Motel Nirvana

After a 267 year-old Princess, can anything surprise?

By their own account, Brad and Sherry Steiger stumbled across intimations of an answer to the question: ‘Who made us what we are?’, quite by accident. After years of painstaking research they discovered, almost as a by-product of their work into alien intelligence, that the great human tribe, far from being mere cosmic incidentals, had in fact been shaped many thousand years ago by collectives of advanced entities from other planets, and in particular from Venus. Suddenly, everything else made sense to them. The giant fossilized footprints they had come across in Peru (was it Peru? I forget) were obviously those of an advanced reptilian being which had evolved on earth and migrated to another part of the solar system; and the well-documented Mayan practice of elongating infant skulls by squashing them between boards was doubtless intended to be a sign of deference to the Indians’ oval-headed alien masters. Why, rock pictures show that the aliens even knew about photosynthesis and were employing it for their own ends, not least of which was to splice up some human genes and cross-breed them with other useful things – plants and spaceships. They’d even got the technology to manufacture human beings from the Madagascan common ring-tailed lemur.

And to think that without the Steigers the world would have remained ignorant of these things.

So the tenth day ends, without satisfaction, in room 12 at the King’s Rest. Gita has been in to clean and left a few nominal swirls in the dirt on the dresser. Outside the air is still as sleep and pearly with dusk. Roseanne Barr’s disembodied voice oozes through the wall from the room next door. For some days now I have felt a strange longing which is neither a longing for contact nor a longing for conversation, but rather, a need to be on familiar ground. Had I been travelling in the Solomon Islands I should have faced my isolation with greater equanimity, but every westerner expects at least to comprehend America, if not to feel in some measure at ease there. Here I find so many hints of common ground give out quite suddenly, like false byways. Someone you can rely upon to have an opinion about soap opera or McDonald’s turns out to have seen angels in her backyard and the man who sells you a cup of coffee thinks himself a reincarnation of Nefertiti. Even among the seemingly familiar there can turn out to be almost nothing recognizable.

DAY ELEVEN

I wake with a start from some instantly forgotten dream as the sun begins to burn blue holes into the earliest light. Some overnight rain has stripped the rose outside of its petals leaving a few trembling stamens held fast in the arms of the calyx. A raven lifts itself from the roof and banks into the sky. The one other guest is packing his car and heading back home, to Colorado by the looks of it. There are no clouds now, just a wondrous filmic sheet flung about the earth and moving lightly in the void, as if pegged out to dry.

Remembering the despondent mood of the previous night, I unpack my African fetish, Hopi dream catcher and quartz crystals and arrange them about the room in an attempt to brighten up the place and construct the kind of homeliness which is at present missing. I light a Camel, drink the remains of last night’s root beer, now flat, switch on the TV and wonder why it is that all American anchorwomen have the same hairdo.

At around nine Gita knocks and, without waiting for a response, lets herself in. Looking down at me sitting on the bed she says, to no-one in particular, ‘Alone watching TV,’ with the satisfaction of one delivering a biographical summation for the purposes of an obituary.

Breakfast of sour frijoles and huevos a la plancha in a cafe in Española, a small, hispanic town about thirty miles north of Santa Fe. Black water runs out from the beans, leaving strange Rorschach blots on a stack of flour tortillas heaped beside.

These I point out to the waitress when she returns to fill my coffee cup.

‘What do they suggest to you?’

‘UFO? I dunno.’

‘Pick an insight card.’ She looks down for a moment at the little gold box, pincers a card between brilliant red nails, studies it a moment, throws it back on the table and pours the coffee.

The card reads ‘Slow down, you’re going too fast; You gotta make the moment last …’ with Paul Simon credited on the bottom in psychedelic letters enclosed by double quotation marks. “Paul Simon.”

‘What’s that for, anyhow?’ Before I leave she asks for it back to show to her boss, but he’s too busy loading a delivery of icecream into the freezer.

Sixties, sixties, sixties. Sometimes it seems as though the sixties generation unplugged en masse after Woodstock. Do they suppose that nothing’s happened since? Like, the end of the Cold War, like the digital revolution, like AIDS, like democratic elections in South Africa, like crack, like the rise and rise of the kind of people who still remember who Paul Simon was, or is, or who give a damn in any case.

Every time I hum the tune I get the line ‘you move too fast’ repeating in my head. ‘You’re going too fast’ doesn’t even scan.

During the drive back to Santa Fe it occurs to me that, despite having been in New Mexico for nearly two weeks, I have taken almost no account of the landscape outside the city limits, which is at least as great a draw to spiritual tourists as the New Age cafes and bookstores downtown. So I swing off the freeway at the next turning, signposted to Chimayo, and head up a single-track paved road onto a desert plateau lined in the far distance with naked mountains whose peaks, despite the sun, remain ice-powdered, giving them the appearance of cut salami sausages. A warm, desiccated wind exposes the matt grey underside of the sage and fragments the plain into a subtle mosaic of drab green and grey. Fifteen minutes of walking through the brush and my position feels unchanged, the mountains ahead as remote as Elysium. A deep cloud, dark as bomb dust, hangs over the horizon fifty or sixty miles away, tailing rain. I realize that it is not so much isolation that is at the heart of my dispiritedness, but claustrophobia.

Santa Fe is quiet today. Down in the plaza some Indian women are laying out jewellery on blankets under the shaded boardwalk of the Palace of the Governors. The afternoon wind has brought humidity, and the possibility of a thunderstorm; art stores and restaurants and parking lots are empty. Although the city is reputed to be at ease with itself, you only have to walk around the plaza before the tourists have arrived or after they have gone to sense the air of restlessness and disquiet. The chamber of commerce sells the city as a place of such antiquity and harmony that its three cultures – Hispanic, Native American and Anglo coexist in steadfast and separate juxtaposition, and extrapolates from this the myth that the City Different is a place of relaxed permissiveness. In fact, New Mexico has a history sufficiently long to have blurred the distinctions between Hispanic and Native American into a complex and pleasing slurry, without annihilating either. It is the newcomers who, unable or unwilling to grasp the subtleties of the place, have saddled it with the label ‘tricultural’ and, with that simple tag, rewritten history. A colonial census of 1790 recognized seven ethnic groups in Santa Fe: White Spanish; Coyote, or Spanish and New Mexican Indian; Mulatto, or half-Afro-American; Genizaro, who were Indians captured by Plains Indians and sold back to Spanish colonists as slaves; Indio or Indian; Mestizo, or a mixture of Spanish and Mexican Indian; and Color Quebrado, which pretty much summed up anyone left over. They were in part united by the conservative lifestyles most suited to harsh terrain and in part by trading alliances. Anglo-saxon culture, in particular liberal anglo-saxon culture, came late to New Mexico, and laid itself like skin on the soup beneath. Since the influx of wealthy, liberal, overwhelmingly white vacationers and retirees in the 1980s and 1990s, land prices have soared in Santa Fe. Every day a letter or an op-ed piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican mourns the conversion of the city from living place to outdoor museum.

I’m going to tell you about Pete. Pete makes his living as a New Age technoshaman. A technoshaman is a shaman with a computer, apparently. It’s a profession with a scientific bent. In fact, much that goes on among New Agers is of a scientific bent, for science can be harnessed in support of more or less any kind of ideology and, by being thus appropriated, spoiled for any other. Afterall, what does it matter if computers powered by crystal matrices and extra-low frequency psychic protector lenses and human beings grown from lemur babies sound improbable? Gene splicing and nanotechnology and virtual reality are pretty crazy too.

Pete the Technoshaman has been developing his technoshamanistic software for eleven years and has chosen to base his code on the Mayan calendar on the grounds that the mathematics of the Mayan grid is the same mathematics as the mathematics of life, a numerically reciprocal permutation table. Pete’s mission has something to do with the rising level of chaos, which, according to Pete, will lead inexorably to the world being in flames and bridges burning behind us.

‘There’s no going back to the Garden of Eden,’ he says, ‘which didn’t even really exist anyway.’

In his living room he has an AppleMac fixed to a number of electronic gizmos with flashing LED displays and impressive monitors. From here he carries on his practice, assisted by his wife, Beth, who is also and incidentally a shaman herself, although not of the technological variety.

Beth fetches some coffee.

‘It all looks, uh, amazingly complex, but how is this Mayan grid business actually going to make a difference?’ I ask.

Pete the Technoshaman gathers himself, sweeps his hair back, double-clicks on his mouse, and says with casual authority, ‘Hey, I’m doing my bit.’

The coffee arrives, and we sit at Pete’s Mac staring idly at a notice flashing on the screen which reads ‘You may activate the program at any time.’

‘You know,’ says Pete with palpable sadness, sucking on his coffee cup, ‘I don’t have answers as to what can happen to the teeming billions, man, but at least I don’t have to wonder what I’m doing here anymore.’

His friend Carl, stationed on the sofabed reading a copy of National Geographic, looks up and interjects:‘Yeah, it sounds so cold-hearted to say that not a lot can be done, but you know, maybe that’s not so bad. I mean, we’re spiritual beings, right?’

‘You know,’ says Pete, bringing up a graphic of the solar system on the Mac, ‘we’re in a wrenching transitional period. Some people would say that because you’re not handing out sandwiches in Somalia you’re not doing anything. But McKenna’s right. The world’s salvation is in pushing the imagination.’

Carl throws down his National Geographic and shakes his head. McKenna, I happen to know, is a West Coast writer who thinks that magic mushrooms provide an insight into alien worlds. He’s become somewhat of a cult figure among men of a certain age.

‘The whole world’s on LSD,’ says Carl, randomly.

‘Information’s the thing, man,’ continues Pete, ‘The future of consciousness and the future of medicine.’ He clicks on his mouse and brings up a flowchart marked in Greek lettering. Then, taking up a phial he walks over to Carl, yanks out a lock of hair with a quick flip of his wrist, puts the hair into the phial, and inserts it into a larger tube connected with electrodes to a piece of metal, and also by some mysterious means, to the computer.

‘This, for example, is kinesiology.’

‘Wow,’ says Carl, evidently impressed.

‘I just place my finger, thus,’ placing his right index finger on the piece of metal, ‘on the electro-kinesiological reaction plate and there’s an electromagnetic disturbance created by the hair that my finger picks up, as it were, intuitively. Understand?’

I nod; Carl simpers.

‘It’s the same as if I touched you. Any live cell will do, you know, because they all react in unison. I don’t need a liver cell to know what’s going on in the liver.’

I mention in passing that I had always imagined hair cells to be dead.

Pete’s wife returns from putting the baby to bed and proceeds to settle down to some other domestic chore.

‘I am a biological scientist,’ replies Pete definitively. In the corner of the room his wife bites her lip.

‘So you know, I rub my finger on the plate and intuitively click the mouse on this list, so.’

He removes the hair phial and replaces it with a bottle of colourless fluid.

‘All the restitutive elements – crystals, colours, food, so forth – are stored in the memory banks of the machine as holographic references, each item is associated with thirteen Mayan numbers, which store enough information on each substance not to have to bother having the real things.

‘Take this bottle of water here. We simply …’ Clicks on the mouse, two doubles.

‘And the numbers are transferred into an electromagnetic pulse so the geometry of the water changes. Or the same information can be transferred to a lamp, or coded as a fractal type for psychoemotional problems or a sound with the information subliminally tagged onto it.’

‘You mean, you don’t need to see your patients?’

‘Uh-uh. They just phone right up, and we send them a tape with the sound on it, whatever …’ He’s picking out the bottle of water and putting back Carl’s hair. From another room the baby begins to howl.

‘Oh Lordie.’

‘What?’ asks Carl, looking a little worried.

‘Just checked the energy levels. Seems like your digestive problem is somewhat better already.’

‘Yeah?’ says Carl.

‘See,’ Pete points to a chart on the screen, which has changed from blue to yellow. ‘If this technology developed you could just grow body parts. Incidentally …’ He double-clicks, the screen shifts, blackens and the message ‘You may activate the program at any time’ blinks back. ‘Tim Leary is speaking at the Sweeny Center today. Do you know who Tim Leary is?’

I smile.

‘Only one of the most important minds of the twentieth century.’ He rises from his chair and lifts a paperback from a pile under the coffee table. ‘This is an original signed copy,’ he says, holding the book out to me, then thinking better of it, he replaces the volume under the table, lining up the spine against a magazine beneath.

‘You get many clients?’ I ask, changing the subject.

Pete considers the question, which has taken him a little by surprise. Finally he says ‘The thing with clients is that a lot of the work is just caring for them, which, you know, doesn’t appeal to me. But I have to fund my research so we …,’ gesturing towards his wife, ‘take on a few clients. There are funding sources for fringe technology like this, of course, but they all want something for it. Nothing, for free, man.’

‘Pow pow pow,’ says Carl, knocking out the funding sources with his finger.

‘This thing, you know, called my reality, is based purely on my own experience.’ Pete clicks on the mouse and brings up a screen with a pattern of stars upon it. ‘Expand my experience, and, man, you really turn me on.’

There is a bookstall in the foyer of the Sweeny Center selling guides to enlightenment, with a list of all the great teachers who have ever attained nirvana, and how they did it. Gautama sat under a Bodhi tree and waited, and, after seven days without food and water, he saw the morning star and was enlightened into formless bliss. Ming travelled for years looking for enlightenment and eventually found nirvana when Hui-neng asked him ‘What is your original face, which you had even before your birth?’ Neither of them had access to a computer. The process of their enlightenments was tortuous and thoroughly unscientific. We leave it to science, these days, to reveal the mystery of the everyday. Perhaps Gautama and Ming would have done better with Pete the Technoshaman’s Mayan program.

Science, they say, is the Moses of the twentieth century and heaven knows, we need one.

There are, incidentally, no enlightened women on the list. There are books on women who run with wolves, women who love too much, women who love men who love other women, universal mother-women, crone-women, angels, goddesses, all sorts of women doing all sorts of things, in fact, but no enlightened ones. Why is that? The sales assistant suggests I listen to Joni Mitchell, whom she regards as highly advanced. I promise to think it over and buy a little beginner’s guide to Zen containing this fragment, by Tung-shan:

The man of wood sings,

The woman of stone

Gets up and dances,

This cannot be done

By passion or learning,

It cannot be done

By reasoning.

A man with a beard the colour of baked beans walks across my field of vision carrying a child in a turban, smiles at someone ahead and is devoured by the crowd. Here they all are, the success stories of late twentieth-century capitalism – sophisticated consumers, moneyed but not dangerously moneyed, educated, but not threateningly so – passing the hours irrigating their colons, birthing their drums and squeezing their higher consciousnesses. Fergus once remarked ‘there’s the work ethic and the self ethic and those two together made America what it is. If you have any criticisms I suggest you take them elsewhere. We’re very protective of our ethics.’

Five minutes before Timothy Leary is due to come on stage the man with the beard the colour of baked beans sits down next to me and produces a yellowing copy of Life magazine with Leary’s signature on it. Seeing me trying to catch the full inscription he leans over and whispers:

‘Grew up with Tim.’

‘Really?’

‘Man, he’s like, my hero. He’s like taken the principle of questioning authority and moved with that in a positive way. Like, I don’t even read the newspapers anymore on account of all the negativity. I’ve learned the hard way that everything you do has a purpose, it’s there to teach you something and it’s all OK … But we couldn’t have evolved this far without people like Tim.’

‘I missed the sixties.’

‘The sixties was really all about, personal growth, being anything you want to be, the power of positive thinking. I mean, I get some negative thoughts, and I think, hey, these don’t belong to me. That’s what the sixties was so … by the way, what’s your ascendant?’

In my mind’s eye there are petals back on the rose outside my room and there is a hummingbird feeding on the waxy spike of the agave flower.

Baked Bean spends the remaining hour of Leary’s talk in a state of intolerable suspense awaiting exactly the right moment to produce his faded copy of Life and ask Leary for an autograph. Meanwhile one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century fumbles around unrehearsed, contradicts himself, pauses, begins again, delivers a few lost eulogies to technology and digitalia, finally succumbs to his own boredom and produces a rave tape. A series of psychedelic images spirals round the room to a techno backbeat. During each lull, and there are many, Baked Bean puts his hand up, and then retreats rapidly, like a polyp feeling for its prey. Poor Baked Bean, I’m sure he’s not so bad, it’s just that I’ve had enough of him.

‘The only way it’s gonna happen is through science, right?’ he whispers. A strobe hits the copy of Life. The music, techno, bam da da boom. ‘I was at Woodstock, right?’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah. And what did that do, right?’

‘Well, it was only a rock concert.’ The music stops.

‘People working on themselves,’ he nods his head in the direction of the crowd now filing out of the door.

‘Uh huh.’

He says; ‘From a scientific perspective you can’t do anything for anyone without healing the inner person. Start with yourself.’

‘Is that so?’

‘In my experience,’ he says, and leaves without the autograph. Ten minutes later he appears around a corner and hands me a leaflet about the spiritual implications of digitalizing dolphin song.

Here is the inconsistency of my position. I am envious of New Age certainties, but jealous of my own, which in general contradict them. Yet, if I am to make anything of the New Age I shall have to file those little prejudices away, for they will ensure that I fail in my attempt to comprehend the world I have chosen, temporarily, to inhabit. I admit to a tendency within myself to maintain a rather dismal inflexibility as shield against the clamour of contradiction. But at the same time I can see that the belief that there are no extra-terrestrials and the belief that there are coexist and have equal authority. It’s insoluble.

I fall asleep with the TV tinting blue the web of nerves behind my eyes, like moonlight on some electronic planet, and I wake up sometime before dawn, chilled to the soul. Above the parking lot of the King’s Rest Motel the sky is black and still as a darkroom, trapping in its invisible fibres the blossoms of a million stars.

Heading West

‘Where the earth is dry the soul is wisest and best.’

HERACLITUS

Memorial Day, driving into afternoon sun on what was once Route 66. On the opposite side of the highway two lanes bumper-to-bumper trudge towards the Continental Divide like a train of metal mules. Bowling beside me is a line of Recreational Vehicles also heading west. Now and then the aluminium pod of an old-style trailer passes by, cutting the air with reflections.

To an American, and more particularly to a westerner, the Recreational Vehicle must be an almost invisible part of the mobile landscape, but a European can only stare as the hulking trucks, passing themselves off as miniature moving idylls, lumber gracelessly along the freeway. We don’t have sufficient wide roads to accommodate them, our cities are too close together, the gas they require is too expensive, we are not rich enough to buy them, we go abroad for our holidays, and, most of all although this is changing – we do not recreate. Recreating is an all-American invention. Americans are compelled to possess their leisure as they are compelled to possess most anything, and to be fully the owner of their leisure, they must accumulate experience. This is why the American recreator will happily schedule in a dozen European capitals in a week, but still won’t hang around in the Sistine Chapel if the paper in the toilets runs out. For the American recreator it is the quantity of experience that matters, not its quality.

After two hours on the road I pull into a rest area, find a spot under a mesquite tree and doze a while with the air conditioning high. I wake up to a woman knocking on the window for two quarters to put in the soda machine. Quite a crowd has gathered in the parking lot, a line of RVs competes for space directly in front of the restrooms, map and vending machines. The woman returns, wanting to introduce me to her dogs. Jeez, dog-lovers.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘this place is full of Mexicans and Indians. Mexicans and Indians. Folks like us are outnumbered. At least it feels that way.’ We finish the soda in the ‘65 Scottie trailer she bought six months ago with the redundancy payoff from a marketing job in Pennsylvania. ‘Came out here, followed the myth,’ she says, ‘and I liked it.’ She doesn’t know how much longer it will be before she settles down somewhere and builds another life.

‘This dog here’s too old to be on the road,’ she says, ‘he needs a place where he can feel comfortable enough to go ahead and die.’

Pinned up in the Scottie is a portrait of Ross Perot taken during his presidential campaign, still looking like a VE-Day vet after all these years.

The rest area feels as though an RV convention pulled in; RVs piled high inside with kids and bulk-buy Kool Aid alongside modest little trailers with chromium trim and lines of rivets, looking like some by-product of rocket science. A couple descend from an ancient Winnebago with Illinois plates and sit under the shade of a cottonwood sucking Diet Cokes in silent contemplation.