by Tom Robbins
Now, when the first guide reaches the terminus of his burrow and the beginning of the next, he instructs the guide for the Second Burrow to remove his blindfold, and then binds his own eyes. And so it goes until the group is at the large central chamber that contains the clockworks. There, they go about “keeping the time” until the hour for the return trip. Theoretically, the thirteen daily guides emerge from the Great Burrow at sunset, although this occurs in actuality only on those days when there are thirteen hours of daylight.
Occasionally other people accompany the guides on their mission. An aged or sickly person who is about to die or a pregnant woman commencing labor is led, blindfolded, to the central burrow, for insofar as it is possible, all Clock People deaths and births occur in the presence of the clockworks. Aside from birthing or dying, the reason for the daily visits to the clockworks is to check the time.
Maybe we should say “check the times,” for the clockworks is really two clocks and the sort of time each one measures is quite distinct. (Maybe we should also establish that it is the original clockworks that is being described here: there was later to be another, and the second figures even more prominently in our story.)
First, there is a huge hourglass, at least seven feet in diameter and thirteen feet tall, made from the finely stitched and tightly stretched internal membranes of large beasts (elk, bears, mountain lions). The hourglass is filled with acorns, enough so that it takes them approximately thirteen hours to pour or funnel, one by one, through the slender passage in the waist of the transparent device. When the daily guides enter the soul burrow, the hourglass is turned on its opposite end. When they depart—in approximately thirteen hours—they flip it again. So “checking the time,” or “keeping the time” is, in the twenty-six-hour day of the Clock People, the same as “making time,” or, more generally, “making history.” The Clock People believe that they are making history and that the end of history will come with the destruction of the clockworks.
Please do not construe the “end of history” or the “end of time” to mean “the end of life” or what is normally meant by the apocalyptically minded when they speak (almost wishfully, it seems) of the “end of the world.” That is paranoiac rubbish, and however one may finally evaluate the Clock People, their philosophy must be appreciated on a higher plane than doomsday drivel.
Well, then, what do the Clock People mean by the end of history and how will the clockworks be destroyed?
Zoom in on this: These people, these clandestinely exiled Indians, have no other ritual than this one: THE CHECKING OF THE CLOCKWORKS—the keeping/making of history. Likewise, they have but one legend or cultural myth: that of a continuum they call the Eternity of Joy. It is into the Eternity of Joy that they believe all men will pass once the clockworks is destroyed. They look forward to a state of timelessness, when bored, frustrated and unfulfilled people will no longer have to “kill time,” for time will finally be dead.
They are preparing for timelessness by eliminating from their culture all rules, schedules and moral standards other than those that are directly involved with the keeping of the clockworks. The Clock People may be the most completely anarchistic community that has ever existed. Rather, they may be the first community so far in which anarchy has come close to working. That is impressive in itself and should fan with peacock tails of optimism all those who dream of the ideal social condition.
The Clock People manage their anarchism (if that is not a contradiction) simply because they have channeled all of their authoritarian compulsions and control mania into a single ritual. It is clearly understood by all members of the community that there is no other ritual, no other required belief than this ONE—and, furthermore, that they themselves created the ritual: they have no silly superstitions about gods or ancestor spirits who hold this ritual over their heads in return for homage and/or “good” conduct.
Ritual, usually, is an action or ceremony employed to create a unity of mind among a congregation or community. The Clock People see the keeping of the clockworks as the last of the communal rituals. With the destruction of the clockworks, that is, at the end of time, all rituals will be personal and idiosyncratic, serving not to unify a community/cult in a common cause but to link each single individual with the universe in whatever manner suits him or her best. Unity will give way to plurality in the Eternity of Joy, although, since the universe is simultaneously many and One, whatever links the individual to the universe will automatically link him or her to all others, even while it enhances his or her completely separate identity in an eternal milkshake unclabbered by time. Thus, paradoxically, the replacement of societal with individual rituals will bring about an ultimate unity vastly more universal than the plexus of communal rites that presently divides peoples into unwieldy, agitating and competing groups.
Now, the Clock People, being visionaries, are not content with their time-checking ritual. After all, it is the lone authoritarian, compulsive action that binds them. They chafe to dispense with it. If it could be eliminated, they could pass out of history and into the Eternity of Joy. Timeless, they could bear their children and bury their dead wherever they chose. However, they understand that at this evolutionary stage they still require the ritual, even as they realize that destroying the clockworks is entirely within their power.
They will not destroy it. They have agreed—and this is central to their mythos—that the destruction must come from the outside, must come by natural means, must come at the will (whim is more like it) of that gesticulating planet whose more acute stirrings thoughtless people call “earthquakes.”
Here, we can understand a bit more about the origins of their culture. The great rumble of 1906, which destroyed practically the whole of San Francisco, was taken by the Indians as a sign. They had left the land and gone to the city. That the city could be destroyed by the land in sixty-five seconds gave them a clue as to where the real power lay.
Within a natural context the phenomenon would never have appeared as a holocaust. Away from the herding centers we prize as cities, an “earthquake” would manifest itself only as a surface quickening of the globe's protoplastic movements, which, at various depths and various intensities, are occurring all of the time, and so not in time but all over time. Being “all over time” is the same as being out of time, because the notion of time is welded inseparably to the notion of progression, but what is already everywhere cannot possibly progress.
From there, it is a short leap to the ledge of the dream: the Eternity of Joy (a continuous present in which everything, including the dance of aging, which we mistake as a chronological unfolding rather than a fixed posture of deepening cellular awareness, is taken together and always).
When the citizens of San Francisco began immediately to rebuild their city, the Indians were understandably very disappointed. The white (and yellow) San Franciscans hadn't learned a thing. They had been given a sign—a powerful, lucid sign—that urban herding and its concomitant technologies are not the proper way to partake of this planet's hospitality. (Actually, there are countless ways to live upon this tremorous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way—the industrialized, urbanized, herding way—to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one wrong way.) The people of San Francisco failed to heed the sign. They capitulated, opting to stay in time and so out of eternity.
Readers may wonder why the Indians, who recognized the earthquake for what it really was, did not simply usher in the Eternity of Joy then and there. Well, they had both a realistic view and a sense of humor regarding their situation. They understood that it would take at least three or four generations to cleanse them of previous cultural deposits. The patriarchs—only two or three of whom are still alive—reasoned that if they could channel all of their fellows' frustrations and self-destructive compulsions into a single, simple ritual, then two things would follow. One, outside that ritual, the community could experiment freely with styles of life instead of the attractions
of death. Two, sooner or later, the Earth would issue another potent sign, one powerful enough to destroy their last icon of time-bound culture, the clockworks, ending the ritual even while it was reshaping much of American civilization.
Which brings us, ticking, to the matter of the second clock. The first clock in the original clockworks, the membrane hourglass, sits in a pool of water. The Great Burrow is situated upon a deep fracture, a major branch of the San Andreas Fault. The Sierra fault is clearly shown on geological maps of Northern California (which does hint at the location of the original clockworks, doesn't it? even though the fracture is very long). In addition, the underground stream that feeds the Great Burrow pool flows directly into the San Andreas Fault. That pool of water is the second clock into the clockworks system. Consider its components.
Moments prior to an earthquake, certain sensitive persons experience nausea. Animals, such as cattle, are even more sensitive to prequake vibrations, feeling them earlier and more strongly. By far the most quake-sensitive creatures in existence are catfish. Readers, this is scientific fact; the doubtful among you should not hesitate to check it out. Catfish.
Now, there is a species of catfish, hereditarily sightless, that dwells exclusively in subterranean streams. Its Latin name is Satan eurystomus, again for the skeptical, but spelunkers know these fish as blindcats. Relatively rare in California, blindcats are quite common in the caverns and caves of the Ozark states and Texas.
The clockworks pool is inhabited by such catfish. Their innate catfish earthquake sensitivity is compounded by the fact that they are tuned in, fin and whisker, to the vibrations of one of the globe's largest and most frenetic fault systems. When a tremor of any Richterian passion is building, the catfish go into a state of shock. They cease feeding, and when they move at all, it is erratically. By constantly monitoring changes in the Earth's magnetic field or the tilt of the Earth's surface or the rate of movement and intensity of stress where faults are slowly creeping, seismologists have correctly predicted a handful of minor tremors, though with no great exactitude. The clockworks catfish, on the other hand, have registered upcoming quakes as far away as Los Angeles (in 1971) and as early as four weeks in advance.
On the earthen walls of the Central Burrow, the Clock People have marked in sequence the dates and intensities of all tremors, mad or mild, that have occurred along the two thousand miles of West Coast faults since 1908. The whole pattern, transcribed from the catfish clock, reveals a rhythmic structure that indicates to the rhythmic minds of the Indians that something emphatic is going to be coming along any week now.
This peek on destruction is Pythagorean only in the sense that with the cataclysmic konking of the last vestige of cultural ritual will come the kind of complete social and psychic freedom that only natural timeless anarchy can offer, the birth of a new people into the Eternity of Joy.
The Clock People regard civilization as an insanely complex set of symbols that obscures natural processes and encumbers free movement. The Earth is alive. She burns inside with the heat of cosmic longing. She longs to be with her husband again. She moans. She turns softly in her sleep. When the symbologies of civilization are destroyed, there will be no more “earthquakes.” Earthquakes are a manifestation of man's consciousness. Without manmade follies, there could not be earthquakes. In the Eternity of Joy, pluralized, deurbanized man, at ease with his gentle technologies, will smile and sigh when the Earth begins to shake. “She is restless tonight,” they will say.
“She dreams of loving.”
“She has the blues.”
62.
IN THE FLIPPERS of dolphins there are five skeletal fingers.
Once upon a time, dolphins had hands.
Observing the residual fingers that remain in their flippers, it is possible to conclude that dolphins had opposable thumbs.
Picture a dolphin holding an ace. Picture a dolphin plucking petals from a daisy: loves me, loves me not. Picture a dolphin, way back when, drawing an astrological chart and discovering that all of its planets were in Pisces. Can you see a dolphin fingering its blowhole? A dolphin at a typewriter writing this book?
Imagine the dolphin, a land animal then (although the Pisces Express stops only at the bottom of the sea), wagging a slick thumb in the lizard-filtered air of prehistory, hitchhiking to Atlantis or Gondwanaland. Would you pick up a hitchhiking dolphin? What if you were driving a Barracuda?
Look, look, look, the author wants to say (to the shortsighted and temporal-minded), the dolphin used to have thumbs! Ponder that when you have a moment. Right now, however, dolphin thumb is eclipsed by Sissy thumb. Flexing in a sooty city garden.
Dr. Robbins, bottoming out the wine, wished to know if the Chink swallowed the Clock People's ideas.
The answer was, and is, no, he never was in total agreement with the Clock People's viewpoints and suppositions, and as the years passed, he agreed with them less instead of more. However, he fell into the hands of the Clock People at a time when most of the world was banging heads together bloodily over vague, meaningless manias such as economic expansion and ethnocentric geopolitics, and his own peoples, the Japanese and the Americans, were among the most fanatical about victory as they prayed to the gods of bullets and taught their babies to walk on the edge of the knife. So, when he met the thirteen families of the Great Burrow and learned the rhymes and reasons of the clockworks, the Chink emitted a long overdue “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” Said he, “It is reassuring to see on the planet signs of intelligent life.”
“My sentiments exactly,” mused Dr. Robbins, as he watched the shadows of Sissy's thumbs leaping like dolphins against the garden wall.
63.
AMONG THE CLOCK PEOPLE, who never had tasted a yam nor seen a whooper, who were unfamiliar with the practice of hitchhiking, who would have been flabbergasted by a can of Yoni Yum and who knew better than to believe in such Fig Newtons of the American imagination as cowgirls, the Chink dwelt for twenty-six years.
For the first eight of those years, he lived virtually as a Clock Person himself, an honorary member of the Family of the Thirteenth Burrow, sharing its food, lodging and women. (Being an anarchistic, or, more precisely, a pluralistic society, some of the Clock People were monogamous, some, perhaps most, practitioners of free love. In a pluralistic society, love quickly shows all of its many smeared and smiling faces, and it should be noted that the term family was relevant only to the clockworks ritual, outside which there was uninhibited intermingling. For example, a man from the Family of the Fifth Burrow might impregnate an Eleventh Burrow lady, and the resulting child, once of age, might be assigned to the Family of the Ninth Burrow.)
In 1951, the war now only a glint in the American Legion's shell-popped eye, the Chink moved into a shack that he built some nine or ten miles west of the Great Burrow. The shack was strategically erected at the narrow entrance to the valley, which, with a creek as its racing stripe, totaled out against the base of the tunnel-filled knoll. In the other direction, a couple of miles beyond the shack, was a trail that led to a dirt road that led to a paved highway that led past, eventually, a combination gas station, café and general store. The Chink began to take fortnightly hikes to that store, where he picked up newspapers and magazines, along with other supplies. These he read to those Clock People (all spoke English but few could read it) who were interested; these were mainly the younger ones, the old Indians regarding that “news” that did not have to do with quakes, hurricanes, floods and other geophysical shenanigans as trivia. The belch of civilization, they called it. Maybe the older Indians were right. It was the Eisenhower Years, remember, and the news read as if it had been washed out of a Pentagon desk commander's golf socks.
The Chink also linked the older Indians with the rest of the world, but in a different manner. Throughout the decades, the Clock People had mysteriously maintained periodic contact with certain Indians on the outside. These outside contacts were medicine men or shamans, although exactly what was their relatio
nship to the clockworks ritual and Eternity of Joy legend the Chink was never to ascertain. However, in the mid-fifties, one or more of these outsiders took to showing up at the Sierra store at the precise hours of the Chink's unannounced visits. They'd drink a beer with him and give him a piece or two of seemingly insignificant gossip, which he would feel compelled to pass along once he was back at the Great Burrow. Thus, he functioned as a medium, as the air is the medium for drumbeats, connecting Clock People, young and old, with distant drummers.
He also functioned as an agent of diversion. When hunters, hikers or prospectors entered the area, the Chink used his wiles to guide them away from the vicinity of the Great Burrow. Conversation studded with tips about game, scenic waterfalls or ore deposits was usually enough to divert the intruders, but occasionally a small rock slide or other mishap would have to be arranged. Even so, a few interlopers, especially rangers of the U.S. Forest Service, slipped through the Chink's net. Those who got too close were slain by the Clock People. From 1965 to 1969, seven outsiders took arrows through their breasts and were buried inside the Great Burrow.
These slayings were a source of contention between the Chink and the Clock People, the latter regarding them as the regrettable but necessary price of protection, the former declaring, “There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.”
The Chink tried to impress upon the Clock People that, with the increase in air traffic over the mountains, as well as in the number of outdoorsmen whom civilization was driving into the wilderness, it was only a matter of “time” before their culture was exposed. What would they do then? Obviously, the System would not be gracious enough to leave them alone. “We will hide in the tunnels,” answered some of the middle-aged. “We will defend ourselves to the death,” answered some of the youths. “The movements of the Earth will take care of all that,” answered the elders, smiling enigmatically.