of?this is the savage hitting the fine Swiss watch with a flint hammer to make it work again. In contrast, we have the sorcerer. He has tens of thousands of chemical species available to him in plant tissue, not to mention commensal bacteria and fungi and viruses that can live in and modify the human body, not to mention mutagens that can actually change the DNA in the human brain, and he has for his laboratory bench, himself, or his victims or allies, and he has time, all the time in the world.
But, says the angel, okay, they can drug themselves, have trances, visions galore, and they can drug their subjects, or victims, with or without their knowledge, but what about all the weird stuff, affecting people at a distance, influencing dreams, cursing, being invisible …
No, no, you haven’t understood, my sparrow. Their bodies are changed. They can make psychotropic chemicals to order, even chemicals affecting a single person. They make them in their own bodies, and expel them through the breath or the pores. The melanocytes all over the skin surface are deeply connected to the limbic system and the pineal body and they can produce exohormones, which, entering the bloodstream of the target through any number of routes, proceed to the brain, where they have the most profound mental and emotional effects. Interesting, hein? The same bodies that control skin pigmentation? An irony, no? Yet here is the essence of what we call sorcery. The sparrow has questions. How come science hasn’t detected these exohormones? Well, science has; am I not a scientist? But what you mean, my artichoke, is “detected chemically.” And the answer is that science is not looking. Science looks largely for what it expects to find, and it does not expect to find any real effects in the claims of sorcerers. Also, science is good at searching for what can be controlled in a laboratory setting, and what can be repeated, so that a certain cause always associates with the same effect. But this is not the case with sorcery, which is an art.
All this was before I met the Chenka, so my questions were like those of a person from a culture that had no music: how can mere ordered sounds affect the emotions? Preposterous! How could a great musician talk to such a person? Looking back now, I see how incredibly patient Marcel was with me, and I blush to recall it, blushing being a good example of psychophysiological effects. And others: did you ever, while sitting in a public place, get the feeling that someone was staring at you, and you looked up and sure enough there was? One of Marcel’s favorites. What do you think that is, mental rays? Beams from the eye? And love. We say, “it’s chemistry,” but it really is chemistry. How little we know, how much to discover, what chemical forces flow, from lover to lover. Yes, indeed.
Marcel’s chemical theory “explained,” if that is the word, much of the anecdotal material about shamanism and sorcery that anthropologists had gathered over the years. He thought that all these were the scattered remains of a very, very old technology. What do witches do, in stories? Two things: they make brews and they cast spells. Brews, of course, are obviously the traditional use of biologicals, and spells are, despite common belief, not silly callings to demons or spirits, but mnemonics. At least, originally. Chenka sorcerers, Marcel claimed, typically had fifty to seventy-five thousand recipes and procedures in memory. And, of course, there is the rub. If you multiply your body’s powers through technology as our culture has done for the last four centuries you are much better off in a material sense than if you only amplify the subjective ones. This is why Sioux shamans no longer rule on the Great Plains, and why, throughout the world, preindustrial peoples are happy to trade fifty-thousand-year-old traditions for cigarettes, whiskey, steel knives, and plastic jugs.
Except for the Chenka, who were a special case. Why did their tradition survive intact? Marcel didn’t know, but he used to grin and say, moving his hands as a conjurer, “the mysteries of the normal curve!” When you get out three or four or five standard deviations from the mean you find some weird stuff. Genius. Golden ages. Giants and dwarves. Two-headed babies. And the Chenka. It’s a good nonexplanation. We thought the Chenka were unique, until I discovered the Olo.
Enough musing. I page through my notebooks until I find what I’m looking for, a kadoul, a ticket to the magic kingdom. I take kwa — leaf, a West African member of the Boraginceae rich in pyrrolizidine alkaloids, mash it with some powders, use a cereal bowl and the handle of a screwdriver as a mortar and pestle to grind the stuff that needs grinding, add a little of my own spit and piss and some water, and put it on the stove to boil down. I say the necessary words, in Olo. The spell, the witch’s brew. It smells dank and rank as it boils. When it has cooked to sludge, I affix a dish towel to a bowl with a rubber band and strain it through, getting about a quarter of a cup of a strong-smelling greenish-brown liquid. I add to this some brown powder, some red powder, some of my blood. The liquid turns a sludgy black and seems to shrink in volume, which is what it’s supposed to do. My artillery. I pour it into an old jam jar. It will keep indefinitely. A good thing, too, because I realize I am not up to changing my interior chemistry just yet, for there are two problems. First, after the drug, and during the time I am under its influence, I will not be fit for anything else but sorcery: not working for Mrs. Waley, not driving a car in accordance with the highway code, not caring for Luz. A sorcerer needs a support team when he or she travels in the m’doli, like an astronaut does on a space mission, and I have none as yet. It was not something I contemplated Dolores ever needing. The second reason is that once I take the stuff, I will be out in m’doli, and my husband will no longer be in any doubt as to my continued earthly existence. A dilemma. I tell myself I am awaiting allies and I go up on a chair and push the jar to the back of the top shelf in my food cupboard. And a third reason: I am scared shitless.
While I am considering protective measures, I decide I may as well take care of the m’fa, too. In the very bottom of my box is a triangular package wrapped in rubberized fabric and gaffer tape. It is my Red Nine. I unwrap it and pick it up. A handful. It weighs, if I recall, two and three-quarter pounds unloaded, and this one has ten rounds in it. My dad kept it on the Kite, and I stole it back when I stole the Kite. I put it on the high shelf next to the kadoul. Maybe I can shoot him if he comes in his body. Could I shoot him? I never killed anyone but me on purpose. In any case, I know it will shoot me, so it will serve in the last extremity, if I find myself literally falling under his spell. Odd, how those common dead metaphors spring horribly to life. Entranced. Enchanted. Bewitched.
Now everything goes back into the box, except the journal, which I continue to read. I wish to reacquaint myself with Jane. The period of Jane’s life between Chenka and Olo was an album of self-delusion, with good examples of all the major types?professional, social, romantic … no, I am being too hard on her. She was a tough girl. It’s not easy losing your first big romantic thing and your sense of the underlying reality of the cosmos at one and the same time.
This gets me thinking again about Dad (for I have gone to see that boat, Guitar, several times, down at Dinner Key). I wonder, is that kind of person still around, will we ever have people like that again? He always said it was his generation, that peculiar lost one that was born during the Second World War. He used to tote up the things that his generation was last at. Last to experience segregation of the races, last to come to sexual maturity before women’s lib and the Pill, last to believe that the United States was invariably the good guy, last to defer without much question to teachers and elders in general, last to get the full load of dead white male culture force- fed into their brains and souls, last to grow up before TV became the ruling power. If Catholic, last to get raised in the pre-Vatican II shut-up-and-do-what-we-say, superstitious, devotional American church. The last to start screwing before Roe v. Wade, and hence and finally, the last to think it mandatory to marry the girl you got pregnant. Thus me.
I was like him, or tried to be, perhaps to be less like my mother, who was thoroughly modern, although only five years younger than he. As she often told me, she went to him to get money for an abortion and he said, before she could ask, let’s get married, and she did. She imagined a life rather like that of the Kennedys, and tried to have one to the extent that she could. Dad stayed home with us kids while she did so. I will give her this, that she made it home for the major holidays, and here they all are, dutifully recorded in short entries about home visits. A dull story, even to the author, who seems to be the sort who will end up wearing a plain brown dress and a bun, with a ring of keys at her waist, standing in the doorway of the big house saying, “I am afraid my father cannot be disturbed.”
Until Witt. That was a surprise, and registered as one in the journal. I am addicted to genius, so Jane wrote back then. If true, I believe I am in recovery now. We did not end up in bed on the night we met, I am happy to say; Witt had that much care for his old pal Lou, but he called me the next day and invited me to that rehearsal and I was a goner. It seems that I actually believed at the time that someone who could ring the changes on race hysteria and hypocrisy the way he could would be fairly immune to racial insanity. Such immunity is not impossible, I must believe. Needless to say, in both Chicago and New York we were acquainted with any number of interracial couples. They were not even unusual in the arty circles we hung out in. Maybe they were writhing secretly, but I saw no evidence of this. Some people, I believe, are just happy to be alive and successful. I thought we would be like them. As I read this, I see I had not a clue. And maybe he didn’t, either. This is what I like to think, even now, that it was Africa that changed him, the witch stuff. He would not be the first decent man to succumb to the
