by Norman Rush
On the second day the terrain changed. There were long dips and rises. I let the boys graze liberally anytime they seemed inclined. Around noon I had my first phenomenological oddity, having to do with light. It came suddenly. There was a surplus of light. I felt I was getting too much light, despite the fact that I was wearing sunglasses that were practically black. The sky was cloudless. An irrational sign or proof that there was too much light was that I thought I could detect a barely visible flicker in the sky just above the horizon. I tried to push this whole subject out of my consciousness, but it persisted. I thought it might be low blood sugar speaking, so I ate some raisins. Peculiar ideation about light continued.
My sunglasses began to feel heavy and irritating. They were preventing something significant from happening. I developed the conviction that they were keeping me from seeing the real colors of the Kalahari and that this was hazardous for me. I would be in danger unless I recharged my sense of the real colors of things by taking my glasses off at some regular interval. I yielded to this notion, mainly in order to exhaust it, but each time I pushed my glasses up onto my forehead I had a stronger sense of some suppressed vibration going on in the landscape which I would be able to see clearly if I looked more intently and for a longer period the next time. This is brain chemistry, I said, and squatted down and hung my head between my knees. I got up, pulled the visor of my kepi down tight, put my glasses back on, and thought about the hunchbacks of Kang.
I was then all right for twenty minutes, until the mania came back reformulated as the proposition that if I actually got rid of my sunglasses, and only if, I would be able to see the true and fundamental color of nature. I was to understand that what we perceive as beautiful individual colors are only corruptions and distortions of the true color of reality, which is ravishing and ultimate and apprehensible only in extremely rare circumstances. This was not a question of hallucination. It was analogous to dream knowledge, but different. I knew that for some reason at some deep level I was doing this to myself. But still I was tempted to act. I said aloud things like This is about self-injury, This is about self-worth, What are we to ourselves? and other pop-psych trash. The experience was strange in every way. Was I trying to get myself to turn around and go back to Kang before it was too late, because navigating in the Kalahari without sunglasses is one thing for Bushmen who have presumably been adapting their vision to a surplus of light for millennia and another thing for a lakhoa already in a state of anxiety? On any trip like mine there’s a point of no return. So was this some ideational response to the fact, which I was already having to fight to repress, that I was over my head? Had my brilliant unconscious chosen the one thing that if discarded would virtually disable me for making the long trip to Tsau but be manageable for a quick retreat back to Kang and safety? I think what broke the grip of this mania on me was firstly just hearing my own voice, whatever it was saying, and, secondly, remembering reading about someone who had been lost in the Kalahari and survived it reporting that he had had to get past a point when he experienced the desert as an organism or totality trying to get him to become part of it, as in surrender to it. This would make my sunglasses mania an analog of the feeling people lost in the Arctic get that they would be more comfortable if they took off their caps and mittens. The mania left, also suddenly, and we went on uneventfully.
That night I did everything right. I wore myself out collecting enough wood for a ring fire, got us all set up inside it, went into my tent, and closed my eyes, and immediately there were lions in the neighborhood. There may have been only one. I heard a roar like no other sound on earth. I felt it in my atoms. This is my reward for taking precautions, was my first thought.
I made myself emerge. I peered around. My boys were standing pressed together and shaking pathetically. I looked for glints from lion eyes out in the dark but saw nothing. Everything I did I managed to do with one hand on the flap of my tent.
Again I went through my lion lore. Lions roar only after they’ve eaten, for example. The paradox is that ultimately I slept better that night than I had the night before. I fell asleep clutching my bush knife.
In the morning I found it hard to eat. There was terror in me. I could die in this place, it was clear.
I dawdled breaking camp because I wanted to give any lions there were a head start at getting torpid. Lions are torpid during the day, was a key part of my lore package.
Music
Anyone who thinks crossing the Kalahari by yourself is boring is deluded. It’s like being self-employed in a marginal enterprise: there’s always something you should be doing if your little business is going to survive. For example, you should always be lashing a stick around ahead of you through the thicker grass to warn snakes to get back. But this isn’t enough, because there are adders, who pay no attention to noise and just flatten themselves when they hear you coming, the better for you to step on them: so you have to be persistent about watching where you walk. Then you have to be careful not to walk directly under tree limbs without looking keenly to see if there are mambas or boomslangs aloft. You also have to keep resetting your level of vigilance, because your forearm muscles, the extensors in particular, begin to burn, the lashing motion being one you’re totally unaccustomed to. In addition to which there is the sun to be careful about. I was keeping myself smeared with something I bought for three pula at Botschem that was supposed to be a strong sunscreen, but I was turning red in strips and patches anyway. And you have to be watchful for ticks. In only one way was I in luck, and that was in regard to dehydration. This was mid-April, that is to say mid-autumn, and perfect walking weather. In summer you could expect to lose about three pounds of water in a day of walking in the full sun.
You do need mental self-management, though, as I’d already partially learned, to get through solitudes like the Kalahari successfully. Fear itself is not enough to fully sustain and occupy you. On the whole I think I did well, which would have amazed certain lightweight women at the American embassy whose name for me, I learned much later, was Party Lights, based on their interpretation of my way of life—lifestyle to them, no doubt—in Gabs.
I was nervous and so were my animals, postlion. I stumbled on singing as a means of calming them down. I was singing for myself, initially, and then noticed that it seemed to help the boys too, especially Mmo. This is ridiculous, but they seemed to prefer complete songs to fragments of songs strung together with humming. I discovered how few songs I knew in full and how few songs of the ones I did know I knew more than one verse of. I think I must have a more complete sense of my total song inventory than anyone else has of theirs, except for professional singers. I know roughly which songs I know only the choruses of. I know which songs I know but discovered I couldn’t stand to sing in the desert, You Are My Sunshine being a prime example of a song I loathed suddenly to which I had never had any objection previously. And there are other songs you have sung only halfheartedly in the past which in the desert suddenly give you peace and seem indispensable, like Die Gedanken Sind Frei. You are astonished at the number of separate songs that have gotten fused together in your mind in some manner that makes it impossible to separate them, à la What do you want for breakfast my good old man? What do you want for breakfast my honey my lamb? Even God is uneasy say the bells of Swansea. And what will you give me say the bells of Rhymney? And there were songs I knew in full and perfectly but which I had no recollection of ever paying attention to when they were popular, like Heart of Glass, now a favorite of mine forever. Songs help when you’ve under duress, which is undoubtedly why the Boer geniuses of cruelty forbid people in solitary confinement to sing.
I was singing so continuously that I began to find I disliked it when I stopped—I disliked that ambience. I was briefly an aide in a nursery school for neglected children, and the best-adapted, happiest, and smartest children in the place were three sisters who had been taken from a mother who kept them chained to a radiator so they would be safe while she was out cir
culating, and who when I asked them what they did all the time when they were alone said We sang. The inspiriting effect my singing had on my animals was not an illusion, and it reminds me now of the period when I was feeling depressed at how commonplace and rudimentary my dreams were compared to Denoon’s. He claimed to dream infrequently, but when he did, his dreams were like something by Fabergé or Kafka in their uniqueness. He would have noetic dreams, and when they were over he would be left in possession of some adage or percept that tells you something occult or fundamental about the world. One of these was the conviction he woke up with one morning that music was the remnant of a medium that had been employed in the depths of the past as a means of communication between men and animals—I assume man arrow animal and not ducks playing flutes to get their point across to man. Living with me made him more provisional about his dreams, especially after I compared one of his adages to a statement some famous surrealist was left with after dreaming, which he thought important enough to print up: Beat your mother while she’s still young. I would always make Denoon at least try to reduce his insights to a sentence or two. The fact is I laugh at dreams. They seem to me to be some kind of gorgeous garbage. I have revenge dreams, mainly, in which I tell significant figures from my past things like You have the brains of a drum. On I sang.
Is it absurd to be proud of your dreams, or not? Denoon was.
Poetry let me down. I elided into poetry from time to time and discovered that I knew a lot of it. My attitude toward rhymed poetry changed utterly. Respect was born. Except for Dover Beach there was almost nothing unrhymed in my inventory. I know quite a lot of Kipling. I know some Vachel Lindsay. Finally one stanza out of Elizabeth Bishop got hold of me and kept inserting itself between pieces of other poems, truculently. It maddened me both by its tenacity and by what it said: Far down the highway wet and black, I’ll ride and ride and not come back, I’m going to go and take the bus, and find someone monogamous. I used opera to drive this away.
Serious Trouble
Serious trouble began on the fourth or fifth day out. It happened because I was doing a thing I had been warned not to do in the desert: I was reviewing my life. Actually I was thinking about an aspect of my life, to wit, who would miss me the most if I was reported lost. Also I was thinking in general about how easy it would be to vanish physically in the Kalahari, how quickly you would turn into dust and be distributed, the usual. I had been advised by people like the lion man to keep my consciousness in my superfices, my skin and eyes and ears, my legs, to be a scanning mechanism and nothing else while I was in the desert. Also I had been told not to try to figure out everything that was odd that might happen to me, like an impulse to stand stockstill, which I had in fact had a couple of times but, naturally I need to point out, only after I had been apprised that this might happen to me. The reason I think I was letting my mind drift in these directions was that I was tired of the singing and chanting that had served me so well during the first leg of my madness. Also I had been told to forget all the Bushman notions I knew, the bizarre items. I hadn’t known what these were, but I was curious to know, so I’d bought more drinks for the lion man, whose face was lined so authoritatively you could faint. Apparently Bushmen say they can hear the sun burning, to which I say So what? The lion man had been touted to me as the ultimate authority on the Kalahari. He did look like an authority, but he was an authority who was living to drink, insofar as I could tell. The Bushmen say they can hear a faint hiss from the sun, he said, as I wondered if this was something he had thought up because he had me in front of him squinting for the truth about the Kalahari. There was a woman who knew everything I wanted to know, someone I would have trusted, she had lived in the Kalahari, but she was no longer around. She had become unwelcome to the government. One thing I am sure of is that the lion man dyes his hair. I had been oblique with the lion man about whether I myself was actually going into the Kalahari, but he knew.
Just after breaking camp in the morning and going through agonies over whether I was giving enough water to the boys—we had missed at least one water point and were doing rations—I thought I heard a short sharp noise that must be a gunshot: like the lion roar, just the one event. Was this an everyday natural thing no one bothers to investigate? We were in a very barren area. When the sound came I felt faint. But then nothing. We proceeded again.
I was trying to buck myself up by reminding myself, apropos the lion man’s stories, that the desire to tell stories is not always the same thing as the desire to convey the truth, when we came to a locale I hated from the outset. It was a grassy, thickly wooded basin. The grass was a coarse gray-green type I knew was unpopular with my boys unless they were at the very end of their tether. I felt I had no choice but to go through this place, which was extensive. The ground was spongeous in spots. The feeling was claustral. The trees, low thorn trees, struck me as very uniform, almost the way trees look in children’s art. The trees were clotted with mud nests, weaverbird nests, sometimes six in a tree. But there was no birdlife. The nests were dead. Not only were there no birds but there was none of the mild almost subliminal background shuffling caused by animals like springhares and lizards you become used to sensing. I kept yawning, for no reason.
To be frank, I think that one thing that led me into the grove was a desperate feeling about my innards. There was a feeling of privacy. We would be out of view in this place. I was hoping and yearning for a sign that this might be the place where I would be restored to normal in this respect at least, that the enclosedness of the scene might summon something. In the normal parts of the Kalahari you are on display for miles in every direction.
There was a sinister gestalt that clearly I began cooperating with and adding to, as in finding the air not only thick but actually fetid, and so on. There may have been a barometric anomaly taking place, it now occurs to me. We went deeper into the grove. My boys were nervous and acting out, and this also affected me. If they’d been placid I could have used that to moderate my readings-in, but they were increasingly jangled and wired-seeming as we proceeded. What was the origin of all the folklore about dogs and horses being sensitive to the presence of ghosts? I wanted to know. It was multicultural, so did it have some basis in reality? The Batswana believed it.
But mainly I wanted to know why my life path had led me into such a frightening place, if I was as intelligent as I was supposed to be. It was because of a fixation on another human, a male. But why had the conviction that this kind of fixation befalls women much more often than it does men not been enough to deter me a little, stop me from acting so generically so precipitously? Somehow this place was worse than anything so far, worse than hearing the lion roar, which I was already pathetically recasting as possibly having been a dream in any case. Also it was abundantly clear I would never be able to relax enough in the grove to think of my bodily processes.