Are boxers who bash each-others’ brains out -- for money -- out of their minds? Would their fights-to-the-finish seem less brutish if they didn’t appear to enjoy themselves so much? Aren’t the fans who salivate at the prospect of blood, of a bone-crushing knockout, equally deranged?
Are the uninvited evangelists who compel “primitive” peoples to cover their breasts and genitals “for the love of God,” who force-feed guileless children alien concepts and rob cultures of their identity, sane or dangerous psychopaths further unhinged by religious zeal?
Listen to the maniacal soul-robbers who harangue their congregations. Look at the transfixed masses of ‘born-again’ who sway and swing and rock, their arms outstretched toward heaven as they pray for the cleansing firestorms of apocalypse. Are they out of their minds or the unwitting victims of mass-hysteria?
What about the “prophets”? Were they merely confused talking heads or cunning terrorists; clueless prognosticators or schemers blinded by their own fury; soothsayers and mystic diviners who spoke in riddles and esoteric babble or crafty politicians bent on sowing fear in the hearts of the masses? Were their intentions noble or did they suffer from acute megalomania, monomania, egomania and thanatomania -- a consuming preoccupation with death? Wouldn’t they all have been diagnosed as certifiably insane -- or called charlatans -- had modern psychiatry not spinelessly declined to see them as superstitious crackpots pickled in gooey mysticism and predisposed to treat all inexplicable natural phenomena as the manifestation of some unknowable, invisible spirit?
Aren’t the dream merchants, the demagogue-pedagogues and the healers, the petty bureaucrats, the would-be public servants and the corporate kingpins who deconstruct reality and peddle cheap imitations of Utopia -- insufferable psychopaths?
If men were put away for their natural tendencies (or for the habits and fixations they pick up along the way) prisons and mental hospitals would be bursting at the seams. Madness is somehow less reprehensible when it festers in high places; when ruthless entrepreneurs are eulogized for their “initiative” and their cunning; when my-country-right-or-wrong “patriots” brush aside lies, rationalize injustice, defend sleaze and political chicanery; when fanatical evangelism is hyped as “God’s work;” when fraudulent and unwinnable wars that only enrich bankers and cannon merchants are waged far from home in the name of “national security;” and when freedom of thought is condemned as heresy and all moral codes are rescinded to protect the interests of the moneyed elite.
Pray tell, who are the mad, and who are the meek who inherit the wind? A slight detour to the brink might help tell them apart. There’s more to madness than meets the eye. Let me count the ways.
Part One
The Tales
IN Dranomos
A desert is a place without expectations.
Nadine Gordimer
It began with the birds. Dead birds. Dead grackle chicks. Had they tumbled out of their nest? Were they ousted by greedy siblings, dislodged by marauding ravens and beaked to death? Was it Shadow, the itinerant tomcat, the elusive feral feline that kept tongues wagging well after backyard gossip had turned to very small talk? The grackles’ eye sockets had been picked clean, their belly feathers plucked as if in haste, their slender legs broken at the knees. They lay there on the concrete patio, four of them, disfigured, stilled, frozen in time.
Then there was the dead lizard at the bottom of the pool, a ten-inch striped little beauty with long, willowy digits and an endearing expression. I’d used a fine-mesh net at the end of a long pole to bring it to the surface, and I’d examined it for signs of life. There were none. The graceful reptile’s eyes were shut. Saddened, I’d cupped it in my hand for a while. Sadness turned to unease. I buried it in the shade of a honeysuckle bush.
No, it wasn’t superstition, legend or a penchant for mysticism that triggered the disquiet, the premonitions. Many years earlier I’d come upon a dying seagull, a stately old bird that flapped its wings listlessly, its lifeless eyes turned skyward as it gasped for one last breath of sea air. The sight of the expiring ace flier had filled me with sorrow; it also produced a numbing fear I’d never known. I remember getting chills, feeling the hair on the back of my neck bristle as if caressed by a sudden, icy gust.
Six months later, my mother died of pancreatic cancer. It’d taken months of pain -- constant, searching, tenacious. She’d turned yellow, gone bald, shed half her weight and slowly lost her mind. I’d witnessed this irreversible transformation with disbelief, helplessness, anger. Our evasions and lies had kept her hoping, fighting at first. Then she’d given up. One day, when the others left the room to stretch their legs after an all-night vigil, I’d touched her face and called her name.
“Mama, mama, don’t go.”
She’d winced and her eyelids had parted ever so briefly, revealing cloudy, swollen, lifeless orbs, like those of the moribund seagull. I knew she’d seen me, felt my presence, heard the words I’d whispered. She expired that evening. June was young and the air was filled with spring’s heady bouquet. A seagull flew by. Every vestige of childhood in me died with my mother that day. Only the dreams she’d dreamed for me survived, some as yet unfulfilled, others beyond reach except in the limitless regions of a mother’s love.
I’d cursed her. No one understood the rage that surged within me. I felt betrayed, lost, abandoned. Taken for granted, often unnoticed in life, longed for in death, my mother would have been the first to grasp this paradox. No one else did, not even my father who, familiar with the contradictions of the human soul, had failed to recognize in his son’s calumnies the brittle fragments of a broken heart. Heeding her last wishes, we’d buried her ashes in a family plot where grandma Henrietta and Uncle Johnny would later be laid to rest. It’d rained that day; it would rain every time I came to the cemetery. And I’d grumbled because my shoes had gotten wet and caked with mud. It’s the nature of coincidence to deliver a hint of irony.
All during my mother’s ordeal, and after her death I’d harked back to that fateful winter morning stroll on the beach when the majestic sea bird had expired at my feet. The sight of dead animals, road kill, but especially birds, would forever elicit surges of melancholy and angst. The grief I felt had not a trace of spirituality. What I sensed was visceral, dark, menacing.
Many years later, as I went on assignment to Central America, the sight of dead birds would take on a new aura. Alive, birds symbolize freedom from earthly bounds. Dead, especially when placed on someone’s doorstep, they telegraph a warning, the threat of a looming calamity. Several investigative reports I’d written had earned me ill-omened accolades: a dead pigeon whose unfurled wings had been stapled to a small funeral wreath and propped against my hotel room door at the Casa Grande in Guatemala City; two dead sparrows similarly positioned on the stoop of my rented studio in Copán. I’d somehow managed to keep one step ahead of my would-be assassins but I would never look at dead birds the same way again.
It was not surprising that the sight of the mutilated baby grackles, less than a week after I’d moved to Dranomos, would stir feelings of anxiety. I’d come down from the small cloud-shrouded mountain town of Patchahei to the high desert plateau where the sky is almost always blue and the sun percolates for months on end. Long, bitter snowy days and frigid nights at 4,000 feet had taken their toll and the prospect of gentler winters and warmer summers had beckoned me down from the summit. Little did I know.
Then, one day, I heard it: a whisper, a distant murmur; throaty at first then high-pitched as it subsided, like the sigh of a mortally wounded beast or the wail of a restless spirit. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It ebbed and flowed like the tide, like an intermittent rustling of leaves.