fish eyes

Yesterday I caught myself wondering how the fish felt when they first breathed the poison. I know how they acted - swimming in haphazard, frantic zig-zags just below the surface of the milky water, bug-eyed and frantic - but how fully did they know they were going to die?

Barbasco root is an excellent tool for catching fish, and back in nineteen-dickety-ninety-two I helped members of the Machiguenga tribal group of Peru, South America pound it with rocks on other rocks, creating a sticky mash that was then placed in wicker baskets and dragged through the shoals of a section of the river that had been painstakingly dammed off with even more rocks (and some banana leaves) in the wee hours of the morning.

After that it was a free-for-all as the poison seeped into the water, whiting it and addling fish brains to the point where they could be easily dispatched with a sharp blow to the back of the head from a machete - a pastime in which men, women and children partook with glee because that, my friends, is how the happy little eco-friendly natives do it.

Worrying about the environment, you see, is for comfortable fat people, like us. My German/American buddy Dan Fast, who grew up in the deep jungle living "native" and decided to stay on into his forties often said that the natives are less eco-freindly than the rest of us - there just aren't enough of them to do a whole lot of damage. But that's the short story. The long story is told slowly over smoky campfires and speaks of thousands of years of dark hot jungle living and dying, of a savage existence eked out on the brink of extinction at the hands of exploitive outsiders and vicious Mother Nature, red in tooth and claw.

What brings the Machis to mind is a book I bought in the Whitcourt Library called “the Storyteller”, by Mario Vargas Llosa, who is to my knowledge the only world-famous novelist Peru has ever produced. I thumbed the spine of the book on the “for sale” rack and recognized the name, since Vargas Llosa had run for the Presidency when I was eight. I remembered that as schoolchildren we used to laugh at “Mario Vargaseosa”. “Gaseosa” is Spanish for soda pop.

Since then I had heard reference to his name a few times as a writer of note and from time to time thought of looking up his work. There it was, in my hand. I bought it, walked out to my truck, and started to read. Page by page it sucked me in and took me back. Or aback. Here a man writes in florid, brilliant literary style of my own home. He describes his experiences with the Machiguengas (with whom I had lived for a couple of weeks) and even paints a picture of the lake by which I was raised. Hear his words:

“Yarinacocha at dusk, when the red sun begins to sink behind the treetops and the greenish lake glows beneath the indigo sky where the first stars are beginning to twinkle, is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen.”

My home, my geographical first love, immortalized in fine literature by a sophisticated world traveler - a distinguished writer, lecturer and politician. Vargas Llosa went further, though, for apparently his study of the Machis had brought him into contact with the Snells (whom he re-named the Schneils) and his description of the conversations they shared was just so “them”. There I was, reading a well-written hardcover novel about personal friends and intimate places, sitting in a nasty big Ford F450 diesel truck in central Alberta. Everything about it was drawing me back home.

This utterly disconcerting experience hits me with two basic responses. First, I am surprised to feel homesickness thudding down into the pit of my stomach. Vargas Llosa writes of fishing for Sungaro and I am transported back, envisioning cleaning and frying the tender flesh of one of those spotted, flatnosed catfish after I’ve pulled it, glistening, from the river. He describes my beautiful Yarinacocha like it's an immortal romantic landscape and I can practically smell the water. Why have I never heard of this book?

Yet here it is and my second reaction is just as strong. I am confronted by an entirely new species of human being – the thinking, educated Peruvian – and I am unsure of how to make their acquaintence. I lived in Peru with a rough, extremely limited understanding of the situation and of my latin hosts and here I am nearly a decade later reading a book tossed to me from the other side of the wall. This man is looking at the organization for which my parents have worked for over thirty years – the Summer Institute of Linguistics – and critically evaluating what he sees.

I am not jolted by the idea that he doesn’t like what we were doing there (It seems, rather, that he views the Snells with a lot of respect). It is more that he (that is, the literary Peruvian) exists and that after living in Peru for seventeen years I am faced by him, for the first time, on the pages of a book in Canada. It is as though we have met at a poetry reading and I'm awkward and I don't know how to hold my drink and I keep stumbling over words and eventually, I know, I'm going to accidently gesticulate wildly and douse the man with wine. I respect him a lot but I am unsure what to make of him, because for so long I’ve thought basically nothing at all about his “type”.

I wonder at the many ways in which I am unaware of how I have put him, the Machiguengas and all other Peruvians into boxes, just to make them less intimidating and easier to stack, so to speak. There is endless complexity to people and it seems that in order to live a person has to draw lines and set up boundaries for the mind, resorting to simplistic explanations to avoid mentally imploding.

Take, for instance, a chair. Any old chair. That chair is a miracle of human ingenuity and a marvel of physics. From an artistic standpoint it is a fantastic subject for study, a cacophony of subtle gradations of hue, value and intensity. It occupies a unique space in the universe and is therefore important in its own individual way. Enter a roomful of chairs, however, and the only way you’re going to ever find a seat before the lecture starts is if you can ignore the miracle of a single chair and say, “Aw, frick. A roomful of chairs. Now, where should I sit?”

So it is with people, I suppose. In order to live and get things done, you’ve got to do some generalizationing, boxing nouns (people, places, things and sometimes ideas) into controllable ideological chunks. The problem is that this attitude, corrupted and magnified by corrupt human nature, tends to go hay-wire-bonkers and leaving no room to pause, reflect, and love. The attitudes engendered when pride mates with naming lead towards the sort of mindless destruction manifested in the cut-blocks where I currently earn money off the people who wastefully land-rape the world for trees in a "chicken-with-head-cut-off" obsession with bottom lines and “getting things done”.

On the other hand, I don't think I really want to advocate a Buddhist nothingness, attempting to empty yourself completely in order to experience the “other” which is you. While those orange-robed chanters might be attempting a good thing, I think it’s an exercise in futility. You can’t do it. To live is to name and while this tends inevitably to degenerate into a desire to control and overwhelm the named, it need not be so. Naming is not a bad thing in and of itself. It need not necessarily destroy – for to name something can also be to give it life and to make it real, to create form out of nothing and to shape order out of chaos.

Probably I should just try to name as the Machiguengas traditionally do – temporarily and contingently and relationally. A man is not “Bill” to them as much as he is “Billmybrothergettingoutofthecanoe”. Then, perhaps, I can step away from boxing and begin to learn how to empathize – to feel what the Other is feeling so that I can begin to truly love. This could go anywhere – even (horrors!) the mind of a barbasco-warped fish.