Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties/Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties (1996)(Rockument)(Disc 1 of 2)[Mac-PC].iso/mac/MAIN/TUNEIN/TUNEIN01.DIR/00399_Field_Tuwaqachi, The Fourth World.txt

Text File | 1995-06-01 | 12KB | 106 lines

Tuwaqachi
The Fourth World
by Richard Grossinger

   Born into it:  we were fiery whelps.  The number four, as such (one, two, three, four) irrelevant---irreverent too.  This is the Hopi number four anyway, rooted in the way the Hopi count days.  This is the magic number four of the American Indians (on the fourth time even a god cannot keep from telling the truth).  This is the number of dimensions in a solid moving through pollen.
   The Navaho take the seeds of plants and suffocate young hawks in a deluge of them, breaking the strength of the torrid wings with the magic weight of grain:  taking then the grain to the new-born child and dousing him with it, baptizing him in its blood and yolk.
   These are the young hunters, continent herders before the days of Cortez and the Spanish (they who came in their migrations by the route of the Hopi to the Hopi themselves, while the Mongolian Navaho swept down from the North, crisscrossing the Great Mesas in a scurry of continental transformation); these are the young hunters of Asia proper (who came to see the strange lost tribe of Hopi dance before the lunar wheel with snakes in their mouths).  This is the planet called America (or Mars) before coming of the White Man.
   And so today we see the conjunction of America with herself (as a rock conjoins with Peter to make the Church of Rome, as gold ore conjoins with the sun to make the alchemical hearth):  end of democratic metaphor, ripening of maize and myth.
   It took a century and then almost another century for the land to catch up to itself, to reclaim itself: the Fourth World, entered first by the Hopi children, entered from beneath the ocean, from beneath the Cretaceous mantle of swans and barnacles, entered through a reed with the aid of spirits in the forms of animals, who became the first creatures of a mythology developed on the surface.
   Or America who is not the discovery of Columbus (that romantic color-blindness of the Western World turning east), who is a secret land, discovered as yet by no one.  And still powerful enough to give its resources to the entire globe without revealing its name: magical, proud, and patient, named scum, and yet lies there in its dunes and forests, the snake it is, refusing to strike back, just yet.
   They speak of patriotism: the lex patriae of this patria is a lush dense outwash, given to peaceful people to develop it by ceremonial means, to be milked cyclically (and then re-fed in prayer), to be reaped and mined under the correct stars, to be reaped and mined for the slow propagation of the indigenous spirit-forms, those that dwell in the forms of animals and grasses.
   The masters of America do not hold the key to the land.  Caught in a mythic trap, they lash out at the rest of the mysterious planet.  They have cast their lot in this Indian country; in many battles they have established their Day of Judgement here.  And their words are quick, but not quick enough to be wrapped around their deeds.  There is a nakedness about their latest war that is embarrassing even to the lords.  In their frustration they ignite further artificial forces, thereby increasing the national debt and hastening the reckoning.  This is the hypothesis then:  cosmic calling time for a deadened kingdom to pay off, to pay up; consequential forces seething in the heart of the land (as in an allegory the spirits choose their costumes, and come....and they come).  And this, sir, is why black children walk your streets with those occult markings on their shirts.  This is why your radio writhes with code words and accidental puns.  This is why your warfare contradicts itself, and contradicts the flag (Betsy Ross, Andrew Jackson, Audie Murphy, and company), despite the strong effort of troops and ad-men, despite the endless reef of supplies and words.  This is why semi-conscious killers roam the streets, committing the sodomies of your dreams, while you dream.  These are secret agents of a resurrecting power:  eating the bones clean, lashing out at female nerves and the sperm bank of Fort Knox and Playboy Club.  This is why chemical blood fills the arteries, calling to the princes of alien stars.  This is why motorcycles thrive in nocturnal alleys.  This is why societies of traditional magic extend their power over the cells.  And why flying saucers patrol, while power lines sag under the dead weight.  Dead spirits glow in legions under the earth, counting backwards.  Heat thrashes at the sands.  The waters of dry cities are flooded through wet cities.  Psychic forces hang like vultures, waiting to burst the bloody corpse.  And small groups are routed; objects are reaffirmed in their names.  No one believes that this is anything more than a thunderstorm, a pretense.  Formally, it is the pretense of the uncompleted completing present-future active-for-round-objects-advancing-in-groups-of-four.  Somewhere in America there is a magical door in a condemned building; when it is opened the actual dancers will fill the streets.  To what skies do you think you are looking for help (first brigade of the defenders of her supposed fag-magest)?  There is not a blessed tree left in this land.  No sacred rivers were spared.  The active rocks have been ripped from their sequence to be used as parts in other machines.  The sacred names you have forgotten.  An Indian here and there holds a syllabic trifle that will get him out in time and then.... This is a land named after rapists and racists, named Cortez, De Soto, Sherman, Boone, Franklin; this is a land named after its conquered, the Dakota, the Ojibwa, the Iowa, the Cherokee (marching--or marched--West out of their holy jungles to hot Oklahoma turf, their land once winnowed in cycles and breaths now seized in one annual leap by America in search of gold.  This people has soaked occult sources for every dime and not paid back one watt of power; this race has chased all message-bearing birds down-canyon, out of the known sky, in psychotic search for its own clear image of society and sanctity; unwilling to share, unwilling to mix, now they must face the deep allies: they think they can win.
   In the fire of the streets (incandescent cells and bombs) the blackman sees
         impossible and mad colors sees
         into in back of his cells sees

         prowling lions
                streaking

         high birds
         and jungle growth green
         into the heart of green-
         growing vine

   hears the chants of a language he cannot
   understand breaking thru finally into the

   single cry of
            Simba
          lion
          bright orange
                 jungle

          birds red
              and hot little things
          king of ceremonial Africa


     the foamier rivers
           the more fertile

black earth
         new moon and

   Simba
     the blackman
            coming
               yes the
   free assumption of black skin by the
   stronger animals at birth
                  free mixture
   of panther and man

          in the sperm

   living fields of sorghum wheat and
   taro-blo

he would

          come running back
     into the filthy streets
 of America calling

to every blackman to look into

rhythmic flashing cells
    deeply turning gums would find the     language

and speak its words
          blaze its name
          for lion
              on his child's shirt
yes on his child's heart.

   And Stokely Carmichael speaking to the American
people saying of the blackman:



we are your
janitors we are
your maids
your porters
your DICK-DIGGERS yes!

         not retracting the slip,
but affirming the strong black cell from which it came

     And in Watts:
     "White man, you started all this the day you
brought the first slave to this country."
     "You created this monster and its gonna consume
you!"
 The worms go through the matter of manufacture, releasing colors back to the fiery source, unhinging tubes into the open universe.  The soyal comes; Ramadan comes: at which the rays about the earth, the anti-sun earth, turn on the equinox, turn on the stomach (source of earthly yearning), and head back through the open end of the universe: this is the time of anti-matter, spirits rejoicing in positronic and anti-neutrinic huts.
   The stars will have new names, phonemes that reel with the rediscovered fire; the hills of black space will crawl with the vibratory return of Sufis and wisemen.  Ripe seas: depositing new sacred animals on the caked chambre-shores, kicking deer, kangaroo, llama, bear.  (The Navaho Times, a newspaper published by whitemen on the Navaho reservation, tickles the fancy of the local Indians by publishing a cartoon of an Indian standing on a stylized moon as first lands commissioner.  Point missed:  spirit-moon, Blake-moon, left-handed moon from the other portion of the sand-painting, from the other dimension of the sky.)
   To the forgotten children: this is not history; do not believe it; do not take it seriously; they are not allowed to rename the rivers and the mountains as they have; the shores on which you emerged from the sea will be the shores on which you dance to the wild returning sea; you will know the names and call things by their right names.
   Don't you see it in the streets, Whitey, end of Jesus-make-believe, end of one god extension metaphor conquest, end of tense tight dancing to polemic vision, end of migratory path, in America, in Asia, in Australia, in Africa (you will never reach to colonize the spirits on the moons of Jupiter.)  Moth, don't you hear the dark cries brewing in the ghettoes; can't you recognize the cries of your own, the Hebrew, the Navaho children in bondage, the earth ready to turn over and bury your crop, end of your verbiage, heavy sharp nouns, bang-up sales, quips, square dances, care races, special buys, water-color goddesses.
   Is not the vibration of the mythic earth zoo loud enough to shake you in your beds at night?  To come at you the other way, man: aren't your images dry enough to send you thirsty into every morning, past vats and kettles that you cannot touch?
   Or do you believe that your exterior scene will be older than the earth itself, you the clearest straightest cat that ever was?  Do you believe in that lesser part of prophet Einstein, astronaut space, slow continual industrial pipes edged on the universe, yeast aging only by seconds?
   How could you not know in your deepest genes what you are stoking?  Do you not see that in mythic time a broken bargain with Hopi priests can be repaid by Vietcong warriors?  Do you not believe that the Africans on your soil can avenge the ancient kingdom of Bunyuro and the Inca temples?
   Myth kicks you in the ass, man; knocks you down from those high towers and missile sights.  You think you can bury a tribe, reduce it to a rare language, quaint religion, a few dancing dolls; remove it thus from the earth.
   But spirit souls have communions with other peoples and in other origins, seeking each other's origins and paying back the price in gold.  When it happens it will be like the old Tarzan movies you won't be able to tell one tribe from another or the men from the animals, or even spirit beasts from stampeding elephants.  Do you think you can fight guerrilla warfare with spirits in misty forests of fire?  And you who don't know what good cosmic sweat is, and call it superstition!
   Speaking of madness and psychosis, you've got us licked by quite a bit, protecting some bitchy white goddess from all our dancing Badger Women, painting your god cleaner and cleaner everyday until he shuns even the fertile earth.  That you will be saved as we all will be saved in eternity:  is true we all know it is not the issue is something having to do with the earth, and these fields we have been placed on, to make it in time, and preserve something from something, in a certain total scheme, in which your time is now up.

Copyright © 1967 Richard Grossinger