Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


Then minute anaerobic bacteria and plant life began to emerge, polluting the atmosphere with sufficient “waste”----oxygen---poisonous to our anaerobic predecessors but life-giving to the unknown coming species of aerobic life and animalcule creatures waiting on the wings of destiny to follow them. Miraculously, the realms of plant life and animal life then reached a life-giving equilibrium, sharing and recycling a newly formed viable atmosphere, by which the plants through photosynthesis gave out the oxygen needed for animal life, while the animals through respiration converted this back into CO2 needed for plant metabolism, a fruitful yet accidental gaseous symbiosis. Then a riot of metamorphosis in the life-sustaining seas until some 400 million years ago some glorious ancestral fish gashed their bleeding fins on dry land and began a new episode, following the plants onto the continents and transforming themselves from fish and crustaceans into reptiles, insects, dinosaurs, turtles, snakes, and finally, surviving the impacts of nemesis asteroids that blighted their predecessors, into mammals and finally glorious us!

Then you, my dear Professor Rivera, began your great odyssey to join me on this couch with our Jack Daniels-----you smoking your Montecristo Number Two and me my Montecristo Number Four. Trillions of drifting atoms had to somehow assemble in an intricate and obliging manner to create you, in an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will exist but once, unless you stretch credulity with Nietzsche’s Eternal Return with a trillion trillion trillion monkeys typing out destinies until all possibilities are so exhausted as to require your repetition. So you started your journey here as some protoplasmal primordial atomic globule somehow surcharged with some inexplicable “elan vital” sufficient to cause it to overcome its environment to reproduce itself without end and begin the Darwinian dance of metamorphosis down to our today together with oneanother.

So somehow over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then reveled in it, grown fins and limbs or flagellate tails, sprouted fins or sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek and oily, been furry and fluffy, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a moose and as small as a dormouse, and a million things more. And, the tiniest deviation in these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from sea-cave walls instead of licking-up the guacamole dip from those nachos!

And of the billions and billions of species of living things which have existed on this planet since the dawn of terrestrial time, 99.99 percent are no longer around---extinct! To escape that fate you must have been prepared to change everything about yourself---shape, size, colour, species, affiliation----everything, and to do so repeatedly and unceasingly. Consider the mystery!----for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the earth’s existing mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your ancestral predecessors on both sides of your family tree must have been attractive enough without a single gap or missing interval to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by the fates and spared by the furies and hostile environmental circumstances beyond comprehension to live long enough to do so. Not one of your chain of ancestors was squashed, devoured, starved, enmired in tar pits, untimely wounded or bitten senseless or sexless by hostile predators, or otherwise diverted from its seemingly all-marshalling quest to deliver the tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only genetic sequence of DNA and RNA that could result, eventually, astoundingly, and all too evanescently in---you!

Then you awaken as a newborn babe and learn a strange tongue at your mother’s breast that let’s you discover that you belong to a people with a language and history and a culture and tradition that have traversed a similar and parallel evolutionary odyssey. -------------Before I came here to Mexico I read the account of the Conquest of Mexico by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, recounting how Hernan Cortes set off with a rag-tag band of 600 Spaniards, burned their boats on the shores of Mexico, and blithely set off to conquer a region perhaps populated by 25 million people and ruled by a ruthless military hegemon, the Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs under Montezuma----and beyond all belief and human credulity succeeded beyond their wildest imaginations! Even given their advantage in some technologies, such as gunpowder, a few horses, steel and body armor, their conquest is a case of reality beggaring fantasy and fiction in its capacity to amaze.

The fact that Pizarro repeated the same feat with 168 Spaniards and one cannon, defeating an army of Incas in Peru under Atahualpa 500 times as large from an Empire of perhaps 12 millions a few years later makes it all the more incredible. Beyond all that, Professor Rivera, I am further mystified by the picture that modern anthropology paints, to the effect that all the modern peoples of the world emerged as small nomadic hunter-gather bands or tribes with the recession of the last Ice Age but some few 50,000 years ago, the so-called “Out of Africa Theory,” and made their way to Europe, Asia, Australia and New Guinea 40,000 years ago, and but 12,000 years ago the saga of straggling nomadic bands of settlers crossing the land and ice bridge from Eurasia and on into this Western Hemisphere of the Americas. Given the fact, or presumed fact, that we all originated or evolved from the animal world and thence to primitive hunter gatherer bands on a similar or relatively equal footing up to 5000-10,000 years ago, how can we possibly understand how some peoples remained at the most primitive levels and others rose to lead global empires, develop science and the atomic bomb, and constitute the nations and incredibly diverse fates, levels of development and conditions of the present world?” he mused aloud. “……..Why was it that Columbus discovered America rather than some Aztec discovering and colonizing Europe, or why didn’t the Chinese discover America, colonize it and proceed on to colonize Europe—(even though I hear some authors claiming that in fact they did!).

“Well Günter, I hope I may call you Günter----and likewise feel free to call me Carlos, I can only second your feelings about the ultimate mysteriousness of it all, and reiterate the truism that the more we know, the more we realize that we do not know. The virtue of intellectual modesty is still current and to be valued despite all the recent advances……..How shall I put it?......With regard to these questions there is inevitably the short answer and the long answer, and ultimately neither is sufficient or definitive. Let me just give you a brief outline of my approach after years of thinking these problems over as an anthropologist, and I know its inadequacy full well---but it may be of some value to you nonetheless.

“For the short answer to the question----how could Cortes with 600 rag-tag Spaniards overpower Mesoamerica with an probable population of 25 million and a military empire centered on Tenochtitlan, itself a city of perhaps 300,000, exceeding the population of Sevilla in Cortes’ contemporary Spain?-----We have to begin with some powerful advantages and of course an incredible amount of sheer luck! What were the major objective advantages? Of course you mentioned the obvious ones of military technology not possessed by the Aztecs-----Cortes had gunpowder and the associated weapons of rifles, pistols and cannon, though in modest numbers; he had a small troop of cavalry mounted on horses which the Aztecs had never seen before, but only 16 of them; his men had quality steel weapons, swords and body armor superior to the weapons of the Aztecs. All of these advantages were considerable on a small scale but could easily be overwhelmed by sheer numbers under the right conditions. Their guns were relatively primitive and at often unreliable, and their firepower limited.

These objective advantages were, however much magnified by the psychological effect which they produced amoung the Aztecs. Critical was the fact that Montezuma did not try to halt Cortes on the beaches with overwhelming force such as Rommel’s strategy against the D-Day invasion, but much the contrary, from his culture and beliefs and psychology, greeted Cortes peaceably, even fearfully, on whole, suspecting he might be a returning God according to a local legend, and inviting him, after a few attempts to turn him back, into his capital as a guest. The fact that the Aztecs had never seen horses, or mounted cavalry, reinforced the belief that they might be gods, as well as the psychological effects of gun and cannon fire, a form of killing at a distance with which they were not familiar and easily terrified by. All these factors are well known, though never by themselves would have proven decisive, as is shown by the considerable success the Aztecs achieved once they determined to put up a strong resistance, as when they initially drove the Spanish from the city.

Moreover, the Spanish advantages were further magnified by the Aztec weaknesses. It is undeniable that the Aztec empire and hegemony rested on brutal repression of subject peoples, much as the Roman empire did initially. The hatred of the Aztecs was further intensified by antipathy of subject peoples to their policy of “State and Divine Terrorism” including the practice of human sacrifice of captured war prisoners, the excision of their beating hearts and draining of their blood upon the idols of their gods, the cannibalism of their bodies and the enforced abasement of the survivors before the idols of the Aztec cult of their God of War, Huizilopochtli. Thus, when Cortes arrived he found numerous allies in the repressed, abused and resentful peoples ready to join any force capable of challenging their Aztec opressors. Thus Cortes’ 600 Spaniards immediately found support from thousands of rebellious auxiliaries from subject peoples.

Additionally, Cortes was able to exploit this condition by the good fortune of having a functional translation service through ‘La Malinche,’ a woman who served as his translator, via a shipwrecked Spaniard who had learned her native language along the coast of Mexico. And Cortes’ advantage in language extended to use of the written language by which he was able to inform his allies outside of Mexico of events and call in reinforcements (after they forgave him for undertaking the whole expedition without authorization).

But if we want the true key to the situation we have to look deeper than these obvious factors. One of the factors of critical importance is one you surely must be aware of Günter, since you were trained as a physician, and that is the power of disease to influence human history, and particularly the dramatic impact of infectious epidemic diseases and plagues on peoples who had no previous exposure and immunity to them. Cortes’ force was initially driven out of Tenochtitlan and then re-entered and conquered it after a considerable siege. Bernal Diaz reported how after the siege the streets were stacked with dead bodies when the Spanish re-entered---but the bodies were not dead from the effect of Spanish gunfire but rather from the ravages of a plague of smallpox and other diseases which overtook the Aztec people confined within the causeways in close and overcrowded quarters, exacerbated by physical weakness as a result of the cut-off of food and water supplies to the large population of the island capital.

Though unintentional, the key to Cortes’ victory was the use of ‘biological warfare’ which decimated the defenders, dying by the tens of thousands from smallpox and other diseases to which they had no immunity but to which the Spanish were relatively immune. This observation is further reinforced by demographic studies which show that the Mesoamericans suffered what was literally “A Holocaust” by which within a single generation of the conquest, the population was reduced from perhaps 25 millions to perhaps 3 million, a death toll of up to 90% surpassing even the “Black Plague” of Europe which took only 30-50 percent on whole. The key here was the separation of the American Indians from contact with Eurasia for some 12,000 years, those 12,000 years being precisely the era in which Eurasians developed plant and animal domestications, dense populations of both humans and domesticated animals, and urban conditions which supported the rise of new epidemic diseases, to which they, after catastrophic plagues, gradually developed immunity but to which the American Indians, along with other isolated groups such as Oceania Islanders, Australian bushmen and other communities were left defenseless at the critical time of Eurasian incursion into their domains. Another later by-product of this holocaust was the need to import African slaves as labor in much of the Americas made necessary by the radical depopulation of the native populations after 1500. The case of Pizarro and Atahualpa in the Incan empire, is also similar.

A big reason Pizarro was able to defeat Atahualpa was because Atahualpa was himself engaged in a civil war over his own succession to power and the Incan throne after the prior ruler had died of smallpox, a disease previously unknown in the Americas, which preceded the Spaniards at epidemic speed, even before they got to the Incas themselves in person. And disease was a big factor in Pizzaro’s ability to consolidate his opportune military victories occasioned by superior military technology such as gunpowder and steel weapons and horse cavalry.

That, you might take as a “Short Answer,” and some might be satisfied with stopping there. Yet the deeper questions, raised on the anthropological side of your question, like the simple question of the child “Why?” repeated over and over to each successive explanation, can still put the greatest genius or theory to rout. If you ask the deeper questions-----Why did Columbus discover America and the Spanish conquer Mesoamerica and South America instead of the Aztecs discovering Europe and conquering Spain?----Why did the Spanish have steel, gunpowder, horses and domestic animals, the compass, written language, and ocean-going ships and the Aztecs none?----Why didn’t the Spanish die of diseases from the Aztecs and Incas instead of perhaps 90% of the Mesoamericans dying from Eurasian diseases? ----then we have to dig deeper into the “Long Answer.”

“Don’t stop Carlos!” said Günter Gross as he got up, “We’re listing intently, be assured, and we are ready for the long answer…….just let me get us a couple of more bottles of brandy, tequila and rum and I’ll pour us some Rum-coco’s and I’ll get a couple more each of these wonderful Cuban cigars….all right now we’re all set-----go on with the ‘Long Answer,’-----we are ready, willing, and waiting!”

“All right then Günter---let’s see, “The Long Answer!” he laughed out loud. How should I put it and how shall I start? Let me see……………Well if we are looking for the Long Answer then we have to go back to the beginning, anthropologically speaking. According to the current wisdom and consensus, which is always tentative and subject to revision, we could say humans began to evolve as a separate species in Africa about seven million years ago, from Australopithecus africanus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus. Early movement out of Africa followed about a million years ago, across Asia, associated with “Java Man” and by 500,000 years ago you had Neanderthal man in Europe. These are what I might call “protohumans.”

But the rise of modern man, associated with Homo sapiens seems to be a rather more recent phenomenon, dating from probably 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, and what we think of as human history probably dates from the movement of these relatively advanced groups “Out of Africa” around 50,000 years ago, what I would call the “Great Leap Forward” to borrow a phrase from your Chairman Mao, Dr. Sartorius. The best conjecture is that around this time an evolutionary change occurred in the human voicebox and/or the nervous system’s wiring for speech which enabled the development of complex language, and with it greater efficiency in social organization for hunting and gathering, along with the cumulative evolution of culture, primitive tool technologies and orally transmitted knowledge.

From that time bands of hunter-gatherer Homo sapiens, anatomically similar to modern humans began to extend the range of their habitation, little by little over thousands of years, occupying most of the habitable globe, until the next big change-----the onset of the Agricultural Revolution and the change from a nomadic to a sedentary settled lifestyle began to take root about 5000 to 10,000 years ago, especially with the recession of the last great Ice Age. This evidently provided the environmental window of opportunity for the development of agriculture---food production and dominion and control over a fixed sedentary environment---that shifted human subsistence from the hunter-gather model to the sedentary agricultural model and as a by-product made possible the development of cities and towns, vastly expanded populations and population densities, urban life, vocational specialization, division of labour, economies of scale and trade, large-scale political organization, and the development of technologies---all the marks of modern civilization.

So if we look at the evolution of human societies for simplicity’s sake as a kind of race in which all peoples started off relatively equally say 20,000 years ago as small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers with no fixed settlements and adapting reactively to the natural environment-----and then we trace the progress of various peoples from that time down to the present when some nations and peoples have attained the most advanced industrial or post-industrial civilizations, a kind of Race to Modernity, then we can find many solid explanations for why some peoples made it to the finish line but others remained at the start line, why some made the cut to the Agricultural Revolution, and then made the next cut to the Industrial Revolution, while some peoples got stuck and never cleared one or more of these successive hurdles. Australian bushmen and forest peoples in Mexico, India, North and South America, and other primitive locales remained nomadic hunter-gatherers down to the present age, when they were overwhelmed by force by more advanced civilizations. Some peoples such as our Pre-Columbian Mesoamericans here in Mexico and the Incas made it to the Agricultural Revolution, yet were cut-short in their development and overwhelmed by more advanced civilizations before they could develop further autonomously, or enter the window of opportunity for the Industrial Revolution, and thus became appendages of global empires.

In all of this a key and critical point in the “race” was that of 5000-10000 years ago in which peoples made the leap from hunter-gather to agricultural civilization through organized sedentary food production. Why is this so important? Because it is the foundation on which all further progress and development rests. As Napoleon said ‘An Army marches on its stomach’ so we can also say on a wider scale that a people and a civilization develops, evolves and marches forward through the millennia of its onward evolution towards modernity ‘on its stomach.’ For millennia almost all human effort was directed at personal and small band survival and subsistence—simply fighting off the threat of starvation and death. All effort was necessary just to provide a minimum of food and calories as a means of personal survival. With the development of the Agricultural Revolution everything changed. Suddenly productive farmers could provide not only enough food for their own survival but a Food Surplus which could be stored, controlled and transferred to support non-farmers who could specialize in trades and further develop productive technologies----first artisans and craftsmen for fashioning useful tools, then professional soldiers and administrators of larger political entities----tribes, towns and then nations----further on the rise of scribes, the learned professions and administrators who could devise written scripts and utilize the institution of written language. Moreover, with the improved productivity from specialization and trade, capital in various forms could be invested in the land and in the tools of the productive processes and in education to further expand the increase in productivity exponentially.

All of this rested on the one irreplaceable foundation: “Farmer Power!” Unfortunately for the farmer, however, the benefit of their productivity was often forcibly appropriated by a kleptocratic elite of professional soldiers, landowners and nobility who took their surpluses without compensation, even reducing them to outright slavery or serfdom. Yet they and the food surplus they generated, remained the indispensible foundation for all the further development of urban civilization, division of labour, higher levels of social organization, the accumulation of knowledge and invention of tools and technologies and the rise of the modern state. It is this farmer generated food surplus that enabled the development of the larger, more complex and more specialized population that was later capable of evolving into an urban, industrial or even post-industrial society of the present age.

And as to armies and empires, we can say they were all created and maintained on the backs of the peasant or slave farmers who produced enough to feed and replenish themselves while producing a surplus that could be expropriated by and sustain the armies and administrators of empire. As we just noted Napoleon’s dictum that an army marches on its stomach made an agricultural base a necessary precondition for sustained warfare and empire. Sun Zi dedicated a good part of his Bin Fa, or Art of War to logistics and supply from the agricultural base. Hobbes described the state of nature as bellum omnes contra omnis, or a constant war of all against all until ordered by his famous Leviathan state. But the state itself made war no less common, though directed outward from the subdued agricultural baseland. I just completed a paper on the history of war: in the 5500 years of recorded history there are also recorded 14,530 wars, or about 2.6 wars per year. In the world there were only 350 years of peace during this period, with an estimated total number of deaths in war of over 400 million. So war is a rather constant human institution, not to mention the civil wars and class conflicts and insurrections noted by Marx’s class conflict theory. But I do suspect civilization brought much peace and stability to individual lives, even where wars occurred on the peripheries of nations. The Darwinian struggle continued by other means, but still on the backs of farmers until the Industrial Revolution replaced them with machines.

“So if we ask your question, Günter----why didn’t the Aztecs discover Europe and colonize them instead of the other way round part of the answer is provided in the differences the two protocivilizations had in access to the pre-conditions for the first leap towards the Agricultural Revolution and the further development of their more and more complex societies. Bernal Diaz observed that the Aztecs were shocked to see horses and men riding horses---taking them for gods! Aside from the fact that this was tactically and psychologically helpful to Cortes, the more meaningful fact was that the Aztecs had virtually no domesticated animals to aid in their rise to an agricultural civilization-----no horses, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, donkeys or such common farm animals of Eurasia. Some large animals still existed which had not been hunted to extinction, such as the buffalo, but these, like the zebra or hippo in Africa proved undomesticable.

Notably they had no use of the wheel! Was this because they were intrinsically stupid and couldn’t invent the wheel? Not at all. In fact some Aztec toys preserved from the time show the use of the wheel in toys but it never became common in transportation. Why? Most likely because there were no large domesticated draft animals---horses, oxen, or donkeys with which to exploit the invention. Using humans to pull wheeled vehicles over rough terrain would be only a marginal improvement over portage. The Incas did have the llama and alpaca, but they were never viable in Mesoamerica and had limited capacity, being a mountain animal. Similarly with domesticable grains and legumes. None of the domesticable grains of the world---wheat, rice, millet, sorghum, oats, or others were native to Mesoamerica, and therefore could not be domesticated and improved by selective breeding for agricultural productivity. In general the Aztecs and Mesoamericans were dependent on only three domesticable civilizational starter crops: maize corn, beans and squash. The Incas had potatoes and manioc but there was little contact with Mesoamerica. Aside from dogs and turkey they had very little in the way of domestic animals to develop their agriculture to a higher stage. This is important in at least two ways that proved historically critical. First, they did not have the animal muscle to replace or supplement human muscle in work and transportation, slowing down their development. Likewise, they did not have cavalry or chariots for war. In short, the Aztec agricultural base was limited and weak and emerged thousands of years after the Eurasian agricultural base and as a result the cumulative growth of urban life, the useful trades and technologies was relatively retarded and cumulatively weaker.

Another aspect is less obvious but proved fatally important. Eurasians developed into both herdsmen and fixed cultivators of the soil. They lived in close proximity with large numbers of sheep, goats, cattle, horses, pigs, chickens and other social animals. In Mexico recently we were accused of developing the “Swine Flu or H1N1” a potential global pandemic which allegedly emerged from viruses jumping species from pigs and chickens to humans and then mutating to become independently infectious and epidemic amoung humans. So now medical scientists are highly aware of how close proximity of large numbers of humans with large numbers of domesticated social animals breeds and precipitates the evolution of new epidemic strains, often by viruses or germs jumping species. Perhaps the number one reason for the failure of the Mesoamericans to mount any effective defense against the Europeans was the simple fact of the “Holocaust” in which up to ninety percent of them died within a generation of contact from smallpox, yellow fever, plague, malaria and a score of other diseases from the Old World from which they had no immunity. This immunity constituted a kind of biological capital which the Europeans had but the Indians lacked, alongside a lack of intellectual and technological capital vis-à-vis the Europeans. This lack of immunity stemmed from the lack of the wild species available for domestication, and the absence of domesticated herds from the farming environment in Mesoamerica, and the concomitant lack of a history of close proximity to large herds of domesticated animals.

Of course an additional negative was simply that humans had arrived in the Western Hemisphere much later than in Eurasia, and a fortiori Africa, and had become settled significantly later. Thus settled agriculture lagged Eurasian agriculture by some five thousand years,---perhaps beginning around 3500 BC compared to 7000-9000 BC for Eurasia. And once started, as in Mesoamerica and in Incan Peru it was slower to develop, and slower to support larger towns and urban congregations, which are the normal pre-conditions for the development of the arts and crafts, technologies, and the larger political organizations capable of resisting aggression or becoming profitably aggressive themselves.

Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


If we play the role of the child with his infernal ever-repeated “Why?” to the next stage of explanation, then we would ask further, well why didn’t they have such domesticable plants and animals, or if they didn’t have them on their own home turf, why didn’t they get them through trade from other places and peoples, just as the Europeans after Columbus integrated the new American crops of maize corn, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco and others from across the globe into their own agricultural mix. Here, my colleagues often criticize me in calling me a “Geographical Determinist,” meaning I am over-simplifying the complexity of history to some simple facts of geography. Yet I think I rebut their criticism, at least as relates to the critical time of the shift from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to settled agricultural lifestyles. At that time, some 10,000 years ago, humans, like all animals were totally dependent on their natural environment and had little power to control or change it.

Nowadays we have science and technology to transform nature, but then the power to transform nature largely had to be found in nature itself first, then slowly and gradually adapted to human control. So often the presence or absence of a starter or “Founder Crop,” or “Founder domesticable species” was critical in making the next “leap forward” possible at all. In short, Eurasia geographically had a great advantage in being the largest land mass on earth in which both plant and animal species could evolve and develop, and its 9000 miles of East-to-West expanse within a single climate zone provided the best environment in the world for the spread of domesticable plant and animal species, should any develop at any point within it. North and South America and Africa, on the other hand were arrayed on a North-to-South axis, and their climate zones varied radically as one drew closer and away from the equator. Thus plant or animal species that could survive at one latitude had little chance to develop or spread north or south, since their biological cycles would be inappropriate to the latitude zone. Eurasian species and crop domestications could spread from Spain to China within a single latitude and climatic zone to which their plants’ and animals’ biological clocks were appropriate or adaptable.

In Eurasia or North Africa the lack of a crop or animal species could often be corrected by importing species from other regions. Thus, Egypt was able to import non-native wheat and grain species along with cattle from Mesopotamia. But, in general we can say that isolation of a civilization often proves fatal in the long run—we might even hypothesize a Fatal Law of Isolation. Where budding civilizations are in contact with other and competing civilizations they often learn and borrow from oneanother---in the positive sense, or they fail to do so and are conquered by those who do innovate to their advantage---in the negative sense. In either case, in Eurasia the competing civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Persia, China, Europe, and Egypt were in constant, if distant communication, sometimes in peace and sometimes in war, and ideas, crop and animal species, technologies and innovations such as writing, art and religions passed between them and strengthened them. Even ironically to sardonically we might say they even strengthened themselves with their diseases and epidemic plagues, increasing their longer-term immunities and biological capital. Mesoamerica, however was isolated----it is even believed that the Incas and the Aztecs had no knowledge of each other since they had little in seaworthy craft, and trade and communications through the rainforests and impassible terrain across the isthmus of Panama, from North America to South America, was highly restricted and often indirect.

Or perhaps this is another chicken and the egg argument---the reason for their failure to develop sea navigation arising perhaps from the apparent absence of another well-developed civilization worth engaging in large-scale trade with---and a fortiori, a cause of their failure to discover and conquer the Europeans or Asians. They were of course isolated by the vastness of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from the other hemisphere. They had little opportunity to learn or adopt innovations from other civilizations or even the negative impulse to resist their aggression. Europe, and in particular Spain had had the advantage of multiple innovations from other civilizations that made possible their rapid conquest of Mesoamerica----they had sailing craft utilizing the sternpost rudder and compass, gunpowder, and paper from China, writing, steel, law and military and political organization from Rome and the Middle East, Arabic navigational techniques and the benefit of Arabic transmission of innovations from China and the East, the horse from the Eurasian steppes and all of the domestic animals and crops of Eurasia as well as immunities to Eurasian diseases. Evidently the only disease of American origin to become epidemic in Eurasia was that of syphilis, which might more appropriately be termed a truer “Montezuma’s Revenge” than the attacks of spastic colon tourists are liable to in Mexico.

Similar fates awaited the isolated populations of Australia and Oceania when thrown into the global world. It would seem that China and Japan have oscillated from openness to the outside world to an isolationism of closing themselves off to the outside world and their concomitant self-strangling of their own progress and competitiveness; and that when they have chosen voluntary isolation, they often succeed for a time in their internal development and the preservation of their controlling elites, as in the case of the Ming and Qing Dynasties in China and the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan, but in the long run awoke to discover that the Fatal Law of Isolation indeed proved fatal to them—the strategy of the ostrich being a dubious one for dealing with a hostile or competitive world----most recently shown by the Cultural Revolution prior to the Kai Fang Opening Up policy of recent years. Europe, in contrast, in Modern Times has risen to pre-eminence precisely because of its fragmentation and the ferment of competition and innovation which excluded the temptation of the Fatal Law of Isolation as a viable option. For them for geographical reasons the siren song of isolation and self-reliance was out of the question to begin with.“

“Well I can see the logic of your argument regarding Eurasia and the Americas---the Americas having started the agricultural revolution five thousand years later and being relatively isolated and hence their progress relatively retarded,” broke in Günter, “…..but I don’t see why Africa, supposedly the original point of development of the Homo sapiens, should have failed to develop large scale agricultural, urban and then industrial civilizations. After all under the “Out of Africa Theory” as the point of earliest origin of modern humans they should have had the greatest head start of all, yet aside from Egypt, which as you say imported its domesticated plants and animals largely from Mesopotamia, why did Africa fail to take advantage of its head start and lead the way to agricultural and advanced civilizations?”

“An excellent question, Günter----and a logical one.---Aside from Egypt, we find the African answer to the ‘Hamletian’ question “To Farm or Not to Farm” was towards the negative. Of course we need not take the racialist rationalizations for Africa’s lack of development too seriously, though they often resurface in times of stress. On an objective basis we could say that each people which made the leap and transition from the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to that of the settled agricultural food production lifestyle had to arrive at a “Viable Package”---that is to say a workable mix of domesticable crops and animals which would sustain settled life in preference to the earlier nomadic to semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle which they were to give up. Of course there might be a mixed phase of mixing the two lifestyles for a term as well. Once again in Africa we are confronted with the geographical and climatic barriers to the transition to fixed agriculture, particularly before pre-domesticated crops and animals of outside origin were imported. I have been to Africa many times with anthropological expeditions and have some knowledge of the terrain and difficulties.

First of all, as we all know, a large part of Africa is unsuitable for agriculture as a result of the desert condition of the Sahara and other arid areas, which has been exacerbated by further desertification from overgrazing and other causes over the centuries. Another African environment hostile to agriculture is the Rain Forest zone, which presents a barrier and thin infertile soils. The Nile river is a special case, since a normally arid and infertile land is made rich and arable through the annual inundations and depositions of rich washed soil by the Nile’s flooding. Nonetheless, none of the principal grain crops, wheat, sorghum, oats, rice, millet or others were native to Africa and available for native domestication. In Tropical West Africa there were African yams and palm for palm oil, in Ethiopia there was coffee and teff, in the Sahel there was some grain---African rice and sorghum but on a limited basis. Also, perhaps surprisingly, since we think of Africa as a continent teeming in big game---zebra, lion, gazelle and the like, there seem to have been no native available domesticable animal species—later imports came from abroad----no cow, goat, pig, donkey, horse or common farm animals—perhaps only the guinea fowl in the Sahel was domesticated. Even modern science with genetic engineering has never succeeded in the domestication of Africa’s wild game species, or of any significant indigenous crop species. Animals could be individually tamed, as in zoos and circuses, but the species could not be bred and selectively cultivated in captivity. Even much later attempts to import horses and other domesticated animals by the later Arab and European colonists were often unsuccessful since such animals could not survive in the malarial, tse tse fly infected areas of tropical rain forest and quickly died off—Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman may reflect the limits of the penetration of the horse from the Islamic realm of the north to the tropical south of Nigeria---perhaps only a King had the rare horses and they died away quickly amoung the tse tse flies and mosquitoes. If we look at Africa on a globe it looks big, but aside from the arid Sahara across its wide part the Sub-Saharan part of Africa is quite narrow and worse yet straddles the Equator so that it is divided into rapidly changing climatic and geographical zones from North-to-South which inhibits the movement of species from zone to zone, mismatching their biological clocks.

This probably explains the original paucity of domesticable species and the barriers to their spreading if domesticated. In any case we can trace the process by which Africa became black back to the Bantu Expansion which was linked to the development of African agriculture based on wet weather crops and summer rains, unlike the winter rain grain crops of Eurasia. Thus the Bantu-speaking peoples, whom we normally associate with the notion of “black” peoples began to develop a “Viable Package” suitable to their environment perhaps around the same late time as the Mesoamericans, that is 2000 to 3000 BC in their homeland around the Cameroons and began to expand their agricultural domain Eastwards and then Southwards, displacing the original non-black Africans, the Khoisan and the Pygmies, who never made the leap from hunter-gatherers to settled agriculture. This was based on yam cultivation, suitable for wet climates, sorghum and African rice, and some cattle. In a few centuries the Bantu blacks had pushed out and completely replaced the original non-black Pygmy and Khoisan hunter-gatherers along a domain of 2000 miles, first to the East and then to the South. This is a key to answering the question of How Africa became Black, at least Sub-Saharan Africa let’s say. They were stopped at the Cape in South Africa since their summer rain and wetland crops of their agricultural “Package” were unsuitable for the Mediterranean and winter rain conditions of the Cape---and thus fatefully the Dutch arrived in the Cape and started their agricultural civilization with the Eurasian package in the 1600’s before the blacks---Xhosa and Bantu speakers—ever arrived!

This also represents another apparent and perhaps unfortunate Darwinian law of Development----that successful agricultural peoples and civilizations will push out, replace, evict, assimilate or exterminate less successful hunter-gatherer societies which fail to make the leap to the Agricultural Revolution, just as modern global empires demonstrate that the Industrialized nations inevitably have taken dominion over any agricultural or pre-agricultural peoples who failed to make the leap from Agricultural Nations to Industrial Nations.

Professor Sartorius-----you undoubtedly observed this in China’s 56 national minorities, such as the Miao, Yao and others-----If we ask the question parallel to the one of how Africa became Black, and ask how did China become Chinese, that answer is provided in tracing the history of the dominant Han people who developed a “Viable Agricultural Package” based on millet and rice, pig, chicken and bean cultivation who then expanded southward over the “Southern Frontier” from their origins on the Yellow River following a “Chinese Southern Manifest Destiny,” just like the Americans’ Westward “Manifest Destiny” expansion across their Western Frontier, first populating the Yangtze basis and driving their peoples further south, then continuing and pushing out the minorities peoples, Thai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, Dai, Miao, Yao and others into marginal mountain and undesirable terrain, and pushing the Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, Khmer-Cambodian and other peoples from their original habitations within present China to the north being thus driven southwards into their present national locations. All this represents the indirect results of “Farmer Power” translated into immense populations, supporting immense armies and division of labour and urban development leading to trade and powerful technologies. Occasionally we find the backwash of large aggregations of herdsmen forming mounted cavalry armies and overwhelming the farming populations, most often then becoming the next ruling class of the farming societies, but essentially becoming assimilated to them in that new role, as in the case of the Mongol empire, the conquest of Ming China by the Manchus, who then went on to become the next Qing Dynasty and arguably the conquers of the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates of Islam.

Well, getting back to Africa, we can say, perhaps contrary to expectation given Homo sapiens presumed origin in Africa, that it was not particularly suitable ground for the development of domesticable plant and animal species, and that the indigenous agricultural development that did occur came late and on a limited basis, the special case of Egypt excluded, and therefore Africa did not support large scale agricultural civilizations which in turn could have supported massively expanded populations, thence further urbanized and industrialized through indigenous development. That is not to say they never would have developed if left to their own, but probably much more slowly and later, which luxury was not in the offing as they were overwhelmed by outside forces before they had the chance.

The effects of European and Islamic slavery cannot be ignored as a retarding force. It is estimated that Islamic slavery across the Sahara and up the East African coast from Swahili speaking slaving centers such as Zanzibar, resulted in the seizure and transportation of up to 30 million slaves to the Islamic world from the time of the first Caliphate down to modern times. That is significantly more than the 20 million estimated to have suffered the “Middle Passage” to the New World, 80% of whom went to Latin America and 20% to Anglo-North America, under the European powers. The working population of cities such as Basra under the Caliphate was largely composed of black African slaves and notable slave revolts were recorded of which contemporary Arab poets and writers wrote with great resentment, supporting their suppression. The combined total of 50 million African slaves, 30 millions drained to the Islamic empires and nations and 20 million to the European American empires, mostly captured by other African tribes or by Arab slaving parties and sold onto the market, to which must be sur-added the millions of slaves retained by the capturing slaveholding African tribes in Africa and not sold on to outsiders, must undoubtedly have retarded agricultural and economic development in Africa prior to colonization by the Europeans, and subsequent European colonial development was undoubtedly directed more to the well-being of the Europeans than their African subjects.
“I have just come from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. I wonder how your theory of “Farmer Power” being the key to development relates to the areas of Oceania, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.” introjected Sartorius, already “three sheets to the wind” from his fourth Tequila Sunrise on top of the dinner wine.

“The Australian case is an interesting one, but it points up and confirms much of the main argument. The bushmen or aboriginal peoples made their way there fairly early, about 40,000 years ago, at which time during the Ice Age Australia and New Guinea were united into one land mass which itself was very close to the Eurasian landmass, in consequence of the much lower sea levels caused by the locking up of much of the sea water in glacial ice. Thus the aboriginals were able to reach Australia over only a few kilometers of sea, by adventure or possibly by accident. In the next millennia they evidently hunted the megafauna of Australia into extinction and continued a hunter-gatherer existence in a relatively hostile arid environment. There were no significant candidates for “Founder Crops” for devising a “viable package” of staples to support sedentary agriculture and little in the way of domesticable herd animals. Hence the Australian aboriginals largely remained as they began, hunter-gatherers in a hostile environment up until the time of the English incursion. They were quickly overwhelmed by epidemic disease or deliberate pressure and extermination by the English settlers, and driven to the less desirable areas similar to the fate of the American Indians, African Koisan and Pygmies and the smaller Chinese minorities. As the sea rose with the melting of the glacial ice at the end of the last ice age, however, New Guinea became separated from Australia by seas, and around 7000 BC agriculture began there with the domestication of the banana and sugar cane, taro and yams, but the areas suitable for agriculture were the mountainous highlands with more abundant rainfall and plant species and space was limited and quickly overpopulated. Though partially making the leap forward into agriculture, nonetheless the highland New Guinea agricultural revolution remained a weak one and was deficient in sources of protein, including domesticated animals. Quite possibly this endemic protein deficiency resulted in the widespread practice of cannibalism and internecine warfare.

Other Polynesian islands were evidently populated by peoples originating in Taiwan of non-Han origin who were reduced to a small vestigial minority on their Taiwan homeland. These peoples arrived at a significant breakthrough in seaworthy craft and navigational techniques, probably linked to the outrigger and catamaran canoes and boats, and were then able to island-hop across the pacific over a period from about 3000 BC to about 1000 AD. The Maori’s only reached New Zealand after 1000 AD, but a very few hundred years before the arrival of the Europeans. In different environments they adopted different strategies, sometimes reverting to hunter-gathering lifestyles, and sometimes, as in New Zealand and Hawaii, developing more intensive agriculture and complex social structures. Remarkably, so formidable were their seafaring abilities that Austronesian/Indonesians even became the first group to settle Madagascar on the African coast, reaching it by sea before the much closer Africans. In general these societies, even if they attained agriculture, were late in getting started, greatly limited in scale, available area and available species, and did not develop complex urban and technological centers capable of resisting the economic and military power of the Western powers who eventually took control of them.

By this time, cogent and exciting as Professor Rivera’s discourse was, Sartorius and Günter were beginning to feel the effects of the long day, a lingering jet-lag and incomplete adjustment of biological clocks, the mounting of the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, and the effects of three bottles of dinner wine, half a dozen cocktails of rum and tequila each, and several wonderful Cuban cigars. Professor Rivera was enough of a man of the world to know the appropriate time to cut short his lecture with a smile, even though he had devoted twenty years to publishing 27 books on the subjects of his discourse and was not a little ‘pen-proud’ of his theories. He therefore invited some of the young professors, scholars, students and staff in attendance at the dinner party to strike up some music and share some of their favourite songs in Spanish, then later nudged some of the good looking women amoung them to invite the guests to dance and join in the singing. Sartorius continued his practical introduction into the art of drinking Tequila, managing lemon wedges, salt, peppers, red shrimps---camorones---which to the delight of the company and under the influence of his imperfect Spanish and the effects of alcohol---he pronounced cabrones, and other requisite paraphernalia of the alcoholic ritual, downing several more to perfect his technique, while Günter Gross stuck to his Rum-cocos. By the end of the evening, as Professor Rivera began to marshal them towards the waiting cars to return to the Hotel Marco Polo, Günter Gross, normally one to hold his liquor heroically, was showing signs of vulnerability, and Sartorius, giving himself up with enthusiasm to a new oneness with the spirit of Mexico, was--- ¡perfectamente borracho!

When the car reached the Marco Polo Hotel Günter, Sartorius and Professor Rivera had continued their rendition of moving songs, accompanied by three pretty graduate students, but Sartorius was discovering as he attempted to exit the open door of the low limousine and stand upright, that his legs had become seriously unnavigable. The bonds of brotherhood were, however not lost on Günter and Carlos, and they gave manly service, propping him under the arms and raising him to his feet as the girls cheered them on. Thus arrayed for action, arm in entwined arm, the small army of the living prepared for a forward advance and central assault upon the looming citadel and objective, the lobby of the Marco Polo Hotel that is, the conquest of which would require a valiant charge of an hundred feet across a blood-red carpet, an appropriate field of battle thought Sartorius; and that only after the defeat of an adversary worthy of Don Quixote, namely a circular revolving glass door enscribed with the admonition “Do not touch! Door opens automatically,” then a manly advance across the ‘killing zone’ of the front lobby and into the gold plated doors of the central elevator, then onwards and upwards to the sanctum sanctoris.

“Theirs was not to reason why, theirs was but to do and die” volunteered Sartorius, as he fortified his courage arm in arm with his bosom comrades and brother heroes, supported at their flanks by two female auxiliary corps which dampened their collective oscillations leftward and rightward of the military objective. Thus they advanced against all odds, attaining their preliminary objective, the glass-encased barrel of the revolving door through an indescribably brilliant series of advances, clever feints, and inspired extemporaneous tactical wheeling maneuvers of incredible subtlety responding to the ebb and flow of battle, reflected Sartorius, his face pressed close against the closed outer convexity of the outer barrier of the revolving door, his sagging lips pressed close to the letters in Spanish pointing out “Door opens automatically!” which it naturally failed to do until completing its slow and laborious second circumnavigation, which Sartorius felt was more than sufficient time for Magellan to have completed two complete global circuits of this sublunary sphere.
When the convex outer door slid back revealing the cruciform giant arrayed for combat before them Sartorius’ blood revived with the spirit of La Mancha and he surged forward abruptly ahead of the supporting company, ready to make or meet his destiny. The others, unprepared for so heroic an advance were pressed to recover themselves and surged forward just after Sartorius, just in time to prevent him from falling upon the field of battle. They heroically bore up their momentarily stricken comrade and prevented his fall—their standard still stood---not however before the cunning enemy dealt them a furious blow from the rear, (ignoble coward that he proved himself to be showing his true and shameful colours!—forgoing the honest trial of a frontal combat for a dishonourable and sinister sneak attack!).

The door seized up into a total halt, trapping the valiant Argonauts in a glass prison that would make the Prisoner of Chillon weep for despair! Sartorius was, however able to rally his troops with a ferocious rallying cry to battle reminiscent of Alexander charging the cowardly King of Kings on the Plain of Issus, and he pulled them forward just as the door re-energized itself and swung open to their advance with the magic of an “Open Sesame” giving them an intensified momentum forwards, up and through the final gantlet of red carpet, seemingly born on the back of a winged-Rocinante, flanked menacingly by dozens of gold-covered chairs in battle array to the left and right of their advance, like menacing Saracen knights.

Magnificently the Six Immortals surged forward, step on heroic step, sagging under the weight of battle and they advanced across the killing fields into the waiting maw of the enemy citadel, the open gold-plated elevator doors awaiting them but another fifty feet onwards. They advanced half the remaining distance, then half of the remainder, losing strength and momentum, then half of the half of the remaining half, and suddenly it seemed to Sartorius that he would become the living proof of Zeno’s Paradox, never attaining the final objective as the united band of immortals listed dangerously to the right and the battle line of gold-embroidered chairs precipitously advanced to attack their flank with the swiftness and lethality of Saladin’s shock cavalry, and Sartorius felt his legs fatally giving out their last strength beneath him.

‘Kyrie Eleison!—Eli, Eli, Eli, Lamah Sabahktan’ he whispered inwardly to himself as he felt himself going down, down, down forever, dark, dark, into the dark, probably to Avernus, the Styx, Cerberus, the final crossing over and a joyful yet joyless greeting and initiation into the brotherhood of the dead shades of heroes----Achilles, Aeneas, and Alexander in the fields of Elysium on the fair brim of Hades’ outer circle.

Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

But little had he suspected in his despair that A Seventh Warrior of the Lord, a Deliverer, A Redeemer, A Mahdi, A Khalki, An Occulted Imam, A Maitreya, A Messiah, a Caliph of Caliphs, A Commander of the Commanders of the Faithful, A Beloved of Allah, an Avenger of the Beloved of God, A Destroyer of Eblis, a Harrower of Hell, A Savoir, A Son of the Father and the Holy Ghost, A veritable Christ—would enter the fray of cosmic battle at that very moment of incipient catastrophe, all seeming irretrievably and eternally lost! At that very moment Pablo, the desk clerk at a full run reached the stricken hero and his strong and invincible arm bore Sartorius upwards from the rising ignominious mud and mire of the field of battle and thrust shut the gaping jaws of the inhuman orifice of the underworld, laying him with the gentleness of the Virgin, arms outstretched in reminiscence of the fulfilled crucifiction and the completed Passion, upon the adjacent Louis XVI lobby chair, enacting a Pieta appreciable only by an El Greco or a Michelangelo! Then laying his beatific finger upon the heavenward button he summoned the modernized Ladder of Jacob and, together with Saints Günter and Carlos and three cherubic feminine angels they made their way heavenwards in unfathomable chiaroscuro in Holy Annunciation, or at least as far as the seventh floor, and Pablo bore them unerringly through the remaining mysteries to the final inner sanctum, the all-opening Key of Peter in his hand, and laid Sartorius in his heavenly bed, loosening his collar and casting aside his worldly shoes, as the Six Apostles who had witnessed the miracle stood silently by in mute adoration, as did the shepherds and the Maji before the holy manger two millennia before them, speechlessly taking in the inexplicably iridescent halo and varicolored aura that seemed to glisten and radiate heavenwards above Sartorius’ moistened, ever-so-human, yet divine-touched brow.







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Commission of Latin American Parliament joins call for UN Parliamentary Assembly

At its meeting on 12 June 2008 in Colombia's capital Bogotá, the Commission for Political Affairs of the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino) has unanimously adopted a declaration endorsing "the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly." The document states that "gradual implementation of citizens’ participation and representative democracy at the global level" is essential to reduce the "democratic deficit" in the international arena. A UNPA is regarded as an "indispensable step into this direction". The Commission declares that it "invites all parliamentary organizations to participate actively in the process of its creation." The Argentine deputy Fernando Iglesias, who introduced the motion, said "Elected representatives throughout Latin America are aware of the advantages a UN Parliamentary Assembly will entail. The unanimous decision of the Commission for Political Affairs of Parlatino is an important first step to build political momentum for this cause in the region." The Latin American Parliament was created in1964 and is based on an international treaty concluded in 1987 which by now 22 member states from the region have joined. The parliamentary assembly is composed of elected representatives of their national parliaments. Its purpose includes strengthening human rights and parliamentary democracy. The meeting on 12 June was chaired by the Argentine Senator Sonia Escudero.






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The next morning Professor Rivera sent a university car to pick them up and Sartorius and Günter Gross spent the morning touring the city more intimately. Of course they visited the Plaza de la Constitution, the heart of the city at the Zócalo, surrounded by the Palacio Nacional and the Cathedral Metropolitana, and took in the Angel de la Independencia. They viewed the Templo Mayor and walked through the Museo de Templo Mayor---getting a flavor of the life of Pre-Conquest Tenochtitlan. There they visited the sites of the great murals of Diego Rivera and of Orozco, including the celebrated “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda” by Rivera, originally in the Hotel del Prado, then transferred to a museum site after the great earthquake, depicting the figure of Death as an elegant woman in a summer dress, Death as one of the close relatives of the human family as it were, a favourite aunt and not a terrifying and alien stranger from another world-----and famously defaced by a religious zealot, protesting the inclusion of the sign held by one of the figures: “God does not exist!” They visited the site of Xochimilco, the remnant from the prior era of the great lake of Tenochtitlan with its floating gardens, now reduced to an atavism amidst the sprawling suburbs of the conurbation of more than twenty millions.

Then they toured the campus of UNAM, or the National University of Mexico, where many of the meetings and speeches for the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly Conference and Regional Caucuses were to take place, and where Rivera was chairman of his department. On entering the main gate of the university Sartorius was struck by the motto above the gates “Not all who should be here are Here; Not all who are here should be Here” and thought it unusually apropos from his experience teaching in America and China, where often the wrong persons showed up at university for the wrong reasons and wasted the opportunity, while many, especially of the poorer classes, were locked out of the precious opportunity they needed, deserved and desired. Next they toured the campus taking in much that was impressive in architecture, study and culture. They visited the Library of the university, a brave modernist design with an immense archetypal mural on its face depicting in Aztec mosaic patterns the cultural history of the nation, going back to its Pre-Columbian roots. Professor Rivera walked them through the library, designed by Juan O’Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martinez de Velasco, incorporating motifs of all eras of Mexican and Mesoamerican history, symbolizing the cultural dynamism and resurgent nationalism of the Post-revolutionary era during the presidencies of Aleman and Cortines, and celebrating the heroes of the Mexican Revolution: Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, Francisco Madero, and Carranza, and many of their national precursors of prior eras---Hidalgo, Morelos, and Benito Juarez, as well as the Pan-American heroes of liberation---Such as Simon Bolivar and Jose Marti. Such dynamic nationalism was also reflected in the Museum of Anthropology, which they had visited the day before.
Towards late afternoon they paused to take a fine lunch at the best VIP dining room of the faculty dining hall of the University, taking in local specialties and many a bottle of fine wine, after which they settled in in the faculty lounge to a generous open bar of tequila, rum, mescal, kaluah, a taste of pulque—a local peasant drink, brandy, and of course a box of Cuban cigars of the highest quality. After a rambling conversation the topic of the hour turned to literature, as Sartorius mentioned that he had noticed and bought a copy in translation of one of Rivera’s novels, then popular on the stands: “The Three Shadows.” He asked Rivera to autograph the flyleaf, and the good professor made a gentlemanly show of modest in assenting, but on condition that Günter would reciprocate by signing his copy of his Collected Poems, which he had in a bi-lingual edition, German and Spanish.

“To tell you the truth Günter, I have to confess to you that I suffer from the congenital writer’s disease: envy. While I have had some success with my novels, which flatters my ego, I have never approached your fluency in poetry.” He admitted with a tone of abashment, “………I would love to hear how you do it, I mean how you work yourself up to the creation of your poems.”

In fact, Günter was known mainly for his prose novels. Only late in life did the literary world awaken to his poetry, and amoung professionals and literary connoisseurs in his old age he was making a second reputation for himself, and turning out his best work. To the world’s great surprise, it was Romantic, incantatory, bardic, and, though far from primitive, primitivistic. Rhapsodic and mystical, he seemed to release into his poetry a raw energy too often damned up in his more “civilized” prose. He regarded his poetry as “a plunge into darkness,” a wrestling with the “exquisite chaos” of the contending angels of the life-force.

Günter at first made a few modest evasions of the request, then after he downed another tequila and inscribed a few sentences on the flyleaf of the book which Rivera’s assistant had retrieved from his office, he then made an attempt at describing his poetic process: “Well if you force me to it………but you know as a writer you can never really put into words what is beyond words……….…..I let, perhaps, an image be made emotionally in me, and then apply to it whatever intellectual and critical forces I possess--------let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of that third image bred of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict……Out of the inevitable conflict of images-----inevitable because of the creative, recreative, destructive and contradictory nature of the motivating center, the womb of war-------I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem…………………”

Then, after a fair pause to consider what he had said, to start up again the momentum of the conversation, Sartorius mentioned that he and Günter Gross were working on a joint book exploring a canon of World Literature, and they asked for Rivera’s advice----what would be the special characteristics of Latin American literature and who would Rivera consider to be the foremost figures and works of Latin American literature which had made a global impact, transcending their national and regional origins, such as to merit their inclusion in the canon of World Literature from a global perspective?

“Well, as far as Latin American literature is concerned,” Professor Rivera responded, “our writers have always been a hybrid and cosmopolitan lot----on the one hand we are part of the Western world and draw our heritage, like all Western writers from the legacy of Classical Greece and the Latin masters of Rome, the Biblical and Christian heritage, and the heritage in particular of Spanish and Portuguese literature, of Cervantes and Camoes; the classical joke of ‘Modernismo” being that Latin American literature has evolved beyond its national and colonial origins to embrace a true regional culture, and that the cultural capital of this “Latin America” is Paris!----Ha!----the place where almost every Latin American writer, artist, thinker or revolutionary would make pilgrimage to take part in the currents of the Western world. On the other hand, we are by necessity rooted in the history, geography and milieu of this corner of the globe, as you see reflected around you with all these references to our Pre-Columbian heritage and the various sub-cultures of our peoples, despite the fact that many or most of whom, just like North Americans, are immigrants or descendents from Europe itself---not only from colonial Spain and Portugal, but from Italy, Ireland, Britain, Germany---even Japan and the Middle-East, and really, like the USA to the north, of all of the countries of the world in a greater or lesser extent. Recall the joke of Borges---that the typical Argentine was an Italian, speaking Spanish, who thinks he is an Englishman! Ha! Ha! So in fact Latin American literature, just like ‘American’ or North American literature, has always been a part of both Western Literature and of World Literature, consciously or unconsciously.


If we ask who are the Latin American “Greats” who have made a global impact and contribution to World Literature as a whole beyond the milieu of their origins, then many of the names are quite obvious and familiar: Above all Borges, whose Ficciones and philosophical, bizarre and perplexing stories and exploratory non-linear modes of narrative are modernist classics the world over, such as “The Garden of the Forking Paths.” Then of course, there are the Nobel Prize winners, including many of the “El Boom” period with its “Lo real Maravilloso”---Magical Realism----of which Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Cien anos de soledad---the Hundred Years of Solitude is foremost. The Nobel Prize, and perhaps the Neustadt, are prima facie evidence of global contribution—res ipsa loquitur------and thus we would have to include Pablo Neruda of Chile, our own Octavio Paz of Mexico, Asturias of Guatemala, and Gabriela Mistral of Chile. Overall I would have to say the indisputable “Big Three” who have had a global impact as part of World Literature over the last century would be Borges, Neruda, and Garcia Marquez.

Yet obviously it would be a travesty to think of Latin America’s contribution to world literature only in terms of a hagiographic handful of beatified ‘Greats.’ The major contributors to world culture from Latin America go far beyond them. Of the Pre-Columbian heritage, we are hampered by the fact that many of the Indian or American peoples had no written language and much of their rich oral language and traditions have been lost or deliberately suppressed. Yet some important works, such as the Mayan classic, the Popul Vuh, or Council Book, a kind of Mayan Bible recording their myths of origin, classical tales of mythic heroes such as the Celestial Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, and a kind of tribal history like the tribal history of the Old Testament, have come down to us, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, originally oral epics memorized by classical singers, then later transcribed into alphabetical script and recorded. As in the case of the heritage of many African tribes, whose oral works and traditions are excluded from the definition of ‘Literature’ by the fact that they were composed orally rather than scripturally, we should keep an open mind and be ready to welcome “Orature” alongside “Literature” where the works are of significant quality and contribution, though I have to admit many of the oral stories and lore as well as contemporary writing offered by opportunistic so-called “Post-Colonial” champions of Third-World cultures are of low quality in their themes, quality of expression and imaginative scope, and of merely anthropological or historical interest, not rising in artistic or imaginative quality to any legitimate level of significant Literature or Orature, and usually bogusly included for reasons of political correctness, guilt, opportunism, or a factitious impulse to liberal inclusiveness, which ignores the vitally necessary criteria of artistic and thematic intrinsic quality. Ultimately Literature qua Literature must address itself to the universal mind, heart and consciousness of humanity as a whole through the intrinsic quality of literary experience, not merely the incidental historical portrayal of the circumstances of a an endless series of sub-groups, ethnicities, genders, and tribalisms without any heightened significance or consciousness beyond their localistic circumstances of origin and of limited interest to others. There can be no World Literature without a standard of intrinsic literary and artistic quality, flexible though it must needs be.

Other Pre-Columbian contributions might include the Cantos Mexicanos, or Songs of the Aztec Nobles, composed orally in Nahuatl and then later transcribed into Romanized script, as was the Popul Vuh, as well as later historical retrospectives recording Romanized transcriptions of Nahuatl, such as Bernardino de Sahagun’s General History of the Affairs of New Spain and Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon’s Treatise on the Superstitions of the Natives of New Spain. Perhaps these are of more historical than literary interest, though they often show the face of Western Civilization mirrored in the collision of the two hemispheres. Other borderline works of historical-cultural cum literary interest would include the Letters of Columbus to the King, and accounts of the conquest, such as Bernard Diaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, and the related historical works of Bartholome de las Casas, “Apostle of the Indians.” Once again, we get into a theoretical point----“What is Literature?”----are these works of historical interest only or are they of wider interest to the whole of humanity because of their universal quality? Sometimes it is hard to say at the borderline----because a work that is perhaps of only local historical interest may become ‘foundational’ to a whole culture---may become a cultural ‘touchstone’ in ignorance of which one can never hope to understand the culture as a whole and the potentially universal ideas which grow out of it-----Perhaps the Old Testament being an example, originally only a self-centered tribalistic totem of a civilizationally marginal people, yet evolving to become the common ethical-religious and spiritual root of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheistic culture dominant in the world today. Yet certainly many parts of it also rise in their literary and artistic high quality to be undeniable parts of literature.

In the colonial period there are many worthy candidates for at least secondary status in the global canon: Juan Ruiz de Alarcon—playwright, and Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, a remarkable woman and Mexican nun, proto-feminist, and intellectual, noted for her plays, poetry and prose.

From there we then reach the revolutionary period of the rise of nationalisms and Latin American nations attaining independency from Spain and Portugal, and going on to develop national literatures and cultures, all the while part of Western culture and literature and of a Pan-American Latin American culture and literature. Simon Bolivar, “El Liberator” was also a prolific writer, historical essayist and narrator of his military exploits. Similarly the Mexican Lizardi was an ardent propagandist and pamphleteer---a kind of Latin American Tom Paine, and also author of the supposed first Latin American novel, The Itching Parrot. Jose Juaquim Olmedo celebrated the victories of Bolivar in his La Victoria de Junin: Canto a Bolivar. As with Goethe, we have the coexistence of Classicism and Romanticism in such works as En el teocalli de Cholula, (In the Temple Pyramid of Cholula) of the Cuban Jose Maria Heredia, probably the first appearance of the Romantic poem in Latin America. Preeminent at this time was probably Sarmiento of Argentina, notably his Romantic views in his Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants—a topic and theme to become widespread, even down to the time of Garcia Marques in his Hundred Years of Solitude. Romanticism and nationalism were as common here in this period as they were in Europe. There are countless others of estimable quality, but perhaps fate did not lend them a global impact.

With the ending of the 19th Century brought on the period of “Modernismo,” which generally saw a break with the nationalistic expression of the prior generation, and writers immersed themselves in a world of artifice and imagination. These were the “Modernistas”, who believed, so it is commonly said, in the French Parnassian ideal of “l’art pour l’art---Art for art’s sake.” They wrote on rare and exotic themes and experimented with language and meter and symbolism. These included Najera, Silva, del Casal and Jose Marti but is generally accepted to have reached its peak with Nicaragua’s Ruben Dario, who I would strongly suggest as a candidate for the global canon of his era.
Then coming down to the early 20th Century, Latin America, together with the rest of the Western world was taken up with a myriad of movements and literary trends. Three women poets distinguished themselves, Alfonsina Storni, Juana de Ibarborou, and notably the Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, known for their impassioned lyrics.

The avant-garde in poetry included, Vincente Hudobro of Chile, Cesar Vallejo of Peru, Nobel winner Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina and Chile’s Pablo Neruda, also a Nobel Prize winner. The Latin American essay reached notable heights with our own Jose Vasconcellos of Mexico, known for his cultural theory and his prominent role in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and in the more artistic and aesthetic Alfonso Reyes. Urena, Picon-Salas and German Arciniegas made the essay a vehicle for social, historical and political ideas in Spanish speaking America. Our Mexican Revolution of 1910 also produced a flurry of revolutionary historical novels, such as El Aguila y la Serpiente—The Eagle and the Serpent—by Guzman, and The Underdogs, by Azuela. Around this time there was also a movement to represent the particular experience of the Indian or Native peoples, raised to the level of awareness of a protracted social problem, called the “indigenista” literature, with such writers as the Bolivian Alcides Arguedas, with his Raza de bronce—Bronze Race, and El Mundo es ancho y ajeno---Broad and Alien is the World, by the Peruvian Ciro Alegria.

Of course coming down to the second half of the 20th Century again we have the great period of “El Boom” in which Latin American literature really is put on the map of globalized World Literature. The Boom reflected the economic development of Latin America and the assimilation of many of the global Modernist influences in form and technique, multiple points-of-view, stream of consciousness and internal monologue, non-linear innovative narrative styles, and other techniques, pioneered earlier in the century by Faulkner, Joyce, James and Woolf. We have Guatemala’s Nobel Prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias, who combined mythological and social themes in such works as “El Presidente,” and The Bejewelled Boy. Then we have Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier who captured the world of magic and superstition in The Lost Steps and other works, and who is generally credited with coining the term “Magic Realism.” Similarly, writers of the older generation carried their work to higher powers, with Borges, Ficciones, that like many of the Boom writers to follow, combined he real with the fantastic, exploring the outer borders and limits of human reason and reality. His younger Argentine comrade, Julio Cortazar, made history with his formalistic experimentation in non-linear narration, embodied in such works as Rayuela—Hopscotch. And our own Carlos Fuentes, rose to global renown with his La Muerte de Artemio Cruz---The Death of Artemio Cruz, accompanied by other Latin American brothers in letters, such as Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru,--La casa verde--The Green House, and of course the now immortal Nobel laureate Garcia Marquez with his Hundred Years of Solitude.

Of course everything under the sun has its day, and The Boom gradually receded. In the Post-Boom period, as is ever the case when we draw near the present things are more complicated and confused, and the broad lines are yet to be recognized. There seems to be a turn towards irony and popular genres, such as in the works of Manuel Puig. We even get “Anti-Boom Literature” such as Alberto Fuguet’s “McOndo” satirizing and puncturing the Magic Realism tradition which had now fallen to become an overworked cliché, every book seemingly mandatorily leading to the Latin American jungle where the real and the fantastic are effortlessly and seamlessly evoked, and the spectre of the fantastic and supernatural more and more idiotically is intruded into an unrelated reality, unmotivated by the narrative, themes and characters. We have the modern “Best Sellers” of Paolo Coelho and Elizabeth Allende, and post-Boom pastiches of Magic Realism, such as Como agua para chocolate, by Laura Esquivel. Historical explorations such as Fernando Vallejo’s account of the violence surrounding the Medellin Cartel appeared, along with the “subaltern’’ and “Testimonio” wave, characterized by such figures as Rigoberta Menchu, and thus the present disappears in the fog of the present day.”

“So what is your take then on the Post-Modern Novel then, drawing on your experience with El Boom and its successors?” asked Sartorius.

“Well as a young writer I was also swept up in the Boom, which in our Latin American literature swept over the area like a tidal wave in the Sixties.” he said.

“As part of the movement, or part of the moment, were you concerned about your originality as a writer?---I mean this ‘anxiety of influence’ thing?” asked Sartorius.

“The originality of a work or a writer is directly proportional to the ignorance of their readers.” Rivera laughed.

“So what’s your take on the Post-Modern novel then, looking back from now?” Sartorius repeated.

As a reaction to Realism I think it was quite healthy, injecting a dimension of fantasy and imaginative development and room for innovations in narrative form that enriched the literary experience immeasurably. From it we begin to evolve the major characteristics of the Post-Modern Novel: Undermining of narrative conventions; subversion of Realism; self-reflexivity; the challenging of the text by the characters; the ‘Metafictional Loop’ whereby the readers re-enact and double searches undertaken by the work’s characters; the emphasis on the reader’s experience----overwhelming, manipulating and thwarting the reader’s strategies of interpretation; narrative impasses and cognitive confusions; the overthrow of the New Critical assumption that a strong reading can master the text with the Post-Modern assumption that no reading can master the text, rendering reading a Sisyphusian struggle against an insoluable range of meanings; the hyper-ironizing interposition of a mise-en-abime of the persona of the persona of the persona of the author or the text within text within text; the emphasis on Intertextuality---writing as re-reading, allusiveness of the text, creative re-inscription blending into plagiarism; the shift of emphasis from the foregrounding of the process of writing the work of Modernism to the process of reading the work of Post-Modernism; the ‘Breaking the Frame” with incestuous mixtures of fact and fiction and the baring of the raw fictionality of the work---or the assertion that the ‘The Truth of Fiction is that Fact is Fantasy;’ assertion of the absurdity of human existence and the radical undecidability of the text or any possible meaning thereof; the emphasis of plot over character with labyrinthine and entrapping plots overwhelming flattened and stereotypical characters; the shift from the Modernist assumption that there is a real story but it is inaccessible in its totality because of the limitations of human consciousness, to the Post-Modern assumption that there is no ‘real story’ and by extension there is no ‘real’ reality and no ‘real life’ to know; the mixing of high and low culture---academia and popular street culture----all these are the characteristics of the Post-Modern Novel we have become all too familiar with.”

“So you are now less sympathetic to the Post-Modern novel than you were before?” Sartorius followed up.

“Well, like everything in life it had its day and made its contribution and then began to manifest its limitations. The pendulum swings too far in one direction and it becomes necessary for it to swing back---Yin cannot overcome Yang, nor can Yang overcome Yin as you say from your Chinese experience. I think the Post-Modern movement has exhausted itself and has become a dead-end which now must be escaped into a new direction. Post-Modernism has become part of the ‘Literature of Exhaustion’ which has lost its life source. What do we have?-----We have onanistic novels fixated on the isolated masturbatory self-reflexive process of writing and reading and text which is cut off from life itself. We have flat, fragmented and stereotypical characters incapable of bearing to the reader the gravity of real life experience---with the psychological reality of the characters undercut by the satiric or implausible nature of the fictional universes they inhabit. We have flights of vacuous fantasy and irrealism dissociated with and untethered to real life---escapism and evasion.

Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


Linked also to a Sassurian sense of language alienated from its active human subject we have also a cancerous fictionality which undermines the sensibility of the sacredness and preciousness of life itself in the real human being that for the moment is the reader of the fictional text, but who must then return to confront and engage his real life in the real world in his real community, with its real natural environment, history and culture, and in which he must by necessity live and die. In short, we have a Post-Modern Novel and Literature which is cut off from life itself, and does not return itself to life and the process of living in the real world after its flights of fantasy and fictionality. As critics such as Raymond Williams points out from a Marxist point of view it is an escapist literature without an active social conscience and without political engagement for social reform or revolution----especially as commensurate with modern globalized social, economic and political conditions, and from an existential or humanistic point of view it is a fiction and literature which evades an engagement with self, reality, and the core issues of life and death and the struggle with the limitations of the human condition in the real world.

The bourgeois realist novel declined into an escape into the bourgeois cocoon of love and family and personal decadence whereas the Post-Modern novel declines into escape into alienated language, disengaged fantasy, social fission and deconstructed helplessness. We have a contemporary literature which is unfit for life. ----But I am ever hopeful---the forces of life itself will buoy this literature up and new works and new voices will return it to health I am sure. The Post-Modern Novel has a rendezvous with destiny, and a rendezvous with life that will return it to the service of life while transforming it into something new---that is life itself.………..So to sum up, all in all, Latin American literature has had a strong mark on global World Literature in the last century, including the greats, Neruda, Borges and Garcia Marquez, and the near greats, Octavio Paz, Asturias, Mistral, Fuentes, Cortazar, and Vargas Llosa. Without them the face of World Literature at the present time would not be the same.” concluded Professor Rivera.
Sartorius looked up from his notebook, over which he was scurrying to note down the significant details of Professor Rivera’s discourse, keeping a record of these conversations across the globe, so as to make use of them in the later book he and Günter were planning and outlining together.

Günter Gross, also raised his glass in a toast, and said to Rivera “Most excellent, most excellent, Carlos. I want to pick up on your initial remarks about the historical-cultural cum literary candidates for the canon-----and I think it is a hard nut to crack theoretically.----Ultimately you have to come up against the big question---‘What is Literature?’---especially as we define it as a living institution rather than a mere word. Nowadays we are bombarded in the modernized anthologies with “testimonial” accounts of former slaves, women, members of ethnic minorities, religions, hyphenated interest groups, and the like, and very often the writings are indeed of some human and historical interest and could commend themselves to broaden one’s perspective in how others might see the world, yet when you come down to it they are not well written or well conceived as writing, offer little in the expansion of consciousness beyond the prosaic and mundane, are not excellent as writing in and of itself, nor do they bring new ideas, sensibilities, experiences or vision. In short they make perfect sense as case studies in a book of Contemporary History or Sociology, or human interest stories for a popular magazine, but there is nothing to them as Literature, by any standard of quality. They don’t really belong in a canon of imaginative masterpieces as much as in a civics or sociology class. But it is devilish hard to identify the standards of literary quality by which to make a proper distinction, and then, after that to identify what is the social role of literature, either in civil society as a whole or within the classroom and institutional academia. I would like to get your views on this Gordian Knot!” Günter asked Rivera.

But just as Rivera was about to formulate an answer Günter Gross’ mobile telephone rang, who glancing down at the monitor, saw it was from his wife in Germany. He excused himself for a minute to go out into the hallway to talk and remained there over twenty minutes, during which time Sartorius and Carlos made small talk in anticipation of his return. When he came back in, his head was bent and he looked somber, and he made an unexpected announcement: “I am sorry my friends, but I have just received some sad news. My brother Jurgen has just died and my wife has called asking for help in making the funeral arrangements. I am going to have to reschedule my flight home, I think.------I think after we give our speeches tomorrow morning at the UN Parliamentary Assembly Conference, I will need to fly back immediately----tomorrow afternoon or evening, as my wife is unfamiliar with how to arrange these things, and needs some emotional support from the sound of things------so I will have to leave you, Robert, in the hands of our friend Carlos for the rest of the week without me. I am terribly sorry but I guess these things can’t be helped.”

With that somber note the convivial and reflective mood of the party broke up, and though lingering for another half-hour, everyone was mindful to allow Günter some peace of mind and make it convenient to get back to his hotel room, from where he would have to make a dozen telephone calls to make new arrangements for his flight, and call back to his family for condolences, funeral arrangements and emotional support. So after a few kindly drinks and belated farewells, the university car took them back to the Marco Polo Hotel, where Sartorius left his friend Günter to his room and the duties which he could only perform alone. Sartorius called Anna Maria Iglesias to get her office to assist Günter in making the new travel arrangements and rescheduling the speaking order at the Conference to allow him to get an early start to the airport the next day.

Thus it came about that Sartorius found himself alone in his room early that evening, when he had expected to be out partying and painting the Zona Rosa red, as he had done the previous evening with Günter and Carlos. Trapped alone in his room, and with the somber mood of the death of Günter’s brother acting as a further depressant, Sartorius found himself drinking alone, draining a bottle of Tequila he had brought home from the last night’s party. As he drank he became more depressed, and as he became more depressed, he drank more, in a vicious circle and downward mood. Slowly the dismal circumstances of his present predicament became clearer to him. He would have to pass the rest of the week----the next three days until his birthday alone and stranded in this hotel room. He would drink heavily, he knew, and would be alone.

As he drank his anxiety increased, and he felt himself falling prey to a psychological weakness and vulnerability. However many good people were around him, supporters of the work of the Committee, he knew that he was never one of them, the good bourgeois citizens, do-gooders and feel-gooders of the middle class. He knew he was an outsider, without a family and largely on his own, like a wolf of the steppes looking into the lighted windows of the villages of the grassland, and wishing he might belong, be warmed by their hearthfires, yet knowing that he was alone and savage in heart, a creature of the timberlands and grasslands, who could never find a home amoung them, indeed, must from time to time tear open the throats of their sheep or even of they themselves to survive. Yes, one part of him was a dreamer, an idealist, a humanist, an artist even----but the other half of him had no place in human society----like the outlawed wolf of the steppes. How often had he longed to end the suffering of his so torn open heart! He knew he must suffer ten, one hundred fold more than the common folk-----it was his lot to suffer and be alone in his suffering-----perhaps Christ-like, perhaps wolf-like. Yet he also often thought that this was his payment---his passage to those moments of intense emotion, of occasional ecstasy that seemingly made his life of so much suffering worthwhile, and redeemable. Without the suffering and the aloneness he would not have those moments of intense life, of insight, of occasional artistic creation even.

Yet the years increased his burden of suffering and isolation until they became more and more unbearable. Consciously he had only contempt for those smooth people, the successful bourgeois with their families and comforts, and easy unthinking, unfeeling belongingness to the herd; in his inner heart he envied them to his bones yet hated them just as well. He longed to tear their throats out, yet he longed for their warmth and comfort as well. Outwardly people took him for a successful professor, yet inwardly he knew he was in agony and alone, even though surrounded by departments of scholars and students who would never guess his plight. For fifteen years he had slept with, had sex with many women, but had never found peace. His loneliness and his despair grew heavier and heavier with the years, as the great stone of Sisyphus must have grown heavier and heavier in his despair, yet he kept rolling forward, perhaps out of habit, perhaps out of fear, ever alone in his pain. Tonight his pain seemed to catch up with him.

For fifteen years, since his divorce and loss of his son, he had played a small private game with himself. However painful today was, he could lighten its burden and give himself a freedom of heart by telling himself, perhaps as a joke, that if it all wasn’t better by his fiftieth birthday, he would be free to end his suffering and kill himself. However agonizing the pain of the moment might be, he always could bear it until that time and then freely cut himself free of it. Perhaps it was a silly psychological crutch, but he learned to indulge his whim, and it seemed to help.

Now his fiftieth birthday was but three days away, and the stakes wagered in his little private game seemed to prey more and more on his mind until he twisted and churned inside himself, feeling more and more uncomfortable being alone by himself in his gloomy room, downing more and more glasses of rum, brandy and tequila. For the first time that he could remember in years and years he began to positively fear being alone by himself, alone drinking by himself----afraid of something----afraid that something……might happen. From time to time, having drunk many glasses of alcohol, he would wonder if he was hearing voices about him----voices whispering or calling his name-----voices luring him with suspect indefinable undertones, in words he could not decipher-----words just beyond making clear, like some song on the radio listened to over and over again, familiar, yet the words of which one could only sense----the exact sound and meaning of which one could just not quite make out over the music.

Around eleven o’clock Sartorius was pacing back and forth furiously, desperate for escape, and could no longer contain himself within his room. He grabbed his things and made his way down to the lobby bar of the hotel, opposite the front desk, sitting down over a Tequila. After fifteen minutes he saw Pablo, the desk clerk who had helped carry and put him to sleep in his room last night just getting off duty and passing command of the desk to his graveyard-night-shift colleague. Pablo walked across the lobby, carrying his saxophone in its black case, and sat down next to Sartorius, giving him a cordial hello. Sensing that Sartorius was anxious he offered to treat him to a drink.

“What are you drinking? Tequila? ….Mmmmmn…..that is good, but I think you need something a bit stronger……a little more challenging and adventurous! I can sense that you are not one of the sheep! You need something with a little more life, a little more imagination in it----here let me introduce you to a glass of Mescal-----I usually drink it before I go on my jazz gigs. After eleven I make some more money and unwind the creative juices playing in several dance clubs and jazz bars around here in the Zona Rosa. I always find a few glasses of Mescal can loosen the creative juices! Here let me treat you-----Miguel---Dos Mescals---doubles!----Don’t worry about it----I get it for free here in the hotel---And they keep a special bottle of the best real stuff for me!------you can pay me back by treating me someplace else later!”

With that Pablo picked up his saxophone and played a few bars just for fun, and when the Mescals came, he picked one up and handed the other to Sartorius, proposing a small toast:

“Lahkhaim!—To life!---To Beautiful, wonderful, horrible Life!” he joked, smiling broadly towards Sartorius with his healthy, infectious smile.

“To Life!” Sartorius riposted, sucking down the strong yet seemingly tasteless ether of the Mescal drink, indeed strong, trying hard to keep from gagging at the back of his throat.

“Slow and easy! Draw the ether down slow and easy----it is powerful stuff, and you’ll feel the kick hit your spine and blood a couple seconds later. First Mescal hits your nerves, then your bloodstream, and then finally your soul!” laughed Pablo.






4






The next morning the University car came early to pick up Sartorius and Günter Gross and ferry them across town to UNAM, the National University of Mexico, where many of the speeches, conferences and events of the Latin American Regional Conference and Caucus for the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly Campaign would take place. Robert and Günter had exchanged places in the speaking order so that Günter could make his speech in the early morning and have time to leave to catch his flight to Berlin. Sartorius would speak later in the afternoon in his stead.

The crowds were lined up from early morning, surging forward to get entrance and the scarce seats left available, and the police were straining to keep order, keeping a wary eye on the swarms of “hoodies” of the Occupy Wall Street movement which turned out a boisterous crowd in support of the event. Sartorius and Günter knew that the turnout was not primarily for themselves, or even for the enthusiasm for the concept of a UN Parliamentary Assembly in general, but reflected the organizational genius of Anna Maria Iglesias, who had packed the speaking agenda with global celebrities who could draw attention to the cause. She was particularly fond of the “Divine Twins” strategy, putting back to back known celebrities who could play off one another and shed some sparks that would hopefully catch fire for the benefit of the good cause.

In the morning following Günter, she had the two ex-Secretaries General of the United Nations---Boutros Boutros Ghali and Xavier Perez de Cuellar. After them came the joint appearance of Isis and Osiris, and the flooding of the campus with the waves of the uncontrollable army of their mass following. In the afternoon, following Sartorius’ speech, came the joint appearance of the next set of “Divine Twins”---the two ex-Presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, then the set of football megastars---Kaka and Ronaldo. The Conference also brought together many leading political leaders from the parliaments and governments of all the Latin American countries and noted writers and media celebrities. The more and more this mounting wave of “People Power” surged forward, however, the more and more active and passive resistance from the entrenched political and financial interests and power holders also appeared as further hurdles to be overcome.

Nonetheless, the global media and the consensus of opinion was that the “Big M”----Momentum---was building globally towards a stronger and stronger position in favour of the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly concept as time went on, bolstered by a wave of public support from the young and restless, represented in numbers from the Occupy Wall Street crowds, and it became more and more costly and unsustainable for the reactionary interests to resist this massive wave of public opinion over the long run. More and more, instinctively and inevitably, the voices and faces of the wide world sought a single place to come together as a people and make themselves heard, and make themselves understood.

After the Conference, the notables attended a Gala fundraising dinner where there was much hobnobbing and banter, and there was the tradition of the comic “roasting” of the celebrities, poking fun at their feet of clay and the foibles of the media circus which always followed and surrounded their lives, as well as enjoying a general sense of good humour and bonhomie. All of this created further “photo opportunities” for those who cultivated and exploited them, and a bit of vicarious thrill for the hoi polloi and the in between. Sartorius overindulged his new-found fondness for Mexican Tequila, and at the end of the evening sloshed his way back to the car ferrying him back to the Marco Polo Hotel in the Zona Rosa.

As he came into the hotel lobby Sartorius passed a party of costumed guests----skeleton clad and skull-capped, or arrayed as devils and demons and assorted spectres---- apparently heading for a party on the Theme of the Day of the Dead, though that day was still two days away, falling, a chance would have it, on his birthday…….this year his fiftieth birthday. Feeling his liquor Sartorius made his way to his hotel room, showered, and then lay down naked on his bed and tried to fall asleep. He could not.

The day’s events replayed themselves in his mind, followed by a blankness not followed by sleep. He paced up and down the room. Then he caught sight of a figure, haggard and terrifying, that he at the first shiver took to be a ghost before confirming it as his own degraded face in the dressing mirror. Gazing hypnotically into the eyes of his image looming back in the dark, then stroking and rubbing at his cheeks and lips, he mused inwardly: “Are ghosts dreadful to us because they bring towards us from the future some component, in the vectoral sense, of our own deaths? Are they partially, defectively our own dead selves thrust backwards, in recoil from the mirrorface at the end of time, to haunt us?-------------The dead, do they sleep?” he asked himself mutely, staring at his shadow on the wall opposite. “Why should they when we cannot?”

After an hour of trying to lose himself in sleep Sartorius, got up again, began pacing back and forth innumerable times, then gave up, dressed, and went down to the lobby bar. Sitting down at the bar he caught the eye of the bartender and mouthed out in a depressed tone: “Mescal! Por favor----double!”

Sartorius remained drinking at the bar for another hour, hoping that a few more glasses of alcohol would tip him over into drowsiness and he would be able to go back to his room and fall asleep. On the contrary, however, the more he drank the more he found it impossible to approach sleep, and aside from a slowing down of his senses, he felt more awake than ever. And it was while he sat there, scarcely moving, that he was in hell and no one knew it. At such times the future became so clear that it was as if he were remembering it, remembering it in place of the past which he could no longer describe. But there was no future and no past, only the unspeakable misery of his own self.

After several Mescals he was joined again by Pablo, who, saxophone case in hand, was just getting off the night shift as it was replaced by the graveyard shift, at which time he would always stop by the bar for the free drinks slipped him by his bartender buddies, often prior to heading out for a late-night gig playing jazz at one or another of the many all-night clubs and cabarets in town. Sitting down next to Sartorius he ordered up two more free Mescals from his campanero behind the bar and slid one over to Sartorius, raising his own glass towards him: “Salut!—Professore!” he smiled over, clinking his glass against Sartorius’ and then downing it in a single motion, then gesturing to his buddy to refill them.

“Professore!” he began, slipping his arm under that of Sartorius, “……I saw you on television tonight! You and all the celebrities for the United Nations Appeal……..very handsome!......very impressive…….I can’t say I approve of all that sort of thing altogether……but I appreciate your style!......and putting on a good show!..........I always respect style, regardless of anything!”

“Salut!” riposted Sartorius, “well, I appreciate the compliment, Pablo, but there is no need to butter me up……..after all we’re good friends now aren’t we?.............I’d rather hear you speak frankly…….You say you don’t approve of our campaign?..............you don’t think a little democracy would be good for the geopolitics of the world and the spirit of human brotherhood?”

“Roberto!-----I love you but I think you and your ilk are amoung the biggest idiot fools in the world! Always running around trying to save the downtrodden, save the world! Always it is save this, save that! Save the starving helpless Ethiopians! Save the debt-ridden Africans! Save helpless Palestine and the Cambodians! Save the helpless Tibetans and Uighers! Don’t buy blood diamonds and don’t wear blood furs! Now save the whole silly world from itself with some silly Parliament where there will most likely only be new opportunities for new opportunists to prostitute themselves with their deceitful posturing and manipulation! ------------I mean why can’t you people mind your own damn business and face up to the simple truth that the world is either going to destroy itself or save itself without your virtuous interference anyway! Why don’t you concentrate first on saving your own miserable lives before taking on the chimera of the world’s woes!”

“But doesn’t somebody have to step up and try to do something collectively to avert the crises and calamities that would be beyond the power of any individual alone, or even any nation alone, to deal with?” Sartorius shot back.
“Calamity!---Calamidades!-----there always has to be some calamity threatening everyone, but which somehow never materializes-------naturally averted by the heroics of the poseurs and do-gooders, no doubt!----but most important a permanent state of fear that we all have to live in and be manipulated by-------but more importantly enhancing their own self-importance and self-righteousness to justify interfering in everybody else’s lives and make such a fucking mess of their own!” retorted Palo.

“Well, Pablo, aren’t you distorting things a bit with a caricature like that?” he replied.

“Not at all Roberto------listen---------Do-gooders-----what are they really like?-----You are an educated man-----you remember from Tolstoy----War and Peace------do remember the conversation in the book with the volunteers on the train----volunteers going off to fight the invading Napoleon? ……….At first they pretended to be great selfless idealists and heroes—there were three of them. The first volunteer after a few drinks revealed himself as an egomaniacal braggart and degenerate simply idolizing his own narcissistic image of himself as a hero and savior of the helpless world!—The second volunteer was a man who had tried everything and had been a complete failure in life and this cause was only an excuse to escape the calamity and worthlessness of his own life and the scolding of his wife and his guilt towards his children for his failure! The third, the only one that Tolstoy found a favourable attitude towards, in the end proved to be a cadet who had failed his examinations and been thrown out of military school and had volunteered to exorcise his own shame and ignominy! Misfits all of them!----the larger number good-for-nothings, poseurs, cowards and conformists, meek wolves, parasites and evaders of reality-----afraid to take responsibility for themselves and hiding in a crowd of moral conformists and like the cookoo bird, having lost their own nests, try to save themselves by living in someone else’s! Ready to go anywhere for the good fight, yet afraid to face the mirror!”

“Ha!---It’s funny Pablo, you may be half-right—sure there are a lot of fucked-up people in these movements, sure-----but that doesn’t prevent you from being half-wrong either! Are they really any worse than any other selection of people?” he replied.

“I don’t say they are any worse----just they should mind their own fucking business first and straighten out their own fucking lives before they go around preaching to the rest of the world. Then at least they could be honest about themselves and wouldn’t have to live a lie---and that is the first step to salvation----if there is any. I might say with Christ that the truth will set you free, if freedom in the world itself wasn’t such a silly mop-headed notion of the liberal idealists that doesn’t exist in the first place. And it can free your mind with some kind of inner freedom if you begin with the truth in your own life.” he answered.

“Well you had better watch out Pablo, with those views you might be mistaken for a Reagan- Republican-Thatcherite-Neo-Liberal instead of a bohemian!” Sartorius quipped.

“Roberto!----I’m beyond the point where I care what anyone takes me for----But Roberto!----we’ve got to get out of here, escape the paper world, and see some real life!----Come along with me---I’m playing with my jazz band until dawn at the Café Chagrin across town----I’ll introduce you to a few friends of mine and we’ll see if we can find something worth living for tonight!” he offered.

Sartorius hesitated, but in the end he knew he could not sleep, and in fact he felt himself afraid to return to his room------afraid of his own negative thoughts and the direction they might turn. To escape himself he decided to follow Pablo. They downed another free Mescal and set off together.

They boarded the cross-town tram and the sound of the wheels on the track rattled through Sartorius’ brain: “Clippity-one; Clippity-two; Clippity-three; Clippity-four……………lickity-cut, lickity-cut, lickity-cut…………” The Mescal oozed in his brain as another of Pablo’s musician friends boarded the tram with his guitar case, and they talked together rapidly in Spanish, Sartorius’s brain too unfocused to follow. He looked out the window, his head hot against the cool glass, seeing the clusters of revelers of the Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead—enacting a Latin or Aztec Walpurgisnacht, wandering along the streets, some carrying candles, some eating sugar skulls and chocolate coffins and skeletons, and some in costumes of demons, skeletons, skull-boned ghosts and assorted denizens of the underworld. The Day of the Dead was really two days, All Saints Day, tomorrow,---or really today, since it was already past midnight----and All Souls Day, the day following---his fiftieth birthday. Pablo’s friend then drew a large bottle of Mescal out of his guitar case and passed it to the three friends, Sartorius taking a long draw with an appreciative smile from the seat behind them.

As the kick from the Mescal hit his backbone and began to radiate out from the foramina of his spine Sartorius was conscious an extended twitching in his field of vision, like the presence of sand fleas in the receding surf on a beach…….Clippity-one; Clippity-two……lickity-cut; lickity-cut…… The tram shuddered on, reeling, cannonading, drunk. Sartorius stared at the quaking, shaking floor. Chingar! Something like a tree stump, or maybe it was the stump of an amputated human limb with a tourniquet on it seemed to be seated on the seat opposite Sartorius; from the seat behind stretched an elongated withered limb at the end of which the white knuckles of a hand applied a death grip to a severed woman’s breast, engorging the nipple with the pressure of its deadly squeeze; a sickening smell of ether and blood filled the car, a severed leg in an army boot appeared, with a pair of spectral hands trying to unlace it across the front; headless things dangled from the ceiling, and cadavers sat about him, the skin falling from their skulls, windpipes protruding from slit throats, smoking fat cigars; screaming burnt bodies of children piled up; a landmine posterboy on crutches and large vacant eyes dragging his intestines; contorted cadavers being strangled by their own limbs with agonized, despairing faces appeared like something out of a Dali surrealscape; the prim conductor in a blue uniform and cap punching their tickets and passing on down the aisle wordlessly in the night.

Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


Sartorius felt the hot weight of an intense and oppressive stare boring into the back of his skull and overwhelmed by the sensation of being scrutinized and followed he turned his head back sharply towards the rear half-car of the articulated tram following and swiveling behind them, alternately coming into and moving out of sight as they negotiated the turns of the winding street. In the half-car behind a small group of men sat around a man with whitish bloated eyes, staring back at him with a threatening mien. Their eyes were all swollen and their lips were big and bruised and he thought they were a clutch of defeated boxers going home after a losing fight. Then he noticed that two of them only had one hand apiece, and that the man with the bloated eyes had only three fingers. He wore rings on all of the fingers and squinted in Sartorius’ direction.

Sartorius turned his head back forward but continued to watch behind him in a convex disc-mirror mounted over the pneumatic doors. Two albino men boarded the tram in ponchos and sombreros. They were freckled and their eyes were green, and they seems queerly beautiful, their eyes serenely opening and shutting, wobbling from side to side, as if they couldn’t stand the light of the streetlights as they passed. They took their seats three rows behind Sartorius, staring forward as though waiting for something.

Behind them at the next stop through the rear door mounted a very tall man and woman in dark glasses, though it was already quite dark in the night outside. Their legs were very long. The rest of their bodies were quite short. They had thin elongate faces behind the glasses. They moved forward in the tram looking for empty seats, shuffling towards Sartorius. They came over to him, stood perfectly straight for a moment, and then, like bizarre actors, they leant over him, keeping their legs straight and bending at the waist. Then they snatched off their glasses to take a closer look at him. Sartorius shuddered and started. Both of their eyes were totally white. They could have been made of milk. They were white and blank and unmoving, as if they had been stuck there, malformed, in the empty sockets. Sartorius felt transfixed, as if suffering a living rigor mortis. Their white eyes didn’t move. They were so birdlike, so alien ghostly, that he couldn’t tell what or where they were looking at.

Then more passengers mounted and dismounted the tram. There was a man with a head like that of a camel, a woman with a terrible hip deformation, another man with white hair and a midget with flaming orange hair and sideburns in a tuxedo, cape and ancient stovepipe dress hat. The silence hovering over the silent stares became unbearable. The midget laughed. He laughed like a drunken goat. He was answered by a laugh by the man with the milk-white eyes. He laughed like a hyena. Then the tramcar began to echo with the murmur of voices, as the small grouplet’s began to gabble amoung themselves. They talked in their inhuman languages. The blankness of death came upon Sartorius. As he watched them, glancing backward and watching in the curved mirror, they began to transform, breaking out of their moulds. The passengers kept changing, becoming something other. What they were underneath kept bubbling up, emerging from the transparency of their skins. After a while he felt as if his eyes were playing elaborate tricks on him, or that a fever was invading him in strange ways. He shut his eyes for three minutes. It was no different when he reopened them. The sound of the wheels on the track rattled again through Sartorius’ brain: “Clippity-one; Clippity-two; Clippity-three; Clippity-four……………lickity-cut, lickity-cut, lickity-cut…………”

The road was endless. The eyes watched him from behind as the tram negotiated corner after corner. One road led to a thousand others, which in turn were fed by paths, turning into dirt tracks, which became streets which connected to the tram line. Sartorius rested his forehead against the cold pane of glass to cool it, staring out the window as they passed the vast ongoing construction site that was the ever-expanding new district of the city. Half-skyscrapers stood high and inscrutable beside shanties, huts and zinc abodes. Bridges being built; flyovers, half finished, were like passageways jutting incredibly into thin air, or like future visions of a time when cars would be able to fly. The moon shone round and bright above them, but had no face. Roads, half-constructed, were crowded with idle construction machinery, set still by the Day of the Dead. Here and there nightwatchmen slept under the stars with dull lamps as their only earthly illumination. Sartorius’ eyes drooped into unconsciousness.

Then he felt an elbow poking at his ribs and a shaking and he awoke to find Pablo pulling him up from his stale-smelling tramseat towards the exit door. “Roberto! Vaminos!----We made it, man---we made it!---Come on---let’s go!— ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Epa!” he shouted as he pulled. Reaching their station the three jumped off, passing a string of moving candlelights passing in the shadows on the opposite side of the road. They made their way down two blocks and entered a doorway beneath a flashing neon sign-----”Café Chagrin,” it announced, and through which was felt the vibration of the jazz-beated music wafting up through the hot and smoke-filled air------warm, dense and palpable. Pushing their way through the dense crowd that filled a long narrow hallway leading to the dark music hall, half in Day of the Dead costumes and half without, the musicians made their way to the bandstand and unpacked their instruments, tuning up for the next set. Pablo spoke to the waiter to arrange a table for Sartorius near the front, and ordered him a double Mescal. Sartorius began to drink and smoke as the jazz band started on its set, and the piano, saxophone, drums and horns began to play off one another, improvising responses as each foray heightened the beating pulse of the music. After three sets and three more Mescals, the band took a break.

Pablo came out from behind the bandstand, drew aside the curtain of a private room, and then escorted a stunning woman towards Sartorius’ table. The woman was dressed as a “Catrina,” from the “La Calavera Catrina” images made famous from the illustrations of Posada and in such murals as Diego Rivera’s ‘Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda.’ That is to say, she was dressed as an exceedingly elegant upper-class woman of the last century in an elegant feathered bonnet and sensually-cut exquisite evening dress fit for an appearance in high-society at a Parisian opera house, but with her body transformed by her costume into a skeleton adorned with a gaily coloured feathered shawl and her face a bewigged white-skull, nonetheless displaying a joyful, almost leering smile. “The Catrina” was a stock image of the Day of the Dead in Mexico, they say derived from the ancient Aztec “Lady of the Dead”----Mictecacihuatl-----and a common costume for beautiful women to sport in the evening revels and costume parties of the holiday.

In past centuries the Catrina figure was supposed to remind sinning humanity that even the rich and the elegant are destined to end in the grave, but over time the Catrina became ironized into a camp figure celebrating the mystic union of Eros and Thanatos in the extended carnival of sensual delight. Sartorius catching first sight of her drew an involuntary suffocating inbreath and held it in a kind of momentary paralysis, not being able to release it, the dread and fear of females which he as all men had drawn in with the primary mammalian milk, then releasing it as she approached.

“The Catrina” made her way across the small dance floor towards Sartorius, Pablo guiding her by her elbow, the lithe beauty of her long limbs evident from her tight dress and swaying movements---her healthy young body displaying an extraordinary, almost animal vitality.-------“Roberto!----let me introduce my friend Maria---she is a singer------I hope she can cheer you up a bit with a little fun!” he twanged playfully,”----Oh, and don’t be dismayed----beneath the gruesome mask there is something more delightful!”

that Maria lowered her Catrina-skull mask, revealing a beautiful dark-eyed Latin-Indian face with rich, dense black hair----the striking visage of a Pocahontas Indian Princess with a warm and inviting smile: “Ciao Roberto!” she giggled out, leaning warmly against his arm, “Pablo tells me you are a so, so serious Professor!---Our goal is to get you to let down your hair and unstiffen your somber face and share a little of the joy of the carnival with us!”
“Enchanté Seniorita!”---he intoned---trying to smile and unwrinkled his brow as he kissed her offered hand. Then Pablo ordered a Mescal for Sartorius and a Marguerita for Maria, before returning to the bandstand to take up the next set. Sartorius offered up a toast to her: “To the most charming skeleton I have ever shared a drink with!”—and she smiled back at him, sipping her drink, as she laid her free hand atop his and curled towards his body. They talked through the next set and then Maria stood up, taking him by both hands, saying: “Come on mister serious Professor! You need to learn how to dance and have some fun!” and with that she pulled him up onto the dance floor, jostling other younger couples lost in the jazz rhythms, and she tried to get Sartorius to loosen up----finally succeeding as he got over his stiffness and embarrassment to some extent to let himself go, and feel the music pulsing through the both of them as they moved, and he felt the vitality of her body kindling that of his.

Then, instead of sitting at Sartorius’ original table, she led him to the private room to the side of the bandstand, where within she poured out a pair of drinks and toasted him again, then snuggling up against his body and letting her hair hang loose as she lifted her face invitingly towards Sartorius’ own. After an embarrassed moment of hesitation, nonplussed, Sartorius gave in to his inclination and kissed her full on her sensually pursed lips, feeling something melting inside his tensed brain. His body flowed more easily towards hers as they slumped together on the plush velvet sofa, and he pushed his face harder against hers, as hers sunk into the soft pillows behind her. Then she snapped bolt upright and began to fumble within the generous cleavage between her large and pendulous breasts, withdrawing at last a large crucifix. She unscrewed a cap at the tip of the crucifix and then poured out onto the glass-covered coffee table in front of the sofa a large mound of white powder.

She then used a hair-clip to move the white powder into parallel lines and withdrew a silver straw-like tube and a small silver spoon from the crucifix. She then pulled back her long black hair out of the way, and inserting the silver tube into her left nostril, began to sniff and suck up the white powder, pressing her right nostril closed against her septum, then finishing the line of powder with a whiffing flourish, shaking her head and hair in satisfaction, giggling into Sartorius face as she buried her face, first against the hair of his chest, then sliding down, against the bulge in his crotch, her hair spreading out across his lap like a silent sleeping hurricane as he felt the heat of her face giggling through the thin fabric of his trousers.

Then she raised herself up, kissing Sartorius upon the neck and lips, and motioned for him to take the next line. Sartorius hesitated, looked back to her questioningly, then yielded to his suffused desire. He sniffed up a line of the powder, then she followed-up with a spoon-full which she held up to his nose, closing off the opposite nostril, him sucking it up in a single whiff. After that Sartorius found himself alternatively drinking, sniffing and snorting, then exploring Maria’s well-sculptured body beneath her clothing, then sharing drinks and snorts with Pablo and his colleagues, then finding himself more and more deeply entwined with Maria’s body and lost in her eyes and smiling, caressing lips. Somewhere, somehow, sometime before dawn he found his face buried in her warm hair and bodice within a taxicab his head pressed against the glass of a window, and then he found himself in his hotelroom in the Marco Polo, several half-empty bottles on the coffee table.

Then pulling each other’s clothing off, piece by piece, lips locked, they made their inevitable way into the bed, Maria’s large vibrant breasts responding to the desire of his mouth, they lost themselves in a carnival of sense and touch, prolonging each moment of pleasure. They kissed and folded their bodies into each other long and long, warm and warm, unendingly nestling between the silk sheets of the king-sized double bed, milking the sweet darkness of its pleasure. Playfully, she sprinkled a trail of the white powder along the erect shaft of his swollen penis and then moved her pulsing inhaling nostrils along its full length to its head, which she then kissed, then licked, then by slow inches swallowed to its hilt. Then Sartorius rolled on top and entered Maria and she squealed and writhed, he pressing his forehead against hers and rubbing his gaping lips and mouth against the sides of her lovely cheeks, finding her lips shortly before the moment of climax. Then they collapsed into a sweet darkness, bathed in each other’s sweat, Sartorius’ head resting on Maria’s naked breast insensate; passing into the dark his only hope was for eternal nothingness, and he hoped it with all his heart.

“Sleep my darling” whispered Maria into Sartorius’ barely conscious ear, stroking the hair on his head. “Sleep Roberto…….sleep is what you need……….…sleep is the first and holiest sacrament Roberto…….every man who reaches sleep reaches faith Roberto…….reaches God, whether he knows it or not, whether he believes or not. It is the first faith.-----and the others grow out of it----you lay yourself in the hands of sleep and know that there will be a morning and that you will be there to rise again from yourself….still you, to awaken to it---- lay yourself in the hands of the night, Roberto…..…sleep baby……….sleep………”

Then she saw that he had drifted off. She began to stroke his ear and the hair on his temple, humming and then mouthing softly to him the words of an old song by Leonard Cohen she loved, and sang softly into his ear:


“All the Sisters of Mercy are not all departed and gone
They came to me then when I thought that I could not go on;
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song,
I hope you run into them, you who’ve been travlin’ so long.

La, la la lah la la, La la la lah la la
La la la lah…..la la la……”


When his alarm clock went off Sartorius was still in a subconscious state. He dragged himself back to the world of the living long enough to send a text message on his mobile phone to Professor Rivera, telling him he was unwell and would skip the organized tour to the local sights arranged for several of the Conference participants. Then he fell back into unconsciousness in Maria’s warm arms, she still asleep, and slept for another four hours. When he awoke he was alone. A note on the pillow opposite told him that she had to go to her afternoon and evening singing performance at another dance club, thanking him for the wonderful night and sending her warm love and friendship. She hoped she would see him again before he left for London.







5





By the time he had collected his wits about him and shaved and showered, changing clothes, it was already afternoon. At the front desk, asking for his messages and mail he learned that Pablo would not be on duty that afternoon and night and was presumably off playing another jazz gig somewhere, but nobody knew where. He got a handful of letters, most apparently related to the Committee work, and he stuffed them into the inner pocket of his laptop carrying case, unable to focus his mind to deal with reading them, and then headed for the bar, which offered a buffet lunch there and found himself ravenously hungry. As he sat and downed several glasses of wine with his meal, followed by another Mescal, he heard coursing through his brain from somewhere: Clippity-one; clippity-two; clippity-three’; clippity-four----------likity-cut, likity-cut, likity-cut-------then the long drawn out banshee-scream of a passing train-whistle leaving an icy contrail trace of pain behind his eyes. He took another Mescal.
Then, not knowing what to do with himself, and again feeling the restlessness and anxiety about staying about his hotelroom alone, he walked down the lobby to the Concierge desk, where he saw a small group of foreign tourists huddling before a waiting mini-bus. The Concierge handed him a flyer: “Bull Throwing Tour: The Golden Cattle of the Sun!---Arena Tomalin!” Distracted, he decided to get on board, handing a folded bill to the Concierge and receiving back a ticket.

They arrived at the Arena. What a wonderful time everyone was having, how happy they were, how happy everyone was! Notwithstanding the morning newspaper’s headlines about five human skulls, forcibly extracted of every tooth while still living, with a leather soccer ball to which the excised flayed and skinned-face of another of the victims was sewn, having been found in the Zócalo, apparently a lesson from the assassins and intimidators of the drug cartel who had claimed over twenty-thousand such victims over the last decade; an outbreak of swine flu and mad cow disease; another political crisis threatening to bring down the government and a teamsters' strike-----everyone merrily laughed away their tragic history, the gruesome events, the past and the underlying death!
Hawkers pushing antique peanut wagons made their way through the crowd, the spectators passing bags down the long rows and passing back the offered money towards the aisle. Just then a bull shot out the gate on the opposite side of the arena from Sartorius. It was a merry bull at heart too, having a good time kicking at those around him and against the wooden barriers, racing the full circumference of the Arena. Unlike the bulls in Hemingway’s Fiesta it knew that it wasn’t going to be killed in a sublime tragedy of fated and fevered blood---it had merely to play, to participate in the gaiety, a light comedy in the romantic spirit. Just, it needed to put on a dangerous show to begin---just to establish its dignity.

Nonetheless, a handful of borrachos, drunk and dragging their mescal bottles with them, began to drop over the barrier and into the ring, venturing to try to ride the bull prematurely. But this was not playing the game by the rules, and was besides undignified---the bull must be taken following the ritual---provoked in a special way and lassoed and humbled in a certain way---fair play was in order----and the charros chased the drunks away.
The bull, having surveyed and circumnavigated his domain, did the sensible thing in the afternoon heat----he lay down and began to drowse. The charros tried to taunt him and get him on his feet but he sullenly refused to be intimidated. A few lances, a charge of a horse, a chorus of catcalls, and a few taunts of the cape and barking and nipping of a dog finally succeeded in raising the bull to his feet.

A matador put on a show of drawing and controlling the bull with his cape, and there were a few half-hearted “Olés” from the stands, but the bull, with a few broom-like sweeps of its horns, drove away the bullfighter and returned to its lethargy. The audience was bored. The bull was bored. The bull broke away and sprinted half down the Arena, then slowed to a trot and sat down at the opposite end. The borrachos and drunks again leapt into the arena, and advanced on the bull with their Tequila bottles in hand, attempting to rouse him. The charros again shooed them away, then lassoed the bull, attempting to drag him to his feet. Then there was a flurry of activity as the second bull broke through his gate and began to churn around the Arena, stirring the first bull to his feet and re-energizing him. Then the charros got the second bull out and the first bull was stampeding about. Finally, two, three, then four lariats lassoed the head and horns of the bull and he was hopelessly entangled, the spectators stomping their feet and chanting, music from the small band blaring.

Sartorius took a swig from his bottle of mescal and lit and dragged upon a cigarette. As the crowd stomped and chanted he heard a buzzing around his ears: Clippity-one; clippity-two; clippity-three’; clippity-four----------likity-cut, likity-cut, likity-cut-------; Then a roar from the crowd: “Ole!------Ole!”---then again: Clippity-one; clippity-two; clippity-three’; clippity-four----------likity-cut, likity-cut, likity-cut-------The bull pulled against the opposing forces of the ropes a while longer, then subsided gloomily; his head swayed back and forth hopelessly, like some immense insect fatally trapped at the center of a spider’s web. The charros made provoking passes at the bull with their lariats, rigging for his eventual rider.

The men in the Arena, on foot or on horseback, passed around a bottle as the men rigged the bull. In the stands the spectators around Sartorius bought lemonade, fruit, potato chips, pulque.
The bull, now rigged, clambered to its feet with its rider---a fat red-faced Mexican with a scar on the left-side of his forehead. The band opposite struck up the chords of the tune: “Guadalajara! Guadalajara!”----half the band singing out loud as they played their instruments. The bull gave a couple of bucks, but in ten seconds settled down to a slow trot, taking the rider off to the pen ignominiously, with no ride, no struggle and no fight. The crowd roared with laughter and then groaned with boredom.

After the fiasco of the first bull, the charros chased the second bull out into the Arena and then went through the motions of lassoing him and rigging him for a rider. The second bull began more spirited than the first, but after ten minutes slowed down to a torpor. They embarrassedly rigged him up slowly, the process protracted.
Sartorius had worked on a ranch near the Sierras one summer in California when he was a student at Berkeley. He was accomplished at riding horses and had taken a try many years ago at some amateur rodeos in Denver and in El Paso, taking a few turns at bronco and bull riding and horsebacked calf-roping. He had grown up reading about the running of the bulls at Pamplona in Hemingway’s novels and in Death in the Afternoon, and had always fantasized about performing in the Arena. Somehow the second rider had not shown up on schedule for the second bull, or perhaps the first bull was disposed of too early so as to throw the schedule off.

The first rider made a motion to ride the second bull, but the crowd booed him off. Two or three drunks made a game of climbing on the bull’s back, but fell off ignominiously, and the charros drove them away. Evidently they were short of a rider. A man walked up to the crowd, evidently either to placate their dissatisfaction or to call for a volunteer rider. Taking a long draw on his bottle of Mescal Sartorius yielded to an inexplicable impulse and clambered down the aisle to the front barrier and jumped down into the arena. The crowd was taken at the novelty and audacity of such a foreigner as Sartorius approached the rigged bull and spoke to the charros, then set himself up on the bull’s back, holding on to the rigging. The bull, resenting the weight on his back, got back his fight and began to buck. Sartorius was astride him and already cake-walking crazily in the middle of the ring. The bull jumped furiously, first to the left, then to the right, and then with both forelegs, as if they had been handcuffed somehow together. It pawed the earth furiously and even crawled on its belly. Sartorius held on fast.

The crowd laughed and cheered. The band struck up again: “Guadalajara! Guadalajara.!” The bull jumped and fought. Sartorius held fast. He held fast, holding on determinedly, with his feet splayed, beginning to look grim, his legs knocking against the sweaty flanks. Then the charros rode up behind him and pulled him off. The crowd rose with a laughing cheer as Sartorius clung to the horseman, than dismounted a safe distance away. He bowed to the crowd and then jogged to the gap in the barrier, where he was slapped on the back and pelted with sombreros. He was treated to a long draft of Mescal from a large bottle before making his way back to the stands. Another rider began to ride the second bull, when confusion broke out when the first bull kicked open the gate of the bull pen, releasing all the other bulls into the arena. The charros scurried to control them as the next rider put on a good show.
After another hour Sartorius rode back to the Hotel Marco Polo in the mini-bus, and his fellow tourists treated him to drinks and sandwiches in honour of his performance. When they reached the hotel Sartorius checked with the desk for any messages or any sign of Pablo or of Maria, but was told nobody knew where they were, probably doing some jazz or music gig somewhere for the Dia de los Muertos---nobody could find them.

After the adventure of the afternoon Sartorius found himself famished. He headed to a restaurant with a full international buffet and ate as much as he pleased, chased by a bottle of Claret and some cocktails. He rested, then read the newspaper and opened his laptop to make some entries in his drafts for his Blog, which he would review later and decide whether to delete, keep or upload to his Blog website. Along about midnight the restaurant gave signs of preparing to close, and so Sartorius rose and began to walk in the direction of the hotel along the Paseo de la Reforma, the main thoroughfare of Mexico City.

Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only




Along the way he passed assorted bands of revelers----some children dressed in costumes just like the American Halloween costumes, out for “Calaveritas.” that is, the American “Trick-or-treat” style of shaking down neighbors or passers-by on the streets for candies, treats or money. Sartorius was surrounded by a buccaneering gang of Mexican boys and dropped a few loose pesos into their hands. They, evidently satisfied with the offered tribute, departed----their leader eating a large Pan de Muerto----“Bread of the Dead”----a sort of sweet cakebread specially baked for the holiday, and the smallest boy at the end of the troop stuffing himself from a bag of chocolate skeletons, sugar skulls, and chocolate coffins. Sartorius thought of “Ching Ming” a similar Chinese holiday in honour of the dead, but this was much more festive and exuberant----the Chinese holiday being banned for years under Mao and then brought back with a kind of Confucian staidness, like the Mexican holiday featuring “grave sweeping” in which family members swept and weeded the graves of their dear beloved dead, or laid out a small offering, but without the Mexican brio of the joking “Taunting of the Dead,” a kind of posthumous after-dinner “Roasting” of the dead, poking fun at their foibles, and the carnival and fiesta energy of the Mexican holiday. Sartorius had also seen the Japanese Bon Festival and the Korean Chuseok Festival, even the Finnish Vappo, but none were as spirited as the Mexican Dia de los Difuntos, which seemed to enjoy the energy of the Walpurgisnacht on the Blocksberg, and some kind of an otherworldly Saturnalia of Life and Death itself.

Sartorius walked and walked. He followed a train of revelers in horror costumes into a movie theatre in the Zona Rosa that featured a Dracula film. Sitting on the fetid velvet fold-down seat he tried to watch the film, being caught up in the surges of female screams as Dracula sank his teeth into his victims. He observed the men were attracted to the figure of Dracula by identifying with his power, whereas the women, convulsed in wave after wave of hysterical screaming reveled in their complete and voluptuous abandonment to the power of the man---a terror for terror’s sake----secretly desired, thrilling and repulsive, which proved them most wholly and orgasmically alive. But after twenty minutes, nursing an incipient headache and not being able to bear the closeness and throbbing noise, he again abandoned himself to walking the streets.

He walked and walked along the Alameda---the great Central Park, then walked further through the Chapultepec Park, with its many museums and greens. He walked past the gay Hidalgo Theatre, the site of the famous Ballet Folklorico. He would have gladly gone in, but it was already too late and closed. Every half-hour or every opportunity Sartorius would stop at a Cantina and down a Mescal or a Tequila. He could not bear to bring himself to face the four walls of his hotelroom alone. Simultaneously, he could not believe himself capable of carrying out his mad plan, surely only a private joke, but he could not convince himself that he would not. He could only think of the next place to escape to as more and more of the city shut its doors in the early morning, despite the holiday being usually extended to 24 hours per day for the two days----a double carnival-----the Dia de Los Inocentes---Today--All Saints Day---focused on the saintly departed children; and tomorrow, the Dia de los Angelitos---All Souls Day---The Day of the Little Angels----tomorrow---his fiftieth birthday. He stopped at cantina after cantina: downing glass after glass of Mescal, Pulque, Tequila and Atole.

And now Sartorius sat helplessly in the bathroom, his anus swollen red, gut wrenching and butt running after the last batch of Pulque inflicted the proverbial “Montezuma’s Revenge.” He sat in the filthy stile, watching the insects which lay at different angles from one another on the wall, a caterpillar wriggling towards him. Now a scorpion was moving slowly towards him, his fine tail curled backwards in an elegant threat. Suddenly, Sartorius rose and trembled in every limb, frantic to wipe himself and pull up and belt his trousers. But it wasn’t the scorpion that he cared about. For from every direction, every surface, every crack and corner and every shadow began to swarm and crawl and buzz towards him. Everywhere he looked another thousand of insects were emerging from their eggs, being born, then forming a locust-swarm, gathering and heading in his direction. Every phylum, genus and species of the insect world was stirring, swarming and moving inexorably towards him, creeping centipedes and writhing and wriggling millipedes, preying mantises with mandibles slicing, mosquitoes droning, tse tse stinging, dung beetles rolling boluses of elephant dung, tarantulas and black widow lurking for the kill, swarming locust, grasshopper, teeming fire ants and pullulating army ants, immense plagues of deadly wasps and swarms of Africanized bees with their stingers and feelers extended, closing, rushing upon him, covering his arms and hands, incising, cutting and puncturing his flesh. He began to involuntarily beat, brush and shake his limbs, knocking off the ennauseating things, then ran his head under the water tap frantically and burst out of the men’s room, hyperventilating, yawling and screaming, moaning, writhing and retching into the hallway. The attendant looked at him, first startled, then knowingly----muttering “Borracho----Borrachon.” Sartorius made his way out into the hall of the cantina and sat down again at the bar:


“Mescal!” he shouted, trying to suppress his hyperventilating disorientation. “…..Double!”

When he had recovered himself, Sartorius didn’t know what to do next. He knew not a soul. He looked up at a wooden crucifix on the wall: “O Windfall of Delight” a voice spoke to him out of the Noche Oscura, identifying itself as St. John of the Cross, patron saint of toilet stalls. He ordered another double mescal. He decided to go back to the Café Chagrin and see if he might find Pablo or Maria. He fortified himself with another Mescal and then called a taxi. As he thought of Maria, of the arms that had held him so recently but seemingly so long ago, he began to shudder, his hands shaking like someone on the DT’s or withdrawal sickness, as he physically suffered from the absence of her body………Man walks, a voice whispered to him, in fear of woman; possession of the constant moon, because the moon has strength to summon her blood to the full and ebb again, and greater strength beyond her own……..Bundling himself into the taxi, he mumbled out “Café Chagrin” to the driver, and nodded off into a drowse.
When he got there he could only recognize the head waiter, who remembering him gave him a seat near the band. The band, however was a different band and neither Pablo nor Maria were anywhere in sight. He downed a Mescal, then looked in at the private room, evidently the lair of the groupies and friends of the band. One of the stage hands remembered him from the last night and waved him in to sit down inside, telling him that Pablo and Maria had gone off to Cuernavaca to play for an all-night Day of the Dead party gig---a lot of money, and wouldn’t be back until the next day.

He however shared his bottle of Tequila with him in the back room, and the new band boys passed some marijuana cigarettes around the small circle of performers, girlfriends and groupies who were closeted there.
Excusing himself to the toilet, Sartorius saw the musicians emptying the back room to go onstage. He returned to the small empty room and looked about, seeing no one. He sat and drank, then noticing the thick layer of dust upon the sideboard, he traced his name in the dust and then erased it, blowing the dust onto the floorboards. Outside he could hear the words of the song the lead singer was singing: “What wind blew you here? What wind blew you here?”　Then he became aware of the dark shape of a man sitting in the shadow of a corner off behind him, playing a game of solitaire, the cards arrayed before him. Sartorius was surprised that the figure wore the same suit of clothes as his own. In the darkness of the room he could not make out the face. Then the figure lifted the pull-curtain and darted out the door into the crowd. Sartorius followed him through the rooms of the large discothèque. As Sartorius edged towards it the figure shifted away, and every time Sartorius moved his head to catch a glimpse of the face, the figure turned away equally so that he could not see it, shifting always so that his back was ever towards him. Finally, the figure sat facing the stage, its back towards Sartorius. It bent forward and a sigh seemed to rise like smoke out of its mouth, rising like the smoke from a Cuban cigar. For a moment Sartorius thought he has imagined the figure, but as he moved closer he saw that it was very real. He moved forward and put his hand upon the figure’s elbow, intending to introduce himself. The figure turned its face towards him. Sartorius was seized with violent trembling. “Good God!” he cried out involuntarily, as a cold sweat ran from his face: the face he looked into was his own.

For a long time Sartorius and his double-self stood looking at eachother, he in shock and the figure with a kind of sardonic smile at the ready curled upon its lips. For a long time the two separate Sartorius’s stood looking at eachother, communicating in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage. Finally, Sartorius found himself compelled to speak, saying “Do I know you?” he finally mumbled out, and being returned silence, mumbled again: “Do I? Do I?” No answer came and, as he tried to follow the retreating figure through the densely dancing and shouting crowd the onset of the press of partying bodies hampered his progress and closed him in until he lost sight of the fleeing soul. Eventually he retraced his steps to the backstage room.

As Sartorius lay back on the wide and soft couch, his head resting on the pillows, he blew the oily smoke upwards towards the ceiling. After another drink he passed out into a merciful sleep. When he awoke the crowd had already dispersed except for a few drunken hangers-on and the band was beginning to pack up. Sartorius dragged himself back into a tentative consciousness. The head waiter came in and asked him where he was staying, found his hotel key with the address in his pocket, and called a taxi. He and the stagehand helped Sartorius pick himself up and bundled him into the taxi, instructing the driver to take him to the Marco Polo in the Zona Rosa.







6





Sartorius awoke early that morning despite having remained quite late in the Café Chagrin, and as he awoke and came to himself he felt the disappearing traces of the rush of the mescal laced with its residual undertow of nervous drag and the onset of the withdrawal symptoms of his icy hangover. He found that he could neither sleep further, as he longed to, nor could he stay still. He surfed aimlessly and chaotically on his laptop for ten minutes, then tossed it in his bag and walked out into the street. He went out in the cool air of the early morning, walked the streets with an intense feeling of being alone as he observed the street-sweepers clearing the refuse of the last day along the gutters, mothers scurrying to pick up morning milk and bread for their children, and shopkeepers unlocking their doors and preparing to set up for the next day’s business.

Observing the skyline on the far horizon and feeling an intense need to escape to somewhere, he was attracted to the outline of the twin volcanic peaks of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl and crossed the street to the bus terminal and searching a series of route maps identified a tourist bus in the direction of Cuernavaca and jumped aboard. Hungry for sleep he drowsed, his head slumped against the cool window for an unknown spell, then awoke with a lurch of the bus to find himself on a fast highway, with the twin volcanoes looming in the mid-distance. , the Sleeping Woman was now perhaps the more beautiful of the two, with jagged angles of blood-red snow on its summit, fading as he watched, whipped with darker rock shadows, the summit itself seemingly suspended in mid-air, floating amoung the curdling ever mounting black clouds surrounding it. The peak of Popocatepetl, the larger of the two volcanoes was surrounded by cumulus clouds, black and rumbling with incipient thunder, and had its own schizoid beauty----one face tracing out the exquisitely curved outline of a sensually full woman’s breast, while the opposite face of the peak was cut away raw and ragged in a precipitous drop from the rim like the severely cut hyper-bang of a punk rocker’s provocative hairstyle----“Sharawaggi”----the word surfaced in Sartorius’ consciousness as the name of a Punk band he had once seen in Berlin---meaning approximately the strange beauty of deliberately exaggerated imbalance and asymmetry---and this became his private pet name for “El Popo”---Popocatepetl----in the Aztec Indian myth the fiery dreamer and warrior-lover wooer of his sleeping mate “Ixta.”

He jumped out at a random place that attracted him, passing a deep ravine stretching out across the countryside, and looked up for a sign to tell him where he was----“Cuautla” he mouthed the word several times, trying to find a plausible pronunciation. Across the ravine as the departing bus shook over the wooden bridge eddies of green and orange birds, sounding a trail of kreeks with ever widening circling rings rose into the sky, as in water from a stone tossed by a wanton boy. Two little pigs disappeared in the dust at a gallop, followed by a shirtless boy in dusty shorts shooing after them. Sartorius followed the curve of the Alcapancingo road downwards from the barranca, watching the severe faces of the declivity as a few goats scampered downwards to find spots of uneaten grass, and headed towards the small nestled town below the highway.

About a half mile above the outskirts of the town, nestled in a cleft in the ravine of the barranca Sartorius found an outlook----a stop for drivers to gaze into the beauty of the abyss below, in which there was a small gazebo with a fountain and a set of stone tables. He sat down alone looking downwards at the rock face of the cliff to drink and rest and gather himself, then decided to take out his laptop and make some entries in his Blog Journal, most of which he would then publish online later on his Blog: “Temptation in the Wilderness—Cuernavaca, Mexico----how many times has the thought occurred to me to let myself fling off this cliff face into the abyss, and make an end of it all and how many times have I drawn back and put it aside? Name it as we choose, with or without any visible God or devil, whether in the natural desert of rocks, ravines and sands, or in the populous moral desert of selfishness and baseness and mindlessness, to such temptation are we called. Perhaps we would be unhappy if we were not. Without the pain and the half-light of our half-fulfilled desires and dream-disappointed world we would remain only Half-Men. Perhaps the infinite has never blazed forth, but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights or smolders, in dull pain, and in graying darkness.—Our wilderness is the wide world in an atheistic and homeless century---a ‘darkling plain’, ------our forty days are the forty long years of suffering and fasting in unknowing, unmeaning and unbelief after sloughing off the first unthinking years of childhood. Nevertheless, to these also comes an end. Yes, to me also was given, not victory, but the consciousness of dubious battle, struggle, pain; and the resolve to persevere therein while life or faculty is left. To me also, entangled in the disenchantéd forests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight and of sound, it was given, after my weariest wanderings, to work out my way into something happier, more joyful and more whole---yet I have not found my way.

I have learned over the years to be self-sufficient—perhaps a wholly fictitious enterprise—of which let us say I have succeeded more in than others that I know—yet have come to know the futility of that self and the vacuity of such supposed sufficiency. I have found myself more and more parched away, parched away by doubt,---doubt verging into spiritual unbelief, then unbelief spreading its desertification into the sahel regions of my work and life, love and self, ending in denial, weariness of pain and death-longing.

Now the hot scirocco wind of my discontent has raged itself out. Its howl went silent within me and I paused, long-deafened in soul to listen in silence. I paused in my farer wanderings and sat me down to wait, and consider. I seem to surrender, to renounce utterly, and say: Away, then, false shadows of hope; I will chase you no more, I will believe you no more. And away too, haggard spectres of fear, I care not-- you too are all shadows of a succubus lie. Let me rest here for I am way-weary and life-weary; I will rest here; To die or to live is alike to me---alike insignificant—And I seemed to lay myself down in a centre of indifference; cast, into a sleep---if not healing then at least palliative and analgesic, the heavy dreams rolling gradually away. As a first preliminary act, perhaps unexpectedly moral, I sought, after futile escape, annihilation of self in some incomprehensible form, and accomplished such in part in my mind’s eyes, and became indifferent.” Then Sartorius’ head slumped, and he sprawled across his laptop shutting it closed, and he drowsed again in the undertow of the mescal of the previous night.

Sartorius awoke to the sound of a crowd of children singing and chanting at him tauntingly: “Borracho, Borrachon! Borracho Mescalito!” and throwing leaves at him. He awoke, disoriented, perhaps because he had not fully regained the power of all five senses, five unless there were possibly less than five, or conversely, perhaps more than five including some that had been possibly forgotten and would serve little use nowadays. He tried to pry open his eyes that seemed covered with glue and looking up into their faces moaned out a “Whaat?” “Nada!” the oldest girl snarled back mockingly. He closed his eyes again. Nada, he thought as his brain swam……….Nothing-----the answer to so many of our questions---What will happen to me when I die?---What is death anyway?---Is there anything I can do about that?-----Of what does the universe consist?-----What is the measure of our influence within it?-----What is our life in cosmic time?------What will our world eventually become?--------What will we leave behind, to be remembered by? Again he heard voices out of the haze: “Nada, Borracho! Nada,Borracho!” He recovered himself and threw them a few pesos and they scampered down the incline road towards small store at the outskirts of the town visible below. He tramped his way down the dusty road, sending up low clouds of white dust, and his mouth had a foul cotton dryness matched by the aching fuzziness of his brain, drawn down by the amoebic weight of his hangover.

The sun is overhead, sharp gusts of wind drive the smoke from the cooking fires in the opposite direction. In the ravine, not even the sound of traffic from the highway far above can be heard. The machine of time appears to have come to a halt, as if it were waiting a signal from the mighty overseer of space and time for some uncomprehended recalibration.

After the third intersection he spotted a Cantina—Bar/Restaurant catty-corner to him, and he crossed over to enter it. On the pavement at the entrance to the Cantina he avoided stepping into two streams of blood that leaked down the sloping pavement into the gutter, coming from the slit-open neck a sizeable green sea-turtle laying butchered at the doorway. Above the doorway swung a signboard “Todos Contentos y Yo Tambian”—the name of the place being, roughly, “Everybody’s Happy and Me Too!” Coming in out of the bright early light of the street the inside of the Cantina was dark and clothed in cool shadow, and despite the ‘open for business’ sign he did not see anyone within. Across the front windows on the sun-exposed side were drawn velvet, or velveteen curtains, too dirty and full of dust to be black, partially screening the entrance. “Ola!” he shouted and finally a middle-aged woman in a black dress with grey-streaked hair tied in a bun atop her head and a teen-aged boy in a stained apron came out from the kitchen area and motioned for him to sit at the bar. He sat down in the darkness, while gradually his eyes adjusted to the cave-like interior and the shapes before him became more defined. He took in the shapes of barrels behind the bar, and of tall liquor bottles arrayed on a long shelf before the mirror. Behind the bar there were big green barrels of cheaper liquor with the names of the contents scrawled out in white chalk on their faces: Jerez, Habanero, Catalan, Parras, Zarzamorra, Malaga, Durazno, Membrillo, Raw Alcohol by the litre, Tequila, Mescal, Rumpope….

As he read the chalked in names of the liquors, his eyes adjusting to the dark, he heard voices intoning gratingly in his ears: “Shade of Robert Sartorius, this is what it is like to die, just this and nothing more; to awaken in a dark place to which the harsh light of day is forever curtained off by a velveteen curtain of filth, in which there is nothing to be hoped for or feared----only the means of mind numbing escape from yet another eternity of nightmare---Liquid Lethe by the Glass……But, (in a Hamletean cum Mephistophlean whisper)-----the choice is yours!----To Drink or Not to Drink!”

“Mescal!...Poquito!” Sartorius droned out, grimacing and wiping his face with a paper napkin. The proprietress poured out a measure into a cracked glass and slid it towards him, following with a plate of sliced lemon, salt and peppers.

After ten minutes, the mescal began to take effect and he could feel the tingle in his spine from the impact, and his mind began to clear partially. He felt hungry as he had had no breakfast and it was nigh onto lunchtime. As he noticed another man with a mustache take a seat at a table on the far opposite side of the Cantina towards the light, the boy bringing him a menu, Sartorius decided to move across to the eating area and took up a table at a booth in the rear wing, motioning for the boy to bring him a menu as well. The boy opened the back windows of the opposite wall, revealing a wonderful view of the twin mountains across the deep barranca. In the booth he also found an outlet for the cord to his laptop and plugged it in to recharge as the boy brought him an English/Spanish menu, placing it in his hands.

Sartorius was used to the belly-laughs of “Chinglish” translations of menus and signs in Beijing, and so was not surprised by the howlers printed on the English menu: “Pooched eggs; Pimisan Chike Chup; Stake; Red Snappers in Tartarus, Spectral Chicken of the House.” He skimmed the options: Sopa de ajo; Chiles rellenos, Rajas a la ‘Popo;’ Machitos en salsa verde; Enchilada de salsa verde; Frijoles refritos; Filete con papas o al gusto; Sandwiches; Chocolate a la Espanola; Chocolate a la francesca; Café solo o con leche…….
“Cervesas!” he shouted at the boy as he went over the menu, and as he downed a swig of iced beer he opted for the Spectral Chicken of the House, refried beans and Frijoles, a cheese enchilada, and a salad. He ate hungrily, and as he partook he called for the boy to bring two more bottles of beer---iced Carta Blanca----and a stack of tortillas with butter. He drank one bottle of beer with his lunch and saved the second for dessert, for which he ordered a plate of fruit and cheese. When he felt refreshed he looked outwards again across the loveliness of wide vista across the barranca separating him from the twin volcanic peaks.

Stark loneliness overcame him. He could not bear living so alone. And yet, so long as there was beauty such as this why should a man feel so unbearably lonely? The answer---as to some idiot’s riddle---was: Because he did. The greater the beauty, the greater the loneliness, for at the back of beauty was harmony, and at the back of harmony was---union. Beauty could not comfort sustainably if the soul were out of it. For him, the future had lost all semblance of reality. He felt like a fly entangled in cobweb filaments, watching the desirable freedom of the air above him with pitiful eyes.

He booted up his laptop and set out to continue his additions to his blog journal. Later---as was his habit, he would decide whether he would upload the draft file to his online blog website, save and store it for personal reference or delete or revise it:

“Beautiful it was to sit there, modest as the Cantina was, in my musing and meditating on the high table-land, in front of the volcanic twin lover mountains---Popocatepetl, the lava-veined Warrior-Lover, and Ixtaccihuatl, the Sleeping Woman, timesporting across the yawning abyss; Over them, as roof, the azure Dome of the blue sky, and around them, for walls of abode, four azure flowing curtains—namely, of the Four azure Winds, at whose bottom-standing sheltered in these mountain hollows far below the snowy tops, with their green flower lawns, and white dressed peasant girls, and black dressed mothers and grandmothers, lovely enough. Or better still, the mud-straw-roofed cottages, wherein stood many a mother baking tortillas and bread, with her children round her—all hidden and protectingly folded up in the valley-folds in the rain zones at the feet of the great pair of prominences. There and alive, as sure as if I beheld them. Or to see, the scattered towns and villages, that lay round their mountain-seat, which, in still weather, were heard to speak by their church-bells with metal tongues; and, in almost all weather, proclaimed their vitality by repeated smoke-clouds or mile-high billowing of dark cumulous bringing rain. Across the ravines I might read the hour of the day, for it was the smoke of cookery, as housewives at perhaps morning, midday, and, dinnertime, were boiling their husbands' and childrens’ kettles, and a blue streak of smoke rose up into the air, successively or simultaneously, from each of the houses of the small settlements, saying, as plainly as smoke could say: Such and such a meal is getting ready here. Not uninteresting! For looking down from the high clifftop and watching the minute figures scurrying about far below, you have the whole colonia, with all its love-makings and scandal-mongeries, contentions and contentments, as in miniature, and could cover it all with a wide Mexican sombrero.—If, in my wide wanderings, I had learned to look into the business of the world in its details, here perhaps was a place for taking it in in thought and feeling.

Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


So near the slopes of the twin volcanoes the weather would change abruptly, and in the course of two or three hours one could see cumulus clouds blacken, shed snow at the peak and rain below and unleash lightning and thunder, then mount miles high into the heavens; then the wind would shift, and the sky would turn from its black fit of depression into a sunny ecstasy of health and well being! How the sky fermented and elaborated itself, in its great fermenting-vat and laboratory of an atmosphere, of a world; I take in this sublime nature--or what is Nature? Would it be tempting to call nature God and say we found it---Eureka!---under our noses and as obvious to anyone not blind as Poe’s purloined letter? Or does God speak to us daily through our hearts and we are only oblivious to his voice having willingly turned ourselves into deaf mutes, or not knowing the language or the wavelength in which he is speaking? Could we not but call nature and the wondrous universe the "Living Garment of God ?" which masking clothing protects our fragile eyes from the unbearable glory of his direct presence, which would destroy us if we were to behold it like a supernova or like Semele’s obliteration? Is God’s absence, his distance, his indecipherability, his shadowed muteness an act of love? The air we breathe is invisible, for if it were visible, nothing else would be.-----perhaps God is also thus invisible, out of love that we might thereby see ourselves and the beauty of the world around us? Or is it nature or beauty, or reason, or the feelings of the heart through which he speaks---or can we take it on authority that he speaks to us in the Bible, the Holy Koran, the Rig Veda or the Fire Sermon, and that should be the end of it? I yearned to hear the voices of the heaven speak through lovely nature, that ever speaks through her; that lives and loves in her, and that lives and loves in me, foreshadowing the infinite. O please say to me that the Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, and my Father's! I yearn to hear these wonderful and beautiful things, and yet I yearn to hear the Truth---and that is the Hell of it. And is this mood but the manic phase of my manic-depression, to disappear into the darkness of my brain’s electro-chemistry? Am I but whistling and mumbling in the dark? ……Eliot said mankind cannot stand too much reality, and perhaps he cannot stand too many question marks, nor live on question marks alone, many or few.

With other eyes, too, would I now long to look upon my fellow man and my fellow sisters; with an infinite love, an infinite pity-----Poor, wandering, lost, homeless and suffering wayward man! Are you not tried, and beaten and galled, even as I am? Ever, whether you are nameless or a global celebrity, a Gates, an Osiris or a basket-lady, your end will be but a grave or ashes just alike. O my Brother, my Sister, why cannot I shelter thee in my bosom, and wipe away all tears from thy eyes !—Truly, from the din of confused and disappointing life, which, each bears in his own solitude, with the mind's organ, I longed to hear, no longer a maddening discord, but a melting into harmony. In the Maldives, I heard the weeping tears of Mother Earth, like inarticulate cries, and sobbings of a dumb creature, destined to drown her children in the heat of her own tears; which sobbing in the ear of Heaven were prayers, but to an absent God. The poor Earth, with her poor joys, was now my needy Mother, not my cruel Stepdame; Man, with his so mad wants and so mean endeavours, had become the dearer to me, though also like myself, like Oedipus in his realization, revealed as the cause of our own and of her suffering. I now took him as Brother and as Sister-----Mon Semblable, Mon Frere! Ma Soeur! Thus was I standing on the porch of sorrow overlooking Popo and Ixta.”
“Mescal!” Sartorius shouted to the boy, “Dos Otros.” He downed one of the two glasses slowly and let the shock of it hit his spinal column. Then his mind cleared, though slowed, and he continued with his draft for his Blog Journal:
“ I am writing again from the Cantina, near Cuernavaca, Mexico, which is named
“Todos Contentos y Yo Tambian”—the name of the place being, roughly, “Everybody’s Happy and Me Too!” Being American, I have long taken the “Pursuit of Happiness” as a birthright, enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. And I still believe that the pursuit of happiness in the largest and most generous sense is a great public good---like Jung’s “Individuation” the progressive and organic unfolding and maturation of the total and global manifold powers and potential of the individual life, and through them the organic and sustainable life of the society as a whole. And Mill “On Liberty” on the desirability of the freedom of the individual in best pursuit of his own development for his own and the social good remains, at least in large part, cogent. Yet what a vapour, mirage and a miasma the common manifestation of the “pursuit of happiness” proves to be!

Though we revere it and it moves our lives for the greater billions of humanity, what is this “happiness” that is so desired and yet so ever elusive as to be a near cause of despair? For the greater number they remain content sleepwalking after their vaporous dream of “happiness” without ever waking up and trying to determine what it is they are pursuing. For the smaller number of the thinking and feeling of the world, the answer is always changing, and the solutions of the prior generations endlessly shift into obsolescence and the new must be re-invented with the changing conditions of life and the world. But at root I have to say that I have overthrown the notion of happiness in my own life as an end in itself, and I would have to say that I would expect every thinking and feeling man or woman to come to a similar conclusion, though I would not advise the opposite extreme of deliberately seeking unhappiness. Happiness is a good but not by any means the highest good, at least in my own estimation and personal feeling, and it is overrated as the blind opaque and vaporous answer as to what people conceive they are living for. Man's very unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under any finite set of pleasures and circumstances of the Finite, a Faustian aspiration to his further development and evolution beyond the limits of his present self, that he will furiously undue any semblance of “happiness” or satisfaction in which he may at any point in life momentarily land himself.

Will the whole fortune of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Carlos Slim taken together make a single peasant, clerk or undergraduate “happy?” Everyone would guess so but experience proves that their happiness will be quickly and inescapably undone by themselves if not by others. They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two at best, a day or two for certain. For they all have souls quite other than a stomach of material desires and would require, if you consider it, for their permanent satisfaction and saturation simply this allotment, no more, and no less of the infinite universe altogether for themselves to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rose. Give him with half of a universe, an omnipotence, he would inevitably set to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declare himself the most maltreated of human beings.—Always there is a black spot in our sunshine; and it is even, as I said, the shadow of ourselves. Homo perversus! But the chimera we have of happiness is somewhat thus: By certain valuations, and averages, egotistically of our own striking, but largely by following social convention and cultural norms, we come upon some sort of average, an expectation of our own well being.

This we delude ourselves by our blind dreams, desires, and self-deception into believing that it belongs to us by nature, and of inalienable right. It is simple payment of our just deserts---our entitlement----presumably in recompense for all our sufferings and hard work if you like, or for the Neo-liberals for our “bearing of risk”---equally fatuous. Its fulfillment and provision requires neither thanks nor complaint. Such are our “just deserts.” If we exceed this delusional benchmark the condition that results we account “happiness.” Any deficit from our arbitrary and delusional expectations is again denoted “misery,” however ungrounded our expectations. It all comes of thy Vanity!---Lao Zi, the sage of Ecclesiastes and a thousand other wise thinkers long realized that ninety percent of what we have desired and either got or not got is completely empty and delusional and a sheer waste of effort. Yet without delusion, illusion, misspent dream and innocence apparently life would seize up of itself, die, and end…….so there we are after all! This supposed happiness is but the factitious carrot dangled under the nose of the donkey to keep him pulling ever ahead---given a bite now and a never just to keep him from total disbelief. I asked myself some years ago: What is this that, ever since your youngest years, you have been fretting and fuming, and lamenting and self-tormenting, yourself about on account of………….?

Say it in one word: because “I’m not HAPPY?” Because I am not sufficiently honoured, loved, pampered, praised, nourished, soft-bedded, and fondlingly cared for ? The inanity of the self-delusion and the childishness of the concept becomes self-evident. First of all, could such momentary satisfaction last more than a day? Second, would it not lead to new dissatisfaction? Moreover, would it be good for anyone, if satisfied in the long run? Would the endless search for the perfect bed in life but lead to anything but a new and discordant dream? Would happiness of the common pampering sort spoil any further or higher development, maturation or strengthening? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the concept is certainly questionable enough to cause us to rethink our Epicurus and by extension Mill. The concept is still viable, but reworked as a proxy for comprehensive health and life-sustaining vitality, not a condition in which we are not satisfied in momentary pleasure prolonged indefinitely, but rather a state of healthy equilibrium in which we, oscillating between momentary happiness and unhappiness, are able to sustainably draw upon, intensify and enjoy all of our energies and powers as human beings in the more intense pursuit of life.

Human experience is a world of illusion, constructed upon a ground of blind striving. From this world there is no escape. Our pleasures can never lead to satisfaction because they are the expression not of our personal selves but of the undifferentiated will---a life force that cascades onward with us or without us. Whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the plane of understanding? I lament with brother Job-----It is hid from the eyes of all living; and the fowls of the air know it not.

To me, in this our life, which is an internecine warfare with the spirit-----Have you in any way a contention and dissatisfaction with your brother or sister or neighbor” I advise you, think well what the deeper meaning and foundation of your discord is. If you gauge it to the bottom of the self-serving illusion and self-delusion, it is simply this: " Fellow, see ! You are taking more than you share of happiness in the world,-----you are stealing something from my share, which, by the Heavens, you will not succeed in; No! A thousand time no, no, no!---I will fight you rather!"—Alas, then the whole lot to be of happiness is then to be divided is such a beggarly and spiteful manner that life and this supposed happiness truly becomes a "feast of shells;" For the substance has been spilled out, and the love for others implied in and perhaps a precondition of our own happiness is lost. —Can we not, in such cases, rather say, like Christ : ‘Take it, you too-greedy individual; take that pitiful additional fraction of a share, which I reckoned mine, but which thou so wanted; take it with a blessing?’---But of course the MBA student would advise growing the pie of happiness for everyone rather than fighting to the death over the zero-sum distribution!---yet they go on tooth and nail fighting for his bigger share of the bigger pie! Menschlich, allzu Menschlich!
Certainly we are made to live for something higher and more durable than the fleeting moment of material pleasure and satisfaction. Yet where is the God, the heaven, the beau ideal, we are to dedicate ourselves to? Is this any less a chimera? We have of course human brotherhood, helping our fellow man to his equally fatuous desires and illusions and self-delusions, and occasionally defending him and ourselves from seemingly undeniable evil, but even service to others equally blind and deluded proves but really another feast of shells.

I am drawn, rather than to simple common happiness as a goal, to Jung’s “Individuation,” which implies a full development of all the powers and capacities of the human person, like the common concept of the Renaissance Man, but including the inner psychic and spiritual development leading to wisdom and harmony with the universe. It implies challenge, evolution and growth that result in as much unhappiness as happiness, but, critically, engages our vitality and life force most completely, so as to keep us most deeply and intensely alive. Sustainable intensity and depth of life and life experience seems the higher ideal rather than any “happiness” of the vulgar sort, which might imply merely a maximization of the number of moments of gratification and minimization of the number of moments of unease. As Goethe’s Faust would have it, Man always striving will always err and encounter suffering, but will always maintain his link with the infinite that will keep his heart and mind most alive to the greatest extent possible. Tolstoy famously said---what is the purpose of life?------To Live! And by that he meant, I think, to live most deeply, intensely, meaningfully and affirmatively, and ultimately most wisely and spiritually. This is the Eternal Yes, to which seekers generation after generation return. Creeds, ideologies, religions come and go---in life faiths disappear---but faith in life itself ever returns in everchanging forms, and the strengthening of life and of the life force within each and all of us is, perhaps, our highest calling---or so it seems to me.

But what then of truth?---excluding for the moment that it may be impossible for any human to be certain he knows it, but yet quite possible to know he does not. Should we live the great dream, the Mythus, irrespective of whether it is true or not, merely because we have decided, for example, that our particular religion or the totems of our people seems to enhance our life? The Grand Illusion? The Big Lie? The Supreme Fiction? Should we keep it as a social good even if it prove a falsity? There’s the Hell of it.

The world and our life within it prove to be profound disappointments, a madhouse farce of illusions chasing illusions within a world of illusion constituted upon a fundament of blind striving. Our pleasures never lead to satisfaction because they are not ours but a mere expression within us of an indifferent and undifferentiated will which but mocks our petty part in it. Apart from the lifelong practice of asceticism accessible only to the rare saint, it is only the contemplation of art that offers any hope of liberation, though temporary and again finally disappointed, from our enslavement to an indifferent will or energy beyond us. But what of this art so praised and prated to us after so much disappointment and unbelief in the impossible illusions of unviable religion? No, art is but the highest power of falsehood. Though pretending to a higher social caste Art is no better than her whoring sister Life in strangling our hopes and happiness. Does Art not but reveal and heighten the fundamental process of chafing life itself----Life ever duping, dissimulating, dazzling, and finally seducing us through its false hopes to live on, play on and pay ourselves out on----seducing us to continue our dubious roles in the farce in the face of overwhelming pain and disappointment when called upon to act out, fuel and be consumed by its energies indifferent to our existence and sufferings? But it is the tragedy of wisdom that while it is perfectly true that life must be understood backwards, in the rear-view mirror of reflection, that it must nonetheless be lived forwards. Ideas can be systematized; life cannot. Perhaps in the end it is only our innocence and our willing suspension of disbelief that makes life possible.

If the rationalists and scientists of the Twenty First Century prove to our greater judgment that the Mythus of the Christian, the Islamic, the Judaic, the Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian creeds are not the same as they once appeared in the eighth century, should we keep up the pretense for “social order and public good,” create a new Mythus or Supreme Fiction, perform endless spiritual CPR on the Old Mythus, or resign ourselves forever to the unknowability of the question by adopting the strategy of the ostrich? Plato through Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. And the examined life? Or maybe there is a healthy balance between the knowing and the unknowing. I don’t know, but I think so!

But indeed ideas and conviction, were they ever so excellent, would be worthless until made part of life and converted to conduct. Or rather, surely, belief or faith as a mythus, a working hypothesis, a ‘myth to live by’ cannot be possible until tested and sustained “in vivo” in the sustaining of our individual and collective lives, and generally evolves out of them or crumbles lifeless and aborted from the catechism books. Properly, “faith” is not possible till then. Inasmuch as all speculation is by nature endless, formless, and a vortex amid vortices, a mise en abime of question marks----only by a felt and lived experience does it find any centre to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a sustainable system. Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by life and action in life. Ultimately a faith must be lived, not proven, and if no faith of the mind and heart sustains us, we will revert even in our mind’s despair to the most primitive animal faith to go on---but even this has its end like all things.

Where then does any of this lead us to? We can only fully share life meaningfully together with those most intimately involved in our own lives, and we in theirs. The Little Prince would advise to love that which is nearest to you—his flower perhaps! Confucius would advise you to do your duty to those in closest relationship to you, and setting that in order, and inspiring others, the whole of human society will be brought into order. Perhaps. Goethe’s Faust and Christ and Mo Zi and Mohammad would urge a greater spiritual striving, a greater love, a greater approach to unity with God and the Infinite. There seems some wisdom in all of them, and some limitation. Confucius was a great humanist and a great ethical thinker, but was limited by the feudal prejudices of his age---likewise Mohammad and Christ and any other human being no doubt. But to love that most closely affected by your own life and to do one’s duty towards it, to maintain one’s honour in life by it, to live consciously as best and as deeply and intensely as possible and to support others, beginning with those closest to one’s own life and radiating outwards, ultimately towards the social and the infinite, seems a viable way to put it---or at least in my own thinking. Carlyle’s “Work! Produce!”----anything that might do an iota of good!---seems a good start in its affirmative spirit, but is a bit suspect as slanted in but the one direction of the “Protestant Work Ethic” to the exclusion of the equally important imperatives of “Love!—Know!----Feel!----Create!---Beautify!----Laugh!----Go forth and Multiply!” But perhaps Tolstoy’s imperative has the edge: “Live!” as intensely, deeply, meaningfully. and beautifully as you know how---and Jung’s “Become Whole---Become the Whole of your Powers!” may be added fruitfully. And like the Lothario in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, we must discover that our “Our America is here or nowhere."-----our ideal dream must be found in our own lives and hearts or never and noplace-----rather than in global quests or books or dreamed of paradises or heavens. Live while it is called today, for the night cometh wherein no man can live further, except through others or in unknown dimensions. And to live, first “Be Free?”----but that is another chain of thought and another hall of mirrors, and my brain has depleted itself for today! I need a drink!”

“Mescal!” Sartorius called out to the proprietress, who was amazed to see Sartorius still sitting typing his blog the full two hours after she went inside the kitchen to clean the lunch plates away. Sartorius could lose himself in his writing and his work on such occasions. “As the hart panteth after the waterbrook, so panteth my soul after thee, O God…..” mused Sartorius to himself as he waited for her return “…….but for the moment I panteth for another glass of mescal.” He downed the last glass of mescal, paid for everything leaving a generous tip, then made his way out of the Cantina and down the street.

Walking several blocks he headed for the small dilapidated church that loomed up in front of him two blocks ahead, promising signs of the center of the town. Reaching it, before him loomed a sign—translated into English also---“Church of the Sacred Virgin For Those Who Have Nobody With.” To his left a peal of suffused thunder rolled out of the dark cumulus clouds ringed about Popocatepetl and grumbled through the summer air until Sartorius felt it palpably upon his skin just as he heard it. Sartorius opened the front door and peered in. There was no one inside, except for the image of the Virgin, smooth and plasterlike, painted with the pastel colours of a Raphael, holding the cherubic Christ child in her arms atop the altar. He went inside and sat down, two-thirds of the way towards the altar. Sitting on the worn wooden pew Sartorius rested, feeling the ether-aftertaste of the Mescal still on his tongue and its lingering drag along his spine. The church was bathed in dark and shadow inside, though the high windows above cast light upon the altar in a baroque chiaroscuro. Then, gazing up at the altarpiece, Sartorius remembered the express letter from Eva he had received at the hotel, and fetched it out of the inner pocket of his laptop carrying case where he had squirreled it away the day before. He slid his fingers under the sealed flap and pried it open:



“My Dearest Robert:

Do you remember tomorrow? It is our birthdays! How sad I am to know that we share the same birthday but that we must be apart on it! You called it “Yuan Fen” or the Chinese name for the marker of fate and destiny deeming that we must come together in life. I did not mention it before you left because I knew how important your work was and I didn’t want you to feel badly about going to Mexico City where you are so needed. But how I miss you, my dearest! I want you Robert! I want you beside me when I awake in the morning and I want your love through the night. I want your children, soon, I want them. I want your life filling and stirring me! I want your happiness beneath my heart and to share your sorrows and kiss them away from your eyes at night. I want the peace that flows from the stroking fingers of your hands! I want this all Robert----I want you Robert! God how pointless and empty the world is without you! I have stopped the clocks in my flat and time has run to a standstill until you return to me! We will celebrate our birthdays when you return after completing your great work, which I long to share with you and support. Come back to me safely and joyfully, my dearest!

With all my love for you,

Eva”



The letter in Sartorius’ hand trembled as he fought back the impulse to cry. He looked up at the image of the Virgin above the altar. Then he felt an urge to pray—he wanted to pray. He knelt down in the dust and bowed his head against the wooden back of the pew in front of him, folding his hands together and resting his head against the back of his hands holding Eva’s letter. He tried to make himself pray for the strength and courage and character to make Eva’s dream of happiness, so worthy, come true. He tried to recite the rote ritual of an “Our Father Who Art…” and then a “Hail Mary, Full Of…...” He could not. A tear fell upon Eva’s letter… blurring her name. He remained silent, his eyes closed and his head resting upon the pew’s back for some minutes. Why, but why must I go on and on again to bear this unbearable suffering he queried himself over and over to no answer. He could not comfort himself with even the solace of Job in mysteries beyond his own understanding. He did not know that man has places in his heart which do not exist, and through them enters suffering, that they may have existence. Then he heavily rose himself up and headed in slow pacing gait towards the exit of the front doors. As he extended his arms to push the doors open he glanced above the inner doorway where an exit sign was normally to be found. A dried and cracked wooden plaque was attached with hammered wooden pegs above the door. He read it. It said: “Quo Vadis?”

As Sartorius walked along the street to the central square he noticed the clock on the town hall: It read Six-thirteen. He felt he had better check the bus schedule to take him back to Mexico City. He checked the bulletin board posted across from the entrance to the town hall---the last bus for the capital would leave at six forty-five. Looking down the barranco the sunset was spectacular too, with its wisps of cloud scattered through the sky, so-called rose-coloured, mother-of-pearl, salmon-pink, cherry----adjectives used here on earth just so that we may understand one another, but none of the colours, as far as we know, had names in heaven. He felt thirsty. The trace of a nauseating withdrawal hangover and incipient headache intimated themselves into his skull. He needed a drink---badly. Turning round, catty-corner to the bus stop was a small Cantina----Terminal Cantina El Bosque read its signboard. He went in. Inside was a middle-aged woman in a black dress playing dominos. It was dark. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness he sat down at the bar.

“Mescal!” he mumbled out, his voice weakened from dryness, “Dos!”

The old lady shuffled across the aisle to a gourd hung over the back of the bar. On the gourd was printed: ‘Mescal Xicotancatl.” She measured off two glasses and slid them over in front of Sartorius. He picked up the first and drew off its smooth ether about halfway down, then hesitated for a long breath, and then quick-upended the glass over his lips, draining it to the last drop. A second later he felt the ‘kick’ as a tingling force hit his backbone.

Sartorius was aware of an inconceivable migraine pain rendering him almost immobile as if a foot-long icicle had been driven into his brain by a sledgehammer. He drew a sip from the second mescal. The icicle began to melt and dissolve in the warm bath water of his skull. Sartorius felt himself getting sober---almost sober now; It was just the rainbows that were dancing out of the coils of darkness and shadow on the deserted bar-room floor, and the giant sand fleas as big as his fist that were burrowing out of sand holes in the mirror, then eating the bits of coloured shards torn from the dancing rainbows, rainbows shredding and knotting into a spaghetti of ribboned colours, then swan-diving into the liquid floor that made him unsure that he had quite sobered up completely. He drew off the ether smelling liquid of the second glass and drained it.

He then called out “Otros mescal……poqito!”

Sartorius has the sensation of a swarm of fuzzy insects nattering about his ears and heard a dull velvety buzzing sound. Then he heard a voice talking to him---high pitched and of indeterminate sexuality------‘Roberto! We warned you that you would come to this if you kept on letting yourself get out of control! Now you’ve been drinking that stuff and look what has become of you! But don’t imagine all of this happens to you without any purpose------we have been leading you into to this……situation……. purposely.-----You have to do something about it!-----We are leading you on to that something!’ Sartorius recognized the voice---him or her he couldn’t quite make out----as one of his Familiars who surfaced occasionally during his more serious drinking bouts in Beijing.
“I’m not drinking any more……” whined out Sartorius. “You can go away!”

Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


A high male-female laugh followed his attempt at appeasement, followed by: ‘You really think it is not too late for all that? You are going to have to do something about all of this! Ha! Ha!-----go ahead---pick it up----it’s only a short one---just a little therapeutic drink to help stabilize things----that’s all you need! No harm in that is there?’
Sartorius lifted the third Mescal and in a single motion drained it. Setting the glass upside down on the table with a muted clatter he noticed a man with a mustache staring impolitely at him and frowning menacingly at him, but he returned the grimace, as the man followed his every motion, seemingly mocking him in imitation, setting his glass upside down on the counter in front of himself just as he did. One of Salvador Dali’s clocks was draped over his wrist, the spinning hands of which stopping at 2:46 then reversing themselves in the mirror to 6:42. Sartorius checked his own watch and 6:42 it was----he had to run across the street or he would be stranded outside the city. He shoved a note towards the Senora and ran out, clutching his laptop carrying case. He ran across the street and reached the stand. 6:48. No bus. He sat down on the bench and looked around him trying to decide what to do. On the opposite corner was a small hotel—unbelievably dirty and dreary.

Depressed, he closed his eyes and seemed to slumber. He found himself walking desperately, like a man lost in a jungle or in a labyrinth suffused in thick fog. He turned and turned and turned. Then he caught sight of a woman, beautiful, leaning against a wall. He took her for a streetwalker at first, trying to catch his eye. Then he looked again and the woman, pulling a thin veil from across her head, revealed a face the very image of Eva. He approached her and kissed her violently on the mouth, she closing her eyes and loosening her lips to take him. He then raised his head and eyes and then flung himself back in horror as a red rat pushed its head and then body from inside her glossed lips and scurried down her blouse…….He sat down bleary eyed at a picnic table inside a gazebo just next to the bus stop and opened his laptop and began to type violently:



“HYPOCRITE LECTEUR!----THIS MEANS YOU!
Mon Semblable! Mon Frere!
You! Lousy Reader! Get out!
Yes You! Don’t pretend you don’t know who it is I am talking to!
What makes you think you have got any fucking right sticking your ugly nose in here when real people are suffering! Go! Now! Go!---Get Out!
Get your filthy hands off this book---Now!—You!---you lowlife! You think you can just barge in here with your lousy twenty bucks or your fucking library card Nook or iPad and own, rent and gawk and manipulate real people’s lives from your chinsy invulnerable tower with its lousy cheap little peep hole? I’m 86’ing your ass out of this fucking text right now! Get lost you closet faggot!---You Peeping-Tom! Go back where you fucking came from!”


Then his head slumped into an unconscious torpor pushing down shut the top of the laptop beneath him.
He was awoken by a superloud insistent honking that put him in fear of being run over by a freight engine. He looked up. It was the bus. Fifty minutes late. He piled in and groggily found an empty seat towards the back. Then slumping sidewards, he pressed the skin of his feverish temple and forehead helplessly against the cold window pane, then blacked out.

A few minutes later a violent jolt woke Sartorius, followed by another. Had Sartorius expected the driver to slow, taking account of the narrowness of the roads and the steep inclines and sheer cliffs they were forced to negotiate? To his increasing horror and chagrin the bus seemed to speed up rather than slow on the treacherous mountain roads. They raced along, miraculously avoiding falling into the deep ravines below and swerving just in time to avoid trucks, sheep, slow moving peasants, cows led by boys or cowering dogs. By the roadside Sartorius saw the corpses of dead sheep and occasionally on the road itself, fresh roadkill, a shapeless bloody pulp that could have been a dog or lizard squashed out, grooved and imprinted with the treadmarks of innumerable tires. The driver was oblivious to Sartorius’ anxiety, blindly transfixed by the unfolding madness on the road. His passengers looked ahead in passive horror as potential disaster after disaster was narrowly swerved by to the sound of the ceaselessly blaring horn, or they creened their necks backward to catch the savage threats, shouts, raised fists and curses which disappeared behind them. Thank God, he thought, it would soon be dark; perhaps he could then unclench himself-----for it would be better not to see one’s own death approaching. After nightfall there would be only the final moment----the blaring horn and overwhelming headlights blinding one’s eyes and then the pain would be over in an overturned tangle of bodies beside the road----a foot here, a hand there----the back of a head covered with the dust and shards of the shattered glass of the windshield, sprayed across the hair and skin of the pale corpses. Then the gas fumes would rise and hover---the ball of flame would erupt and billow black smoke then die out, and then finally there would be the men in uniform searching the charred bodies, the cloth welded inseparably into the blackened flesh, for bits of surviving wallet’s or bags that might yield some clue as to the identity of those who had been. In the failing light Sartorius blacked out completely.

High above the lone bus as it fitfully rounded the potholed mountain roadway overlooking the great Ciudad the small moon dropped down from the enveloping cloud cover and the Mexican night had fallen, soft and fervid, enwrapping with its grape-blood color and its scents, the aftertaste of musked sunset, the million millions of caprices, intrigues, passions, longings and regrets of men and women teeming below.

“Zócalo!” was the next thing Sartorius heard. “Zócalo!—End of the Line!” He felt the bus driver’s strong hand and arm shaking his shoulder. He looked around and saw that he was already at the bus stop for the central square in Mexico City, the Zócalo. It took a minute to gather himself together, and the bus driver handed him his carrying case as he helped him down the step to exit the bus. He walked across the immense public square, flanked by the Cathedral, and headed for the Zona Rosa.

He passed the Angel de la Independencia, the Angel of Independence high and triumphant on her column on the La Reforma and then made his way into the Zona Rosa. A black poodle dog followed at his heels whimpering. By this time he was tired and needed to sit. He handed the dog some scraps of a beef burrito he had wrapped in paper and placed in the back pocket of his laptop carrier. He was thirsty and needed to drink. Making his way in the direction of the Marco Polo Hotel the first bar he saw was the Café Kabbalah. He entered and the bar was half full and he took a seat at the tables next to the book niche at the corner of the lounge. The black poodle followed him in and curled up at his feet. A waiter approached dressed like a devil in a miniskirt. His legs were of black-netted hose fastened behind with garter snaps which were held by the scarlet halter beneath his red skirt and which followed well-shaped legs down to his stiletto high-heels. In his right hand he bore a thin iron pitchfork, ending in a barbed black trident. His arms were thin and sculpted and hyper-gracefully controlled as he crossed them beneath his scarlet brassiere, revealing a Depo-Provera induced cleavage. He wore his skirt high so that as he bent to remove the last customer’s dirty glasses and trays the skirt hiked up to show the cleavage between his legs……a scarlet-red pair of Victoria’s Secret panties revealing the camel-foot beneath the fabric, his genitals well tucked and taped between his legs. His face was a whiteface on which was painted in garish colours the exaggerated pointed lips of a Picassoesque harlequin with a rouge-red dot on the cheeks, his eyebrows and eyes skillfully bowed-upwards and the lids painted with glitter. His hair was a huge Pompadour wig. From below the miniskirt also protruded the base of a long curling tail, ending in a barbed point, above which in the small of his back was a heart-shaped sign on which was inscribed, in Spanish and in English: “Beware! S/he-Devil’s Tails are Prehensile and Insatiable!” The S/he-demon smiled with the teeth of a LadyDracula, bending over at the hips to push his breasts in front of Sartorius’ eyes, showing his long canines as he drawled out in a swish queen falsetto:

“Haiiiy, Angelface! What’s your poison?”

“Mescal, Doble” answered Sartorius, trying not to look at his décolletage.

“Pronto, Dahling” he responded, pursing his lips for effect, in apparent imitation of Marlene Dietrich, offering him a tray of complementary chocolate coffins, skeletons and sugar-skulls. There is no end of devilish, contortions, Sartorius thought, once human beings feel free to compete with God to create or uncreate themselves.

Sartorius picked up the mescal and drained half of it, wiping a thin stream that escaped down the corner of his lip. A half-second later he felt the drag of its impact along his nerves and blood. He looked around and saw a mixed crowd, half-straight and half-gay, half of whom were dressed in costume for the Dia de los Muertos---The Day of the Dead. He glanced around him and found a covey of hermeneutic seeming books arrayed in an alcove. He looked towards the waiter and called out: “Otros”……..”Double, Por Favor” and he began to lean back in his chair and run his fingers over the titles:

“A Treatise on Sulpher: written by Michail Sandivogius, i.e. anagrammatically Divi Leschi Genus Amo; The Hermeneutical Triumph or the Victorious Philosopher’s Stone, a Treatise more compleat and more intelligible than any has been yet, concerning the Hermetical Magistery; The Secrets Revealed, or an Open Entrance to the Sub-Palace of the King, containing the greatest Treasure in Chymistry never yet so plainly Discovered, by the famous Englishman styling himself ‘Anonymous’ or Eyraeneus Philaletha Cosmopolita; The I Ching; The Secret Gardens of the Sheik Nefzao, translated by Sir Richard Burton; The Way of Sufi Knowledge and Hermeneutic Powers, by al-Rumi; The Musaeum Hermeticum, Reformatum et Amplificatum, Omnes Sopho-Spagyricae artis Discipulos fidelisseme erudiens, quo pacto Summa illa vera que Lapidis Philosophici Medicina, qua res omnes pualemcunque defectum patients, instaurantur, inveniri & haberi quaet; Continens Tractatus Chimicos; Malleus Maleficarum; Theologus Autodidacticus, by Ibn al-Nafis; Philosophus Autodidactus, by Ibn Tufail (Abubacer); Sub-Mundanes, or the Elementaries of the Cabbala, reprinted from the text of the Abbe de Villars; Physio-Astro-Mystic: with an Illustrative Appendix from the work Demoniality, wherein it is asserted there are in existence on earth rational creatures besides men, including the Djinn…………..”

“Are there?” Sartorius queried to himself, as the waiter brought his second Mescal, swishing his tail behind him with a suggestive look.


As he sipped off the top of the ether he ran his finger along the volumes of this Canon of the Night, then at length took down the last book and began to thumb through it, skimming through the illustrations. The Mescal began to sink in and the nattering buzz of the fuzzy insects about his ears returned. He recognized the voice of his Second Familiar, not the first of the Cantina, but a distinguishably male Mephistophelean voice of a Qing Dynasty Minister, or perhaps an Inquisitor from the Spanish Inquisition, Machiavellian in tone, speaking to him in Mandarin:
“Zemma ban, Roberto, Zemma ban?-----You are going to have to do something……….about this…….unfortunate situation……something……..Zemma ban?........we are here to help…………what will it be, Roberto……..what would a man of honour do………….what would a Junzi do……….What would the Duke of Zhou do………Surely there are precedents to follow?............The last Ming Emperor on Coal Hill----was he not a man of honour remembered in respect?...........Something…………”

“Bi zui!....Zoukai!...Zang Gui---Guai!” Sartorius shouted out, his arms waving off the invisible voices looming impalpably in the air before him, causing the waiter to look apprehensively in his direction. Catching the waiter’s eye, he held up his empty glass and called out: “Dos Otros……Doubles!,….Por Favor!”
He picked up the book on the Cabbalah, and opening the chapter on the Demons of Shaitan, he began to read, but as soon as the words began to form in his own mind he heard the voice of his First Familiar, of indefinable sex, reading out loud to him, as it were over his shoulder:

“………….Erekia, the one who tears asunder; and they who shriek with a long-drawn cry—the Illirikim; Apelki, the misleaders or turners aside; and those who attack their prey by tremulous motion---Dresopim; ah, and the distressful painbringing ones---the Arekesoli; and one must not forget, either, the Burasin, destroyers by stifling smoky breath; nor Glesi, the one who glistens horribly like the carapace of an insect; nor Effrigis, the one who quivers in horrible manner; ----------Roberto!------don’t forget: the Mames, those who move by backwards motion; nor the movers with creeping motion; nor the Seducers that cut unseen in the night---severing the roots of manhood in the darkness----collectors of trophies of the living dead; nor of the evil questioners---the Grand Inquisitors, whose knived tongues stop not until the Truth be Cut Naked of its Lies to the Bone………………….these are the Demons and the Djinn who visit men in their beds while they sleep……………so that………….”
“Basta!” Sartorius shouted and snapped the book shut, cutting off the voices of the Familiars, reducing them to silence. Then he drew down the last glass of Mescal, sip by sip, and opened a package of cigarettes, a “666” brand offered on a tray, lighting and smoking several until his nerves calmed. Then, he paid his bill and made his way in the direction of the Marco Polo, followed by the poodle.

On his way he passed a train of children walking, dressed for the festival, like a Halloween outing or Mardi Gras of the Dead, with some dressed as skeletons, devils, witches and demons, some with deathly skulls upon their heads, some eating and exchanging sugar skulls, chocolate coffins and chocolate skeletons, some holding lighted candles as they walked, making a gay time of the Dia de los Muertos. Many would be spending these hours at the graves of their dead relatives, passing a candlelight vigil at graveside, then making merry with their near and dear. Passing in the other direction was a party of the “Gay” crowd of the Zona Rosa, and they dressed like the cult showings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show----with camp queens in drag, and every variety of demon, demon lover, sexual succubus, “Pinheads,” butch and femme extremes, Elvis and Michael Jackson “Thriller” imitators, and the whole spectrum from camp to vamp, a carnival of joyful perversity---for fun and “pour epater les bourgeois.” More than one hundred trooped into the entrance of an art cinema on which was displayed on the marquee: “Dia de los Difuntos—Servibilis: Oberon and Titiana’s Golden Wedding—A Rocky Horror Brockenplay for Walpurgisnacht!” A camp vamp in drag tossed some Pan de Muerto to the ebony poodle, who jumped to wolf it down, abandoning Sartorius and following the camp train of revelers off into the cinema.


Sartorius returned to the Hotel, but instead of going to his room he sat down in the lobby bar across from the front desk. He ordered a tequila, and began to sweat as he thought of the prospect of being alone in his room. He was tired and wanted to lay down to rest, but when he entered the hotel, he couldn’t bring himself to go up to his room. A vision of the straight razor in his shaving bag floated before his sight. For so many years he had regarded this private myth as a mere game, a mere joke: On his fiftieth birthday he would slit his throat and make an end of it. He never really convinced himself that he would really do it. Now, flush with mescal he had heard voices out of nowhere telling him “you have to do something about the………situation.” Now he could not really convince himself that he wouldn’t do it. The straight-razor in his bag was more than a fetish. He was afraid to be alone in his room---afraid of what he might do to himself---especially with the hallucinations from the mescal floating up to the surface. He couldn’t go back there, at least until after his Birthday had passed. Downing a mescal he depressively mused in his mind: How does one kill fear I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat? …..The bullet is not run, the blade not forged, the man not born. Even the winged words of truth drop at your feet like lumps of lead. You require for such a task an enchantéd and poisoned blade dipped in a lie too subtle to be found on earth. Dizzy and slightly nauseous he felt his mind turn like the Wheel of Ixion. He downed another. Then seeing the glass in his hand trembling, he switched from mescal to tequila to try to calm himself down and get a hold on his mind.

Then Pablo came into the bar and sat down next to him, his saxophone case in hand. He ordered two Mescals and slid one over to Sartorius. He told him he was just getting off work at the Hotel and that in an hour he would be doing a special one-off Dia de las Muertes all-night jazz gig at Club Paradiso, where there would be dancing and drinking all night for the Day of the Dead. He would make a lot of money, and there would be a hot crowd ready to cut loose---costumes, drugs, gangsters, millionaires, drug cartel playboys, sex-molls and killer-thugs, show people and stars. He invited Sartorius to come with him----maybe he could find Maria for him again----but she might be with another boyfriend----he didn’t know----anything could happen on a night like this----you just had to go and find out. Sartorius was still afraid to return to his room. He had nothing better to choose from so he thanked Pablo and called a taxi to take them to Club Paradiso.

In the taxi Pablo unscrewed a large crucifix around his neck, revealing on the upper half a silver spoon, and in the lower half a canister of white powder. He took three sniffs of the white powder, compressing his opposite nostril to charge the suction. Then he offered the canister to Sartorius, who followed his example, taking in three laced snorts. Sartorius felt his nose go numb and his mind blanking out and he heard a buzzing around his ears: Clippity-one; clippity-two; clippity-three’; clippity-four----------likity-cut, likity-cut, likity-cut-------; Then again a rushing sound like through a railway tunnel, then again: Clippity-one; clippity-two; clippity-three’; clippity-four----------likity-cut, likity-cut, likity-cut-------Then he sensed himself before a large cavernous tunnel in the center of the earth stretching and winding infinitely upward. Behind him were the gods and goddesses of the underworld---now Pluto and Persephone---now Isis and Osiris---now Shaitan and Iblis in a Protean flux. He looked into a grand mirror and saw that he had been transformed into Pablo, his golden jazz saxophone hung around his neck on a golden chain. Next to him in the mirror, like bride and groom, was Eva, her face veiled. The god of the underworld commanded he should lead Eva out of hell and death and into the light of life above if he could, like Orpheus, play his instrument and lead her upwards, never yielding to temptation to look back on her until they emerged into the golden sun above.

As Sartorius turned towards the upward passage Eva took off her veil and they set off, one following the other, and Sartorius, as Pablo began to play the jazz riffs that ascended higher and higher, accelerating in their jazzy racing run and pitch, endlessly climaxing heavenwards, ever endlessly reaching for, but not quite reaching the pure orgasmic release of the infinite; playing as he swagged ever upward, leading Eva footing entranced behind him. Finally he reached the opening of the passage and as the sun’s rays just warmed his forehead but had not yet blinded his darkened eyes, he uncontrollable turned back to share the joy of the moment anticipating the joy on Eva’s face; but as his glance took in her longed for face he saw that he had been a moment too soon in his anticipation, and that Eva’s face was still shrouded in the darkness behind them, and he fell to his knees with shock as he saw her lovely body crumbling into dust, and the last look between their eyes that they shared in a loving despair as her shade was drawn by moving shadows downwards towards death. As Sartorius sunk into his despair tears welled behind his closed eyes and streamed onto his wrinkled jacket. Then he felt an elbow poking at his ribs and a shaking and he awoke to find Pablo pulling him from the taxi. “We made it, man---we made it!---Come on!” he shouted as he pulled.

At the Club Paradiso Pablo joined his jazz band and began to play hot jazz numbers, to which the audience danced furiously, bringing the energy of the crowd first to a simmer, and then to a boil. Then the jazz band featured solo virtuoso numbers where each showcased player would draw out the possibilities of his particular instrument higher and higher, faster and faster to the nth degree. Pablo on sax raised an electric glissando that left one panting breathlessly for heaven. Then the trumpeter seemed to mount unbelievably to higher and higher notes that could only be heard in a dog’s heaven. Then the jazz drummer, a sardonically smiling dwarf-gnome of three feet three and one-half inches who Pablo had introduced to Sartorius as Oskarnello Raguna but who spoke with a German accent launched into a syncopated drum riff that would have put Gene Krupa to shame for its frenzy and which reduced the movements of the dancing couples to the involuntary zombie twitching of surreal marionettes, seemingly jerking helplessly at the ends of invisible strings attached to his drumsticks. At the end of his solo he chanted out a line of verse after each climactic crescendo on the drums:


Smash a little windowpane
Put sugar in your beer;
Mrs. Biddle plays the fiddle,
Dear, dear, dear.


Finally the featured singer was announced---“The Immortal Teresias”---a strikingly handsome man with classical features, mustachioed in a Tuxedo with a wine-purple cummerbund wrapped around his torso, with tophat, cane and buttoned white gloves---hair slicked back and waxed and oiled glossy in the style of the 1920’s, looking a bit like Joel Grey in the Movie “Cabaret”---who gave a rendition of Cole Porter’s song “Anything Goes:”


In olden days a glimpse of stocking below the knee
Was considered quite shocking,
But now, Heaven knows,
Anything Goes!

Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes!

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos
And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that I'm bound to answer
When you propose,
Anything goes!



The next act to follow was a female singer in a stunning low-cut glittering metallic silver sequin evening dress, slit provocatively, who sat on the piano under a spotlight, singing into a microphone, crossing and revealing her beautiful legs as she sang a rendition of “Love for Sale” ---after being introduced as ” The Angelic Teresa:”

Love For Sale!
Appetizing young love for sale
Love is Fresh, still unspoiled
Come and sample, lightly styled.
Who will buy?
Who would like to sample my supply?
Who’s prepared to pay the price
For a trip to Paradise?
Love for sale!........


Then she moved about the seated guests at their tables, singing languorously and seductively, teasing each guest with her long flowing scarf which she wrapped about the most virile men’s necks, successively pulled away behind her and let fall, trailing along the floor behind her as she coaxed then abandoned each seduction in turn, offering her luscious décolletage and svelte hips, coming and going:

……..If you want the thrill of love
I’ve been through the mill of love
Old love, new love
Every kind of love but True Love…….


Finally, after a musical interlude, it was announced that Teresias and Teresa would sing a duet rendition of “You’re the Top.” The stage darkened, then a spotlight center stage: Teresa sang the first bar, in profile, entering from the center curtain into the spotlight, from which successively her face, then arms, then full body appeared seductively, in full left profile---she raising and stroking her left leg against the thick edge of the curtain, then caressing it like a lover as she sang to it; then she danced moving always forwards, facing always right, her left visible in profile, finally rubbing her back seductively against the thick edge of the curtain while she pulled her long white scarf towelingly behind her gyrating hips, then disappearing with a flourish, stage right:


You're the top!
You're the Coliseum.
You're the top!
You're the Louver Museum.
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss
You're a Bendel bonnet,
A Shakespeare's sonnet,
You're Mickey Mouse!

Then a second later, Teresias appeared in his Tuxedo and cummerbund from his first number—spotlighted center stage, raising and flourishing his tophat high in his right hand, his head and arm emerging from the curtain’s edge, then moving to center stage in right profile, tapdancing across the stage as he sang, then finally disappearing, stage right:

You're the Nile,
You're the Tower of Pisa,
You're the smile on the Mona Lisa!
I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, baby, I'm the bottom you're the top!

Then the two alternated their appearances in profile, singing to each other, appearing from behind the opening of the left and right curtains, center stage; First Theresa:

You're the top!
You're Mahatma Gandhi.
You're the top!
You're Napoleon Brandy.
You're the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery
You're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane!
You're sublime,
You're turkey dinner,
You're the time, the time of a Derby winner
I'm a toy balloon that’s fated soon to pop
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!



Then Tiresias:


You're the top!
You're a Waldorf salad.
You're the top!
You're a Berlin ballad.
You're the boats that glide
On the sleepy Zuider Zee,
You're an old Dutch master,
You're Lady Astor,
You're broccoli!
You're romance,
You're the steppes of Russia,
You're the pants, on a Roxy usher,
I'm a broken doll, a fol-de-rol, a blop!………………..


And with that as the music rose to the final crescendo and the whole audience waited for the final flourish, Tiresias turned out of profile and into full front faced view before the audience. The audience gasped as they realized that Teresias and Teresa were one and the same person, the female dinner gown, bouffant hair and make-up covering the left half of Tiresias’ body, and the Tuxedo clad male covering the right half of his body, the two suits of clothing sewn together along the centerline bisecting him perfectly down the center of his body. The illusion was so perfect until the last second that everyone in the room gasped, stunned for a full minute. Then, holding the moment of shock in suspense, milking for all it was worth, Teresias, the two bisected halves of his androgynous body fully exposed to full view, continued singing in a mixed voice to the song’s climax in an extended crescendo:

But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're…..the…….. top!

It was an absolute sensation, and the applause was thunderous! Then in encore, Teresias repeated the whole song again moving with vigorous strides up and down the central catwalk, pivoting at each end of the catwalk on each successive stanza, to give the left and right halves of the audience successive views of his male and female personas profiled as he gloried himself, singing and smiling ecstatically with arms raised upwards, the music ever accelerating to a more fevered pace, until the Siamese he-and-she disappeared behind the curtain centerstage, throwing kisses to all.
After twenty minutes the band took a rest and Pablo returned with Teresa, in full female dress, and Maria in tow, sitting down together with them at Sartorius’ table. Sartorius noticed that Theresa wore a large Yin/Yang medallion cased in gold prominently in the cleavage of her dress. Pablo introduced them:
“Allow me to present….Roberto!-------Professor Robert Sartorius that is.”
“Ces’t mon plaisir, Messiur le Professor”

--------

Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

After an hour, Terry invited Sartorius to the “Green Room” backstage, a kind of private room where the performers, their boyfriends and girlfriends, the musicians, groupies and hangers on would get together, talk, laugh and entertain themselves away from the public eye. They rambled on, talking at random and becoming better friends, and Teresa introduced him to many of the other performers, with whom they joked and shared Tequila, Mescal and the occasional snort of cocaine or drag of marijuana. Terry leafed from time to time through the pages of an old French quarto, the title of which Sartorius leaned over to take in: “La Vie Militaire, politique, et privée de Chevalier d'Eon.” Then they were joined by Oskarnello, the midget drummer, who sat across from them and lit up a hand-rolled brownish cigarillo, inhaling and exhaling, his face soon shrouded in an unmistakable cloud of misty hashish.

“Your piece was fabulous! Really magic!” blurted Sartorius to Tiresias, everyone bubbling over with narcotic giggles.

“You don’t know the half of it!” pronounced Oskarnello from within his cloud of mist, “……………Terry and I also do a magic act together, laced with gender-bender levitations and transformations behind black velvet!”

“Really?..........I really must see it!” effused Sartorius.

“Watch this,” intoned Tiresias as he held up his crystal class of wine over the table, “Oskar….you’re on!” Then Oskar let out a high shriek that whined into the inaudible register and the glass began to vibrate, then shake, and finally burst and shattered, showering its contents across the table.

“Bravo!” shouted everyone, along with Sartorius, who added “……….when can we see the act?”

“Well, we really haven’t done it for a couple of years---maybe we’ll do a revival, eh Oskarovich?…….” he replied.

“The sots don’t really appreciate us, you see………..” explained Oskarnello, “…………..those who sneer at us, and sneer at themselves, for paying to let us fool them, what they never see is the yearning. If it were a religious yearning, a yearning after God, a higher prestidigitation in a sacred place----well no one would dream of disrespecting that. But us, no---our kind of a show, our show is a yearning-----Yes!-----a yearning of the same deepest stuff----- Yes!........but they see it as only after a miracle, only to contradict the given world—that, they hold it in contempt……..they are looking just for the trick you see, and are sure they will find it just beyond their fingertips……… if we angle for awe--------for the true miracle we live in-------- they refuse us……...worth a horselaugh…….. followed by a sneer---------a sneer in the mirror, put paid with the price of a ticket.”


“Yes, tragically all too true…..” lamented Tiresias, “…………..we are to our own chagrin disciples, incarnations if you will, of the Greatest Magician…………………now when He created the universe he didn’t say ‘Now for my first trick I’m gonna make light’…………..He said ‘Let there be light!’ and the Big Bang unleashed itself, allowed light into what had been Nothing and Nothingness, and the light congealed itself into matter and anti-matter, infinite hadrons, and leptons and quarks and worlds---suns and galaxies effusing out into a Virgin Time rushing forward to inflate a timeless void. But when we minor Magicians try to bring our bit of the miracle back into that Something, that Everything He created—renewing contact with its original stuff, we get the sneers and not awe. You notice that in the act we work in the dark, and under a spotlight, and we only allow the light, like the sun on the earth, to light up one hemisphere of the real at a time, either the male or the female remains in the dark. And it is only at the dénouement, the orgasmo-climax, that the flash-bulb of apocalypse and revelation uncovers that they are the two halves are of the one sphere. Like God, you always have to work with the light----make it do only what you want it to do………It’s all about the light-----you control the light and you control the effect----a magician’s perfect mirror must send everything back to the eye, and a magician’s perfect black velvet must send nothing back----the big bang of revelation set off against the black hole of mystery.”

Then they rambled on in this vein, more and more incoherent as the evening dragged onwards, talking at random and halting to introduce new friends as they incessantly came and left, making their entrances and exits, and with whom they joked and shared additional Tequila, Mescal and the occasional snort of cocaine or drag of marijuana. Then they made their way back to the open dance floor and enjoyed themselves.

Towards four in the morning, Sartorius was oozing Mescal and alcohol from every pore and had danced with Maria and Teresa alternately for hours. Teresa pressed her body close to his and stroked his ear, whispering into it: “Roberto!----I think you are ready for something special! I don’t take everybody there---it is a special place only for special people. You have to be the right kind of person at the right time------and be ready for something new---it is a private club and you need a pass to be admitted. Here----this is your pass---I have signed you in as my special guest---let’s get Maria and Oskar and grab a taxi.” –He handed Sartorius a card with the drawing of a magician in top-hat and tails levitating a beautiful girl over whom he passed a hoop, upon it. The name of club was printed on the top:





Teatro Magico: For Madmen Only!----(Private Club: Admission by Membership or Personal Invitation Only).





The Teatro Magico, or Magic Theatre, was lit by a neon sign poorly visible from the street and at the end of a long alleyway towards the rear of the compound. Sartorius, Maria and Teresa approached the massive solid red wooden door and Sartorius rang the doorbell. Overhead, above the face of the door was a moderately sized flashing neon sign in purple and red with exactly the same design as the card--stating again:

Teatro Magico: For Madmen Only!----(Private Club: Admission by Membership or Personal Invitation Only).


A small porthole-like door at shoulder height opened to reveal the face of the doorkeeper, an immensely tall muscled man with a shaved head who appeared to be either a strong-man from a circus or a gangster’s “muscle,” who eyed the trio with a cold suspicion. Sartorius silently presented the card to him through the porthole. He examined it for a full minute, his cold and suspicious eye passing repeatedly from its face to theirs. Hearing a voice shouting at him “Open up you moron” he was perplexed until he responded to the kicking against the bottom of the door and looked down to see Oskarnello venting his rage. The door opened. They found themselves in an ornately appointed hallway with crystal chandeliers and a plush red velvet carpet leading to a hat-check room where they gave up their things. Oskar then disappeared behind the counter with the hat-check girl. The trio then entered the theatre itself.
The Teatro Magico, was not one theater and had no central hall for an audience, but fashioned on the popular “Cineplex” model, rather consisted of an array of smaller theatres in a semi-circular ringed hallway sided at intervals by small lounges, to the far side of which were arrayed various ornate gilded doors, each inscribed with an alluring title designed to invite entrance, and the near side of which was an endless curved mirror. Anyone was free to enter or not enter as many of the smaller theatres as one wished or none at all at his own choice. This with one great difference, Teresa cautioned, there were no seats or audience, but that the partaker himself was taken up in a role in the drama, as it were, as part of a dream come alive, a ‘virtual reality’ or an incarnation into another life, to continue until he should chose to exit by the door by which he entered.----Thus, transcending its origin as a ‘Cineplex,’ it might be better styled a ‘Psychoplex.’

Sartorius followed Maria into the first concave lounge area and Maria ordered a round of Mescals from the attendant. She then sat herself within a smaller curtained booth at the back of the lounge at the back of which lay a continuous mirror. The waiter brought her drink and drew the curtain behind him, leaving Maria enclosed alone within. With a note of confusion, Sartorius followed Theresa’s lead in taking his glass of mescal and sitting down on the long ottoman opposite the booth. Theresa then unscrewed the cap atop a large crucifix locket hung about her neck, within which was a miniscule spoon with which she extracted a portion of white powder which she raised towards her nose, drawing it forcefully inward while holding one nostril closed with her forefinger. She then offered Sartorius the next spoonful, with which after a small hesitation he took imitating her lead. From behind the curtain they heard Maria’s voice begin to hum absently, then break out with intermittent rushes of feeling into scraps and lines of her well-known cabaret songs. Theresa then excused herself off to the ladies room, motioning with her head hintingly towards the booth curtain behind which Maria sat waiting.

Drunk with a trembling expectation of the appearance of her face, and beginning to feel his pulse quicken under the kick, Sartorius braced himself with a second spoonful of cocaine and walked precipitously towards the hanging curtain. Sartorius then, after a lingering moment of seeming numbness as he laid his fingers against the velvet cloth, pulled against the curtain, struggling against a charm that seemed to deprive him of all his will and all his energy, and of almost all of his lucidity at the moment he wanted them most. He succeeded in drawing back the curtain that hid her face from him and he walked to where Maria stood. She herself seemed moving backward, towards the back of the small enclosure, the whole of which was occupied by a great mirror that reflected her image, but not his, for he was just behind her and entirely covered by her. He heard her voice singing the sultry cabaret song in ineffably exalted sirenlike tones that pulled against his heart with a physical force as she approached the mirror: “In olden days…………….Now heaven knows, Anything goes!” As she sang Maria walked towards her image in the glass with her arms outstretched and the image came towards her. The two Marias---the real one and the reflection---ended by touching, and then their hands touching and seeming to melt and pass into each other just as Sartorius put out his arms to clasp the two in one embrace. But, by a sort of dazzling miracle that sent him staggering, Sartorius was suddenly flung back, while an icy blast swept over his face; he saw, not two, but four, eight, then hundreds of Marias spinning around him, laughing at him and fleeing so swiftly that he could not touch one of them. At last, everything stood still again, and he saw himself in the glass. But Maria had disappeared.

He rushed up to the glass. He struck at the walls and at the glass surface with the heels of his hands and fists. Nobody! And tears from somewhere fell, streaming downwards like a soft rain upon the cold glass. Which way had she gone? Which way would she return? Only an invisible voice rang out again its sultry Porteresque echo: “Now heaven knows, Anything goes!”

Returning to find him, Teresa gathered Sartorius together and led him down the curving hallway towards the ornate multiple doorways of the Cineplex. She told Sartorius he was free to choose. Sartorius walked a few paces to inspect the titles of the offerings on the first three doors: (1) “You Rule All Before You With Absolute Power!”
(2) “A Friendly Ball Game” (3) “All the Women of the World are Yours!”-----Sartorius entered the first door:

As the door of the theatre closed behind you, you strode forward, noticing first that you were clothed in a turquoise coloured ceremonial robe and with a large jade image of a Jaguar pendent from a heavy jade necklace suspended on your chest. On your head was a crown of jade and gold, topped with innumerable long and striking trogon feathers, the blue-green of meter long quetzal feathers, and the multi-coloured rainbow like feathers of the troupial. You were seated on an ornate throne of pure gold atop the Grand Pyramid, Tempel Major, above which was sculpted in bas relief the images of the Gods: First and foremost Huizilopochtli, the Sun and War God, patron and protector of the Aztec empire; then of Tlaloc, the Rain God; then Xochiquetzel, and then Quetzelcoatl, the Plumed Serpent and patron of the city of Tenotichtlan. A eunuch slave approached you, prostrating himself on the ground before he spoke without daring to raise his eyes to your own:

“Lord Tlacaelel, the Tlaxcallan war captives have arrived at the base of the Pyramid. The priests and the warriors await your orders.”

“Bring the first son of the captive Tlaxcallan king to me here, and send his daughters to my palace apartment and prepare them for their fates.” you ordered.

You looked below, down the glittering and terrifying expanse of the Grand Pyramid. The eunuch made his way down the long stone stairs from the peak of the pyramid where you were seated towards its base, an armed warrior at every landing and a torchbearer at every ten steps. The steps were stained a purplish brown along their length from decades of the river of running blood from their top and the rolling of the dead, heartless bodies down to the base, where below the chiefs of the abattoir severed and carved the limbs of the defeated soldiers into the cooking vats to be shared out to our victorious Aztec warriors. When the eunuch reached the head of the column of prisoners, their hands bound with leather straps behind their backs, and relayed the instructions to the ear of the Lieutenant of the Guard, the warrior guards moved to execute his orders. You could see the white haired head of the captive King of the Tlaxcallans drop helplessly as he saw his children being led away from him----his son to certain death and his daughters in sexual bondage to the harem of his lifelong enemy, you, Lord Tlacaelel. You saw his knees collapse and his white hair cover the ground as the body shook with convulsive sobbing.

The Captain of the Guard, Marlo Xiloj approached and prostrated himself, then rose to speak into your ear: “Lord Tlacaelel, shall the old man die as well?”

You answered: “No, he is broken to the power of Tlacaelel. He will return home childless and chastened before his people, a living testimony to our absolute power.”

The Captain responded: “Why do we let them live? Why don’t we exterminate the Tlaxcallans and their kingdom and reduce them to slaves, as we have all the other kingdoms surrounding us and them? They are defeated in battle----why let them go on?” he queried.

You answered: “If we kill all the actors, our Theater of Terror will go dark! No! The whole world witnesses our power here clearly and willingly submits. And furthermore, the Tlaxcallans are our close cousins! Nothing is so sweet as to devour a hated brother! And furthermore, our God, the great Huizilopochli does not like the flesh of the barbarous peoples from far away. He devours his own close kin! To our god the captives from those distant foreign expeditions are like hard yellowish, tasteless tortillas in his mouth! Only sacrificial victims from nearby cities, our own near flesh and blood will come to our god like warm tortillas, soft, tasty, straight from the fire!---sweet as your own sister!----We keep the Tlaxcallans alive and free to suffer beautifully for the glory of our Beloved One, Huizilopochli-----Marlo Xiloj!—if you are going to be a captain you mustn’t be afraid to look straight-eyed into the dark beauty of the heart of darkness!” you say.

Then the bound captive Prince, proud and defiant, was led before you and the priests and guards forced him onto his back upon the altar. You took up the black obsidian knife, scalpel sharp, tore open the tunic of the prince and with a single deft motion entered the cavity of the chest, the priests prying back the ribs exposing the beating heart. You looked into the Tlaxcallan prince’s eyes, still conscious. With a motion of your arm you forced your right hand into the open chest and under beating heart of the supine prince, and without severing the vessels you lifted it up out of the chest where it continued to beat gloriously, hot and living in your hand! You looked from the heart to the eyes and saw the lids droop, and close, like the eyes of the Tlaxcallan queen, the boy’s mother when you entered her, forcing her legs apart for the first time after the victory at the battle at Taxcala. As you took the obsidian knife and cut the arteries of the beating heart in your hand, spilling and spattering the blood in a wild orgasmic chaos you were in near delirium as you raised the still beating heart to the beloved face of your God Huizilopochli and watched the streaming red blood bring life to the face of the Adored One before you!

As you felt your teeth enter the warm and still beating heart, the hot blood running down the corners of your mouth and as you kissed the upturned lips of the idol you convulsed, then began to shriek with revulsion and you ran, hyperventilating, to escape. You pulled open the door of the Theatre and saw Teresa standing next to a gilded mirror smoking a cigarette in a long cigarette-holder while leaning against an ivory statue of Cupid on a pedestal.

“Roberto!---what is wrong?” she pleaded, grasping your hand and comforting you.

“The horror!” you answered hypnotically, “……the Horror!”

“Well, Roberto, you had better get a grip on yourself before the next feature. Here, sit down and have a drink.” She motioned for the usher behind the theatre bar and he brought a large bottle of Mescal, pouring out two glasses. You drained one glass, then half of the other. Though you were back in your own clothes, you noticed the stream of blood about your mouth from the previous scene trickling down the side of your mouth and into the cup. Teresa picked up the half drained, blood stained second glass of Mescal, raising it to her lips, saying jokingly to you as she drained it: “Leave me my bloody bever for soothsay,” after which the usher then refilled both glasses from the bottle. Then Theresa picked up one of the glasses, handing you the other and proposed a toast: “To Roberto---and his Brave New World!” and you downed the ether together, “…..but maybe you need something a little lighter for a change….which do you choose next?”

Having recovered yourself, you agreed with Teresa’s suggestion and looked down the hallway for your options. You chose door number two…….”A Friendly Ball Game…” Teresa said, to reassure you “And if you are still a little bit nervous, we can go in together.” You walked in side by side.

“Xbalanque! Quick get it!” you heard from behind you as you found yourself running forward. You caught the heavy rubber gummi ball full on the yoke you were wearing around your middle, then kept it in the air, dribbling it with the motions of your thighs and upper arms, which were padded. Two opponents were quick on your heels giving chase. Across the field to your right you saw Tiresias in his male form running parallel to you dressed in the same coloured yoke and pads. You and Tiresias were teammates, and bore an uncanny resemblance to each other---appeared to be twins, almost mirror images of each other. Just as you were about to be overtaken by the opposing trio you turned and quick-batted the ball adroitly towards the line of advance where Tiresias was sure to arrive in the next second when the ball would reach him. He looked halfway down the field and saw his object: a stone hoop mounted atop the stone wall of the court, towards which you were intent on propelling the ball.

“You're up, Hunahpu!” you bellowed out, “………to your right!.....Go!Go!Go!”

Both the Red and the Blue teams were shouting madly as Tiresias scampered down the right sideline, three paces ahead of his pursuers, frantic on his heels. The gathered crowd roared out their excitement, rising to their feet as Tiresias took his shot------A miss!----but so close!

Happy you were, you Divine Twins, to be playing the Mayan ball game again, having swept out the ball court of your fathers, the prior generation of Divine Twins, One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu who had been so cruelly killed and dismembered by Xibalba, the Lord of the Underworld for disturbing his peace with their loud sporting revels, as was told in the Popul Vuh, the Council Book, which recorded all things past and foretold all things…..whether there would be death, or whether there would be famine, or whether quarrels or wars would occur. You knew it for certain, since there was a place to see it----there was a book. The Popul Vu, the Council Book, was your name for it.
Below the earth, as you and Tiresias played and shouted, Xibalba, horrible and stately in mien, covered his ears to shut out the din:

“Damn! Damn! Damn!----I thought we had gotten rid of that horrible game long ago!” he, One Thanato, Lord of Death, said to his underling Seven Thanato, his captain. “Seven Thanato----go up to the world of the Roof of the Sun and invite those damned new players down for a Friendly Ball Game!-------‘You are summoned you will tell them-----You must come-----We would play ball with you here in the Court of the Underworld.’”

“It is done, Lord Death.” said Seven Thanato.

You and Tiresias received Seven Thanato graciously and accepted his invitation. You knew that your own Fathers, One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu had received a similar invitation and met a cruel death by accepting. But you were not of a character to turn down a challenge, however daunting.

On the first day of the game, the team of Death played against you and Tiresias unto a draw, and you broke off, retiring for the night. Seven Thanato took you, the Divine Twins, you and Tiresias to the House of Cadavers to sleep, giving you a torch and two cigars. “You must burn the torch and smoke the cigars through the night, but return them intact in the morning, on penalty of death, instructed Seven Thanato,” who then returned gloatingly to Lord Death, sure that he would return to see their cadavers on the morn. You, however had a plan------you had brought a jar of honey with you to refresh yourself throughout the game, and you smeared some of the honey on the tip of the torch and the tips of the cigars. The honey attracted the fireflies during the night, so that from the distance that Seven Thanato watched you, it appeared that the you had lit them. Seven Thanato reported to Lord Death that the game was underway and that they were sure to find the dead twins on the morrow. However, much to his chagrin, on the dawn you returned the torch and the cigars to him intact, and the Lord Death was forced to concede his loss of the engagement and ordered the second day of the Friendly Ball Game to begin.

The second day of the game, so unexpected, attracted a jostling crowd of Demons, Spectres and Devils of the Underworld in their thousands as spectators. Looking on as you and Tiresias donned your yokes, pads and equipment they gossiped: “What’s happening? Where did they come from? Who begot them and bore them? Our hearts are hurting, because what they are doing to our team is no good! They are different in their looks and different in their very being!” they said amoungst themselves.

Hearing thus, Lord Death, whose own name was Xibalba and who presided over the game stopped you both when you bowed before him to pay your respects prior to the commencement of the action, so as to ask a few friendly questions:
“Where might you have come from? Please name it.” Xibalba asked them.
“Well, wherever did we come from?” you asked rhetorically, looking towards Tiresias “To tell you the truth we don’t know!” That was all you said. You didn’t name it.

“Very Well, then.” said Lord Death “Let the game proceed!”

“Let’s play ball boys!” you called over to the Team of Death, and you ran out in full spirits to enjoy the sport.
As they had done before to trap your fathers One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu to their deaths, Xibalba prepared tricks they were sure would prove fatal. Xibalba after an hour said the old ball which you both had brought with you was defective, and insisted on using a new ball. You complained, saying the old ball was fine and the new ball was nothing but a covered skull. Xibalba insisted, however and you acceded to his wish. The Captain of the Team of Death smashed the ball hard at you, aimed directly at your heart. Instead of intercepting the ball, you dove in a somersault on the ground, letting the ball pass over you and strike the stone wall of the Ball Court behind you. With a loud crash the new ball splintered and a knife blade emerged from it, clattering upon the ground.

“What’s that?” you and Tiresias cried, “Death is the only thing you want----you don’t have the honour to play fairly! You summoned us to the game and now you cheat! If you can’t play fair we will simply take our ball and leave!”

“Well, don’t go boys! Don’t be spoil sports! We can still play a fine game, and to show you what good sports we are, we’ll even use your ball!” said Xibalba.

So the game continued through the second day, ending again in a draw. So Xibalba gave you both leave to retire for the evening. Seven Thanato again plotted your deaths during the night, locking you into to the Jaguar-Demon House to die. “Good-bye, my boys! I don’t think we will be seeing each other soon! Let me introduce our good friends you will be lodging with here tonight to you: Here is the one called Gouger of Faces, he delights in gouging out your eyeballs!---There is the one called Sudden Bloodletter, he snaps off your heads!----then comes Crunching Jaguar, the eater of flesh, and Tearing Jaguar, who tears your bodies open!---Sweet Dreams!” The heads of the many demons loomed at you out of the darkness like the devouring heads of Scylla, the Hydra-headed devourer. You, however had stuffed your bag and poncho with the carrion bones from the House of Cadavers of the night before, and then threw them to the demons, saying: “Don’t eat us! We brought you something even better that should be yours! Bon Appetite!” with which the demons began to gorge themselves on the carrion, fighting amoungst themselves for the last scrap, until they fell asleep over themselves, tired and satiated. Xibalba and Seven Thanatos arrived at dawn again in a light and joyful mood. Xibalba said to him: “Let’s collect their skeletons and put them into our trophy case to remember this game by!” However when they opened the door they found the Jaguar-Demons on the floor, still asleep, and you two, the Divine Twins beaming with health, Tiresias calling out to them with a playful sneer: “Let’s play ball boys—we’re up for it!”

“Why haven’t they died?” cried out the throng of demons assembled at the Ball Court of the Underworld, and were amazed at the feats of the two of you, the Celestial Twins in the House of Death. “I can’t believe what I am seeing---I must have drunk too much Mescal last night and I’m hallucinating all this!” said Seven Thanatos. The game proceeded and finally you made a supreme effort at the end of the last inning, and leaping a head higher than the captain of the Team of Death, batted the ball through the stone hoop with your shoulder.

Sweet as the victory was, there was great danger in it. You knew the Lord of Death was above all a sore loser, and spite was at the core of his being and character. Xibalba, Lord Death invited you to a celebration dinner before returning home, but you suspected another attempt on your lives before you would be allowed to leave his domain. You had in California been a fan of the Magic Castle, which had a club for teaching young magicians magic tricks. Knowing the delight of the demons and lords of death for destruction, you announced that you would provide some light entertainment at the celebration dinner by performing some magic tricks, destroying things and magically restoring them.

First, you took a watch and placed it on the table, covering it with an handkerchief. Then you smashed the watch into pieces, showing them to the demons. Then you placed the pieces in the handkerchief in the pocket of Seven Thanato. You chanted the magic phrase: “AllyeAllyeOxenFreeFreeFree!” and then took out the handkerchief, opening it. The watch was whole and restored! The Demons were delighted!-----You had discovered that they were all really such children at heart!

Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


Next you drew a live dove from beneath your tunic. You took up an obsidian knife and cut off its head, and the Demons laughed as they watched the headless bird run about the floor, not knowing that it was dead! Then you picked up the carcass of the dead bird and the head and placed them within a bird cage. You covered the bird cage with its night cover and said the magic words: “EenyMeenyMinyMoe—CatchA…..” then pulled off the cover, opened the cage and the dove flew skywards to freedom! There was a stomping of feet and chortling cheering heard far and wide across the House of Death.

Then Xibalba, Lord of Death, arose and said: “Very Good! Excellent indeed! But before you can return home you must do one more trick for us. You know the rite of human sacrifice. The losing team in the Ball Game is condemned to death. You have yet to kill a person! Yet you must be confident in all your wonderful magic that you can bring him back to life! This is my command and condition for your safe return home to the World of Light: You must kill your Twin brother Hunahpu and bring him back to life! You must make a human sacrifice without Death! We love our small delights here in the House of Death------delightful entertainment is a bit in short supply down here unfortunately!”
So Seven Thanato and Xibalba laid Tiresias on a black marble altar and opened his tunic at the chest. Xibalba picked up an obsidian knife and incised his chest, then Seven Thanato pulled back the ribs, exposing the beating heart. They then handed you the obsidian knife and instructed: “Make your Deathless Sacrifice now, Magister Ludi!”

You wedged your hand beneath Tiresias’ beating heart and lifted it upwards. But instead of cutting out the heart you took the obsidian knife and applied it to the center of the top of his head and dissecting his entire body along the centerline, separating and bisecting his body into two neat halves. The demons, specters and devils of the Underworld gasped in amazement as they saw that one half of Teresias’ body was male and the other half transformed into a female, cut away separately completely, linked only by the beating heart shared between them! Then Tiresias arose, severed and bisected into two halves, and his two halves began to dance and sing, sliding across the dance floor making a good imitation of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers: “S’Wonderful!---S’Marvellous!----that you should care for me!” he-and-she sang and danced and twirled together, breaking into a tap dance between refrains!
The demons and specters after recovering their breath burst into an uncontrolled applause: “They must be reincarnations of Ometeotl, the “Dual God,” male and female both----both the mother and father of the Gods!” they shouted

Then you escorted the he-and-she halves of Tiresias back to the altar. You severed the beating heart between them and held it high above your head until it stopped and there was no doubt Tiresias was dead. You then replaced the heart between the dead male and female halves of the cadaver and covered them with a white sheet. You passed your hand over the cadaver and repeated the magic words: “NihilHumanumAlienumEst!”

Then Tiresias rose under the white sheet like a ghost at Halloween, the cloth still covering his face and body. You held the edge of the sheet in front of Tiresias’ body as his body rose to a standing position, and as the suspense built you finally let go with a dramatic flair, whipping the white sheet away! Before the assembled devils, demons and specters appeared Tiresias in his performance costume—half male and half female---half Teresias in a tophat and tails, and half Teresa in her drag dinner dress of silver sequin, bisected neatly down the centre! After milking the moment of shock for all it was worth Tiresias turned to break into his performance, singing, gliding and tapdancing:

You're the top!
You're the Coliseum.
You're the top!
You're the Louver Museum.
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss
You're a Bendel bonnet,
A Shakespeare's sonnet…..


You're Mickey Mouse!

You're the Nile,
You're the Tower of Pisa,
You're the smile on the Mona Lisa!
I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, baby, I'm the bottom you're the top!

The effect was sensational and the applause thunderous! Then from here and there in the audience spontaneously you began to hear the words: “Me!....Me!....Let me try it!.....Cut me in two and bring me back to life again!......I want to try it!” as the hearts of the Underworld were filled with a childish longing and yearning for the dance.

You were about to perform the trick on Seven Thanatos, when Xibalba, the Lord of Death was insulted by your offence to his pride and announced: “No----Protocol demands that I go first as the Lord of the Underworld”---he said as he moved to your side, shooing the captain aside.

“Very Well” you said, “You ought to come back to life. After all aren’t you Death? And aren’t we making you happy, along with all the vassals of your domains?”

Thus Xibalba, the Lord of Death was the first one to be sacrificed, and you cut out his beating heart, which was Black and spurted blood of black ink in your hands when it was severed. You cut, bisecting his body into two, as you had done with Tiresias. And, then you said the magic would take a short time, so you would do a few more while we all waited, and you similarly sacrificed Seven Thanatos and his lieutenants. They did not come back to life. They had no regenerative other, no soul to rejoin their bodies. Their bodies lay sexless and dead, the dismembered Eunuchs of Death. Their end was their end and no new beginning.

And then the Xibalban vassals, devils, demons, specters of the undead rose in a panic, seeing their Lords dead before them. “Death be not Proud!” they shrieked and scurried like lemmings to the edge of the abyss, the Pit of Eblis. There they piled up, on the edge of the abyss, like myriad ants, Myrmidian spectres trying to make up a single body from a buzzing swarm of ants, to replace their dismembered Lord, the Lord of Flies; but failing they tumbled into the abyss, free-falling for hours until they reached absolute bottom, all bent low in surrender, meek and defeated in the lake of sulphur and fiery brimstone. Then you and Tiresias wheeled the dismembered bodies of Xibalba and Seven Thanato to the edge of the abyss and pushed them over, following them with your gaze, disappearing into the black chaos below.

Then you two, you Divine Twins, embraced each other and wept in each other’s arms with manly though tender tears of joy. Such was the defeat of the Rulers of the Underworld, the omnipotent Lord Death Xibalba and his servile minions. And you brothers accomplished all this only through Wonders and Self-Transformations.

Arm in arm, you glorious two headed for the exit door of the small theatre of the Psychoplex and returned to the hallway. Sitting to recover your breath, the usher poured two more glasses of Mescal, and you toasted each other: “Tie Ger Mer! Sworn Brothers!---Semper Fi!” you exchanged, drawing off the cool ether of the Mescal.

“Now I’m getting into the fun of it!” you blurted out, putting down your glass of Mescal. “Now for the next adventure!” you effused, moving towards the third door: “All the Women of the World are Yours!”-----“Perhaps I’ll try this one alone!” you said smiling back at Teresias, opening the ornate door.

Immediately you discovered yourself in a wonderful forested glade, watered with a beautiful stream with the most luxurious foliage, flowers, and the cooing voices of the exotic jungle birds----quetzel, trogon and troupial. In the center of a large clearing in the glade was an immense tree, singular in its immensity, that seemed to tower to the heavens---a veritable Tree of Igdrasil in its proportions. Beneath it was a young Aztec warrior, exquisitely handsome and well muscled, Adonis-like in his beauty, standing ever vigilant with a sword beneath the tree, fields of ripening maize corn visible at the edges of the clearing further down the glade. Upon his head was a golden crown, encrusted with sun-shot jade and precious gems, ears of maize corn sculpted in purest gold upon the crown, and topped with a headdress of brightly coloured feathers, green-blue, orange and iridescent purple, of the quetzal, trogon and troupial.

You crept in the underbrush until moving about behind the Aztec warrior, deliberately aside of his field of vision. Then wagering that you could affect the surprise, you drew your spear and ran straight at him, just out his peripheral vision. You built up speed and momentum as you neared the beautiful youth, raising your javelin to your shoulder. The warrior heard your footsteps and turned to face you-----too late!------and you released the javelin straight into the his naked neck, cutting the jugular vein and with half its length emerging out the backside of his spine. The blood spurted frantically as the youth dropped to his knees, then looking up into your face to see his undoer. As his eyes caught your gaze, your hands rested boldly upon your hips, your pelvis thrust forward in proud triumphant display; the fallen man’s eyelids lifted, then drooped, and he died kneeling, the spear shaft thrust through his throat holding him up in a posture of prayer, his lips mouthing words, mocking speech, but with nothing to be heard but the congested gurgling of his ebbing and effusing blood.

From a palace far below you caught sight of a filing troupe of one hundred of the most beautiful women you had ever seen, clad entirely in immaculate white, their hair exquisitely done up, and carrying on their heads jars and urns of oil, food, dates, and other delicacies, or articles of gold embroidered clothing. Some played flutes and lyres and wondrous instruments. At their head was a being, one could say a woman, but the being was too beautiful to be an earthly woman, and seemed to have a superhuman radiant aura about her, intimating that she was not of earthly origin but a Goddess.

As the vestal column neared and found you standing over the kneeling corpse, the Goddess spoke out decisively: “The King is Dead---Long Live the King!” With that she lifted the golden crown from the blood-spattered head of the fallen youth and placed it on your head. Her underling women then stripped the robe from the fallen victim, removed the spear, and laid him out naked upon the ground---the gaping bloody hole opened wide beneath his open gasping fishlike mouth, still in frozen dead posture seeming to want to say something, but unable. The women took the naked body on a stretcher, anointed it with oil, and then cast it into a newly dug and unmarked grave, between two rows of maize corn.

The women removed your blood-bespattered clothing, poured water, soap and then oil and incense upon your naked well-muscled skin, washing your naked body and genitals unashamedly, then clothing you in a gold embroidered tunic and adjusting the quetzal feathers on your golden crown. Then the Goddess spoke:

“I am Xochiquetzal, Goddess of Love and Fertility. You are now my earthly king! You shall reign with absolute power until the next King comes to slay you, as you have just slain the King before you! Until that time you shall rule with the power of an emperor, vital and unageing. All the women of this land shall be your harem and your semen’s seed shall spread over their bodies like the kernels of maize corn upon the land of the fertile plain! You shall marry me and become as a God! The women of the earth shall worship your body, your phallus and your seed as their God! We shall retire to the Palace and consummate the ceremony! Then the women carried you and the Goddess, seated side by side, hand in hand in a sedan-chair litter on poles, in royal estate towards the palace. As they chanted their entoxicating melodies, singing joyfully in choral unison as the procession neared the Palace, you abandoned yourself willingly to the songs of the Sirens.

At the palace thousands of women, all nubile and gorgeous, lined the halls and bowed to you as you entered, the Goddess at your side. They installed you in your apartments next to the Goddess’ and then bathed you in frankincense and myrrh, and anointed your well-muscled body with holy oils, christening your skin. They brought you endless delicacies to eat, dates, exotic nuts, curries, puddings, gels, meat and fowl, fish and vegetables, in the most diverse sauces and spices. Aphrodisiac spices and wines were brought, powdered rhinoceros horn and tiger bone, oysters and shellfish, and hosts of others. Music was played endlessly by a female band, naked to the waist who entertained you, while oriental singers sang lyrics of great seductiveness and delicacy, suffusing the imagination. You felt your potency surge within you violently.

Then the Chief Priestess returned at the head of an endless train of nubile women clad in the most enticing garments. Behind her walked three gruesome hags who carried a litter surrounded with a purpled cloth curtain. They placed the litter, which looked like a small puppet stage beside a white marble pillar thrust up behind the altar. Each hag, a pale semblance of a Medusa, was accompanied by a priestess of a secondary order of extraordinary beauty. The three gruesome hags, who alone could approach the litter, drew back the curtain of the litter and before you appeared an extraordinary face atop a limbless torso, limbless except for one withered leg which extended upwards and across the back of the shoulders and base of the neck, with a diminutive foot, exquisitely wrapped in Chinese foot bindings and a silken shoelet dangling helplessly behind the figure’s left ear. The leg was atrophied and devoid of muscle, and at its base their was but a small pubic mound from which the genitals had been excised. The torso was sewn tightly into a silken sack like a papoose on the chest of which was a mystic arabesque. Atop the torso was a face of seeming feminine beauty dressed entirely in a consummate feathered headdress of immaculately white down feathers which drew tightly about the outline of the face, concealing any presence of hair like a nun’s white wimple. The skin was of perfect smoothness and delicately rouged and the lips protruded thickly in a perfect guled cupid’s bow glossed and pointed at its tips and ridges. The eyes seemed splayed like two extended wings of a delicate small bird of an immaculate white that resembled a masquerade ball mask, but with the feathers seeming to grow from the eyes themselves. The eyelids were closed, but also shingled with tiny soft white feathers, which took the place of eyelashes, with a line of diamonds and tiny coloured jewels limning the very edge of the upper lid as if penciled by a royal cosmetician. The three hags lifted the papoosed torso up a small ladder and placed it in cradling nest atop the erect pillar.

At a signal from the Chief Priestess drums took up a relentless jungle beat and the train of maenad women raised their voices in a collective wailing song which must have been of the repertoire of the Sirens, jazzing to a mounting frenzy. The women of the train tore the clothes from their bodies and danced a frenzied writhing hypnotic dance, hormonally-crazed about the marble pillar, some by turns pressing and sliding their splayed vulvas up and down its erect length like the pole dancers of an erotic theatre. With the rising wails of the maenads the face began to turn upon its neck in slow tortured ritual circles and the grimacing mouth began to moan and attempt speech in an unknown glossalalia. At a climaxing drumstroke the perfectly fletched and splayed feathered eyelids of the face burst open with an awakening start, revealing within their downed frame the empty blood-red caverns of the gaping eye sockets from which the balls had been gouged and torn. The face shrieked in a tone that was clearly of a residual male timbre, and the mouth gaped open, from which issued not a human tongue but two, the tongue having been sliced precisely in two from its tip to its base, revealing two forked tips, one of red and the other of green, snakelike, from which no human speech issued, but a serpentine babbling or talking in tongues or helpless shrieks and plaintive moans. All about the crazed maenad chorus rose and quickened to the drumbeats in a frenzying ecstasy and violent crescendo of chant: “Imbunche, Imbunche, Imbunche…………………...Imbunche!”

Finally, the Chief Priestess of the Goddess in a purple robe entered your chamber and announced it was time to conduct and consummate the marriage ceremony. The priestess performed the ritual, chanting the verses, and a maenad chorus replied hypnotically in sensual song and dance; then she led the Goddess to her nuptial bed, preparing her concealed behind the gauze curtain veil of the crimson-purple wedding chamber. Then the Priestess indicated only one thing remained of the ritual before the consummation and the night of pleasure and sublime ecstasy: The Sacrifice.

She indicated that to consummate the ceremony the living, beating heart of a woman must be excised from her body, then placed upon a silver tray, and placed over the marital bed while still alive and beating. She led you to the sacrificial altar, where was bound the body of a selected victim, a handsome woman, writhing, naked to the waist, with her face covered with a veil. The Priestess placed the sacred curved obsidian knife in your hands, then pulled back the outer curtain of the sacrificial altar. You hesitated, unsure of yourself, then raised your hand. You could see the fear in the eyes of the sacrifice, somehow vaguely familiar. You watched as she struggled against the leather bands that held her hands tight, and she squealed against the gag in her mouth, emitting a high hysterical and plaintiff whine. As you stepped forward the Priestess uncovered the sacrifice’s veil and removed it from her face. It was Eva!—your sister and your own heart! To your horror you saw the Priestess cut open her chest and pry back her ribs. You reached between the ribs and held Eva’s beating heart in the palm of your hand. You froze, inexplicable to yourself, unable to move or act.

“Strike!” The Priestess shrieked at you “Strike and sever the beating heart!--Strike or you shall be stricken dead!”
You raised the obsidian knife above your head--the full arm’s length above your head….you struck downward with all your remaining might------striking dead-----the Priestess and not Eva! You rushed to Eva, cutting her bonds and gag with your obsidian knife, then kissing her frenzied face and lips, bent on your knees, so uncontrollably desperate and frantic in your holiness towards her. Then you then picked her up in your arms and rushing towards the Exit of the theatre of the Psychoplex you pushed open the gilded door, re-entering the hallway. But when you had regained the hallway all had disappeared as into a lost dream, and Eva was no longer in your arms. Neither was the Teatro Magico behind the door, but you found yourself naked in your own hotel room at the Marco Polo Hotel, pushing open your bathroom door and re-entering your sitting room, darkened except for the moonlight shining through the translucent curtains. You collapsed onto the sitting room sofa, then poured yourself a large water tumbler full of Mescal from a large bottle on the coffee table before you. You gulped it down incredulously, first one, then two then the final gulp, drawing down and draining the Mescal’s ether to the bottom. You wiped your eyes and heard the buzzing about your ears and the shock of the Mescal hitting your spine and your bloodstream. Then you looked towards the bedroom, and you saw Maria rise from the bed, naked except for her lace panties, drawing you backwards towards the bed. You saw the exquisite tropical butterfly, floridly tattooed, large and iridescent across the small of her back, moving above her sculpted buttocks as she walked you towards the bed---and beneath it, delicately stenciled, the word: “Mariposa.” You became the butterfly as she moved, and fluttered drunkenly around her enticing body, like a moth before a flame in the night.

“Roberto!” she intoned pleadingly, “Come back to bed!-----we are getting cold waiting for you!” As she kissed you and caressed you inside your thigh, fondling your genitals, the stiffening shaft and heavy balls, which lifted, hardened and surged before you at her caressing touch; you glanced to the other side of the double King-sized bed and saw Teresa in a seductive negligee, fully feminine and inviting, yet with Tiresias somehow, submerged somewhere there within, half-hidden under the sheet, beaming back at you warmly and joining Maria in caressing your hardening penis, then lowering to suck your aching left ball and mouth then the tip and end of your cock playfully as Maria slid her tongue, French kissing, inside your mouth. Then the Mescal flooded your senses and you were unsure where you were, who, what you were doing or whom with, or doing to. You lost yourself in the rush of yourself, like the rushing wings of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis into the unknown realm of flight towards the blinding sun upwards, and then dark, down into sleep and into a long unremembering…………..
Sartorius awoke at noon in an empty room, nursing a wild hangover. He could not tell if it all had been dream or real. It was as if he could not tell if he were a man dreaming he were a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. He leaned over from the bed and poured himself a last glass of Mescal, draining the bottle and sucking down its strong ether. He lay long incoherent in the bed, and closed his eyes, drowsing several times, then regaining a fuller consciousness; then he considered what he had to do-----his plane for London would leave at 6:00 pm. As he raised himself to shower, he glanced back at the bed. Fallen between the pillows was a handscrawled note: “Roberto!----Vaya con Dios!” It was unsigned.

Sartorius pulled the cord drawing back the curtains and looked outside his room: it was pouring rain from a thick dark deck of rainclouds above, thunder rumbling above his head like the threatening voices of the gods. An occasional flash of lightning would illuminate the gloom below. Slowly he gathered himself together, nursing his hangover with small sips of Mescal, then calling room service to have a lunch brought up to his room, then finally getting himself into the hot shower, that “three-minute miracle of self-transformation,” with which he was wont to undertake the daily ritual re-emergence. After the shower he took his meal in his robe, then smoked a cigarette, blowing the smoke upwards towards the ceiling. He dressed and gathered his things together, packing his bags, and then called down to the desk for a taxi to Benito Juarez Airport. The traffic was slow and heavy under the pouring rain, and Sartorius rested his forehead against the cool glass of the car window in a melancholy stare, dragging on a cigarette along the way.

The flight was delayed because of the rainstorm and he took a string of Tequilas in the airport bar, waiting and waiting. Sartorius sat long at the airport bar looking at the rows on rows of bottles arrayed on display before him and looking at himself in the array of mirrors behind the bar long and long. He stared at the bottles----bottles on bottles----half-empty, then fully empty bottles receding with himself into the endless mise-en-abime of refracted emptiness. He dropped his eyes at last. Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anis, of jereez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel-tower of glasses---a towering, a babel of glasses rising high above the clouds into the sky, and then the bottles, the vast and empty volcanic mountain of empty bottles, piled high like the towering, heavenward gaping mouth of an extinct volcano-----the cumulation of all the bottles of his empty life----the glasses and the bottles empty, the sum total of all that he had drunk and thought in his life-----he saw them all piled tower-like, babel-like high into the airy sky----and he saw them come crashing, come crashing downward like a grand Niagara of broken glass, plunging downwards with an unbearable din, the broken bottles and glasses of a lifetime, plunging downwards and fracturing and splintering themselves, bursting into smithereens, bursting into tangled shards, a sea of tangled shards stretching out before his feet. He saw them all, and smelt them all, from the very beginning----bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, of Johnny Walker, Vieux whisky, blanc Canadien, the aperitifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of Tequila, and the gourds, the gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful Mescal…….

Sartorius sat very still. How could he hope to find himself to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of those lost or broken bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, forever, the lost shard-----the solitary clue to his identity? How could he go back now and look, and scrabble and clutch, bloody-fingered around in the broken glass, under the eternal bars and under the glazed-glass oceans?

Then he fumbled in his pocket and re-found the letter. Eva’s letter. He read and re-read it, long and long. Eva’s face floated before him, seeming to appear above the looming abyss and constellate itself towards him like a beckoning beam of a lighthouse in a storm to a sailor in peril, tossed on a deadly sea; her face appeared to him------Beatrix-like to his Dante, Sita-like to his Rama, a Guan Yin and Madzu appearing before his eyes; Layla-like to his Majnoun, Gretschen-and-Helen-like to his Faust, his ewige Weibliche---his Eve to his Adam-----his Virgen de la Soledad, all seemed beckoning above the waves to the shipwrecked sailor, clasping at his spar, clasping at his lost shard. A line out of Rilke floated up and into his consciousness, like a last piece of flotsam or jetsam bubbling up from a sinking ship: “For here there is no place that does not see you: You must change your life. “

Then the delayed plane finally boarded, taxied, and took off. Sartorius held his hot brow against the cooling glass of the porthole window as the plane mounted, swung and spiraled heavenward through the beating rain and gloom. Then suddenly, with a flash of golden light, the airplane burst through the cloud cover below and emerged into the bright sunlight above the cloud-deck, as Sartorius watched the flashes of lightning buried and smothering in the translucent dark clouds below. The plane circled, first heading Southwest then coming round on a course heading towards the Northeast, in the direction of London. As it did so it passed between the twin volcanic peaks of Popocatepetl, the Passionate Warrior, and Ixtaccihuatl, the Sleeping Woman, their heads pushing bravely into the sun above, encircled by the whirlpooling deck of blackened and thundering cumulus girdled below their waists.

As he looked down, strapped and buckled firmly into his airseat amidst the galley rows of open portholes, taking in Popocatepetl to his left and Ixtaccihuatl to his right, he felt a sense of release, of tension suddenly letting go from a danger passed, an evanescing of nemesis into the blue, clear sundrenched sky above; and he felt as he felt Odysseus must have felt, clearing the twin perils of the black swirling whirlpool of Charybdis and the many-headed devouring monster of Scylla behind him, or lashed to his mast, as he heard faintly disappearing, the sweet but deadly voices of the Sirens, those around him with wax-plugged ears pulling, eyes-averted in their airseats on the oars of their daily lives. He thought of Eva and felt her presence near him, near to his heart, and reached out his arms inwardly to embrace her there, and he said yes, yes he said, yes he said to himself, yes he said as he asked himself if he would, and his heart was going like mad as he drew his face near down to her face in his mind, and he could feel her breasts against him all perfume, and he said yes, and his heart was going mad and he said yes to himself, yes I will, Yes.

Note: This is Chapter 27 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only


Introducing Spiritus Mundi, a Novel by Robert Sheppard: Highlights
Posted on February 12, 2011 by robertalexandersheppard

Introducing Spiritus Mundi, a Novel by Robert Sheppard
Author’s E-mail: rsheppard99_2000@yahoo.com

Related Links and Websites: Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard

For Introduction and Overview of the Novel: https://spiritusmundinovel.wordpress.com/
For Updates on the Upcoming Movie Version of the Novel, Spiritus Mundi & Casting of Actors and Actresses for Leading Roles See: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com/
For Author’s Blog: https://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com//
To Read Abut the Occupy Wall Street Movement in Spiritus Mundi: http://occupywallstreetnovel.wordpress.com/
To Read a Sample Chapter from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundisamplechapters.wordpress.com/
To Read Fantasy, Myth and Magical Realism Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundifantasymythandmagicalrealism.wordpress.com/
To Read Sexual Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: The Varieties of Sexul Experience: https://spiritusmundivarietiesofsexualexperience.wordpress.com/
To Read Spy, Espionage and Counter-terrorism Thriller Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: http://spiritusmundispyespionagecounterterrorism.wordpress.com/
To Read Geopolitical and World War Three Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundigeopoliticalworldwar3.wordpress.com/
To Read Spiritual and Religious Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundionspiritualityandreligion.wordpress.com/
To Read about the Global Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly in Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundiunitednationsparliamentaryassembly.wordpress.com/
To Read Poetry from Spiritus Mundi：https://spiritusmundipoetry.wordpress.com/
For Discussions on World Literature and Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycriticism.wordpress.com/
For Discussions of World History and World Civilization in Spiritus Mundi: https://worldhistoryandcivilizationspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Eva Strong from Spiritus Mundi: https://evasblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Andreas Sarkozy from Spiritus Mundi: http://andreasblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Yoriko Oe from Spiritus Mundi: http://yorikosblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Robert Sartorius from Spiritus Mundi: http://sartoriusblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/


I write to introduce to your attention my double novel Spiritus Mundi, consisting of Spiritus Mundi, the Novel—Book I, and Spiritus Mundi, the Romance—Book II. Book I’s espionage-terror-political-religious thriller-action criss-crosses the globe from Beijing to London to Washington, Mexico City and Jerusalem presenting a vast panorama of the contemporary international world, including compelling action, deep and realistic characters and surreal adventures, while Book II dialates the setting and scope into a fantasy (though still rooted in the real) adventure where the protagonists embark on a quest to the realms of Middle Earth and its Crystal Bead Game and through a wormhole to the Council of the Immortals in the Amphitheater in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy in search of the crucial Silmaril Crystal, and to plead for the continuance of the human race in the face of threatened extinction from a nuclear World War III, all followed by a triple-somersault thriller ending in which a common garden-variety terrorist attack is first uncovered by MI6 and the CIA as the opening gambit a Greatpower Game of States threatening World War III and then, incredibly, as the nexus of a Time Travel conspiracy involving an attempt by fascist forces of the 23rd Century to alter a benign World History by a time-travelling raid on their past and our present to provoke that World War III, foiled by the heroic efforts of the democratic 23rd Century world government, the Senate of the United States of Earth, to hunt down the fascist interlopers before their history is irrevocably altered for evil.

When activist Robert Sartorius, leading a global campaign to create a European Parliament-style world-wide United Nations Parliamentary Assembly presses the proposal in New York on his old friend the UN Secretary-General and is rebuffed due to the hostile pressure of the conservative American administration, his Committee resolves to fight back by launching a celebrity-driven Bono-Geldof-Band Aid/Live 8-style “People Power” media campaign and telethon spearheaded by rock superstars Isis and Osiris and former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to mobilize global public support and pressure in alliance with the Occupy Wall Street Movements worldwide. The Blogs of Sartorius, activist Eva Strong and Committee Chairman Andreas Sarkozy reveal the campaign’s working struggle, their tangled love affairs, a loss of faith, attempted suicide, reconciliation of father and son after divorce, and recovery of personal love and faith.

Things fall apart as the idealists’ global crusade is infiltrated by a cell of jihadist terrorists using it as a cover, then counter-infiltrated by CIA agent Jack McKinsey and British MI6 agent Etienne Dearlove. A cat-and-mouse game of espionage and intrigue ensues pitting them against the Chinese MSS espionage network allied with the Iranian Quds Force crossing Beijing, London, Moscow, Washington and Jerusalem unleashing an uncontrollable series of events which sees the American Olympic Track and Field Team bombed on an airplane in London, uncovers a secret conspiracy of China, Russia and Iran to jointly seize the oil reserves of the Middle-East, and witnesses Presidents Clinton and Carter taken hostage with Sartorius, McKinsey, Eva and other activists at a Jerusalem telethon rally cut short by the explosion of a concealed atomic device in a loaned Chinese Terracotta Warrior, then flown by capturing terrorists to Qom, Iran as “human shields” to deter a retaliatory nuclear attack.

In Book II, Spiritus Mundi, the Romance they encounter Iran’s Supreme Leader in Qom as the world teeters on the brink of nuclear confrontation and World War III, while mysterious events unfold leading Sartorius and McKinsey from their captivity in the underground nuclear facilities of Qom into a hidden neo-mythic dimension that takes them to a vast ocean and land at the center of the world, Middle Earth, Inner Shambhala, and to involvement in a mysterious Castalian “Crystal Bead Game” linked to the destiny of the human race on earth. They then embark on a quest for the Silmaril, or Missing Seed Crystal to the central island of Omphalos in the Great Central Sea in the middle of the globe, aided by Goethe, the Chinese Monkey King, Captain Nemo, the African God-Hero Ogun, and a Sufi mystic they traverse a ‘wormhole’ at the center of the earth guarded by ‘The Mothers’ and the fallen angel tribe of the Grigori (Genesis 6:1-4) which leads the way to critical meeting of the “Council of the Immortals” at the Black Hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy to determine the final fate of the human species.

The heroes battle and overcome the treacherous opposition of Mephisto and his satanic subaltern Mundus through their Underworld and Otherworld adventures and successfully plead the cause of the continuation of the human species before the Immortals, returning with the critical Silmaril Crystal. resolving the Crystal Bead Game and thereby inspiring through the Archangel Gabriel a dream in the mind of Iran’s Supreme Leader which brings a new Revelation causing him to release the hostages and an end the crisis. China and Russia stand down from aiding Iran in seizing the Mid-East oil reserves, but in a treacherous blow the Chinese instead utilize their forward-positioned armies to attack their former ally Russia and seize Siberia with its large oil and gas reserves instead. President Barret Osama, America’s newly-elected first black President then invites Russia, Japan and South Korea to join NATO and together they succeed in expelling the Chinese from Siberia and usher in a new Eurasian and global balance of power and a New World Order.

Rock Superstar Osiris meanwhile, after undertaking a narcissistic Messianic mission in the wake of the Jerusalem atomic blast is dramatically assassinated on live world-wide television on Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa by a disillusioned follower. His wife and rock-star partner Isis then leads a spiritual movement to reconcile and unite the clashing religions and catalyze a common global spiritual Renaissance through a Global Progressive Spiritual Alliance which seeks to construct an Inter-faith Temple on the ruins of the atomic blast in Jerusalem. In counter-reaction to the cataclysmic events the world finally implements Sartorius’ crusade for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, but not before Sartorius has himself has died, Moses-like of a heart attack while helping to foil a metaconspiracy mediated by Time Travel in which a fascist agent from the 23rd Century who has time-transited back to our time to alter a benign history by causing WWIII and thus preventing the evolution of a democratic world government, the United States of Earth, which follows him through time and nabs him just in the “nick of time” to prevent Aramgeddon.

The book ends with the opening ceremony of the UN Parliamentary Assembly which is attended in Sartorius’ name by his widow Eva Strong, whom Sartorius had fallen in love with and married in the course of the novel, and by their son Euphy, newborn after Sartorius’ death. They are joined in cinematic climax at the ceremony by newly chosen UN Secretary-General Clinton, President Osama and UN Parliamentary Assembly Committee Chairman Andreas Sarkozy who have just received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in creation of the world’s first world parliamentary assembly within the United Nations, bringing together the representative voices of the peoples of the world in face-to-face assembly and dialogue for the first time in world history.

Highlights:

All the Highlights of the novel cannot be contained in such a short Introduction, but a few of them would include:

1. Spiritus Mundi is the first novel in world history to portray the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assemblyon the working model, inter alia, of the European Parliament and the first novel to portray the Occupy Wall Street Movement and related movements worldwide;

2. Spiritus Mundi is a prophetic geo-political WWIII novel of the near future forseeing a conflict and conspiratorial surprise attack by a resurgent “Axis” of China, Russia and Iran seeking by a decisive blow in jointly seizing the Middle-East oil fields to radically alter the global balance of power vis-a-vis the West in the world and Eurasia. Like Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon, it forsees the inclusion of Russia in NATO, and goes far beyond in forseeing the inclusion of South Korea and Japan, following a joint Chinese-Russian occupation of a collapsing North Korea and the Axis strike at the Middle-Eastern oil fields;

3. Spiritus Mundi is an exciting espionage thriller involving the American CIA. British MI6, the Chinese MSS, or Ministry of State Security and the Russian SVR contending in a deul of intrigue and espionage;

4. Spiritus Mundi is a Spellbinding Terrorism/Counterterrorism novel involving a global plot to conceal an atomic bomb in a Chinese Teracotta Warrior to be detonated in Jerusalem;

5. Features the romantic and sexual searching and encounters of dozens of idealist activists, rock-stars, CIA and MI6 agents, public-relations spinmeisters and billionaires with a detour into the bi-sexual and gay scenes of Beijing, New York, California, London and Tokyo:

6. Establishes and grounds the new genre of the Global Novel written in Global English, the international language of the world,

7. Spiritus Mundi is a novel of Spiritual Searching featuring the religious searching of Sufi mystic Mohammad ala Rushdie, as well as the loss of faith, depression, attempted suicide and recovery of faith in life of protagonist Sartorius. Follows bogus religious cult leaders and the Messiah-Complex megalomanic-narcissistic mission of rock superstar Osiris that leads to his dramatic assassination on worldwide television in Jerusalem, followed by the religious conversion of his wife and rock-star parner Isis;

8. Features the search for love and sexual fulfillment of Eva Strong, a deeply and realistically portrayed divorced single mother involved in the United Nations campaign, who reveals her tortured heart and soul in her Blog throughout several disastrous sexual affairs and ultimately through her final attainment of love and marriage to Sartorius;

9. Features Sartorius’ experience of a bitter divorce, alienation and reconciliation with his son, his loss of faith and attempted suicide, his battle against drugs and alcoholism, his surreal and sexual adventures in Mexico City, and his subsequent redeeming love and marriage to Eva Strong;

10. Contains the in–depth literary conversations of Sartorius and his best friend, Literature Nobel Laureate Günther Gross, as they conduct worldwide interviews and research for at book they are jointly writing on the emergence of the new institution of World Literature, building on Goethe’s original concept of “Weltliteratur” and its foundations and contributions from all the world’s traditions and cultures;

11. Predicts the emergence of the institution and quest of “The Great Global Novel” as a successor to the prior quest after “The Great American Novel” in the newer age of the globalization of literature in Global English and generally;
12. Features the cross-cultural experiences and search for roots, sexual and spiritual fulfillment and authenticity of Asian-American character Jennie Zheng, and Pari Kasiwar of India;

13. For the first time incorporates in the dramatic narrative flow of action the mythic traditions of all the cultures and literatures of the world, including such figures as Goethe, The Chinese Monkey King, the African God-Hero Ogun, surreal adventures in the ‘Theatro Magico’ in Mexico City bringing to life figures from the Mayan-Aztec Popul Vuh, Hanuman from the Indian classic the Ramayana, and many more;

14. Book Two, Spiritus Mundi, the Romance is a fantastic Fantasy, Myth and Magical Realism Rollercoaster Ride: The more mythic Book Two utilizes a Wellsian motif of Time Travel to explore the making of history and its attempted unmaking (a la Terminator) by a hositile raid from the future on the past, our present, and the foiling of the fascist attempt by an alliance of men and women of goodwill and courage from past, present and future generations united in a Commonwealth of Human Destiny; Like Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Welles’ Journey to the Center of the Earth it involves a journey to an interior realm of the “Middle Earth;” it also contains a futuristic travel through a wormhole to the center of our Milky Way Galaxy for a meeting with the “Council of the Immortals” where the fate of the human race will be decided;

15. Is a fantastic read on a roller-coaster ride of high adventure and self-exploration!

C Copyright 2011 Robert Sheppard All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard: Table of Contents

Spiritus Mundi
Contents

Book One Spiritus Mundi: The Novel Chapters 1-33

1. Departure (Beijing)
2. A Failing Quest (New York)
3. War Council & Counteroffensive (Geneva)
4. New Beginnings (London)
5. Republic of Letters (Berlin)
6. Fathers and Sons (Washington,D.C.)
7. Ulysses: Blogo Ergo Sum (Beijing)
8. Frequently Asked Questions (London)
9. In the Middle Kingdom (Beijing)
10. Past and Present (London-South Africa)
11. Telemachus (Washington, D.C.)
12. The Everlasting Nay (Beijing)
13. My Brother’s Keeper (London)
14. In the Global Village (Beijing-Tokyo)
15. Deceits and Revelations (London)
16. Be Ready for Anything (Beijing)
17. The Obscure Object of Desire (London-Pyongyang)
18. Sufferings (Beijing)
19. Of the Yearnings of the Caged Spirit (London)
20. Cyclops (Washington, D.C.)
21. The Engines of Illusion (Beijing)
22. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (London)
23. The Temptation of the Sirens (Beijing)
24. Truth or Consequences (London)
25. Lazarus Laughed (Beijing)
26. Neptune’s Fury & The Perils of the Sea (The Maldive Islands)
Naval Diaries and Ship’s Logs of Admiral Sir George Rose Sartorius (1780-1875)
27. Penelope (London)
28. The Volcano’s Underworld (Mexico City)
Teatro Magico
29. The Everlasting Yea (London)
30. Paradise Regained (Little Gidding)
31. To the South of Eden (Kenya-to Midrand-Johannesburg South Africa)
32. In a Glass Darkly (London)
33. Spiritus Mundi


Book Two Spiritus Mundi: The Romance Chapters 1-21


1. Gerusalemme Liberata & Orlando Furioso (Jerusalem)
2. In a Glass Darkly (London)
3. Great Expectations (Jerusalem)
4. The Parable of the Cave (Qom, Iran)
5. The Xth Day of the Crisis (London)
6. The Supreme Leader & The Three Messiahs (Qom)
7. Going for the Jugular (London)
8. The Night Journey, Goethe & The Monkey King (Qom)
9. The Central Sea, The Crystal Bead Game & The Quest
10. The Island of Omphalos & The Mothers
11. The Council of the Immortals & The Trial By Ordeal
12. Nemesis
13. Armageddon (London)
14. The Fever Breaks
15. High Noon & Showdown at the OK Corral (Washington, D.C.)
16. Ecce Homo (Jerusalem)
17. Deliverance (London/Lhasa)
18. For Every Action…. (Moscow/Beijing)
19. The Burial of the Dead (London/Little Gidding)
20. Spiritus Mundi (London/Jerusalem)
21. In My End is My Beginning
—-The Convening of the First Meeting of the
United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (New York)

Appendix 1: A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly: Frequently Asked Questions
Appendix 2: Spiritus Mundi: Index of Principal Characters

C Copyright Robert Sheppard 2011 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only





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