[ Music ]
 [ Music ]
 Chapter 2, Into the Devil's Paradise.
 Did I say we were a party of five?
 We were a party of five when we arrived at La Charrera,
 but we were a party of six departing from Puerto Leguisamo.
 Ev and I were living together as much as a couple can live together
 when they sleep in a hammock every night and pile off a boat
 with four other people to hang their bed in the trees.
 He was with us too. Sia.
 I must explain Sia.
 There is a phenomenon happening in South America which I didn't meet in India.
 It has to do with fringe religions.
 The New Jerusalem, whose devotees seem to be mostly fruititarian.
 There is a tribe of such people, Americans,
 who since 1962 or '63 have been drifting down through Latin America,
 chiseling on each other, living with each other, loathing each other,
 weaving intrigues.
 They communicated through Ouija boards with these things they called the beings of light,
 and a whole mythology was built up around reincarnation.
 According to them, everyone is a reincarnation.
 One person was the reincarnation of Rasputin.
 Another was a refugee from the inner circles of the Hare Krishna cult
 who wore white robes and white rubber rain boots.
 He was the reincarnation of Erwin Rommel.
 And then the leader, the central mystery of the whole group, was Sia.
 He had been Ev's companion for four years.
 He was very strange and believed that he had been several prominent people reincarnate.
 I was in a peculiar dilemma.
 My categories were not very rigid either.
 I thought, "Aren't we all happy hippies?"
 I had been in Asia perhaps too long,
 and I don't know that much about how the universe is put together.
 But among these people, it turned out that there were a lot of funny categories
 difficult to tolerate.
 If Sia didn't want you to do something, he would have a blank look for a moment
 and then announce that it had been revealed to him on the instant
 by the beings of light that you shouldn't, for example, peel fruit with a metal knife.
 The tiny minutia of existence were controlled by these hidden forces.
 He had monkeys that were Christ incarnate.
 Sia traveled with animals, monkeys, dogs, kittens, parrots.
 He insisted that all the animals be vegetarian.
 So the animals were twisted and unhealthy.
 Their eyes were going around in circles, and he was telling me,
 "This is Buddha, this is Christ, this is Hitler."
 It was not actually this demented.
 I exaggerate to give the flavor, but in Sia's head, I'm sure it was this loose.
 As we put off from Puerto Leguizamo, we were therefore six--
 Vanessa, Dave, Ev, Dennis, and myself, and Sia, six people.
 Sia hated me.
 Ev had left him in San Agustin and come to Bogota,
 where they had kindly said we could have their apartment.
 In the two weeks while we were getting together the equipment for the expedition,
 Ev and I began a relationship, or the beginning of a relationship,
 which may have been a source of resentment for Vanessa.
 There was a lot of tension around all this, but I said,
 "Look, I like this woman, and she speaks Spanish."
 This was my best argument, appealing to reason.
 Now are you seriously suggesting that we trek many days into the Amazon basin
 with our specious grip on the local language?
 It makes very good sense that Ev should come.
 Eventually there was mutual agreement that she should come with us.
 However, in the meantime, Dave, who had not kept track of this intrigue,
 cabled Sia and invited him to meet us in Florencia and come with us into the Amazon.
 We piled on a vintage Colombian Air Force plane,
 and then landed at Florencia, Dave, Vanessa, Ev, Dennis, and I,
 Ev's dog, and ten tons of equipment, which was to be transported down the Putumayo.
 Sia was at the airport waiting,
 thinking that the woman he had lived with for four years had gone to Peru
 with the person in white robes and matching rubber boots.
 Actually, no.
 There was an emotion fraught sorting out of all this at the airport fence.
 Later in town, Ev and I took one room at the hotel,
 leaving Sia to sort it for himself still further.
 With there seeming to be no possibility of grace on anyone's part,
 I was attempting to signal Sia that since he had last seen Ev,
 her life had taken a new direction and become something else.
 I was disconcerted and am a bit of a milk toast, hating tension,
 so I chose to think that it was out of my hands.
 He came to our room and said,
 "Well, it looks like there's nothing here for me.
 I am planning to fly back to Bogota.
 Thank God, thought I."
 Then he went to his room and went into communication with the beings of light.
 He came back two hours later to say,
 "You can't find it without me."
 By this he meant the Ukuhe.
 "You don't know anything about the jungle. I'm a man of the forest."
 He was into an image of himself as a man of the forest.
 With great reluctance, I went along with this idea.
 When next we flew, it was on to Puerto Leguizamo,
 and we now had him, his dog, his cat, his monkey.
 Sia wore robes.
 He had a staff, a staff with flowing fajas.
 I had already determined that the boats leave Puerto Leguizamo very irregularly.
 I thought we would have to wait.
 Perhaps even up to two weeks wouldn't be unusual.
 The hotel is tiny, the food terrible.
 I figured we would rub up against each other.
 Then he would leave.
 He was being very unpleasant to Ev, and it was a strain for everyone involved.
 I had actually been with Ev only two weeks and thought,
 "These people have been together four years.
 They've traveled to India together.
 What role should I be playing in all this?"
 But it did not happen as I had anticipated.
 It turned out that there was a boat in two days.
 And so, in what seemed like hours, the arrangements fell together,
 and we paid the 600 pesos to secure our fair downriver.
 At dawn, the appointed morning, all our animals, cameras,
 I Ching, butterfly nets, plant presses, formaldehyde, notebooks, Finnegan's Wave,
 all the things that one must have to go into the Amazon,
 were piled at the river's edge on a tiny trading boat that was to be our vessel.
 Ernito, our captain, indicated that we were to have the area
 on top of the cases of bottled fluorescent soda.
 We were informed that it was six to twelve days to where we wanted to go,
 depending on business.
 Puerto Leguizamo disappeared, and the river, the green bank,
 the shrill of insects and parrots, the brown water, became our world.
 [Music]
 We made our way under power, but slowly, to the middle of the shining brown river,
 under an immense sky, under an immense sun, a delicious moment,
 when one has done all that one can for a journey, and is at last in motion,
 no longer responsible since giving that burden up to pilot or engineer,
 boatman or ground control.
 The world one is leaving has been truly broken away from,
 the destination still unknown, a favorite kind of moment,
 more familiar in the sterile environs of ocean-crossing passenger planes,
 and so how much richer here, surrounded by the cargo of sun-dried fish
 and brilliant gaseouses.
 I made a small space where I could sit cross-legged and rolled a joint.
 The flow of the river was like the rich smoke I inhaled,
 the flow of smoke, the flow of water and of time.
 All flows, said a beloved Greek, who called the crying philosopher,
 but why crying? I love what he says, it does not make me cry.
 What a luxury, smoking again in the tropics, again in the light,
 away from the season and places of death, away from living under the state of emergency
 in Canada, on the edge of war-bloated mad America,
 mother's death and coincidentally all my books and art,
 carefully stored, carefully collected and shipped back,
 burned, fire and cancer, cancer and fire,
 away from these terrible things, sudden fissures in the psychic landscape
 that open and swallow one's whole world,
 monopoly houses waxy green go tumbling into fissures in an animated psychic landscape.
 And before all that, Tokyo, its jovian atmosphere,
 the pretension of fitting into the work cycle,
 how inhuman does one become in an inhuman situation for a little while?
 Tokyo demanded the spending of money, the saving of which was the only way out.
 Ten months of deepening alienation that began with leaving tropical Asia
 and like a comet being drawn in to nearly brush its star,
 being drawn through Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo and Vancouver,
 before being hurled over war-toiling America
 and on into the outer darkness of other wretchedly poor tropical countries.
 A flight from Vancouver to Mexico City passed over my mother sleeping in her grave
 for the first winter, on, over Albuquerque,
 only a pattern of freeway interchanges in the desert's night emptiness,
 on and on into what was then only an idea, the Amazon.
 Out on the river, the past could enter the stillness and exfoliate before the mind's eye
 like some dark rose of interlocking kazooistry.
 Forces, visible and hidden, stretching back into one's past,
 migrations, religious conversions, discoveries,
 make each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history on a scale of millennia.
 The inertion of introspection is toward memory,
 for only in memory is the past recaptured and understood.
 In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors,
 but in the lacuna, in the rare moments when experience in the present is a minimal thing,
 an indolent self-examining thing,
 then memory is free to speak and call forth the landscapes of our striving
 in other moments now past.
 Now, the now that is a time beyond the confines of this story,
 a now in which this story is past,
 I do not worry the past as I did then.
 It is now set for me in a way that it was not set then.
 Not set then because so recent,
 still to be relived in memory and learned from.
 Five days of river travel lay before us, undemanding,
 freeing the mind to rove and scan.
 Two all-inclusive categories emerged in the world that was our vessel and crew,
 and ourselves out on the broad river.
 Those distant banks were no more than a dark green line separating river and sky.
 Two categories, the familiar and the unfamiliar.
 The unfamiliar was everywhere, drawing inane analogies into common conversation.
 The Putumayo is like the Ganges.
 The jungle invokes Ambon.
 The sky is similar to the skies of the Serengeti plain, etc.
 The illusion of understanding, a lame way of getting one's bearings.
 The unfamiliar does not give up its secrets in this game.
 The Putumayo does not become like the Ganges.
 The unfamiliar must become known as itself before it is correctly recognized.
 The familiar things are people.
 The people here appear as known quantities because they have been known in the past.
 So long as the future remains like the past, they will remain known quantities.
 Certainly this is not New York, Boulder, or Berkeley,
 but we are trying to become extra-environmentals,
 develop a sense of appropriate action that is never at a loss.
 It is the familiarity of these people that makes them windows in my imagination,
 opening on to the past.
 [bell rings]
 Dennis, of course.
 He is the time tunnel longest on a parallel track to my own.
 No need to mention genetics.
 Back our connection goes until lost in primal, unlanguaged feeling.
 We grew up in the same household,
 shared the same constraints and freedoms until I left home at 16.
 But I held close to Dennis, and in the middle of my 21st year,
 returning from Seychelles to Bombay,
 in the hold of the British steam navigation company liner Caranja,
 racked with hives, heartbreak, and dysentery, I was weak, semi-delirious.
 Eight days of passage from Port Victoria, Seychelles, to Bombay was then 68, 35 dollars.
 In spite of being ill, I was obliged to travel the lowest class,
 or my funds would not carry me home.
 My bunk was a metal plate that folded down from the wall,
 public toilets and the hammer of the engines.
 Bilge water sloshed from one corner of the passageway to the other.
 Fifteen hundred displaced Indians from Kenya,
 victims of the Africanization, were traveling in the hold.
 All night long, the Indian women came and went from the toilets down my passageway,
 filled with bilge and engine throb.
 Without hashish, it would have been unbearable.
 After many days and nights of this, I awoke feverish in the middle of the night,
 the air redolent with curried food, excrement, and machine smells.
 I made my way to the exposed deck on the stern.
 The night was warm, a smell of curry not altogether lost even here.
 I sat down with my back against a heavily painted metal box of firefighting equipment.
 I felt my fever then lift and a great sense of relief come through me.
 The recent past in the Seychelles and in Jerusalem seemed then to release their hold on me.
 I had a clear space in which to turn toward the future and discern it.
 Unbidden then came the thought that I would go with Dennis to South America.
 It was a certainty.
 And so in time, it happened.
 Not immediately, not before much more wandering in the east,
 but eventually, by February '71, the prophecy was all around us.
 River, jungle, and sky enclose us and bear us toward La Charrera,
 this boat very little like the Caranja,
 but its small diesel engine an echo of the larger engines further away in time.
 Yes, Dennis came with the first.
 These others, different histories.
 Vanessa and I had been together in the experimental college at Berkeley.
 She was from New York, the Upper East Side.
 Father, prominent doctor, older sister, a practicing psychoanalyst.
 Mother gives teas for the wives of UN delegates.
 Private schools, then in a gesture of liberal chic,
 Vanessa is supported by her parents in her choice of Berkeley as a university.
 She is intelligent, a slightly feral twist to her gawkish sexuality.
 Her brown eyes hid schemes and puns.
 We were part of a group at Berkeley, but in the fall of '68,
 I went to New York to try to sell the tortured manuscript
 that had been generated by my self-enforced seclusion in the Seychelles Islands.
 This was a rambling, sophomoric, electropolitical diatribe
 that was to die a-burning, fortunately.
 But in the less jaded light of autumn '68, I took that work and flew to New York,
 in which place I knew no one, no one but Vanessa.
 She dug me out of a flop house on West 43rd, where I had crash-landed,
 and persuaded me to move up to the Hotel Alden on Central Park West.
 Musty, but stiff with a Yiddish-type respectability.
 Our riverine departure for the heart of Commissaria Amazonis
 followed by three years the languid moment when she and I sat together
 at the outdoor restaurant near the fountain in Central Park.
 She with her Dubonnet and I with my lowenbrow.
 In the eyes of the poor scholar and revolutionary that I then imagined myself to be,
 the scene seemed staged in its casual elegance.
 We were talking about Dennis, whom Vanessa had never met.
 He really is some sort of genius, I guess.
 Anyway, I'm his brother and I am quite in awe of him,
 having seen it all from up close, as it were.
 And he had an idea that you think has great potential.
 Actually, that's putting it mildly.
 I think that he may have seized the Angel of Gnosis by the throat and borne the beast to the mat.
 This idea that he has, that somehow the synogens work by fitting into DNA, is startling.
 It has a ring of truth that I can't ignore.
 The political revolution has become too murky to put one's hope in.
 So far, the most interesting unlikelihood in our lives is DMT, right?
 Reluctant agreement.
 Reluctant because the conclusion that it leads to is so extreme.
 Mainly that we should stop fucking around inside the flaming madhouse of fascist America
 and go off and grapple with the DMT mystery.
 Because, you know, we are schooled in the Western cultural tradition
 and can readily see that this drug is some kind of outrage.
 That properly understood, might, you know that I think that it would,
 have tremendous importance for the historical crisis everybody is in.
 Okay, so say that I suspend my judgment. What's up?
 I'm not sure. How about a trip to the Amazon?
 That's where these drugs are endemic, and that's enough solitude for anyone.
 Maybe. I'm trying to get on a dig that will happen in the Gibson Desert next year.
 I understand, and I am committed to going to Asia in a few months, for who knows how long.
 No, this thing about the Amazon, if it happens at all, is off in the future.
 But you should think about it.
 And something else. He lowered his voice mysteriously.
 Right. The something else is flying saucers.
 They're mixed up in this somehow.
 It's pretty murky now. It doesn't matter yet.
 But DMT is somehow linked to the whole notion of saucers.
 Deep water. It's a hunch, but strong.
 Dave was something else. We called him the flower child.
 He was a delight-provoking paradoxical amalgam of naivete and strong-willed insight.
 A Polish count, ambassador to the court of great Elizabeth,
 and friend of Dr. D, brightened his genealogy.
 I had met him during the summer of '67 in Berkeley.
 We had both been hitchhiking from the corner of Ashby and Telegraph,
 and when one kind soul picked both of us up, we became acquainted on the ride over the bridge.
 Since those days, Dave had graduated, both from the upstate New York commune he idealized,
 and from Syracuse U in ethnobotany.
 In letters that passed between us when I was in Benares,
 he became determined to be part of the venture to the Amazon basin.
 He found in the jungles and mountains of South America a world even more spellbinding than he expected.
 To this day, he has not returned.
 Vanessa, Dave, and I gathered in Victoria, British Columbia,
 near the gnashing beast, but not yet of it.
 We lived there three months, ramsacking articles, writing letters,
 maintaining constant correspondence with Dennis, who was in Colorado,
 amassing information on a near-mythical world that none of us had ever seen.
 I had wandered through Southeast Asia and Indonesia,
 viewing ruins in the former and collecting butterflies in the latter.
 Whether that gave me an edge and experience seemed unlikely.
 Vancouver Island, lost in swirling snow, fell behind as by a series of telescoping leaps
 the barriers to our entry into the anticipated magical world fell away,
 until we come to this indolent moment.
 February 6, 1971.
 We are at last freed of our umbilical connection to civilization.
 This morning, under the uncertain skies which mark the Amazon during the dry season,
 we have at last gotten underway, part of a flotilla of gasoline and fruit soda suppliers
 who are on their way to La Charrera and will certainly carry us as far as El Encanto on the Rio Caraparaná.
 Moving toward the absolute center of the geography of the secret,
 I am moved to ponder, as ever, the meaning of this truly strange search.
 I am having difficulty processing the intense content of my expectations.
 There can now be little doubt that given that we continue to press forward as we have,
 we shall reach a state of satisfaction.
 We have been so long seeking this thing and it is so difficult to understand.
 Projections concerning who we will be or what we will do when this excursion is over
 are unconsciously based on the assumption that our experience will leave us unaffected,
 an assumption which is doubtless false, but its alternative can hardly be imagined.
 Later.
 Two hours out of Puerto Leguizamo, upriver winds have caused us to tie up on the Peru side
 to await calmer weather.
 We are at Puerto Naranja.
 It is not shown on the Atlas Codazzi.
 The pattern of river travel immediately asserts itself.
 Following the channel means moving from side to side of the river,
 usually near one of the banks.
 The land is thickly covered by a dense canopy of jungle reminiscent of central Saran
 or the coast of Angbón, a Venusian forest.
 The dull drum of the engine, the cooing of pigeons, part of our cargo,
 like the sacred Ganga, the brown smooth water of the Putumayo,
 soon flows through all our dreams and daydreams.
 Sia watches me fixedly.
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 The familiar falls behind, the river is broad.
 The mystery for the present is in the strangeness of this place,
 the watery flatness.
 Five days the Rio Putumayo will put us at the mouth of the Rio Caraparaná.
 There is a mission there, San Rafael.
 We are looking for Dr. Horacio Guzman,
 mentioned in one of our papers as the source of an authentic sample of the Ucugue we are looking for.
 Guzman is an anthropologist working with the Huitoto upriver from San Rafael
 at a tiny village charmingly called San José del Encanto.
 This village is situated at the beginning of a 110 kilometer trail through the jungle to La Charrera.
 Not only can Guzman be helpful in our search,
 but he can help us hire bearers for the trek over land.
 Many days to anticipate this personage.
 In the meantime, the cramped world of this trading vessel is ours.
 The Faviolita, selling plastic shoes, tinned food, and fishing line
 at the small clusters of houses on stilts that appear several times during each day of travel.
 We arrive, tie up, and while the jefe of our vessel makes negocios with the colonistas,
 I take my butterfly net and walk to the jungle,
 hoping to escape the stinging flies that swarm near the boat landings.
 Sometimes there are long, opinionated conversations, everyone animated and taking part.
 Sometimes a silence falls among us that lasts for several hours,
 once each of us is comfortable watching the riverbank slide monotonously by
 or nodding on the edge of siesta.
 It is February 7th, 1971, a Sunday.
 Last night we arrived at an unnamed place and spread our mosquito nets and hammocks
 for the first time in the Amazon.
 8 a.m. found us back on a rainy river under leaden skies.
 The moods of the approach to the secret are many.
 The air is delicious with oxygen, and the odors which reach us from the passingly unhung forest
 change with the frequency and subtlety of a sonata.
 Brief stops at police inspections and ever more isolated riverside dwellings mark this day as well.
 Today, after 40 minutes early morning travel,
 we passed a shallow depression in a clay bank on the Peruvian side of the river.
 There, thousands of parrots were gathered around a salt source.
 The sonic shrill of their many-throated voice and their iridescent green bodies
 breathing the air heightened the impression of moving in an aqueous Venusian world.
 We tied up others up a lick, and some of our crew went across the river to capture some parrots
 to add to the traders' already large menagerie.
 With our own small monkey, the non-human population of this ark of fools
 now numbers two dogs, three monkeys, a kitten, a dante, a cock, a pig, and a crate of pigeons.
 Today is the day of the full moon, and tomorrow we will arrive at Alencanto.
 There, if present plans hold, we will meet Dr. Guzman.
 The tensions that divide us have also surfaced.
 Vanessa and Sia, who have very little in common, are warm friends.
 Is this because I have miffed Vanessa? It is not going well at all.
 Dennis is very quiet. Dave is worrying about the food.
 He is a chronic worrier and naive.
 He seems to have thought that one just takes off one's shoes and goes to an Indian brother
 and says that one wants to learn the secrets of the forest,
 and they say, "Come, my son. Come with us, and you will learn the secrets of the forest."
 Now that he is actually confronted with the Amazon jungle, he seems a bit taken aback.
 Animals are falling off the boat into the river once an hour.
 The captain of the boat hates us because we have to stop to drag these sucking monkeys out of the dream.
 (gurgling)


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.64 sec
Decoding  : 2.83 sec
Transcribe: 2006.32 sec
Total Time: 2009.79 sec