by Kate Braverman.

It is Christmas, perched above the Pacific on a cliff outside Acapulco. It’s 99 degrees.
Ornately decorated pine trees attached with wires to terra cotta urns sit in aggressively air- conditioned hotel lobbies. They look like vestiges from another planet. Carved mahogany balconies are draped in green velvets, antique brocades and holly wreaths entwined with tin angels, heads adorned with aluminum crowns glued on hair an apparently universally mandated obligatory straw blonde. They might be fetishes or amulets from a vanished cargo cult. Christmas carols form an incessant audio substrata, like a predictable tide. Sequences of traditional songs rise from camouflaged speakers in erroneous translations rendered in versions so mangled by distance, by wind shredding palm fronds, errant waves carved by stars, salt drifting through bougainvillea like stray malignant bullets, that an accidental filtering occurs, and they become almost tolerable.

The jungle smells of rotting vegetables, petrol, wood cooking fires, and hunger. And something burning on the vague, ambiguous periphery, leaves or rubber or history. The village women look like novels. I can see their parts, their chapters, the residues from pregnancies, divorces, a jail, perhaps, or sanitarium. An unfortunate incident with authorities one didn’t have the password or cash to satisfactorily resolve. They carry their tragedies with them. No translation is required. It’s a dusk of deceptive placid aqua. Sun lacerates their skin while they tether cows and goats to tamarind trees. This concordance of irradiated late afternoon studded with coconut and coral is holy ground.

As a citizen of a post-historical persuasion, I am my own cartographer. I designate the sites I will embrace or exclude. The standard maps are insufficient for my ambitions and affections.

On the Acapulco boulevards, nativity scenes are outlined in neon, garlands of gold and silver bulbs thread like genetically engineered cobras through the palms and yellow flowering hibiscus trees. The air is layers of decaying prayers like a satellite losing orbit, falling down not as fragmented metal but as streams of invisible origami. Bays are littered with this debris, tangled in oily kelp and bilge, a further fluid avenue of entreaty, hallucination and inspiration.

I tend to leave the country during Christmas, when American Christianity embraces corporate capitalism with a delirious fervor of excessive sentimentality and consumption. As a woman alone, without the prohibitions of family, as an atheist, a Californian in a region without seasons, where it is a perpetual version of summer sliding in and out of remission, the requisite American variant of this holiday is simultaneously offensive, absurd, garish and repellant.

As an experimental writer, I nurture my propensity for risk, for expeditions requiring armed bodyguards, and pilgrimages of an indelible order where landscapes reveal themselves with an erotic shock. I collect shrines, cathedrals, temples and mosques, graveyards and burial sites as some women do rare coins or stocks. I have practiced asanas in Bali, lit candles into leaves shaped like severed hands and set floating like my own distinct miniature flickering armada on the Ganges at Varanasi at dawn. I have touched the Wailing Wall and Sphinx, climbed through Angkor Wakt, Tulum and Chichen Itza, sat in the Blue Mosque, Notre Dame, and the Gothic synagogues of Prague, in the Jewish quarter Hitler left intact as a museum for an extinct race. I have experienced historic and aesthetic rapture in the architectures, fabrics, music and canvasses man has designed and constructed, but I have not translated these astonishing emotionally resonant manifestations into even a partial spasm of conventional religious or spiritual impulse.

I interpret religion ethnographically. When I’m in a certain mood, I assume the postures and costumes custom ordains, with legs and shoulders covered, face veiled, head bare or shielded, shoes removed or feet covered. I pray on dirt floors, on marble covered by woven rugs, and on carved wooden pews. I chant, light incense, and proffer offerings of chrysanthemums and orchids, fruits, cowry shells, copper and silver coins, and beads. The choreography of supplication, propitiation and benediction arouse me.  Ritual is sexual and electric in rooms of scented smoke, where votives insinuate drowned constellations and sun bleeds itself raw through stained glass. Typically, I hear the call for prayer, rams horn or cathedral bells and ignore such punctuations as I do Gucci and Gap billboards.

To be an artist, one is defined not only by what one sees, but also by what one refuses, pronounces an intrusion, a lie, a fraudulent fence where there are none, and deletes. One must embrace but one also resist. The purity of process necessitates constant discipline and practice. It’s a form of psychological and cultural yoga.

Last year, precisely, I was in Tanzania, trekking by jeep to Olduvai Gorge, site of Louis and Mary Leakey’s excavations of the first hard evidence, bone hard, of proto-man and our evolutionary successors. Olduvai Gorge, the most resonant terrain on my personal map, remains as it was when Mary Leaky died. Here, the first footprints of what would be man were discovered, and vegetation has grown between the indentations of the earliest naked feet of bipeds. The site is deserted and the sparse remaining artifacts seem posthumous, less than a footnote, tacked to boards in dusty cases in a roadside shack. The defining moment of Homo sapiens is less than a souvenir stand. This is a desecration and an atrocity. Still, the remnants are unequivocal and revelatory.

1.7 million years ago, the inhabitants of Olduvai Gorge are designated as proto-human Australopithecines. A mere 200,000 years later, the first evidence of rocks chipped with the intention of use as tools or weapons are so staggering in implication, that we are, at l.5 million years, called Homo hibilis.  We began our collective journey began by flaking, sharpening and gouging our way to our present status as Homo sapiens.

When I studied anthropology at Berkeley in the 1960’s, man was defined as “ the tool maker.” Man is an animal with one unique characteristic, namely the creation of devices that enable sophisticated behaviors and complex social interactions. In scientific fact, a region of inquiry anathema to most writers and artists, a territory the fevered creative avoid as if sensing lethal contagion, man possessed an arsenal of tools thousands of millennia before we developed the physiological ability necessary for vocal cords and language.

In the beginning was not the word, but rather the stone. Consider the implications of a more comprehensive definition of Homo sapiens. Man is a self-aware biological entity co-evolving with his tools. The first century of this millennium will be defined by the incrementally increasing synthesis of man in conjunction with his tools. That these tools now involve the integration of our most advanced methods including molecular engineering, biopharmacology and information technology is but a partial draft sketch of the future.  We believe we are creating prototype designs for regenerative medical procedures, disease detection and eradication and, ultimately, immortality.  In reality, we are designing and experiencing an historical singularity.

As a writer, I entered into a covenant with the page. In the thirty years of my publishing activities, I have become an alchemist of the language, constructing pyramids and cathedrals of words, with my sensory apparatus tuned to describe physical and emotional circumstance by sound, rhythm, cadence, scent and texture, exposure, free association, confession, juxtaposition and intuition. I embarked on my journey as one drifting from a pier, on a current, passing the point of no return, and deliberately entering the ocean. Metaphorically, I skinned myself with my fingernails and tied the loose tissue to a mast for a sail. I divested myself of mouth and eyes and wrote on a molecular level, using my neural network as a plot and atoms as a pen. That such endeavors have the power to startle a reader, to cause weeping, laughter and grief seems magical. It isn’t. We are a wildly creative species and our inspirations are intrinsic to our Homo sapien repertoire.

As America squanders its accidental empire, global webs of electronic bridges and ridges of alternative routes are rising, spreading and mutating, coalescing into an anatomy with a distinct morphology. It’s a collective consensual apparatus that is already operational. Several years ago, the last indigenous South Pacific navigator, a man trained to travel thousands of miles by the quality of starlight and scent, died without an apprentice. The collective apparatus ruled, by omission, that such skills were no longer valuable or necessary.  I have witnessed the marginalization and disappearance of entire professions. The examples of this cultural deletion are legion and include psychoanalysis, Latin and Greek as de rigor in the academic curriculum, and even observational schools of science such as botany and mycology. Artists fear that like the original navigators of sea smell and blue nuances, they who could translate the dialect the ocean speaks in cobalt spasms and whispers of cerulean, they too will be erased from the consensual apparatus. They are correct.

The human narrative is fundamentally one of metamorphosis. All creation myths gathered by ethnologists offer curiously similar monsters and deities. The hybrid beings known from oral history and cave wall painting, with their ability to fly, breathe fire, transform themselves into other elements or invisibility, seem brutally prescient. We are the culmination of evolutionary accidents and adaptations. Climate change and drought drove us from our arboreal nests. We climbed down from the withering forests, utterly unprepared, clawless and slow compared with our predator competition. Consider the stalking grace and lunging capabilities of a saber tooth tiger. I have witnessed the strategic choreography of a lion pride assaulting a water buffalo. Photography fails to reproduce such an event, omitting the cracking sounds of bones being chewed by teeth, hide dragged across dry grasses, and the indelible smell of blood under a ferocious noon sun.

We became Homo hibilis when we sharpened stones for specific purposes, hunting, fishing, skinning and gutting. As our tool making developed, as our implements expanded into devices for stitching and assembling, we became Homo sapiens. We and our complicated inventions are now co-evolving with a speed far beyond exponential. Within generations, a speciation will occur as it has for millions of years. The next phase of our existence will produce what may be called Homo technicus, perhaps.

Where is God in this? Where he or she or it has always been, in the unimpeded imagination of man, in the emotional fabric of a consciousness that has defined us, but is now, once again, mutating and evolving. God of Thunder. God of River and Rain. God of Volcano and Cloud. God of Eagle. God of War. God of cave painters and Michelangelo. God with names like Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Apollo, Osiris, Aten, Jesus, Muhammad. God of rumor and plague. God with a name you may not speak. God with gender distinctions. God of the M-16, the credit card, daisy bomb and DNA microarray. God of the perpetually changing new marching orders, salutes, fashion codes, rites of passage and taboos.

It took man a million years to invent the wheel. Then agriculture, permanent encampments, fortressed cities, moots with crocodiles, the Industrial Revolution, the abandonment of villages and extended families, and we all know all the rest. In all the airports of all the capitals, kiosks sell diaphanous underwear, books like television shows inflicted on the innocent page, and Radiohead cds. We are barbarians with credit lines, concealed weapons and an insatiable appetite for novelty and t-shirts with shiny logos. It is still the Dark Ages and we all want to look sixteen.

Now, beyond my balcony, the local women are untying their goats and walking side roads in silence. Sugar cane. Corn. Perhaps they remember men with mouths punctuated by gold teeth with unexpected gaps where you see clouds pass. Men who promised fresh tarpon, marlin, powders from Columbia more precious than emeralds. They receive regulation absolution in churches. In between, they engage in clandestine voodoo. They worship gods that protect women who move their moon hips like ships in a hurricane.

But Homo sapiens will metamorphose into Homo technicus within centuries. This is inexorable. As Bertrand Russell said in An Outline of Philosophy, “ Chemical imperialism has been the main end to which human intelligence has been devoted.”  Our history, our transitory edifices, citadels, idols, saints, film stars and metropolises are manifestations of the raw power of chemistry, which is the thread and fabric of our universe. It is this invisible empire on which our global configuration floats, flourishes, devises deities, epics and bards to recite them, immutable laws and regulations, and like the tide, washes them from shore.

There is only the electron fire of chemical bonds, the flash of synapses and the inflamed imagination and mysterious psychology of Homo sapiens in constant and accelerating transition. God did not create us. Proto-man evolved from small tree dwelling pre-primates, learned the possibilities a rock and opposable thumb present, and invented God.

As a child, my mother often read poetry to me. “To A Poet a Thousand Years Hence”
haunts me still. James Elroy Flecker asks, “ But will you have wine, and music still? And statues, and a bright-eyed love? And ideal thoughts of Good and Ill? And prayers to Him who sits above?”

The answer is probably no. What Homo technicus will chose for intoxication, pleasure, and solace can neither be envisioned nor predicted. As the neo-Romanticism that fueled
the epiphanies and lyrical experimental writing of my tenure is consumed by Watson and Cricks’ helix and its ineluctable potentialities, I recognize myself as a post-historical being on a planet that has already morphed into an other. As one who spent three decades enmeshed with writing machines, riding electronic spasms of consciousness and translating and composing them into stanzas and chapters in voluntary solitary communion, discovery, confession and, occasionally, redemption, the knowledge that my endeavors are as fleeting a gesture as footprints across a dusk beach is simultaneously a personal holocaust and strangely liberating.

Who is better trained and self-deformed, on a molecular level, to comprehend with complete clarity the resonances and implications of the spectacularly exquisite turbulence of the particular terrain they inhabit than a poet? As Marcel Duchamp noted, to be twenty and write poetry is to be twenty. To be fifty and write poetry is to be a poet. Gods come and go. The trade routes always shift.

We sense this, a sort of nervous agitation when asked to present our documentation to representatives of the current rulers. We know our visas are provisional and cannot explain or contain us, with our multiple identities continually emerging and revising themselves. In the post-historical coalescing global configuration, we are living our incarnations simultaneously. Do we hesitate at the borders, holding forms with questions we can’t answer, wondering which face from our interior corridor of masks we must display? Will we reach the port for which we have embarked? Will they recognize our flag, our vehicle, our currency, dialect and gestures? Will they take Platinum Express or stone us on sight? Will we be anointed or arrested? Is our cargo still of value or have they declared it obsolete, contagious, subversive?

For a while still, perhaps a generation or two, some will record, in acts of personal alchemy, the extraordinary juxtapositions of their existence. I have seen autumn appear like an inland sea, forests I thought a permanent viridescence like an anchor or wall, suddenly turn henna, burgundy and claret. I called it a season for alcoholics and drug addicts, for women feeling themselves coming apart in a stunned confusion of amber and russet. In the 3 a.m.bouts of rain and seizures of lightning that are a poet’s dominion, I have eaten thunder, thinned to bone and worn perfume scraped from the dead. I have translated and reconfigured the charged air, unencrypted it to its sheared essence where lamplight is calibrated an elegant 14 carat and everything is tinged with pear. Such light can burn in deserted rooms for years with no fear of suffocation or fire.

I have sought astonishment and found it. There out a window, in a ruin of maples, a surprise filigree across branches soft like Oriental gold and the texture of remorse. The increments of my life have been rendered in pages. Leaves. Trees. Women. Rags. Night vines make their own sly means, their strategies for survival. Currents run between women and forests, roots blown loose. We are celestial aberrations, improvising orbits. We wave our stumps like women talking with flags from ships. Now a landscape, now a ravaged amphitheater, or massacre with body bags like corn stalks the night before harvest, when the moon is full and an astounded orange. Cities vanish. Citadels and labyrinths suddenly reappear. The boat the Pharaoh planned to take across the Styx or a similar tributary. View it now, at leisure, with a discount.

Sunsets above Acapulco, a sliver of rose and silver between cliffs. I take a god free breath. I inhale tropical air, integrating suggestions of vanilla, orchids and some inexplicable contraband that doesn’t have a name and will without warning vanish. I may not taste this again for a year or the rest of my life. I call to the circling hawks, dolphins and marlin with my secret chant. A poet has access to certain unusual avenues of transmission and navigation. I note the position of Venus, the moon behind cliffs, the sky darkening like a performance of absolute subtraction, not a single cloud loiters above this bay. These are the pages and days of my temporary inhabitation on the third planet of a marginal sun in a solar system of little cosmological significance.

The waters are not still. They are never still, with their sunken gallons and cargoes of golden idols with ruby and diamond eyes somewhere off shore, beyond any border between land and water. Ruins are always relative. All fluid bodies contain dialects of intrigue, promise, rumor and conspiracy, like a further penumbra beneath reefs. If this is all I learned in fifty years, it’s enough.

Copyright 2006, Kate Braverman.