was looking for my wallet, at that very moment, that’s how close I was to not having my life changed, when Tracy O’Neill came barging in and said, Come on, we’re going to see Marcel Vierchau. And I said, Who’s Marcel Vierchau, and she said he’s the world’s greatest anthropologist, dummy, and he’s gorgeous, we’re all going to go over to Low Library and sit in the front row and masturbate. I said I wanted to get a beer and she grinned and held out the remains of a six-pack of Bud, sweaty-cold.
So we went, maybe five or six of us, all dorm rats, sick of the lamp and up for something rich and strange. Low Library rotunda is the largest venue on the Columbia campus and they needed the seats. Maybe three hundred people showed up, well over half passing for maidens. We didn’t get to sit in the very front, but we had good position, well within masturbation range, as O’Neill remarked.
The star was introduced by a dim old soul, a relic of the Mead era named Matson, or Watson. She told us that Vierchau was a rare piece of cheese, an ornament of the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, French Academy, U.S. Academy of Sciences (hon.), author of Sorcerer’s Apprentice, twenty-nine weeks on the Times bestseller list, and on and on, lists of publications, editorships, adding up to the hottest French anthropologist since Levi-Strauss (his mentor, in fact), ran the hundred in 10.1, could bench 350, and had a penis like a baguette. O’Neill, spluttering, added these, and we were all making a small spectacle of ourselves, when the lady came to the end of her dithyramb, and Vierchau walked out on the stage.
Well. He really was gorgeous to the point of absolute unfairness. I am afraid we gaped. The hair was the first thing, a huge thick flowing mop, sunset-colored, touched with silver on the sides, remarkable, threw a glow out across the audience like a baby spot. Beneath this, the necessary broad brow, deep-set sea-blues behind round wire-rims, prow of a nose, icebreaker chin, and lips, as they say, red as wine. He was wearing what he almost always wore, a dark silk turtleneck, a Harris tweed jacket, and dark, beautifully cut Italian slacks.
The applause died down, he paused, smiled, wiggled his eyebrows to show that he did not take himself that seriously, thanked Watson or Matson, reminded her that she had neglected to mention his membership in the Bicycle Club of France. Titters. “Our species,” he began, “is approximately a hundred thousand years old.” I suppose I must have heard that speech at least fifty times, and read it too; it was the basis for an article in Nature in 1986. “I must give the Speech again, Jeanne-Claire,” he would say, flourishing another invitation. He always added some new stuff, as research advanced, but basically it was the same line: his life’s work. And misleading in the extreme, he always added. Only for the goyim, he used to say. So I can easily put together the themes here in my head, swinging in the moonlight.
A hundred thousand years ago, people with the same sort of brains we all have, speaking languages no less complex, lived, worked, loved, and died. Recorded history, however, begins between eight and six thousand years ago, coincident with the development of agriculture in several regions of the Old World. Before that, a great silence, some ninety thousand years of silence. And so I wonder, what were those people doing with those so excellent brains all those endless days and nights? Not working all the time. Hunter-gatherers in benign climates do not work very hard. Their tools are simply made, as are their shelters. Most hunter-gatherer tribes work fewer hours a week than Frenchmen; far fewer than Americans. So what do they do? This, to me, is one of the great tasks of anthropological science, to penetrate the great silence, using as our informants the tiny number of people who are still making their livings that way.
So, I ask you, what would you do, with your marvelous brain, all those centuries? No books, no writing, few man-made things, little pressure from the environment, no television or radio, no newspapers, only the same hundred or so people to talk to? I think you would play with the environment, Homo ludens, after all, and you would become intimate with it. You would invent art, to symbolize this. You would develop an intimacy with your environment so deep that we children of industrial civilization can scarcely imagine it, an intimacy deeper, perhaps, than we have with our lovers or our children, perhaps even deeper than we have with our own alienated bodies. They would be participants in an environment that was alive in the same way that they themselves were alive, whereas we are merely observers of an environment that is dead. All the little particles, yes? Yes. And another thing we would play with would be the most interesting thing in our environment, which is the human mind, our own minds and those of others. And with this, very slowly, centuries and centuries, remember, a technology develops. This technology is based not on the manipulation of the objective world, as our own is, but rather on the manipulation of the subjective world. Now, you may be familiar with the statement by the British scientist and science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in which he states: any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic. Just so. And what I am proposing is that among traditional cultures there is a sufficiently advanced technology of which we know very little, and what little we do know of it we denigrate, yes? And for want of a better term, we call this magic.
Here he always paused, to let it sink in. The scientists in the crowd would look nervously at one another, the New Age types would beam and chortle. Yes, magic, he would say. Even the word itself connotes charlatanism, the phony, what is not to be taken seriously. From magi, the word the ancient Greeks contemptuously used for itinerant Persian conjurers. Today, in the West, to all sensible people, it means theatrical trickery, like this.
At this point he would take an egg out of his pocket. You have all seen this a hundred times, yes? I make the egg vanish, so. I produce it out of an empty hand, so. And out of my mouth, so. I drop it from one hand and catch it in my other hand?so?but the egg has vanished from the lower hand. You all saw it drop, but it is not where you thought it was. Ah, it is still in the hand that dropped it. But no. There is nothing in either hand. Technically, called a vanish-and-acquitment. But here is the egg again out of my ear. Technically, a production. You marvel, yes. Finally, I crack the egg on the podium and abracadabra! It turns into a pigeon which flies up to the ceiling. Do not worry, please, this pigeon is an indoor pigeon and will not make a mess.
Gasps. Screams. Vast applause.
His eyes crinkle entrancingly behind the glittering lenses. So, let us deconstruct what you have just seen. I am French, therefore I deconstruct. First, all of us bring to this phenomenon a cultural load. We do not observe it objectively; there is no such thing. And this load tells us that there is no magic. What you are observing is merely legerdemain. You cannot tell me how I did it, perhaps, you cannot explain what you saw, but you have utter confidence that the egg did not actually vanish, that the pigeon did not actually appear out of the egg. But let us take a poll, this being America: who here thinks I have actual magical powers?
Half a dozen hands shot up, waving wildly, us girls, naturellement, and a few of the crystal-and-patchouli crowd. Laughter, in which he joined.
I will be available for worship after the lecture, he remarked, to more chuckling. But most of you do not, and properly so, for you are all materialist empiricists. That is your culture. Of course there are people who simply believe in magic in the same way that some of you believe in a religion, but this is not what I am talking about. Again, this is a technology. It works whether you believe in it or not, just as a pistol will shoot you dead whether or not you believe that there are such things as pistols. What I just did with the egg and the pigeon was to demonstrate one element of this technology, which is the control of the consciousness of one person, or a group of
