Norman Rush - Mating

I was singing so continuously that I began to find I disliked it when I stopped — I disliked that ambience. I was briefly an aide in a nursery school for neglected children, and the best-adapted, happiest, and smartest children in the place were three sisters who had been taken from a mother who kept them chained to a radiator so they would be safe while she was out circulating, and who when I asked them what they did all the time when they were alone said We sang. The inspiriting effect my singing had on my animals was not an illusion, and it reminds me now of the period when I was feeling depressed at how commonplace and rudimentary my dreams were compared to Denoon’s. He claimed to dream infrequently, but when he did, his dreams were like something by Fabergé or Kafka in their uniqueness. He would have noetic dreams, and when they were over he would be left in possession of some adage or percept that tells you something occult or fundamental about the world. One of these was the conviction he woke up with one morning that music was the remnant of a medium that had been employed in the depths of the past as a means of communication between men and animals — I assume man arrow animal and not ducks playing flutes to get their point across to man. Living with me made him more provisional about his dreams, especially after I compared one of his adages to a statement some famous surrealist was left with after dreaming, which he thought important enough to print up: Beat your mother while she’s still young. I would always make Denoon at least try to reduce his insights to a sentence or two. The fact is I laugh at dreams. They seem to me to be some kind of gorgeous garbage. I have revenge dreams, mainly, in which I tell significant figures from my past things like You have the brains of a drum. On I sang.

Is it absurd to be proud of your dreams, or not? Denoon was.

Poetry let me down. I elided into poetry from time to time and discovered that I knew a lot of it. My attitude toward rhymed poetry changed utterly. Respect was born. Except for Dover Beach there was almost nothing unrhymed in my inventory. I know quite a lot of Kipling. I know some Vachel Lindsay. Finally one stanza out of Elizabeth Bishop got hold of me and kept inserting itself between pieces of other poems, truculently. It maddened me both by its tenacity and by what it said: Far down the highway wet and black, I’ll ride and ride and not come back, I’m going to go and take the bus, and find someone monogamous. I used opera to drive this away.

Serious Trouble

Serious trouble began on the fourth or fifth day out. It happened because I was doing a thing I had been warned not to do in the desert: I was reviewing my life. Actually I was thinking about an aspect of my life, to wit, who would miss me the most if I was reported lost. Also I was thinking in general about how easy it would be to vanish physically in the Kalahari, how quickly you would turn into dust and be distributed, the usual. I had been advised by people like the lion man to keep my consciousness in my superfices, my skin and eyes and ears, my legs, to be a scanning mechanism and nothing else while I was in the desert. Also I had been told not to try to figure out everything that was odd that might happen to me, like an impulse to stand stockstill, which I had in fact had a couple of times but, naturally I need to point out, only after I had been apprised that this might happen to me. The reason I think I was letting my mind drift in these directions was that I was tired of the singing and chanting that had served me so well during the first leg of my madness. Also I had been told to forget all the Bushman notions I knew, the bizarre items. I hadn’t known what these were, but I was curious to know, so I’d bought more drinks for the lion man, whose face was lined so authoritatively you could faint. Apparently Bushmen say they can hear the sun burning, to which I say So what? The lion man had been touted to me as the ultimate authority on the Kalahari. He did look like an authority, but he was an authority who was living to drink, insofar as I could tell. The Bushmen say they can hear a faint hiss from the sun, he said, as I wondered if this was something he had thought up because he had me in front of him squinting for the truth about the Kalahari. There was a woman who knew everything I wanted to know, someone I would have trusted, she had lived in the Kalahari, but she was no longer around. She had become unwelcome to the government. One thing I am sure of is that the lion man dyes his hair. I had been oblique with the lion man about whether I myself was actually going into the Kalahari, but he knew.

Just after breaking camp in the morning and going through agonies over whether I was giving enough water to the boys — we had missed at least one water point and were doing rations — I thought I heard a short sharp noise that must be a gunshot: like the lion roar, just the one event. Was this an everyday natural thing no one bothers to investigate? We were in a very barren area. When the sound came I felt faint. But then nothing. We proceeded again.

I was trying to buck myself up by reminding myself, apropos the lion man’s stories, that the desire to tell stories is not always the same thing as the desire to convey the truth, when we came to a locale I hated from the outset. It was a grassy, thickly wooded basin. The grass was a coarse gray-green type I knew was unpopular with my boys unless they were at the very end of their tether. I felt I had no choice but to go through this place, which was extensive. The ground was spongeous in spots. The feeling was claustral. The trees, low thorn trees, struck me as very uniform, almost the way trees look in children’s art. The trees were clotted with mud nests, weaverbird nests, sometimes six in a tree. But there was no birdlife. The nests were dead. Not only were there no birds but there was none of the mild almost subliminal background shuffling caused by animals like springhares and lizards you become used to sensing. I kept yawning, for no reason.

To be frank, I think that one thing that led me into the grove was a desperate feeling about my innards. There was a feeling of privacy. We would be out of view in this place. I was hoping and yearning for a sign that this might be the place where I would be restored to normal in this respect at least, that the enclosedness of the scene might summon something. In the normal parts of the Kalahari you are on display for miles in every direction.

There was a sinister gestalt that clearly I began cooperating with and adding to, as in finding the air not only thick but actually fetid, and so on. There may have been a barometric anomaly taking place, it now occurs to me. We went deeper into the grove. My boys were nervous and acting out, and this also affected me. If they’d been placid I could have used that to moderate my readings-in, but they were increasingly jangled and wired-seeming as we proceeded. What was the origin of all the folklore about dogs and horses being sensitive to the presence of ghosts? I wanted to know. It was multicultural, so did it have some basis in reality? The Batswana believed it.

But mainly I wanted to know why my life path had led me into such a frightening place, if I was as intelligent as I was supposed to be. It was because of a fixation on another human, a male. But why had the conviction that this kind of fixation befalls women much more often than it does men not been enough to deter me a little, stop me from acting so generically so precipitously? Somehow this place was worse than anything so far, worse than hearing the lion roar, which I was already pathetically recasting as possibly having been a dream in any case. Also it was abundantly clear I would never be able to relax enough in the grove to think of my bodily processes.