José Lezama Lima, "Thoughts in Havana," trans. James Irby

Because I dwell in a whisper like a set of sails,
a land where ice is a reminiscence,
fire cannot hoist a bird
and burn it in a conversation calm in style.
Though that style doesn't dictate to me a sob
and a tenuous hop lets me live in bad humor,
I will not recognize the useless movement
of a mask floating where I cannot,
where I cannot transport the stonecutter or the door latch
to the museums where murders are papered 
while the judges point out the squirrel
that straightens its stockings with its tail.
If a previous style shakes the tree,
it decides the sob of two hairs and exclaims:
mi alma no está en un cenicero.

Any memory that is transported,
received like a galantine from the obese ambassadors of old,
will not make us live like the broken chair
of the lonesome existence that notes the tide
and sneezes in autumn.
And the size of a loud laugh,
broken by saying that its memories are remembered,
and its styles the fragments of a serpent
that we want to solder together
without worrying about the intensity of its eyes.
If someone reminds us that our styles
are already remembered;
that through our nostrils no subtle air thinks forth
but rather that the Aeolus of the sources elaborated
by those who decided that being
should dwell in man,
without any of us
dropping the saliva of a danceable decision,
though we presume like other men
that our nostrils expel a subtle air.
Since they dream of humiliating us,
repeating day and night with the rhythm of the tortoise
that conceals time on its back: 
you didn't decide that being should dwell in man; 
your God is the moon
watching like a banister
the entrance of being into man. 
Since they want to humiliate us we say to them:
el jefe de la tribu descendió la escalinata.

They have some show windows and wear some shoes.
In those show windows they alternate the mannequin with the stuffed ossifrage,
and everything that has passed through the forehead
of the lonesome buffalo's boredom.
If we don't look at the show window, they chat
about our insufficient nakedness that isn't worth a figurine from Naples.
If we go through it and don't break the glass,
they don't stress amusingly that our boredom can break the fire 
and they talk to us about the living model and the parable of the ossifrage.
They who carry their mannequins to all the ports
and who push down into their trunks a screeching
of stuffed vultures. 
They don't want to know that we climb up along the damp roots of the fern
--where there are two men in front of a table; to the right, the jug
and the bread that has been caressed--,
and that though we may chew their style,
no escogemos nuestros zapatos en una vitrina. 

The horse neighs when there's a shape
that comes in between like a toy ox,
that keeps the river from hitting it on the side
and kissing the spurs that were a present
from a rosy-cheeked adulteress from New York.
The horse doesn't neigh at night;
the crystals it exhales through its nose,
a warm frost, of paper;
the digestion of the spurs
after going through its muscles now glassy
with the sweat of a frying pan.
The toy ox and the horse 
hear the violin, but the fruit doesn't fall
squashed on their backs that are rubbed
with a syrup that is never tar.
The horse slides over the moss
where there is a table exhibiting the spurs,
but the perked-up ear of the beast doesn't decipher.

The calm with stumble music
and drunken circus horses in a tangle,
where the needle bites because there's no leopard
and the surge of the accordion
elaborates some tights of worn taffeta.
Though the man doesn't leap, there's a sound
of divided shapes in each indivisible season,
because the violin leaps like an eye.
The motionless jugs stir up a cartilaginous echo:
the shepherd's blue belly
is displayed on a tray of oysters.
In that echo of the bone and the flesh, some snorts
come out covered with a spiderweb disguise,
for the delight to which a mouth is opened,
like the bamboo flute elaborated
by the boys always asking for something.
They ask for a hollow darkness
to sleep in, splitting open, with no sensitivity,
the style of their mother's bellies.
But while they sharpen a spiderweb sigh
inside a jug passing from hand to hand,
the scratch on the lute doesn't decipher.
The indicated some moldings
that my flesh preferred to almonds.
Some delicious moldings riddled with holes 
by the hand that wraps them
and sprinkles them with the insects that will accompany it.
And that waiting, waited for in the wood
by its absorption that doesn't stop the horseman,
while not some masks, the ax cuts
that do not reach the moldings,
which do not wait like an ax or a mask,
but like the man who waits in a house of leaves.
But in tracing the cracks in the molding
and making a glory of the parsley and the canary,
l'etranger nous demande le garçon maudit. 

The musk ox itself knew the entrance,
the thread of three secrets
continued till it reached the terrace
without seeing the burning of the grotesque palace.
Does a door collapse because the drunken man
with no boots on yields to it his dream?
A muddy sweat fell from the shafts
and the columns crumbled in a sigh
that scattered their stones as far as the brook.
The roofs and the barges
safeguard the calm liquid and the chosen air;
the roofs that are friends of the toy tops
and the barges that anchor in a truncated backland,
scatter in confusion caused by a stuffed gallantry that catches unawares
the weaving and the obverse of the eye shivering together in masks.

To think that some crossbowmen
shoot at a funeral urn
and that from the urn leap
some pale people singing,
because our memories are already remembered
and we ruminate with a very bewildered dignity
some moldings that came out of the hunter's pecked siesta.
To know whether the song is ours or the night's,
they want to give us an ax elaborated in the sources of Aeolus. 
They want us to leap from that urn
and they also want to see us naked.
They want that death they have given us as a gift
to be the source of our birth,
and our obscure weaving and undoing
to be remembered by the thread of the woman beset by suitors.
We know that the canary and the parsley make a glory
and that the first flute was made from a stolen branch.

We go through ourselves
and having stopped point out the urn and the doves
engraved in the chosen air.
We go through ourselves
and the new surprise gives us our friends
and the birth of a dialectic: 
while two dihedrals spin and nibble each other,
the water strolling through the canals of our bones
carries our body toward the calm flow
of the unnavigated land,
where a walking alga tirelessly digests a sleeping bird.
It gives us friends that a light rediscovers
and the square where they converse without being awakened.
From that urn maliciously donated,
there come leaping couples, contrasts and the fever
grafted into the magnet horns
of the crazy page boy making a slick torture even more subtle.
My shame, the magnet horns smeared with a cold moon,
but the scorn gave birth to a cipher
and now unconsciously swung on a branch.
But after offering his respects,
when two-headed people, crafty, correct,
strike with algal hammers the tenor-voiced android,
the chief of the tribe descended the staircase.
The beads they have given us as gifts
have fortified our own poverty,
but since we know we are naked
being will come to rest upon our crossed steps.
And while they were daubing us in wild colors
so we would leap out of the funeral urn,
we knew that as always the wind was rippling the waters
and some steps were following with delight our own poverty.
The steps fled with the first questions of sleep.
But the dog bitten by light and by shadow,
by tail and head; 
the dog of dark light that cannot engrave it
and of stinking shadow; the light doesn't refine it
nor does the shadow nurture it: and so it bites
the light and the fruit, the wood and the shadow,
the mansion and the son, breaking the buzz
when the steps go away and he knocks at the portico.
Poor silly river that finds no way out
nor the doors and leaves swelling their music.
It chose, double against single, the cursed clods,
but I don't choose my shoes in a show window.

As it lost its shape on the leaf
the worm sniffed and inspected its old home; 
as it bit the waters that had come to the defined river,
the hummingbird touched the old moldings.
The violin of ice shrouded in reminiscence.
The colibri unbraids a music and ties a music. 
Our forests don't force man to become lost,
the forest is for us a harmonium in reminiscence.
Every naked man that comes along the river,
in the current or in the glassy egg,
swims in the air if he suspends his breath
and stretches out indefinitely his legs.
The mouth of the flesh of our wood
burns the rippled drops.
The chosen air is like an ax
for the flesh of our wood,
and the hummingbird pierces it.

My back is irritated and furrowed by the caterpillars
that chew some wicker changed into centurion fish,
but I go on working that wood,
like a sleepless fingernail,
like a harmonium that ties and unbraids in reminiscence.
The forest, breathed upon,
releases the hummingbird of the instant
and the old moldings.
Our wood is a toy ox; 
the city state is today the state and a small forest.
The guest breathes upon the horse and the rains, too.
The horse rubs its muzzle and its tail over the harmonium of the forest; 
the naked man intones his own poverty,
the colibri stains and pierces him. 
My soul is not in an ashtray.

Michael Taussig, The Corn-Wolf: Writing Apotropaic Texts

Truth can be suppressed in many ways and must be expressed in many ways.

                                    —Bertolt Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács”

Act One

Anthropology graduate student finishes two years of fieldwork and returns home with a computer full of notes and a trunk full of notebooks. Job now is to convert all that into a three-hundred-page piece of writing. No one has told her or him (1) how to do fieldwork or (2) that writing is usually the hardest part of the deal. Could these omissions be linked?

I mean—what a state of affairs! Here we have what are arguably the two most important aspects of anthropology and social science, and they are both rich, ripe secrets—secret-society-type shenanigans. Why so? Could it be that both are based on impossible-to-define talents, intuitions, tricks, and fears?

All the more reason to talk about them, you say.

Yes, but what sort of talk?

For is there not something else going on here, something connecting fieldwork to writingwork, something they have in common? For instance, fieldwork involves participant observation with people and events, being inside and outside, while writingwork involves magical projections through words into people and events. Can we say therefore that writingwork is a type of fieldwork and vice versa?

Act Two

In a commentary on Ludwig Wittgenstein's thoughts critical of James Frazer's The Golden Bough, Rush Rhees cites him: “‘And when I read Frazer I keep wanting to say: “All these processes, these changes of meaning—we have them here still in our word-language.”’”[1]

Wittgenstein continues: “If what is hidden in the last sheaf is called the Corn-Wolf, but also the last sheaf itself and also the man who binds it, we recognize in this a movement of language with which we are perfectly familiar.”[2]

What is Wittgenstein getting at? It is not altogether clear. He refers us to a movement or slithering and shaking that occurs in figures of speech, tricks you might say, which can occur with terms of reference that slip over into allied terms of reference such that cause becomes effect and insides outsides. Something like that.

The Corn-Wolf is:

1) That which is hidden in the last sheaf of corn harvested.

2) The last sheaf itself.

3) The man who binds the last sheaf.

When Wittgenstein says we are perfectly familiar with Corn-Wolfing in the moves our language makes, is he demagicalizing Frazer or, to the contrary, is he raising awareness about the magic in language, meaning the familiar moves it makes?

And there is another movement, as well, although we don't necessarily pick this up from what I have said so far or from what Wittgenstein says in his commentary, and this is the notion of sacrificing a human being or animal standing in for the corn spirit. The person who binds the last sheaf is something more than a man or a woman with a sickle or scythe doing an honest day's labor. You can find intimations of this in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Europe up to the time when Frazer published The Golden Bough, and according to Frazer you find it in many other times and places elsewhere—ancient Egypt, for example; think of Osiris, the corn god; ancient Greece, think of Dionysus. It is a momentous theme and Frazer spends two volumes on it. In an age of agribusiness and global warming, of environmental revenge following attempts to master nature, it is worth thinking about the disappearance of the vegetable god and its sacrifice. In the supermarket there is no last sheaf.

Act Three

A whole mythology is deposited in our language. [R, p. 10e]

This quotation from Wittgenstein is what intrigued me for many years in Rush Rhees's commentary before I got sidetracked by the Corn-Wolf. I have recalled it again and again: “A whole mythology is deposited in our language.” It sticks in my memory. It has become part of my mythology. For this to me is the anthropological project: becoming aware of that presence in our lives, in our writing, and institutions, so as to neither expose nor erase but conspire with it, as does the wolf.

Always but always I find this Corn-Wolf tugging at my elbow. I am writing a five-page piece on obscenity for a conference in Iowa, and I cannot resist my tongue-in-cheek title before I have written a word: “Obscenity in Iowa.” It carries me away into the heartland on account of the contradictions this word obscenity contains. So I write a Hayden White-type annals, a diary of four days in my life watching out for the obscene, all the time aware of the heave and shine of Wittgenstein's “mythology.”

Or else I am writing about liposuction and cosmetic surgery as I hear ever wilder stories about these procedures in Colombia among poor young women. I am enthralled by the desperation of this search for beauty and the elimination of nature by artifice. There is so much to tell, so much to consider, but what stands out most is the fairy-tale resonance of this endeavor ending in disaster, same as the stories of the devil contracts that I heard in the Colombian sugarcane fields almost forty years before.

Or else I am thinking of the desperate need for cocaine, the mythologies this rests upon and creates, cocaine that has now made Colombia into a drug colony instead of what it was for four hundred years, a gold colony, and if you don't know or can't feel the mythic power of gold and the fairy tales it has spawned circling around God and the devil, then there is no hope for you.

And the wolf was there bristling hair and breathing fire whenever there was violence because if you write about violence, I found out quickly, if you are serious, it sticks to you no matter how hard you try to get the drop on it. Worse still, you so easily make it worse. How come? After all, common sense would tell you that writing is one thing, reality another. How could one bleed—as they say—into the other?

So, how much of a difference is there between Wittgenstein's mythology in our language and the mythic realities of these things?

They are exotic, you say. Not at all typical, you say.

But aren't they simple, everyday examples of life itself, of the lust for life and cruelty, of the value and beauty that makes the world go round?

And nothing is as exotic in this regard as agribusiness writing itself.

Yet what chance is there for my anthropological project given the prevailing agribusiness approach to language and writing that wipes out the Corn-Wolf?

Or so it seems.

Act Four

Agribusiness writing is what we find throughout the university and everyone knows it when they don't see it. “Even today,” wrote Theodor Adorno in his essay on the essay, “to praise someone as an écrivain is enough to keep him out of academia.”[3] You can write about James Joyce, but not like James Joyce. Of course there is always “experimental writing” and “creative writing” and “this is just a work in progress,” as if all writing is not a work in progress. “Expt. writing” is to real writing as the sandlot is to daddy's office. Licensed transgression.

Agribusiness writing knows no wonder that, when it comes to anthropology, is really a wonder. Agribusiness writing wants mastery, not the mastery of nonmastery. Compare with Wittgenstein on Frazer: “I must plunge again and again in the water of doubt” (R, p. 1e). Or Georges Bataille: “I resolved long ago not to seek knowledge as others do, but to seek its contrary which is unknowing.”[4]

Agribusiness writing is a mode of production (see Marx) that conceals the means of production, assuming writing as information to be set aside from writing that has poetry, humor, luck, sarcasm, leg pulling, the art of the storyteller, and subject becoming object. It assumes writing to be a communicative means, not a source of experience for reader and writer alike (see Raymond Williams's critique of George Orwell, model of the English language at its transparent best, and, guys, watch out for those mixed metaphors, please!).[5]

And it assumes explanation when what is at issue is why is one required. What is an explanation and how do you do one, and how weird is that?

This is the main reason for Wittgenstein's beef with Frazer's view of magic. Wittgenstein singles out the assumption that we have to come up with an explanation for exotic magics like the Corn-Wolf on which Frazer spends so much time. Wittgenstein goes on to say (1) we have this exoticism, too, this magic, right here in our language, only we don't see it, and (2) describe, don't explain. But then that's no easy task; witness the following: “we have only to put together in the right way only what we know, without adding anything, and the satisfaction we are trying to get from the explanation comes of itself” (R, p. 7e). And (3) be open and be true to the emotional wallop we should get when we read about stuff like the Corn-Wolf.

Recall old wolf Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science choked up because in explaining, he claims, we generally reduce the unknown to the known because of our fear of the unknown. Even worse is that this procedure conceals how strange is the known. Agribusiness performs this in spades. It cannot estrange the known, that with which it works, its itselfness.

Act Five

Agribusiness writing wants to drain the wetlands. Swamps, they used to be called, dank places where bugs multiply. As if by magic the disorder of the world will be straightened out. Rarely if ever with such writing do we get the sense of chaos moving not to order but to another form of chaos.

This law 'n' order approach reminds me of mainstream anthropological approaches to magical healing ritual in non-Western cultures, seen as restoring order to the body and to the body politic. But isn't agribusiness writing resolutely rooted in science as anything but ritual?

Could agribusiness writing itself be magical, disguised as anything but? Pulling the wool over one's eyes is a simpler way of putting it, using magic to seem as if having none, is what I am getting at. Here I think of so-called shamans using sleight of hand to deal with malign spirits and sorcery. What we have generally done in anthropology is really pretty amazing in this regard, piggybacking on their magic and on their conjuring—their tricks—so as come up with explanations that seem nonmagical and free of trickery.[6]

Act Six

Hardly a sentimental traditionalist or antiquarian, in fact outrageously modern, Wittgenstein provides my anthropological self with a sense of Nervous System writing as magic—of writing as the Corn-Wolf—of writing that agribusiness renders moot, cutting down the field in which there is now no last sheaf never, all sheafs the same, just corn, we might say. Say dollars. Might as well.

Or so it seems.

Nervous System writing, what is that? It is writing that finds itself implicated in the play of institutionalized power as a play of feints and bluffs and as-ifs taken as real in which you are expected to play by the rules only to find there are none and then, like a fish dangling on the hook, you are jerked into a spine-breaking recognition that yes! after all, there are rules. And so it goes. Not a system but a Nervous System, a nervously nervous Nervous System, impressed upon me negotiating military roadblocks in the Putumayo area of rural Colombia in the 1980s as the counter–guerrilla war heated up and reality was—how shall we put this—“elastic” and multiple, “montaged,” Brecht would say, a fact that had been strongly impressed upon me by the spasmodic flows of sorcery and its curing by shamans singing with the hallucinogens drunk in small groups, myself included. Think of a cubist drawing with its intersecting planes and disorganization of cherished Renaissance perspective. Think of a person changing into a jaguar, at least from the waist up. Or yourself outside of yourself looking at yourself. “The silence fell heavy and blue in mountain villages,” wrote William Burroughs, no doubt thinking back to his time in the Putumayo, with that “pulsing mineral silence as word dust falls from demagnetized patterns.”[7] As I listened harder to my friends in agribusiness slum towns far from that sort of war and those hallucinations and that sorcery, I sensed how multiple real were their views of the world, too.

And what about me and my practice of writing? Wasn't I meant to straighten this mess out? A year or so later in my hometown of Sydney, for me one of the world's centers of order and stability anchoring the order/disorder paradigm we cherish—we have order, the other doesn't—I saw the grafitti on a ferry stop in the harbor: Nervous System, it said, ominous in its enigmatic might. A sign from the gods? A system on the verge of a nervous breakdown? What sort of contradiction and Corn-Wolfing play of words was this? At that time I was reading the British House of Commons Blue Books of 1912–13 with their testimony concerning the atrocities in the rubber boom in the Putumayo, Colombia, like those in King Leopold's Congo—over there, back then. British Consul Roger Casement up the Putumayo River reporting to Foreign Secretary, Sir Edmund Grey. The violence was too much to read, my mind shuts off, has to be exaggerated, but now it's not violent enough, whoa! where am I going with this? Only stories after all—stories Casement got from other people telling stories, and worst of all none of the motives made sense, leaving just violence, a nervous system there on the frontier, so many hearts of darkness and the ultimate violence was giving the Nervous System its fix, its craving for order, at which point it would spin around, laughing at your naiveté because the more order you found, the more you jacked up the disorder.

Could it be that the stories themselves were the aether in which violence operated, the real reality? What then would be an effective critical response? Check the archive to go beyond Casement's stories to prove … well, prove what? That reality does not come storied? That you can get the story behind the story and out-story it? And what sort of calculus of utilitarian logic could prove that rubber, like oil today, was the root cause? At once too easy and too crazy. Or could it be that violence became an end in itself aligned with demons and magics expelled by contemporary psychology but ever present in The Genealogy of Morals or Bataille's visions of excess, the sacred payoff that comes from breaking the taboo? In which case my question becomes, What sort of story can cut across and deflect those violence-stories, this being every bit as much a question of art and of ritual as it is of social science? The writer looks the history in the face at the receiving end of a chain of storytellers and has for a brief moment this one chance, the one permanently before the last, to make this intervention in the state of emergency, before the writer's story is swallowed up by the response it causes.

That is what I call Nervous System writing.

Roland Barthes said codes cannot be destroyed, only “played off.”

But “only” is quite enough. More than enough.

Hidden inside the last sheaf, the Corn-Wolf knows this well—imagine the scene there in the corner of the field as the reapers close in. Think Breughel. Think Thomas Hardy. And the Corn-Wolf is also the sacrificed—that never to be understood activity, sacrifice, like the Nervous System itself.

Nervous System writing aims at being one jump ahead of the rules of rulelessness but knows at the same time this is a doomed pursuit. If it is true that there is a mythology deposited in our language, NS writing aims not at exposing that mythology but at conniving with it.

Act Seven

I have long felt that agribusiness writing is more magical than magic ever could be and that what is required is to counter the purported realism of agribusiness writing with apotropaic writing as countermagic, apotropaic from the ancient Greek meaning the use of magic to protect one from harmful magic. This is prefigured in the wolfing moves alluded to by Wittgenstein, moves that counter the other, as in a Chinese martial art that imitates so as to deflect.

Wolfing moves include the following:

1) Refusing to give the Nervous System its fix, its fix of order.

2) Demystification—fine—as long as it implies and involves reenchantment. Glossing Walter Benjamin, Adorno talks of trying to have “everything metamorphose into a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things.” Note the word “spell.”

3) Recognizing that while it is hazardous to entertain a mimetic theory of language and writing, it is no less hazardous not to have such a theory. We live with both things going on simultaneously. This absurd state of affairs is where the Corn-Wolf roams. Try to imagine what would happen if we didn't in daily practice conspire to actively forget what Ferdinand de Saussure called the arbitrariness of the sign. Or try the opposite experiment. Try to imagine living in a world whose signs were “natural.”

4) We destroy only as creators, says Nietzsche. What he means is that by analysis we build and rebuild, in ever so particular a manner, culture itself. And nowhere will this be more pertinent than in anthropology—the study of culture. But what is also meant is the blurring of fiction and nonfiction, beginning with the recognition and appraisal that this distinction is itself fictional and necessary. That too is a Nervous System, the endorsement of the real as really made up. The ultimate wolfing move.

Act Eight

But are we capable of wolfing the wolf? For we are the last sheaf—are we not? And who will bind us? Is self-sacrifice the way out? After all, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss say that the god sacrificing itself is the origin of all sacrifice. Truly the mythology is one jump ahead. For as the world heats up, thanks to agribusiness, is it possible that subjects will become objects and a new—which is to say “old”—constellation of mind to matter, body and soul, will snap into place in which writing will be neither one nor the other but both, in the Corn-Wolfing way I have described in the previous act, the one permanently before the last?

The End

*     *     *     *     *

This is a modified text of a talk given on 27 March 2008 at a panel on “Meaning and Method in History” with Hayden White, organized by the Columbia University Center for the Humanities by Akeel Bilgrami. I would like to thank the editors of Critical Inquiry for their suggestions and also Peggy Phelan and Bina Gogineni for their love of the Corn-Wolf. I have just finished Dale Pendell's fabulous little book on Hayden's colleague, Norman O. Brown—whom I knew a little—and as I reworked this text I found myself thinking of him a lot, a Corn-Wolf if ever there was one. See Dale Pendell, Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown (San Francisco, 2008).

---

[1] Rush Rhees, “Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual,” in Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. Brian McGuinness (Chicago, 1982), p. 69.

[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's “Golden Bough,” trans. and ed. Rhees (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979), pp. 10e–11e; hereafter abbreviated R.

[3] Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2 vols. (New York, 1991), 1:3.

[4] Georges Bataille, “What I Understand by Sovereignty,” Sovereignty, vol. 3 of The Accursed Share: An Essay on Political Economy, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1991), p. 208.

[5] See Raymond Williams, George Orwell (1971; New York, 1981).

[6] See the discussion of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Victor Turner in Michael Taussig, “Homesickness and Dada,” The Nervous System (New York, 1992), pp. 149–82 and “Visceralty, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic,” Walter Benjamin's Grave (Chicago, 2006), pp. 121–56.

[7] William Burroughs, Nova Express (New York, 1964), p. 32.

Terence McKenna, The Transformations of Language

Terence McKenna, Language About The Unspeakable

William Burroughs, from The Soft Machine (1961)

And the other did not want to touch me because of the white worm-thing inside but no one could refuse if I wanted and ate the fear-softness in other men. The cold was around us in our bones. And I could see the time before the thing when there was green around and the green taste in my mouth and the green plant-shit on my legs. Before the cold... And some did not eat flesh and died because they could not live with the thing inside... Once we caught one of the hairy men with our vine nets and tied him over a slow fire and left him there until he died and the thing sucked his screams moving in my face like smoke and no one could eat the flesh-fear of the hairy man and there was a smell in the cave bent us over... We moved to keep out of our excrement where white worms twisted up feeling for us and the white worm-sickness in all our bodies. We took our pots and spears and moved South and left the black flesh there in the ashes... Came to the great dry plain and only those lived who learned to let the thing surface and eat animal excrement in the brown water holes... Then thick grass and trees and animals. I pulled the skin over my head and I made another man put on the skin and horns and we fucked like the animals stuck together and we found the animals stuck together and killed both so I knew the thing inside me would always find animals to feed my mouth meat... Saw animals chase us with spears and woke eating my own hand and the blood in my mouth made me spit up a bitter green juice. But the next day I ate flesh again and every night we put on animal skins and smeared green animal excrement down our legs and fucked each other with whimpering snorting noises and stuck together shadows on cave walls, and ate surface men... Thick time before thing when the skin over my head and green taste and the horns and we fucked before the cold. The thing inside me would. We caught one of the hairy men animaled him over a slow fire eating my own hand, and the thing sucked his screams green bitter juice. Those lived who learned to let the softness in, eat animal excrement in the brown bones... I made another man put on the skin green plant shit on animal stuck together flesh. So I knew with the thing inside always find animals to feed with our vine nets. Blood in my mouth made me spit up moving in my face like the next day I ate flesh again... Moved to knee legs and fucked each other twisted up feeling and stuck together shadows on our bodies.

Vampire bats—reservoir of rabies virus—gave us the virus gimmick back in the White Time which we used with monotonous results in our frequent skirmishes with the Surface People who moved South ahead of the cold. The virus reservoir was in the brown fat of the bats on which they subsist during hibernation. We learned to make extracts of this fat. Regulated doses could produce either the walking cold inside—our habitual state—or the state of hibernation that preserves the meat indefinitely. Stacked up cord-wood of Surface People in our cool blue grottos where The Queen who now produced the fat from her vast body sat immobile covered with limestone spinning the juice out of her eyes. We are blind and we eat with our eyes which sometimes run together into one, by the usual procedure, giving rise to Cyclops stories and other stories which we edit for improbability scatter before issuing them over the fire to The Carriers privileged class of Story Bearers who are exempt from the meat grotto and go their insouciant South way spreading our edited copies.

Michael Taussig, from Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative

When the human body, a nation’s flag, money, or a public statue is defaced, a strange surplus of negative energy is likely to be aroused from within the defaced thing itself. It is now in a state of desecration, the closest many of us are going to get to the sacred in this modern world. Indeed this negative state can come across as more sacred than “sacred,” especially since that most spectacular defacement, the death of God, was announced by Nietzsche’s madman: “Do you not feel the breath of empty space?” he demands, lantern held high in the blazing sun.

I take this space to be where the defacing action is, sucking in this book as sheerness of movement within an emptiness so empty anything could happen in a continuous blur—like Margaras, the White Cat, Hunter and Killer, not similar to anything, just similar. “He can hide in snow and sunlight on white walls and clouds and rocks,” William Burroughs advises, and “he moves down windy streets with blown newspapers and shreds of music and silver paper in the wind.” Margaras is what this book is, an extended commentary on what G.W.F. Hegel called “the labor of the negative.”

Something so strange emanates from the wound of sacrilege wrought by desecration that rather than pronounce theoretical verdict and encapsulate defacement’s mysterious force, I see my task first and foremost to be not its explanation but its characterization. Yet this is a cheat for, after all, do I really believe there is such a thing as explanation? And as for having a task? Is it not a failure, doomed from the outset, a surrender to the way of the world, wanting to be one with and even devoured by the subject matter of the negative? The ultimate act of being similar?

For characterization of defacement can never confront its object head-on, if only because defacement catches us unawares and can only be known unexpectedly, complicit with the violence of daily life. The writer must confront the resistances. Why else do we write? The shortest way between two points, between violence and its analysis, is the long way round, tracing the edge sideways like the crab scuttling. This we also call the labor of the negative. And here I follow not only the scuttling crab, eyes protruding on stalks, body armor dripping, but Walter Benjamin’s appraisal of Eros is Plato’s Symposium, for whom truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does justice to it.

Thus, so easily we join truth and secret; with rapture we skid between them, envelope the one in the other: truth = secret. Yet embedded within this ingrained poetry of daily habit there exists something not so obvious, a finely tuned theatrical process, thanks to which, as Benjamin sees it, the revelation shall do justice to the secret. In fact, he portrays such a revelation as the burning up of the husk of the beautiful outer appearance of the secret as it enters the realm of ideas; “that is to say,” he adds, “a destruction of the work in which the external form achieves its most brilliant degree of illumination.”

The just revelation amounts to a funeral pyre, and something else, as well. For beauty has been waiting for this incendiary moment as the fate through which it shall rise to unforeseen heights of perfection, where its inner nature shall be revealed for the first time. At the moment of its self-destruction, its illuminating power is greatest. This decidedly mystical process—which I equate with unmasking—whereby truth, as secret, is finally revealed, is hence a sacrifice, even a self-sacrifice, thanks to an inspired act of defacement, beautiful in its own right: violent, negating, and fiery. And this carefully contrived process of the just revelation, be it noted, stands in juxtaposition to exposure, which Benjamin warns, would only destroy the secret.

Yet what if the truth is not so much a secret as a public secret, as is the case with the most important social knowledge, knowing what not to know? Then what happens tot the inspired act of defacement? Does it destroy the secret, or further empower it? For are not shared secrets the basis of our social institutions, the workplace, the market, the family, and the state? Is not such public secrecy the most interesting, the most powerful, the most mischievous and ubiquitous form of socially active knowledge there is? What we call doctrine, ideology, consciousness, beliefs, values, and even discourse, pale into sociological insignificance and philosophical banality in comparison: for it is the task and life force of the public secret to maintain that verge where the secret is not destroyed through exposure, but subject to a quite different sort of revelation that does justice to it. This is the verge of “a thousand plateaus,” resolute in its directionless stasis, my subject, my just subject: the characterization of negation as sacred surplus whose force lies entirely in the mode of revelation we seek and seek to make.

It is the cut of de/facement that releases this surplus, the cut into wholeness as holiness that, in sundering, reveals, as with film montage, not only another view via another frame, but released flows of energy. As Thomas Elsaesser observes in his essay on Dada cinema, “It is the cut as the montage principle that makes the energy in the system visible and active.”

If it is the cut that makes the energy in the system both visible and active, then we should also be aware of cuts in language, strange accidents and contingencies, as in the way the English language brings together as montage the face and sacrilege under the rubric defacement. It is by means of this contingency that I am alerted to the tenderness of face and of faces facing each other, tense with the expectation of secrets as fathomless as they seem worthy of unmasking—one of the heroic tropes, in my experience, of that which we call Enlightenment, no less than of physiognomy, reading insides from outsides, the soul from the face.

I take the face to be the figure of appearance, the appearance of appearance, the figure of figuration, the ur-appearance, if you will, of secrecy itself as the primordial act of presencing. For the face itself is a contingency, at the magical crossroads of mask and window to the soul, one of the better-kept public secrets essential to everyday life. How could this be, this contradiction to end contradiction, crisscrossing itself in endless crossings of the face? And could defacement itself escape this endless back-and-forth of revelation and concealment?

Defacement is like Enlightenment. It brings insides outside, unearthing knowledge, and revealing mystery. As it does this, however, as it spoliates and tears at tegument, it may also animate the thing defaced and the mystery revealed may become more mysterious, indicating the curious magic upon which Enlightenment, in its elimination of magic, depends. In fact, defacement is often the first thing people think of when they think of mimetic magic, like sticking a needle in the heart of a figuring so as to kill the person thereby represented, and it is no accident that this was Frazer’s first example in the scores of pages he dedicated to the magic art in The Golden Bough. Defacement is privileged among these arts of magic because it offers the fast track to the mimetic component of sympathetic magic, in which the representation becomes the represented, only to have the latter die, in the slipstream of its presencing.

Defacement evokes a prehistory of the face as sacrifice, as does Georges Bataille where he rewrites Darwin and Freud with their histories of the almighty consequences of man’s ascent to the upright posture from the crouching ape. This is the long sought-for source of repression, Freud crowed to his muse in Berlin, Wilhelm Fliess, because the sense of smell, finely attuned to the anus and genitals of the Other, thereby lost its ascendency of the senses once man strode forth on two legs. Henceforth the eyes were regnant and shame entered the world, just as sex came to concentrate on the genitals that had to be covered from sight. Hastening to add that it was mere speculation, more often than not consigning these thoughts to elaborate footnotes over a page long, Freud nevertheless clung to this history to the end, over thirty years, from his 1897 letters to Fliess, through the Rat Man and the essay on love and ubiquity of debasement of the loved object, to the ominous Civilization and Its Discontents with its prophecies of sexual demise and the total triumph of bodily repression.

It was not just the nose that was at stake in this millennial struggle for the rights of the body, but the anus as the sensory button of the world, adrift in the wake of civilization as a heavy, if occult, presence, heavy enough for the philosophically trained authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment to affirm for smell an epistemology totally at odds with normal, civilized, perception. For if the visual settled in with a nice sense of distance between self-enclosed subjects and other-enclosed objects, this distancing was annulled with nasal perception, such that the senses ran riotously into one another as much as into the Other, as with the dog, man’s best friend, loyal to a fault, never happier than when its nose is up the Other’s rear end. Hence the ambivalence of primal words, as with “dog,” man’s esteemed companion through the ages, no less than the sign of all that is base and degrading. Hence Bataille, canine to a fault, adding his astonishing fable of the ape’s anus to this series of connections between face and nether regions. It all began as a frightening scene at the zoo, the tender faces of children exposed to the blossoming bottom of the ape swinging its scarlet self into focus to dominate the visual field like a gorgeous flower, suggesting to Bataille that the ascent of man to his privileged status in the cosmic design is summed up in the development of a mysterious organ he called the “pineal eye” on account of its ecstatic relation to the sun. Located at the tippy-top of evolutionary development, the crown of the head, with direct access to the heavens above, this eye is in reality a solar anus whose singular achievement is to make the visual olfactory. Like that noble bird of prey and icon of the state, the eagle of mythology, this is an eye that can look straight into the sun and, when it does so, it stimulates immense, offensive ejaculations as the sign of an orgiastic fusion of self with Other, just as the child screams at the sight of the amazing anus on the other side of the bars. All this is the result of the reconfiguration of the ape’s anatomy, the migration of anus headwise, absorbed into the body of man to conceal itself as a mere cleft in the buttocks. “All the potential for blossoming,” notes Bataille, “found the way open only toward the superior regions of the buccal orifices, toward the throat, the brain, and the eyes. The human face,” he concludes, “is a conflagration that had, until that moment, made of the anal orifice both bud and flame.”

Defacement works on objects the way jokes work on language, bringing out of their inherent magic nowhere more so than when those objects have become routinized and social, like money or the nation’s flag in secular societies where God has long been put in his place. Defacement of such social things, however, brings up a very angry god out of hiding, and Nietzsche’s madman distraught with implications of the death of God knows of no better return to life than this, although to call this a return would be to muffle Michel Foucault’s argument, built on that of  Bataille, that with the death of God transgression acquires a different character than before, because now it is transgression itself that is God, most pronounced, most condensed, in what we call sex—that secret we are henceforth doomed to always speak about precisely because it is secret.

This reconfiguration of repression in which depth becomes surface so as to remain depth, I call the public secret, which, in another version, can be defined as that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated, first drawn to my attention in an extreme form in Colombia in the early 1980’s, when there were so many situations in which people dared not state the obvious, thus outlining it, so to speak, with the spectral radiance of the unsaid; as when people were taken off buses and searched at roadblocks set up by the police or military, the secret being that these same police and military were probably a good deal more involved in terrorism and drug running than the guerrilla forces they were pitted against. Likewise, but in a different register, was what people in the towns and hamlets in northern Cauca, Colombia, where I’ve lived on and off since 1969, call “the law of silence,” a phrase I first heard in the early 1980’s when, side by side with the suspension of civil liberties and the imposition of military rule via recurrent “states of emergency,” mutilated corpses would mysteriously appear on the roads leading to town. Today as I write, in January 1998, the “dirty war” has reached heights nobody would have believed back then, massacres of peasants occurring daily, and it is routine for human-rights people to figure the action in terms of the smoke screen uniting paramilitary killers with the regular military forces. We all “knew” this, and they “knew” we “knew,” but there was no way it could be easily articulated, certainly not on the ground, face-to-face. Such “smoke screens” are surely long known to mankind, but this “long knownness” is itself an intrinsic component of knowing what not to know, such that many times, even in our acknowledging it, in striving to extricate ourselves from its sticky embrace, we fall into even better-laid traps of our own making. Such is the labor of the negative, as when it is pointed out that something may be obvious, but needs stating in order to be obvious. For example, the public secret. Knowing it is essential to its power, equal to the denial. Not being able to say anything is likewise testimony to its power. So it continues, each negation feeding the other while the headlines bleat “EL ESTADO, IMPOTENTE.” And much the same applies, so I am informed, to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and so on. Only the movies tell it like it is, especially those concerning corruption in the New York City police force. But that’ fiction.

My examples, as much as the experience within them, seem extreme and tend to weaken the all-consuming banality of the fact that this negativity of knowing what not to know lies at the heart of a vast range of social powers and knowledge’s intertwined with those powers, such that the clumsy hybrid of power/knowledge comes at last into meaningful focus, it being not that knowledge is power but rather that active not-knowing makes it so. So we fall silent when faced with such a massive sociological phenomenon, aghast at such complicities and ours with it, for without such shared secrets any and all social institutions—workplace, marketplace, state, and family—would founder. “Do you want to know the secret?” asked William Burroughs in the journal he kept in the months before his death. “Hell no!” he replies, talking to himself, to us, his cats, and to death. “All is in the not done.”

Nietzsche would be smiling in his death sleep at this adroit maneuver with the two-realities model of the world, surface and depth, appearance and a hidden essence, bequeathed the West by Plato and Christianity. “The ‘apparent’ world is the only one,” he wrote just before his final breakdown. “The ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added.” That is another karate-like maneuver with reality’s investment in the secret, embracing it in a classic Nervous System play-off. And this mocking language, crisp and timely, reminds us that the point of living, even at the point of death, is not to try to master the secret by evacuating it, as when one says, excited by a sudden insight, that … “the secret of the public secret is that there is none.” Jackpot! Trembling hands reach out to grasp the negativity.

“Hell no!”

So our writing, as much as our living, becomes extensive, opening out pursuant to filmy trails of the unsayable, not closing down on the secret quivering in fear of imminent exposure. So our writing becomes an exercise in life itself, at one with life and within life as lived in social affairs, not transcendent or even a means to such, but contiguous with action and reaction in the great chain of storytelling telling the one before the last. Yet how can you be contiguous with the note merely empty, but negative, space?

Elias Canetti pronounced secrecy as the very core of power. And he is most decidedly right. Wherever there is power, there is secrecy, except it is not only secrecy that lies at the core of power, but public secrecy. And there is a distinct possibility of falling into error here. To put it bluntly, there is no such thing as a secret. It is an invention that comes out of the public secret, a limit-case, a supposition, a great “as if,” without which the public secret would evaporate. To see the secret as secret is to take it at face value, which is what the tension in defacement requires. According to Canetti, this tension is where the fetishization of the secret as a hidden and momentous thing, made by persons by transcendent over them, verges on explosive self-destruction capable of dragging us all down. This is his foreboding, what he identifies as the virtual law of the secret. But against this apocalyptic dread, I regard the public secret as fated to maintain the verge where the secret is not destroyed through exposure, but subject to a revelation that does justice to it.

And the madman in the marketplace agonizing at the death of God? Is he really worried about God gone, belated guilt at killing the Father, impetuous deed too easily carried out by the callous, who will live to rue the day? A heavy psychodrama? He certainly is worked up. But about what? Listen to his rant. Is there still any up or down? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?

God is not the problem. Killing him achieved nothing. Maybe less than nothing. The mystery-model of the real continues stronger than before with God-substitutes piling up by the minute. The addiction to the disjunction of appearance and essence goes deep. Before the two thousand years of the Christ-man behind the scene there was the Plato-man with beautiful and true forms hidden behind the sensuous crust of appearance. Secrecy and mystery all the way down. This is why the madman raves and why only the madman raves, because, being mad, he sees that Enlightenment created other gods busy behind the scene of the screen. He smashes his lantern there in the marketplace in broad daylight. “I have come too early,” he says. “This tremendous event is still on its way.”

This then is the breath of empty space. For if we were to abolish depth, what world would be left? The apparent world, perhaps? But no! With the abolition of depth we have also abolished the apparent world!

Canetti’s fear of the apocalyptic powers of the secret as exploding fetish: realized.

And Nietzsche leaves us with this picture of a postfictional world bereft of depth. It is movement etched in black and white. Burroughs’s cat. “He can hide in snow and sunlight on white walls and clouds and rocks, he moves down windy streets with blown newspapers and shreds of music and silver paper in the wind.”

Mid-day, says Nietzsche, setting the scene without the screen. Moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind.

Defacement!

Alan Watts, Symbols and Meaning

William Burroughs, from The Soft Machine (1966)

Joe Brundige brings you the shocking story of the Mayan Caper exclusive to The Evening News — 

A Russian scientist has said: “We will travel not only in space but in time as well” — I have just returned from a thousand-year time trip and I am here to tell you what I saw — And to tell you how such time trips are made — It is a precise operation — It is difficult — It is dangerous — It is the new frontier and only the adventurous need apply — But it belongs to anyone who has the courage and know-how to enter — It belongs to you — 

I started my trip in the morgue with old newspapers, folding in today with yesterday and typing out composites — When you skip through a newspaper as most of us do you see a great deal more than you know — In fact you see it all on a subliminal level — Now when I fold today’s paper in with yesterday’s paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I am literally moving back to the time when I read yesterday’s paper, that is traveling in time back to yesterday — I did this eight hours a day for three months — I went back as far as the papers went — I dug out old magazines and forgotten novels and letters — I made fold-ins and composites and I did the same with photos — 

The next step was carried out in a film studio — I learned to talk and think backward on all levels — This was done by running film and sound track backward — For example a picture of myself eating a full meal was reversed, from satiety back to hunger — First the film was run at normal speed, then in slow-motion — The same procedure was extended to other physiological processes including orgasm — (It was explained to me that I must put aside all sexual prudery and reticence, that sex was perhaps the heaviest anchor holding one in present time.) For three months I worked with the studio — My basic training in time travel was completed and I was now ready to train specifically for the Mayan assignment —

I went to Mexico City and studied the Mayans with a team of archaeologists — The Mayans lived in what is now Yucatan, British Honduras, and Guatemala — I will not recapitulate what is known of their history, but some observations on the Mayan calendar are essential to understanding this report — The Mayan calendar starts from a mythical date 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu and rolls on to the end of the world, also a definite date depicted in the codices as a God pouring water on the earth — The Mayans had a solar, a lunar, and a ceremonial calendar rolling along like interlocking wheels from 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu to the end — The absolute power of the priests, who formed about 2 percent of the population, depended on their control of this calendar — The extent of this number monopoly can be deduced from the fact that the Mayan verbal language contains no number above ten — Modern Mayan-speaking Indians use Spanish numerals — Mayan agriculture was of the slash and burn type — They had no plows. Plows can not be used in the Mayan area because there is a strata of limestone six inches beneath the surface and the slash and burn method is used to this day — Now slash and burn agriculture is a matter of precise timing — The brush must be cut at a certain time so it will have time to dry and the burning operation carried out before the rains start — A few days’ miscalculation and the year’s crop is lost — 

The Mayan writings have not been fully deciphered, but we know that most of the hieroglyphs refer to dates in the calendar, and these numerals have been translated — It is probable that the other undeciphered symbols refer to the ceremonial calendar — There are only three Mayan codices in existence, one in Dresden, one in Paris, one in Madrid, the others having been burned by Bishop Landa — Mayan is very much a living language and in the more remote villages nothing else is spoken — More routine work — I studied Mayan and listened to it on the tape recorder and mixed Mayan in with English — I made innumerable photomontages of Mayan codices and artifacts — the next step was to find a “vessel” — We sifted through many candidates before settling on a young Mayan worker recently arrived from Yucatan — This boy was about twenty, almost black, with the sloping forehead and curved nose of the ancient Mayans — (The physical type has undergone little alteration) — He was illiterate — He had a history of epilepsy — He was what mediums call a “sensitive” — For another three months I worked with the boy on the tape recorder mixing his speech with mine — (I was quite fluent in Mayan at this point — Unlike Aztec it is an easy language.) It was time now for “the transfer operation” — “I” was to be moved into the body of this young Mayan — The operation is illegal and few are competent to practice it — I was referred to an American doctor who had become a heavy metal addict and lost his certificate — “He is the best transfer artist in the industry” I was told “For a price.” 

We found the doctor in a dingy office on the Avenida Cinco de Mayo — He was a thin grey man who flickered in and out of focus like an old film — I told him what I wanted and he looked at me from a remote distance without warmth or hostility or any emotion I had ever experienced in myself or seen in another — He nodded silently and ordered the Mayan boy to strip, and ran practiced fingers over his naked body — The doctor picked up a box-like instrument with electrical attachments and moved it slowly up and down the boy’s back from the base of the spine to the neck — The instrument clicked like a Geiger counter — The doctor sat down and explained to me that the operation was usually performed with “the hanging technique” — The patient’s neck is broken and during the orgasm that results he passes into the other body — This method, however, was obsolete and dangerous — For the operation to succeed you must work with a pure vessel who has not been subject to parasite invasion — Such subjects are almost impossible to find in present time he stated flatly — His cold grey eyes flicked across the young Mayan’s naked body: 

“This subject is riddled with parasites — If I were to employ the barbarous method used by some of my learned colleagues — (nameless assholes) — you would be eaten body and soul by crab parasites — My technique is quite different — I operate with molds — Your body will remain here intact in deepfreeze — On your return, if you do return, you can have it back.” He looked pointedly at my stomach sagging from sedentary city life — “You could do with a stomach tuck, young man — But one thing at a time — The transfer operation will take some weeks — And I warn you it will be expensive.” 

I told him that cost was no object — The News was behind me all the way — He nodded briefly: “Come back at this time tomorrow.” When we returned to the doctor’s office he introduced me to a thin young man who had the doctor’s cool removed grey eyes — “This is my photographer — I will make my molds from his negatives.” The photographer told me his name was Jiminez — (“Just call me ‘Jimmy the Take’”) — We followed the “Take” to a studio in the same building equipped with a 35 millimeter movie camera and Mayan backdrops — He posed us naked in erection and orgasm, cutting the images in together down the middle line of our bodies — Three times a week we went to the doctor’s office — He looked through rolls of film his eyes intense, cold, impersonal — And ran the clicking box up and down our spines — Then he injected a drug which he described as a variation of the apomorphine formula — The injection caused simultaneous vomiting and orgasm and several times I found myself vomiting and ejaculating in the Mayan vessel — The doctor told me these exercises were only the preliminaries and that the actual operation, despite all precautions and skills, was still dangerous enough. 

At the end of three weeks he indicated the time has come to operate — He arranged us side by side naked on the operating table under floodlights — With a phosphorescent pencil he traced the middle line of our bodies from the cleft under the nose down to the rectum — Then he injected a blue fluid of heavy cold silence as word dust fell from demagnetized patterns — From a remote Polar distance I could see the doctor separate the two halves of our bodies and fitting together a composite being — I came back in other flesh the lookout different, thoughts and memories of the young Mayan drifting through my brain — 

The doctor gave me a bottle of the vomiting drug which he explained was efficacious in blocking out any control waves — He also gave me another drug which, if injected into a subject, would enable me to occupy his body for a few hours and only at night. “Don’t let the sun come up on you or it’s curtains — zero eaten by crab — And now there is the matter of my fee.” 

I handed him a brief case of bank notes and he faded into the shadows furtive and seedy as an old junky. 

The paper and the embassy had warned me that I would be on my own, a thousand years from any help — I had a vibrating camera gun sewed into my fly, a small tape recorder and a transistor radio concealed in a clay pot — I took a plane to Mérida where I set about contacting a “broker” who could put me in touch with a “time guide” — Most of these so-called “brokers” are old drunken frauds and my first contact was no exception — I had been warned to pay nothing until I was satisfied with the arrangements — I found this “broker” in a filthy hut on the outskirts surrounded by a rubbish heap of scrap iron, old bones, broken pottery and worked flints — I produced a bottle of aguardiente and the broker immediately threw down a plastic cup of the raw spirit and sat there swaying back and forth on a stool while I explained my business — He indicated that what I wanted was extremely difficult — Also dangerous and illegal — He could get into trouble — Besides I might be an informer from the Time Police — He would have to think about it — He drank two more cups of spirit and fell on the floor in a stupor — The following day I called again — He had thought it over and perhaps — In any case he would need a week to prepare his medicines and this he could only do if he were properly supplied with aguardiente — And he poured another glass of spirits slopping full — Extremely dissatisfied with the way things were going I left — As I was walking back toward town a boy fell in beside me. 

“Hello, Meester, you look for broker yes? — Muy know good one — Him,” he gestured back toward the hut. “No good borracho son bitch bastard — Take mucho dinero — No do nothing — You come with me, Meester.” 

Thinking I could not do worse, I accompanied the boy to another hut built on stilts over a pond — A youngish man greeted us and listened silently while I explained what I wanted — The boy squatted on the floor rolling a marijuana cigarette — He passed it around and we all smoked — The broker said yes he could make the arrangements and named a price considerably lower than what I had been told to expect — How soon? — He looked at a shelf where I could see a number of elaborate hourglasses with sand in different colors: red, green, black, blue, and white — The glasses were marked with symbols — He explained to me that the sand represented color time and color words — He pointed to a symbol on the green glass, “Then — One hour” — He took out some dried mushrooms and herbs and began cooking them in a clay pot — As green sand touched the symbol, he filled little clay cups and handed one to me and one to the boy — I drank the bitter medicine and almost immediately the pictures I had seen of Mayan artifacts and codices began moving in my brain like animated cartoons — A spermy, compost heap smell filled the room — The boy began to twitch and mutter and fell to the floor in a fit — I could see that he had an erection under his thin trousers — The broker opened the boy’s shirt and pulled off his pants — The penis flipped out spurting in orgasm after orgasm — A green light filled the room and burned through the boy’s flesh — Suddenly he sat up talking in Mayan — The words curled out his mouth and hung visible in the air like vine tendrils — I felt a strange vertigo which I recognized as the motion sickness of time travel — The broker smiled and held out a hand — I passed over his fee — The boy was putting on his clothes — He beckoned me to follow and I got up and left the hut — We were walking along a jungle hut the boy ahead his whole body alert and twitching like a dog — We walked many hours and it was dawn when we came to a clearing where I could see a number of workers with sharp sticks and gourds of seed planting corn — The boy touched my shoulder and disappeared up the path in jungle dawn mist — 

As I stepped forward into the clearing and addressed one of the workers, I felt the crushing weight of evil insect control forcing my thoughts and feelings into prearranged molds, squeezing my spirit in a soft invisible vise — The worker looked at me with dead eyes empty of curiosity or welcome and silently handed me a planting stick — It was not unusual for strangers to wander in out of the jungle since the whole area was ravaged by soil exhaustion — So my presence occasioned no comment — I worked until sundown — I was assigned to a hut by an overseer who carried a carved stick and wore an elaborate headdress indicating his rank — I lay down in the hammock and immediately felt stabbing probes of telepathic interrogation — I turned on the thoughts of a half-witted young Indian — After some hours the invisible presence withdrew — I had passed the first test — 

During the months that followed I worked in the fields — The monotony of this existence made my disguise as a mental defective quite easy — I learned that one could be transferred from field work to rock carving the stellae after a long apprenticeship and only after the priests were satisfied that any thought of resistance was forever extinguished — I decided to retain the anonymous status of a field worker and keep as far as possible out of notice — 

A continuous round of festivals occupied our evenings and holidays — On these occasions the priests appeared in elaborate costumes, often disguised as centipedes or lobsters — Sacrifices were rare, but I witnessed one revolting ceremony in which a young captive was tied to a stake and the priests tore his sex off with white-hot copper claws — I learned also something of the horrible punishments meted out to anyone who dared challenge or even think of challenging the controllers: Death in the Ovens: The violator was placed in a construction of interlocking copper grills — The grills were then heated to white heat and slowly closed on his body. Death In Centipede: The “criminal” was strapped to a couch and eaten alive by giant centipedes — These executions were carried out secretly in rooms under the temple. 

I made recordings of the festivals and the continuous music like a shrill insect frequency that followed the workers all day in the fields — However, I knew that to play these recordings would invite immediate detection — I needed not only the sound track of control but the image track as well before I could take definitive action — I have explained that the Mayan control system depends on the calendar and the codices which contain symbols representing all states of thought and feeling possible to human animals living under such limited circumstances — These are the instruments with which they rotate and control units of thought — I found out also that the priests themselves do not understand exactly how the system works and that I undoubtedly knew more about it than they did as a result of my intensive training and studies — The technicians who had devised the control system had died out and the present line of priests were in the position of some one who knows what buttons to push in order to set a machine in motion, but would have no idea how to fix that machine if it broke down, or to construct another if the machine were destroyed — If I could gain access to the codices and mix the sound and image track the priests would go on pressing the old buttons with unexpected results — In order to accomplish the purpose I prostituted myself to one of the priests — (Most distasteful thing I ever stood still for) — During the sex act he metamorphosed himself into a green crab from the waist up, retaining human legs and genitals that secreted a caustic erogenous slime, while a horrible stench filled the hut — I was able to endure these horrible encounters by promising myself the pleasure of killing this disgusting monster when the time came — And my reputation as an idiot was by now so well established that I escaped all but the most routine control measures — 

The priest had me transferred to janitor work in the temple where I witnessed some executions and saw the prisoners torn body and soul into writhing insect fragments by the ovens, and learned that the giant centipedes were born in the ovens from these mutilated screaming fragments — It was time to act — Using the drug the doctor had given me, I took over the priest’s body, gained access to the room where the codices were kept, and photographed the books — Equipped now with sound and image track of the control machine I was in position to dismantle it — I had only to mix the order of recordings and the order of images and the changed order would be picked up and fed back into the machine — I had recordings of all agricultural operations, cutting and burning brush etc. — I now correlated the recordings of burning brush with the image track of this operation, and shuffled the time so that the order to burn came late and a year’s crop was lost — Famine weakening control lines, I cut radio static into the control music and festival recordings together with sound and image track rebellion. 

“Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill! — ” 

Inexorably as the machine had controlled thought feeling and sensory impressions of the workers, the machine now gave the order to dismantle itself and kill the priests — I had the satisfaction of seeing the overseer pegged out in the field, his intestines perforated with hot planting sticks and crammed with corn — I broke out my camera gun and rushed the temple — This weapon takes and vibrates image to radio static — You see the priests were nothing but word and image, an old film rolling on and on with dead actors — Priests and temple guards went up in silver smoke as I blasted my way into the control room and burned the codices — Earthquake tremors under my feet I got out of there fast, blocks of limestone raining all around me — A great weight fell from the sky, winds of the earth whipping palm trees to the ground — Tidal waves rolled over the Mayan control calendar.