The Body Tribal
On Thursday morning we packed the van, loaded the food and drinking water, and shuffled all of our camping goods to the various side shelves and spaces. Spirits were high, and so were we. The warm May sun shined brightly on our backs as we went about the task of turning an ordinary cargo van into a fully-loaded roadway dirigible angling itself north and west towards the mountains of Appalachia. Our course would take us through two additional states before finally depositing ourselves in southern Pennsylvania, at the base of South Mountain. After crossing the Potomac, we had to acknowledge that we were no longer safe within our own borders, and we had to surrender to the unknown.
We passed through strange lands, some of which had obviously been gouged by monsters of ferocious nature and sinister intent. The side of one mountain was a giant carved channel, as if a gargantuan beast of Lovecraftian proportions had clawed a hole at the very summit. My chauffeur, a spindly Asian man of many years and advanced patience, told me that he had once been in a place like this, where the borders between reality and the surreal are far thinner than elsewhere. Caution, he advised me, was the way to navigate and survive such geological absurdities. As we drove through the entry in the mammoth rock cliffs, steep walls of carelessly gouged granite and limestone rose like skyscrapers on either side of us. Every now and then a huge piece of earthen stone would come crashing and smashing down the mountain, an unstoppable juggernaut of sedimentary power, twelve-hundred pounds heavy and hurtling down at us at speeds of better than seventy miles per hour. Anyone attempting to meet its earthen embrace would only find themselves surrendering to oblivion in a matter of seconds... a victim of the indelible laws of inertia and momentum.
We stop for gas. I see that the cafe' inside the gas station is manned by an enormous woman of Brobdingnagian size and girth. She smiles at me and offers me a cup of coffee. I shake my head and explain to her that my particular religion of choice does not allow for strong stimulants. She instead offers me a grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the low, low cost of $2.49. She assures me that the bread is thick, the jelly is local, and the peanut butter is chunky, much like myself. Insulted, I turn away from the woman and instead purchase a well-thumbed copy of Swank magazine that I see laying on the cafe' table closest to the window. A young boy, no older than thirteen, observes me taking the only copy left in the store and comments dryly that his father would "tan his hide" if he does not come home with at least one skin mag to satiate his father's legendary rage and libido. I reach into my backpack and offer the young lad my copy of Greasy Girls and the Submissives Who Love Them. The boy blanches. I offer him instead my only Leo Buscaglia book What Is Essential Is Invisible To The Eye. The boy comments that the cover is missing, and some of the pages are stuck together and cannot come undone, but I do not hear him anymore. Already the van is filled with gas and my people are beckoning me further north, away from the sound and the fury. Away from civilization.
As our crew wound their way further and further up the mountain, we started losing sunlight at an alarming rate. God despises tardy campers, and withholds the nourishing rays of light from them until they can learn to manage a timetable with some degree of aplomb. We, atheists and agnostics one and all, cursed the omnipotent deity angrily shaking his world-crushing hand at us and continued our desperate trek to the campsite with just a few candelas of starlight to guide us. We arrive at the camp just as the last rays of light disappear once and for all, shrouding us in twilight gloom. We become one with the darkness. We join it in a way not altogether natural.
Our female spiritual guide, known only to us as "the filthy hippie", is now negotiating with the camp owners to allow us inside. She offers them several tiny bags of Bolivian Marching Powder and rubs the contents of one of the pouches against her gums to show them that she is serious about gaining entry to the camp. The woman behind the registration desk, a young and curvy blonde of no more than twenty summers, admires the filthy hippie's enormous breasts and says that entry can be gained if we divest ourselves of clothing and give us three bags of the glittering white marching powder as trade. Seasoned travelers, the filthy hippie and my chauffeur immediately remove their outer raiments and stand before the camp council in brazen defiance. I notice that my chauffeur, despite his racial handicap, is enormously endowed. His phallus, no less than nine inches long in its flaccid state, resembles not so much a penis as an errant potato sausage left too long in the sun, it's contents swelled tightly against the casing almost to the point of gross distortion. The filthy hippie, her body ravaged by time and lack of proper support garments through her wayward teenage years, nonetheless contains enough fertile hills and gently-sloping valleys in order to pass muster. The two of them are admitted into the camp with no hesitation.
I, on the other hand, refused to remove clothing for the sake of effective and impartial journalism. I instead chose to use an invisibility technique called "going dim" that I learned from a brilliant and charismatic man teaching terrorism 101 at the University of Maryland. My professor assured me that while I could not indeed truly become transparent as glass, I could remain 'unseen' for lengthy periods of time, visible only out of the corners of the eye, a fleeting glimpse of something now vanished into thin air. This knowledge served me well. The campsite volunteers saw nothing as I slipped past them in the gloomy twilight, as silent as oiled smoke.
Inside were fire twirlers, dancers, jugglers, lovers, ravers, and magicians of all sorts. A man in stilts, dressed only in pantalettes, passed me by with a wave of his gloved hand. There was a tent set up as a clothing exchange for the women, with a number of odd renn-faire dresses, velvet pants, beaded vests and silk shirts available. All you needed to do was make a donation of a piece of clothing, and something else was yours for the taking. Another tent was offering fresh-baked bread and butter from a stone baker's hearth. A tinsmith was melting bars of metal in his smelting kiln and forging them into spoons and brooches. A child walked by with a bullroarer and a didgeridoo. A group of naked college girls passed by me, giggling as they headed off to the sweat lodge in order to purge the toxins from their body. Their tight young bodies, heretofore untouched by the ravages of time, remained in quiet defiance of gravity, a jiggling testament to the power of youth. Another group consisted of ten or fifteen horny males between the ages of eighteen and fifty, dressed in kilts and leather body harnesses, heading off to "Faerie Circle" to indulge in numerous homosexual pursuits the likes of which I cannot even fathom. Although their bodies and beards were graying with age and most of them had shorn off their hair in keeping with the western homosexual's ardent fascination with youth and near-obsession with virility, their eyes were still bright and glittering, their pace along the forested path still young and enthusiastic.
In the Amazon Camp an impressive display of nearly three dozen medicine women were meditating and praying on spiritual problems that plagued one of their sisters. A malevolent tumor, nestled deep within the stomach of one of the sisters, was slowly killing her. The women were meditating and using faith energy to heal the tumor and make it benign once more. I watched them closely, positive that some strange pagan witchcraft would surely occur within moments. A moment passed, and then two. Finally, unenlightened, I turned away from this meditative tableau and walked off into the night, the sounds of female voices deep in invocational prayer slowly receding into the distance as I walked away.
In the sweat lodge I sat in a small tent barely four feet high and sat in complete darkness as the heat and the darkness overwhelmed me. For the first twenty minutes I experienced hardly anything. Then, as the heat and the darkness took ahold of my mind, it happened. Partial connection to the universe. I saw images of my past, and my present. The future was blocked to me, a wall of impenetrable black obsidian. I saw people from long ago in my past, when I was a child. The 70's was a peculiar shade of sunlight, almost pinkish-hued. The 80's was almost metallic in it's quality of light, and all of my remembrances of it involves winter instead of summer. I saw my old friends from the military, looking how I remembered them. I also saw my old friends from college, although they looked as I am sure they look now, fifteen years later.
Strangely, I never saw my parents in any of my delusional visions, or any of my family. It was as if my psychic bond with them was severed, and I could no longer pick them up on any frequency I tuned to. My psychic antennae to my biological relations was fused, and of no use to me in the heat... in the dark. Instead, I had to settle for the opening to the sweat lodge being shoved violently open, and daylight as bright as the corona of the sun itself blazing in, reducing my pupils to the tiniest of dots as I shielded my eyes against the monstrous flood of searing light. We were all led out of the lodge, coughing and gasping, to the river, where we instantly plunged ourselves deep into the cool green waters of the river. There, suspended a half-meter below the surface, I drifted along with the current and opened my eyes and saw the pebble bottom of the river slowly passing underneath me as the powerful current carried me southward towards the rapids. Schools of indigo-shaded mountain trout, some as small as aquarium fish, viewed me indifferently as I floated by placidly. They understood through some low-grade telepathy that I meant them no harm, only that I was one with the river, and with my inner self. I was nothing anymore except a spirit of the water, transformed from this crude flesh into a wavering bluish-white river soul, carried quietly downstream by snowmelt and the force of gravity.
Later that night, as I watched five young naked women cavort in the warm forest rain and smear fresh mud all over one another's bodies, it occured to me that what i was seeing was a complete lack of inhibition. It was communal, and it was cooperative. These were people who all had one thing and one thing only on their minds...escape. Escape from the city, from the job, from the cultural identity they had to agonizingly endure from nine to five every day, Monday through Friday. The names, the titles, the personas... None of it mattered here. All that mattered was that the rain was warm, the mud was fresh, the girls were giggling, and everybody was in love. Nothing else mattered. The drug-fueled stream of complete friendliness and openness was not only brought about by the ecstasy and the hookahs, it was the valve with which all of these people could finally unclench and open themselves to a small world comprised only of the here and the now. The valve was the release by which everyone could finally vent out all of the problems of society and just live life for a few nights free of care and worry.
No more wars in Afghanistan, no more trillion dollar buyouts. No more corporate greed and atomic plant layoffs. No more pollution in the waters and acid rain in the skies. No more anger and piss and vinegar and hatred for your fellow human being. Here, under the heavy green canopy of oak and maple trees, there was no more fat and thin, Catholic and Protestant, no more black and hispanic and white. There was an abolishment of all things negative. Instead, there was free soba noodles for any who were hungry, and coffee for the tired and water for the weary. There were hugs and kisses and groping and caressing and indulgences of all varieties. It was completely on the opposite spectrum of rationality. It was pure emotion. Simple bliss.
On the last night, we watched the thirty-foot "Wicker Man" burn high into the sky. The column of amber and orange fire went seventy feet into the air. The white and blue smoke, looking so much like a giant rising mushroom cap, went a thousand feet into a starry, wanderlusting night. People took off their clothes and danced naked around the giant pyre, singing songs of peace and love. Singing and chanting and laughing and dancing. Girls were twirling batons made of fire and spinning around so fast you thought of the ancient dervishes of the Asian steppes. A man next to me downed a small green bottle of sweet dandelion wine and gave me a sweaty hug and told me "There's nothing like this to make you believe MORE in the genuine decency of humanity." --> And for the most part, he was right. These people were kind, and gentle, and caring souls. Yet, underneath it all, behind the facade of peace, love, and understanding, I could tell that this was not an ideology, this was an escape. A chance to relinquish identity and be something else for five days and four nights. None of these people would carry back the lessons they had learned swimming in the cool, green river. The enlightenment of the sweat lodge. The bonding at the noodle house. The songs around the campfire. The spirits in the dandelions made manifest in fermentation, trapped for a brief time in a small hand-blown green bottle, and then set on their final path from tiny spore to a digested enzyme in the belly of a drunken man wearing a waterlogged hemp shirt.
These people had failed to grasp that ideas only have power when you take them from Nirvana and bring them forcibly back into the waking world and work at turning them from wistful dreams into a concrete reality. Hope is important, but hope without the will to make it real is useless. To make the whole world a unified entity of peace and compassion, it needs to transcend drugs and love and lust. It needs to expand outwards past the forest and the parking area checkpoint. It needs to grow down past the road, over the river, across the county, down the state line, all the way into the REAL world. It needs to not only survive, but thrive, in reality.
I think the founders of the Four Quarters Camp (hippies and dreamers one and all) are part of that movement, and are trying to genuinely shape the world into a place that they would be proud to be a part of once more, but their eight-hundred disciples are mostly attached to this dream for the mind-bending chemicals, and the physical attraction to the raiment-free bodies of the fellow campers, and the casual exchange of bodily fluids amongst the culturally unsophisticated who live for that set of powerful genital spasms and irregular grunting and panting that eventually signals the continuation of the species.
The people bonded, and there was love.
Community. Unity. Harmony.
A dream of a world filled with poets, artists, and musicians in the boardrooms and classrooms.
A world filled with clean skies and safe water to drink from your local stream.
A dream of peace, and of total spiritual and emotional freedom.
If only I could believe it were true.
We passed through strange lands, some of which had obviously been gouged by monsters of ferocious nature and sinister intent. The side of one mountain was a giant carved channel, as if a gargantuan beast of Lovecraftian proportions had clawed a hole at the very summit. My chauffeur, a spindly Asian man of many years and advanced patience, told me that he had once been in a place like this, where the borders between reality and the surreal are far thinner than elsewhere. Caution, he advised me, was the way to navigate and survive such geological absurdities. As we drove through the entry in the mammoth rock cliffs, steep walls of carelessly gouged granite and limestone rose like skyscrapers on either side of us. Every now and then a huge piece of earthen stone would come crashing and smashing down the mountain, an unstoppable juggernaut of sedimentary power, twelve-hundred pounds heavy and hurtling down at us at speeds of better than seventy miles per hour. Anyone attempting to meet its earthen embrace would only find themselves surrendering to oblivion in a matter of seconds... a victim of the indelible laws of inertia and momentum.
We stop for gas. I see that the cafe' inside the gas station is manned by an enormous woman of Brobdingnagian size and girth. She smiles at me and offers me a cup of coffee. I shake my head and explain to her that my particular religion of choice does not allow for strong stimulants. She instead offers me a grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the low, low cost of $2.49. She assures me that the bread is thick, the jelly is local, and the peanut butter is chunky, much like myself. Insulted, I turn away from the woman and instead purchase a well-thumbed copy of Swank magazine that I see laying on the cafe' table closest to the window. A young boy, no older than thirteen, observes me taking the only copy left in the store and comments dryly that his father would "tan his hide" if he does not come home with at least one skin mag to satiate his father's legendary rage and libido. I reach into my backpack and offer the young lad my copy of Greasy Girls and the Submissives Who Love Them. The boy blanches. I offer him instead my only Leo Buscaglia book What Is Essential Is Invisible To The Eye. The boy comments that the cover is missing, and some of the pages are stuck together and cannot come undone, but I do not hear him anymore. Already the van is filled with gas and my people are beckoning me further north, away from the sound and the fury. Away from civilization.
As our crew wound their way further and further up the mountain, we started losing sunlight at an alarming rate. God despises tardy campers, and withholds the nourishing rays of light from them until they can learn to manage a timetable with some degree of aplomb. We, atheists and agnostics one and all, cursed the omnipotent deity angrily shaking his world-crushing hand at us and continued our desperate trek to the campsite with just a few candelas of starlight to guide us. We arrive at the camp just as the last rays of light disappear once and for all, shrouding us in twilight gloom. We become one with the darkness. We join it in a way not altogether natural.
Our female spiritual guide, known only to us as "the filthy hippie", is now negotiating with the camp owners to allow us inside. She offers them several tiny bags of Bolivian Marching Powder and rubs the contents of one of the pouches against her gums to show them that she is serious about gaining entry to the camp. The woman behind the registration desk, a young and curvy blonde of no more than twenty summers, admires the filthy hippie's enormous breasts and says that entry can be gained if we divest ourselves of clothing and give us three bags of the glittering white marching powder as trade. Seasoned travelers, the filthy hippie and my chauffeur immediately remove their outer raiments and stand before the camp council in brazen defiance. I notice that my chauffeur, despite his racial handicap, is enormously endowed. His phallus, no less than nine inches long in its flaccid state, resembles not so much a penis as an errant potato sausage left too long in the sun, it's contents swelled tightly against the casing almost to the point of gross distortion. The filthy hippie, her body ravaged by time and lack of proper support garments through her wayward teenage years, nonetheless contains enough fertile hills and gently-sloping valleys in order to pass muster. The two of them are admitted into the camp with no hesitation.
I, on the other hand, refused to remove clothing for the sake of effective and impartial journalism. I instead chose to use an invisibility technique called "going dim" that I learned from a brilliant and charismatic man teaching terrorism 101 at the University of Maryland. My professor assured me that while I could not indeed truly become transparent as glass, I could remain 'unseen' for lengthy periods of time, visible only out of the corners of the eye, a fleeting glimpse of something now vanished into thin air. This knowledge served me well. The campsite volunteers saw nothing as I slipped past them in the gloomy twilight, as silent as oiled smoke.
Inside were fire twirlers, dancers, jugglers, lovers, ravers, and magicians of all sorts. A man in stilts, dressed only in pantalettes, passed me by with a wave of his gloved hand. There was a tent set up as a clothing exchange for the women, with a number of odd renn-faire dresses, velvet pants, beaded vests and silk shirts available. All you needed to do was make a donation of a piece of clothing, and something else was yours for the taking. Another tent was offering fresh-baked bread and butter from a stone baker's hearth. A tinsmith was melting bars of metal in his smelting kiln and forging them into spoons and brooches. A child walked by with a bullroarer and a didgeridoo. A group of naked college girls passed by me, giggling as they headed off to the sweat lodge in order to purge the toxins from their body. Their tight young bodies, heretofore untouched by the ravages of time, remained in quiet defiance of gravity, a jiggling testament to the power of youth. Another group consisted of ten or fifteen horny males between the ages of eighteen and fifty, dressed in kilts and leather body harnesses, heading off to "Faerie Circle" to indulge in numerous homosexual pursuits the likes of which I cannot even fathom. Although their bodies and beards were graying with age and most of them had shorn off their hair in keeping with the western homosexual's ardent fascination with youth and near-obsession with virility, their eyes were still bright and glittering, their pace along the forested path still young and enthusiastic.
In the Amazon Camp an impressive display of nearly three dozen medicine women were meditating and praying on spiritual problems that plagued one of their sisters. A malevolent tumor, nestled deep within the stomach of one of the sisters, was slowly killing her. The women were meditating and using faith energy to heal the tumor and make it benign once more. I watched them closely, positive that some strange pagan witchcraft would surely occur within moments. A moment passed, and then two. Finally, unenlightened, I turned away from this meditative tableau and walked off into the night, the sounds of female voices deep in invocational prayer slowly receding into the distance as I walked away.
In the sweat lodge I sat in a small tent barely four feet high and sat in complete darkness as the heat and the darkness overwhelmed me. For the first twenty minutes I experienced hardly anything. Then, as the heat and the darkness took ahold of my mind, it happened. Partial connection to the universe. I saw images of my past, and my present. The future was blocked to me, a wall of impenetrable black obsidian. I saw people from long ago in my past, when I was a child. The 70's was a peculiar shade of sunlight, almost pinkish-hued. The 80's was almost metallic in it's quality of light, and all of my remembrances of it involves winter instead of summer. I saw my old friends from the military, looking how I remembered them. I also saw my old friends from college, although they looked as I am sure they look now, fifteen years later.
Strangely, I never saw my parents in any of my delusional visions, or any of my family. It was as if my psychic bond with them was severed, and I could no longer pick them up on any frequency I tuned to. My psychic antennae to my biological relations was fused, and of no use to me in the heat... in the dark. Instead, I had to settle for the opening to the sweat lodge being shoved violently open, and daylight as bright as the corona of the sun itself blazing in, reducing my pupils to the tiniest of dots as I shielded my eyes against the monstrous flood of searing light. We were all led out of the lodge, coughing and gasping, to the river, where we instantly plunged ourselves deep into the cool green waters of the river. There, suspended a half-meter below the surface, I drifted along with the current and opened my eyes and saw the pebble bottom of the river slowly passing underneath me as the powerful current carried me southward towards the rapids. Schools of indigo-shaded mountain trout, some as small as aquarium fish, viewed me indifferently as I floated by placidly. They understood through some low-grade telepathy that I meant them no harm, only that I was one with the river, and with my inner self. I was nothing anymore except a spirit of the water, transformed from this crude flesh into a wavering bluish-white river soul, carried quietly downstream by snowmelt and the force of gravity.
Later that night, as I watched five young naked women cavort in the warm forest rain and smear fresh mud all over one another's bodies, it occured to me that what i was seeing was a complete lack of inhibition. It was communal, and it was cooperative. These were people who all had one thing and one thing only on their minds...escape. Escape from the city, from the job, from the cultural identity they had to agonizingly endure from nine to five every day, Monday through Friday. The names, the titles, the personas... None of it mattered here. All that mattered was that the rain was warm, the mud was fresh, the girls were giggling, and everybody was in love. Nothing else mattered. The drug-fueled stream of complete friendliness and openness was not only brought about by the ecstasy and the hookahs, it was the valve with which all of these people could finally unclench and open themselves to a small world comprised only of the here and the now. The valve was the release by which everyone could finally vent out all of the problems of society and just live life for a few nights free of care and worry.
No more wars in Afghanistan, no more trillion dollar buyouts. No more corporate greed and atomic plant layoffs. No more pollution in the waters and acid rain in the skies. No more anger and piss and vinegar and hatred for your fellow human being. Here, under the heavy green canopy of oak and maple trees, there was no more fat and thin, Catholic and Protestant, no more black and hispanic and white. There was an abolishment of all things negative. Instead, there was free soba noodles for any who were hungry, and coffee for the tired and water for the weary. There were hugs and kisses and groping and caressing and indulgences of all varieties. It was completely on the opposite spectrum of rationality. It was pure emotion. Simple bliss.
On the last night, we watched the thirty-foot "Wicker Man" burn high into the sky. The column of amber and orange fire went seventy feet into the air. The white and blue smoke, looking so much like a giant rising mushroom cap, went a thousand feet into a starry, wanderlusting night. People took off their clothes and danced naked around the giant pyre, singing songs of peace and love. Singing and chanting and laughing and dancing. Girls were twirling batons made of fire and spinning around so fast you thought of the ancient dervishes of the Asian steppes. A man next to me downed a small green bottle of sweet dandelion wine and gave me a sweaty hug and told me "There's nothing like this to make you believe MORE in the genuine decency of humanity." --> And for the most part, he was right. These people were kind, and gentle, and caring souls. Yet, underneath it all, behind the facade of peace, love, and understanding, I could tell that this was not an ideology, this was an escape. A chance to relinquish identity and be something else for five days and four nights. None of these people would carry back the lessons they had learned swimming in the cool, green river. The enlightenment of the sweat lodge. The bonding at the noodle house. The songs around the campfire. The spirits in the dandelions made manifest in fermentation, trapped for a brief time in a small hand-blown green bottle, and then set on their final path from tiny spore to a digested enzyme in the belly of a drunken man wearing a waterlogged hemp shirt.
These people had failed to grasp that ideas only have power when you take them from Nirvana and bring them forcibly back into the waking world and work at turning them from wistful dreams into a concrete reality. Hope is important, but hope without the will to make it real is useless. To make the whole world a unified entity of peace and compassion, it needs to transcend drugs and love and lust. It needs to expand outwards past the forest and the parking area checkpoint. It needs to grow down past the road, over the river, across the county, down the state line, all the way into the REAL world. It needs to not only survive, but thrive, in reality.
I think the founders of the Four Quarters Camp (hippies and dreamers one and all) are part of that movement, and are trying to genuinely shape the world into a place that they would be proud to be a part of once more, but their eight-hundred disciples are mostly attached to this dream for the mind-bending chemicals, and the physical attraction to the raiment-free bodies of the fellow campers, and the casual exchange of bodily fluids amongst the culturally unsophisticated who live for that set of powerful genital spasms and irregular grunting and panting that eventually signals the continuation of the species.
The people bonded, and there was love.
Community. Unity. Harmony.
A dream of a world filled with poets, artists, and musicians in the boardrooms and classrooms.
A world filled with clean skies and safe water to drink from your local stream.
A dream of peace, and of total spiritual and emotional freedom.
If only I could believe it were true.