Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

She drew her hand away sharply. Mauro had lost all restraint, becoming more and more grotesque. His facial muscles twitching uncontrollably, he became bolder and bolder, desperately trying to touch her breasts.

She was glad when the shaman interrupted them. “Join the birds,” he said, shaking toucan and kingfisher skins, “lighten your body to lighten your spirit.”

When Mauro realized the Indians wanted to make him like them, he undressed without embarrassment and let them paint his body with annatto and genipa juice. Long tufts of feathers were tied to his shoulders, his hair was coated with some sticky matter and had white down scattered over it. Finally a bark lace around the foreskin tied his penis to his lower abdomen. Petersen could feel his limbs growing numb; incapable of thinking or reacting, he allowed himself to be disguised without making a fuss. Putty in their hands, he watched unmoved as one of his packets of cocaine was squashed beneath the foot of the Indian who was dolling him up.

“It’s great!” Mauro exclaimed when Petersen’s transformation was complete. “You look like an old parrot, Herman! An old, plucked macaw!” And he slapped his thighs, so pleased he was with his metaphor.

The shaman placed a kind of large bundle wrapped in plant fibers at Elaine’s feet. He spoke to her earnestly for several minutes, interspersing his speech with singing, clucks and gusts of fetid breath.

He was handing the aracanóa , that smoke-cured dream, the proof, the guarantee of the Other World, back to her. Its contents were mysterious, its antiquity acknowledged. By a miracle known to Tupan alone, the whole of the world was shown in it. Not a blade of grass had been omitted, not an insect. Everything in it was indecipherable, apart from the stone eggs waiting for the rainy season to hatch out in the rivers. It was up to her, the great sister of Qüyririche, to take it. She must see how his fathers and he himself had taken care of it. Men, men and more men had died so that this magnificent thing should live. She must know, she must realize herself.

With that he turned away and left, taking Mauro and Petersen with him. Alone, Elaine watched them take more epena and start to move round a blazing fire with tall, crackling flames, some way away from where she was. Soon the whole tribe was dancing in a fiery glow speckled with insects and glowing embers. They went forward and back, raising their arms. She recognized Mauro and Petersen in the crowd from their awkward movements. The beer was flowing freely. The women and, what was even more dumbfounding, the children had started to take the drug.

A change in the rhythm focused her gaze on the red glow of the fire. Elaine saw the shaman emerge from the group of dancers and come toward her accompanied by three torchbearers. Stricken with sudden terror at the idea that she might be compelled to join in the barbarous celebration, she took advantage of the darkness and hid behind a bush growing on the edge of the precipice. The shaman showed no surprise: the Messenger had gone back to Qüyririche. He had expected her to leave and raised his arms to thank her. Her sons would guide him, him and his people. The moment had come.

Elaine saw them return to the center of the clearing. The music stopped abruptly, the bodies froze in the light of the torches. The shaman briefly harangued his tribe and knelt down to kiss the earth. Then he picked up a torch, had one each given to Mauro and Petersen, and stood between them, while two other Indians positioned themselves on either side. There was a brief moment of hesitation when they started to run, but the Indians grasped the strangers by the arm and forced them to set off. Getting into the spirit of the game, Mauro shook himself free and tried to overtake everyone. Elaine thought they were going to go past her; amused, she was admiring the long ribbons of flame when she saw Mauro’s torch wobble then disappear in a wailing curve. Far from slowing down, the other runners plunged over the precipice deliberately, dragging Petersen with them. In that same futile second the shaman beat his arms as if he were trying to fly. Immediately the whole crowd of the Indians rushed toward the precipice. A blaze of fire threw itself at the night, the torches swirled and crackled, plunging into the invisible jungle, where they continued to glow, like phosphorous rockets under the sea. The plumed torsos floated for a moment, swathed in residual light, sparks of down … Angels falling.

THE AIM OF A CHRISTIAN TEACHER: to lead the disciple back in time so he can see the real origins of his erroneous belief. Close to Platonic anamnesis.

GLOSSOLALIA … Everything begins with the myth of Pentecost: the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles and gave them the gift of tongues, the better to convert the unbelievers. In terms of output, of rhetorical efficiency, the ability to speak all languages or to reduce them all to one amounts to the same thing.

Ite et inflammate! Go and set on fire! Ignatius Loyola orders the members of the Society. Prattle on and make a bonfire of all dialect — nothing gets a blaze going so well as hot air.

China Monumentis remains one of the the most beautiful books it has been my privilege to hold in my hands. As in his Œdipus Ægyptiacus , Kircher creates marvels of typography in it that inspire respect.

ONCE THE CLOCK HAD BEEN INVENTED, no one went back to the hourglass except to boil eggs. There’s no alternative: we must finally take account of the sacred character of human solitude and its struggle. A moral code has no meaning except inside this combat area, that of a lucidity that is not despairing but free of false hopes of transcendence.

TURNING ONE’S BACK on the waters of the spring like the tigers of Bengal …

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE: Although unaware of it, Kircher is writing an encyclopedia of everything that is going to disappear or be called into question after him. In that sense he is the curator of knowledge already fossilized during his lifetime rather than the first museum worthy of that name. The Copernican then Galilean revolution in astronomy, the sudden extension of the chronology of the earth overturned received ideas with the violence of a tidal wave. Kircher chose not to embrace this new conception of the world but to uphold the old one at all cost. He is the Noah of his age. His life’s work is the ark of a submerged world.

THE TRAPDOOR SPIDER HAS COVERED ITSELF in a fine spider’s web. Strange. Redundant: a fly-trap set over the fly-trap.

“WHERE DOES A THING COME FROM if it has not been ready for a long time?” Father Kircher, Goethe says, always appears at the moment when he’s least expected. He’s a mediator, he gets us, like children, to put our finger on what is causing a problem.

“MACHINES FOR THINKING”: those of Lull, Kircher or Jonathan Swift in the chapter devoted to the academicians of Laputa. The same desire to combine words or concepts in an automatic way, to draw on their vast reservoir of potentialities. Equipped with a computer, Kircher would probably have used it to play chess, produce sonnets and cantatas or to shuffle the letters of the Torah ad infinitum . He would have made the numbers feel sick, hoping to get them to spew up as quickly as possible something that was worth the effort among the things that are possible.

ONCE ONE GETS INVOLVED IN BIOGRAPHY, one has to resign oneself to the role of Sancho Panza.

NEVER LOOK STRAIGHT AT THINGS, but always with a sidelong glance, the only way of bringing out their beauty and their faults. Learned from Heidegger. The parrot, not the other one. Although …

I CONTINUE ON MY WAY, resolutely, without knowing whether it’s taking me closer to or farther away from the essential, without even knowing whether it’s going anywhere.