KUMQUAT SHAMAN

Trying to chronicle my life histories, which by now you may have guessed expand many lives, I am not to clear in what order these things may have occurred to me or may have occurred to themselves. I say to themselves because there are so many experiences that I often think that there had to be more of me or many things which were not me experiencing themselves and fiddling their awareness within me. Cleopatra for instance could not have been just one person. But I am trying to maintain a sequence of sorts so that you don’t end up in some jagged edge and cease all interest in thinking about me. If you think about me I am that much larger, we make each other through our awareness of one another. A tree that you chop down never forgets you. A deer you shoot saves your image for ever in her eye. Don’t forget me.

The linearity of my biography, with the exception of the unspeakable, is based on what I remember, there must be some logic as to why I remember each thing in that order, so I hope that the sequence that divines itself works the magic for you. And so we move on to my next memory of myself .

I was sitting under a kumquat tree, I don’t really know what a kumquat tree is, I don’t even know if such a tree is large enough for one to sit under the thing, but I am telling you the truth. Sometimes as I remember things I don’t necessarily remember my state of being, I may have been an armadillo sitting under a kumquat tree, or maybe I was a giraffe wit my head under a kumquat tree, you can make it happen.

But I do remember eating a kumquat that had fallen on my head, and that sparked one and more memories. If you have never eaten a kumquat you ought to. It is a surreal experience, really surreal. It is this sort of orangely yellowish bluntly round fruit that is rotting from the moment it is ripe, and mostly not rotting so mostly ripe. And when you got to eat it you measure the idea that you might not eat the rotten parts but they are so strangely distributed, that it seems like you are going to have to destroy the whole fruit to accomplish eating the pleasantly ripe portions, and so it was that after contemplating this, I finally decided to just eat the whole thing.

As it is natural, the first time you eat a fruit you sort of eat it slowly so that if it turns out to have a large pit such as apricots, which have a pit that makes you not want to consume them because when you see a naked apricot pit it makes you sick. It looks exactly like a small tumor, and that is what you find after you eat an apricot, you are left with a small tumor, there is nothing pleasant about that. The most succulent and adorable fruit to eat is a Kiwi, I have an orgasmic expulsing feeling run through my being when Kiwi fruit enters my mouth, so gentle it caresses your tongue, it teases your taste buds; you will never know exactly what a kiwi taste like, you are always trying to assert what it is that makes it taste so good, you are baffled by it, I mean your eating a kiwi you are in some gentle way, even the pits are delicious, you don’t even think of picking them off, which is how kiwis reproduce, you then go and shit somewhere and something good will grow from that. Apricots do not like to be eaten and you have to be ugly to eat apricots, pretty people don’t eat apricots to flesh out a tumor, horror. Do a survey and you will find this out for yourself, you will find that apricots are popular with dentists and generals.

So I gently applied squashing pressure with my lips all around this tiny fruit, just a little over two centimeters in diameter, and the kumquat just begun to fall apart oozing out of itself, sort off, as if something was being born from it and it was just opening itself wider and wider no resistance only resilience, and when I caught a feel of the first pit it was huge, the thing might a been bigger that the kumquat, and then appeared another and so no sooner had I tossed one kumquat pit away when I found two and three all the way up to five and all of the pits seemed far larger in size than the fruit itself, and they were dark and alien looking, they had nothing in common with the kumquat, they were just evil brides from some evil world and I was releasing them into this one; and get this, the kumquat tasted wonderful, a sort of sweet and soft taste, I liked it! Just like aliens to get into our planet with something inoffensively tasty. But I am telling you that I felt really weird realizing those pits so much so that after the first two I refused to look at the others, I just flung them as far from me as I could and was done with that.

But the experience brought home to me a memory of armadillo hunting. Kumquat eating and armadillo hunting, yes the connection is obvious. I was a Chicha Indian, don’t ask me when in men years, I don’t know, but I remember being this Chicha Indian running around with a very sorry looking and overly long stick or spear armadillo hunting, and we trapped one, them armadillos run fasts, but they were no mach for our corralling abilities. And we Chichas were very good at corralling things. We ate a lot of meat, we had to be good at it. Besides that our tribe had in the beginnings been ruled by Chicha women, I don’t know much about that period, it was early in our history, but the little that is said of it is not good, so we Chicha men took power and corralled the women and things got a little better. It is all about corralling for us, so armadillos have it better to hide from us.

We Chichas never adopted farming, you see that requires to much thinking, preparation, and you have to have a lot of faith, faith that things are really going to grow, and that the rain god is going to throw you rain and you have to dance really hard for that, and we weren’t into rituals, even our sex was not erotic we went straight in and got on with it, maybe it was different when the women were our leaders, but if so we did not remember that. Occasionally one of our woman would get armadillo eagerness to run away and we the men would corral her and gang on her like with the armadillos. Everyone had fun. Besides being meat eaters we liked a lot of fun, Chicha, the name of our tribe, was not derived from the name of our beer it was the name of our beer!

I was one of the smarter one’s in our tribe, you could tell this because I did not eat horse or human meat. The others did, I was one of a few that saw horses and humans as non-edibles. Oh I had eaten both on occasion, horses taste better than humans, humans have a tendency to make a big deal out of getting killed which taints the flavor of the meat badly bitter. Horses just think it is going to happen and get this look on their faces like they are really scared but they are not, they just don’t want to be eaten willingly, they know that meat that fights its way into the stomach is better preserved. Humans get all frantic as soon as they know they are supper they just squirm like chickens, chickens and humans horses and pigs, strong associations accordingly. Anyway the humans we ate were usually the slaves we would capture, which we never kept for long because of our nomadic life style, hence the need to eat them or trade them, and slaves run really skinny not a lot of fat on them, I like fat I love fat, I love pigs and cows, you can feed me fat any time. I have carried that trait into this life, I eat meat every day, and if I don’t eat meat every day I feel bad, really bad. In my tribe, when we wanted a wife we gave her a cow, no real woman could say no to a cow.

Anyway I was one of the wiser Chichas and so I became friendly with one of our stranger tribesman, he was old, don’t ask me how old in men years I just know that he was old, he was strange in that he had abandoned many of our traits, he would not eat our meats, nor go on our hunts, you had to hunt to eat meat, only a woman would not hunt, but he was not a woman, he was strange. He ate fruits and grasses and kept to himself, we sort of let him be, he sort of kept a distance back, we would roam to our next location which change every few days, and he would follow a sun and a moon behind. Catching up to us as we were setting a feasting fire, and chicha drinking our tribe. We called him Horai. The name means stranger, but in a very bad way, sort of like the pits in kumquat, it can be in something that you eat but you won’t eat it and you try not to look at it as much as possible. Horai was mindful of that.

The problem with Horai was that he kept on telling stories about the bird man that he was, that he was here to fly our tribe some place else, a distant some place else, that eventually we would all grow feathers and fly away like birds. We were nomads, we did not have cities like the Incas and the Aztecs, I may have preferred to be born into one of those regal tribes, and certainly dress in fancy feather gear like Apaches. But we knew what an Armadillo and a woman were, both a lot of fun, we did not need to be imagining things, to be frank we did not even have an art form. We did not sit around thinking that there were magic bushes or spirits in the dangers of the forests, when it did not rain, we simply said that there was no water, when we had not animals or slaves to kill we simply ate one of our unruly young. Calm things down a bit.

Sure we were not isolationists, occasionally on our long circled travels, we would encounter Indians that made pottery to practice rituals with those things, we saw them celebrate a wedding, husband and wife taking each others drinking bowls and poring each their blood into a larger bowl from which the two would drink as one. We saw them wear rings around their ears and on their belly buttons; and we saw them erect temples to which they would surrender living animals with all their flesh still in the bones, surrendered to the altar and non to be eaten; we saw them do all that and then burn the temple to the ground. And we never were aware of what all that meant or what all that was.

Horai, however thought that our tribe had a future with the birds and Horai would be the first to fly away with them, he kept on telling us all this over and over again, and as the story never changed, we all suspected it was from his eating all those berries and no meat, and soon it came to be that I was Horai’s only friend, I didn’t believe him any more than the others, I was not a fool and the idea of not eating meat to become a bird seemed to me horrid, I would rather be alligator.

Then one day, Horai said to me, “I am as old as I will ever be.” Again I was smart one in our tribe but that meant nothing to me, I took it to mean nothing special Horai has said plenty of things that meant nothing to me, and so I just drank some more chicha to calm any questions that might dare rise from me. But Horai did not cease with these words, he went around to all of the members of the tribe saying “I am as old as I will ever be.” And the tribe would just laugh at him like wild dogs, “mas chicha mas chicha.” We even suspected that maybe some berries had fermented in his stomach or that someone had filled him full of chicha. It is true you know that chicha stops you from hunting. Many a hunters that have gone out there with chicha on their bellies never return.

That late afternoon, Horai asked the tribe to come see him fly away, he would go to the highest mountain and from there fly like a bird. The tribe had seen plenty of birds fly and was not moved into seeing one more. I felt a bit sad for Horai, sadness does not come easily to us, but I was one of the smart ones, I could feel a bit sad, so I told him that I would accompany him. He nodded, and I followed him up to the mountain which leaned towards the other side and into a sea of unknown jungle.

At the very peak, we really only climbed to the third tallest, but Horai was going to fly higher it did not matter which peak he was really taking off from. I got a little uneasy, it was windy and cold, very cold, did not seem like a good day but maybe that is why it was a good day for Horai to leave. We had said nothing to each other all the way up, and now we said nothing, he walked to the edge, turned his head back to give me one last look and jumped.

I was startled for a second but then nothing that I had not expected had taken place, and so I regained myself and walked back down the mountain. When I arrived everyone was waiting for me, they were all eager to know if he had flown away. I trembled at the crowed, they would be expecting my answer but I fluttered into a strange despair, and then for my friend Horai, I yelled with spirited arms in the air: “He flew! He flew! He flew!”

Since that, now celebrated day, many Chichas have flown…