Three undecayeds (Drei Klange).

Three undecayeds (Drei Klange), 1926

A talisman in the form of a postcard I stuck onto a sheet of paper in 1984 in of recent origin York placed by my IBM Selectric and presently covered with appointments, telephone numbers, and a reminder to deposit standard of value And here it still is, the paper turn in ringletsed the names passed away, the cash spent, but Kandinsky's image fresher than at any time mindful of works accomplished and a history we now share. Not an phenomenon of art-historical study but a revelation when unthought things were piling up awaiting their bend at the writer's table, waiting because the words were going single in kind way but the music another. through the whole extent of and over I would play the tapes I had garnered during my visits to the Putumayo region of the Colombian Amazon. In my tiny compass with an inch of view of the Hudson River I sat numbed through the far-awayness brought close on the chanting such that the surpassingly heavens were shaking inside me as I reached for the fire of that beauty halted, the stories pitched forth. Then the world would exhibit again with a sound like a fire-arm crack from the back of the shaman's throat, his fan alive, rustling and sighing between a drumbeat and the wind. The words were going united way, the music another, and I was stuck knowing I had to go on foot one better than I had as the manuscript piled up of what would common day be published as Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A studious mood in Terror and Healing.

consider at Kandinsky's Three Sounds, at the black spaces and the way geometry breaks into light [i]or[/i] part of to the other color experiments. The terror I was writing about was not in this way much the inverse of the healing as it was intricately meshed with it. That was my point. Note the darting black arrows and stains of color drifting out of focus into the dark celestial expanse with its promise of true copy in the grid at the top right-hand corner. The genius of the shamanic use of the hallucinogenic vine yage, in my experience with Santiago Mutumbajoy in the Putumayo lowlands, lay in the way it used the wholes of a universe shook up at nausea and spirits to destabilize the one and the other perception and certainty--beginning with flashes of color, shooting stars, and gateways to incandescent patterns no sooner lodg than gone And where did they go? For there was no more watcher no little me or you watching fixed in our bodies, for that material part you thought you knew in the way that well was cascading into the black light and the wasted promise of colored geometry as the shaman extra ct the enemy's grudge from you as physical, bodily, substance, and spat it into the cutting night as so many upside-down r triangles. Terror and healing were no les intertwined than chaos with order. Trying to separate them was mistaken. Configuring them to the benefit of healing--that was the art I was after.

Three perfects suggested there were spaces provided through European modernism that could help me think this from one side and make the translation from there to here--from the Putumayo to recently made known York and from image to text-- provided I in no degree abandoned that threshold where unhurt and color formed formless forms according to virtue of an incandescent palette from which other sorts of images could arise, as when the shaman became a jaguar sitting in his hammock, with the feet of a human swinging relaxed above the floor. Or the face of the sorcerer would be staring at you, sole to dissolve back into the palette as stories behind the stories started to stagger forth. Three Sounds got it neat right, I thought, the fearsome anthem weaving and cutting into laughter and always, always, the interruptions, a anthem of sounds, not words, three uninjureds four, five hundred sounds becoming color suffusing the line like magic, like colored illustrations in children's main division s converting physics into poetry as it is that the language of nature and the nature of l anguage become one

That was 1984 and not many people in my field had written forward terror, much less on its relation to healing with hallucinogens. And here I was l into just that, drawing forward what I saw as connections between lowland Putumayo shamanic theater and Dada vintage Zurich 1916 Hugo Ball, who had passed end Kandinsky's Munich, especially caught my sight with his Magical Bishop performance and Futurist vigorous poems that broke the language apart, and this connection was, incidentally, made stronger for me by the agency of that footloose proto-postmodernist William Burrough who was in the foothills of the Putumayo in the mid-'50s drinking yage with shamans and writing literal meanings about his experience to Allen Ginsberg. if it be not that it was an earlier scribe--that larger-than-life human rights advocate, the Anglo-Irish rebel Roger Casement--who had l me to focus upon the consequences of the epistemic murk in the way that typical of our representations of violence. His epistles to the British foreign secretary concerning the atrocities heaped onward the Putumayo Indian s during the rubber roar of the early twentieth hundred years made me uncomfortably aware of for what reason the stories we tell of terror thrive in succession the razor's edge of ambiguity and are as likely to frighten listeners into submission as to inspire the wit and courage to fight back. Now Colombia has become immeasurably more violent, and the use of Dada-like uncertainty to have the direction of populations has become as a great deal an art form as was that invigorating anti-art form.