A second thing: Despite the complete absence of a discernible social order among the Asadi, today I may have witnessed an event of the first importance to my unsuccessful, so far, efforts to chart their group relationships. Maybe. Maybe not. Previously, no real order at all existed. Dispersal at night, congregation in the morning – if you choose to call that order. But nothing else. Random milling about during the day, with no set times for eating, sex, or their habitual bloodless feuds. Random plunges into the jungle at night. What’s a humble Earthling to make of all this? A society held together by institutionalized antisocialness? What happened today leads me irrevocably away from that conclusion.
Maybe.
This afternoon an aged Asadi whom I’d never seen before stumbled into the clearing. His mane was grizzled, his face wizened, his hands shriveled, his grey body bleached to a filthy cream. But so agile was he in the Wild that no one detected his presence until his strangely clumsy entry into the clearing. Then, everyone fled from him. Unconcerned, he sat down in the center of the Asadi gathering place and folded his long, sparsely haired legs. By this time, all his conspecifics were in the jungle staring back at him from the edge of the clearing. Only at sunset had I ever before seen the Asadi desert the clearing en masse.
But I haven’t yet exhausted the strangeness of this old man’s visit. You see, he came accompanied.
He came with a small, purplish-black creature perched on his shoulder. It resembled a winged lizard, a bat, and a deformed homunculus all at once. But whereas the old man had great round eyes that changed color extremely slowly, if at all, the creature on his shoulder had not even a pair of empty sockets. It was blind, blind by virtue of its lack of any organs of sight. It sat on the aged Asadi’s shoulder and manipulated its tiny hands compulsively, tugging at the old man’s mane, then opening and closing them on empty air, then tugging once again at its protector’s grizzled collar.
Both the old man and his beastlike/manlike familiar had a furious unreality. They existed at a spiritual as well as a physical distance. I noted that the rest of the Asadi – those who surrounded and ignored me on the edge of the communion ground – behaved not as if they feared these sudden visitors, but rather as if they felt a loathsome kinship with them. This is difficult to express. Bear with me. Maybe another analogy will help. Let me say that the Asadi behaved toward their visitors as a fastidious child might behave toward a parent who has contracted a venereal disease. Love and loathing, shame and respect together.
The episode concluded abruptly when the old man rose from the ground, oblivious to the slow swelling and sedate flapping of his huri, and stalked back into the Wild, scattering a number of Asadi in his wake. (Huri, by the way, is a portmanteau word for fury and harpy that I’ve just coined.)
Then everything went back to normal. The clearing filled again, and the ceaseless and senseless milling about resumed.
God, it’s amazing how lonely loneliness can be when the sky contains a pair of jagged, nuggetlike moons and the human being inside you has surrendered to the essence of that which should command only your outward life. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? What I mean is that there’s a small struggle going on between Egan Chaney, cultural xenologist, and Egan Chaney, the quintessential man. No doubt it’s the result more of environmental pressure than of my genetic heritage.
That’s a little anthropological allusion, Moses. Don’t worry about it. You aren’t supposed to understand it.
But enough. Today’s atypical occurrence has sharpened my appetite for observation, temporarily calmed my internal struggle. I’m ready to stay here a year, if need be, even though the original plan was only for six months. Dear, dear God, look at those moons!
The Asadi Clearing: A Clarification
From the professional notebooks of Egan Chaney: My greatest collegiate failing was an inability to organize. I’m pursued by the specter of that failing even today. Consequently, a digression of sorts.
In looking over these quirkish notes for my formal ethnography, I see I may have given the reader the completely false idea that the Asadi clearing is a small area of ground, say fifteen by fifteen meters. Not so. As best I’m able to determine, there are approximately five hundred Asadi individuals. This figure includes mature adults, the young, and those intermediate between age and youth, although there are no ‘children’ or ‘infants,’ surprisingly enough. By most demographic and anthropological estimates, five hundred is optimum tribal size.
Of course, during all my time in the Wild, I’ve never been completely sure that the same individuals return to the clearing each morning. It may be that some sort of monumental shift takes place in the jungle, one group of Asadi replacing another each day. But I doubt it. The Wild encompasses a finite (though large) area, after all, and I have learned to recognize a few of the more distinctive Asadi by sight. Therefore, five hundred seems about right to me: five hundred grey-fleshed creatures strolling, halting, bending at the waist and glaring at one another, eating, participating in loveless sex, grappling like wrestlers, obeying no time clock but the sun, their activities devoid of any apprehensible sequence or rationale. Such activity requires a little space, though, and their clearing provides it.
The
