As a kid, I didn’t think anything about this. It was just a way to spend time before you were sleepy. I assumed that anybody could do it. Sometimes in museums, if things got boring, I would amuse myself by trying to guess what was in the next room. But that seemed pretty ordinary, too.
One summer, after college, I had worked at Columbia Medical School. I had a dormitory room for the summer, at Physicians and Surgeons Hospital. The room was bare, nothing in it. I used to lie on the bed at night, go up to the ceiling, and look down on myself lying in bed. By then I was old enough to think this was odd. I had pejoratives to apply to it, like “dissociative state” and “schizophrenia.” So I stopped doing it.
Anyway, the idea of astral travel didn’t seem too alarming, and I tried it with Gary. It is, after all, just another kind of guided meditation in an altered state. I visualized my chakras glowing brightly, spinning like white spirals. Then I visualized myself leaving through my third chakra, moving up to the astral plane—which to me appeared as a misty yellow place.
So far, so good. I began to see why people so often imagined heaven as misty or cloudy. This misty astral plane was agreeable. It was peaceful to be standing here, in all this yellow mist. I felt fine.
“Do you see anybody here?” Gary said.
I looked around. I didn’t see anybody.
“No.”
“Stay there a minute and let’s see if anybody comes.”
Then I saw my grandmother, who had died while I was in medical school. She waved to me, and I waved back. I wasn’t surprised to see her up here. I didn’t feel any particular need to talk to her.
So I just waited around. This astral plane was rather featureless. There weren’t any palm trees or chairs or places to sit down. It was just a place. A misty yellow place.
“Do you see anybody else?” Gary said.
I didn’t. Then:
“Yes. My father.”
I felt worried. I hadn’t had an easy time with my father. Now he was showing up while I was vulnerable, in an altered state of consciousness. I wondered what he would do, what would happen. He approached me. My father looked the same, only translucent and misty, like everything else in this place. I didn’t want to have a long conversation with him. I was quite nervous.
Suddenly he embraced me.
In the instant of that embrace, I saw and felt everything in my relationship with my father, all the feelings he had had and why he had found me difficult, all the feelings I had had and why I had misunderstood him, all the love that was there between us, and all the confusion and misunderstanding that had overpowered it. I saw all the things he had done for me and all the ways he had helped me. I saw every aspect of our relationship at once, the way you can take in at a glance something small you hold in your hand. It was an instant of compassionate acceptance and love.
I burst into tears.
“What is happening now?”
“He’s hugging me.”
“What are you feeling?”
“It’s … all over,” I said.
What I meant was that this incredibly powerful experience had already happened, complete and total, in a fraction of a second. By the time Gary had asked me, by the time I burst into tears, it was finished. My father had gone. We never said a word. There was no need to say anything. The thing was completed.
“I’m done,” I said, and opened my eyes. I had bounced right out of the trance state.
I couldn’t really explain it to Gary—I couldn’t really explain it to anybody—but part of my astonishment at the experience was at the speed with which it had occurred. Like most people who have had therapy, I had an expectation about the pace of psychological insights. You struggle. Things happen slowly. Years may go by without much change. You wonder if it is making any difference. You wonder if you should quit or hang in. You work and you struggle and you make your hard-won gains.
But what of this experience? In less time than I took to open my mouth to speak, something extraordinary and profound had happened to me. And I knew it would last. My relationship with my father had been resolved in a flash. There hadn’t even been time to cry, and now that it was over, crying seemed after-the-fact. I had no desire to cry. The experience was already finished.
This made me wonder if my ideas about the normal speed of psychological change might be incorrect. Perhaps we could accomplish massive change in seconds, if we only knew how. Perhaps change took so long only because we did it the wrong way. Or perhaps because we expected it to take so long.
New Guinea
I am in a house made of thatched grass in Tari, a remote province in the highlands of New Guinea. Sitting around the open fire are a half-dozen muscular men, naked except for grass skirts and hornbills on their necks and sticks piercing their noses and colorful paint on their faces. Outside, I hear the leathery flapping of fruit bats moving through the night. I am staying here for the next four days and my friend Anne-Marie is asking about Rose, the woman whose house this is.
In the light of the fire, Rose picks at the bloody stump of her index finger while we eat dinner. Anne-Marie inquires whether Rose has injured herself.
“Naw,” says our Australian guide, Nemo. “She cut it off.”
Anne-Marie is horrified. “She cut her finger off?”
“Yeah, she got angry.”
“What about?”
“Hebrew’s new wife. See, Rose is Hebrew’s second wife, and when he told her he was going to take a third wife, she got mad and cut off her finger. As a protest.”
Hebrew, the husband, sits there by the fire. Anne-Marie asks what he felt about this.
“Me no liking this,” Hebrew says in pidgin. He switches to English for us. “Rose better stop this foolishness or I divorce her,” he says, and pounds his thigh for emphasis.
“Want to see the finger?” Nemo asks. “She kept it; you can see it if you want to.”
“Maybe after dinner,” Anne-Marie says.
Rose sulks and cleans the stump of her finger.
“I told her not to pick at it,” Nemo says, “but I guess she knows what she’s doing.”
As I watch this, all I can think of is the carpeting in the elevators of the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore.
We slept in the Shangri-La Hotel the night before. It is a very nice high-rise hotel, but because so many travelers to Singapore have crossed the international date line, they tell you the day in the carpeting. You get on the elevator and the carpeting says “TODAY IS SATURDAY—HAVE A NICE DAY.” Or whatever day it is. They change the carpeting each day.
Now, one day later, we are in a thatched hut in the middle of New Guinea, surrounded by painted men. A young girl of three or four stares at me solemnly. She is Rose and Hebrew’s daughter.
“How old is your daughter, Hebrew?”
“Eight,” Hebrew says.
This is clearly wrong. “He doesn’t know how old she is, mite,” Nemo explains. “None of these blokes knows how old they are. Doesn’t matter here.”
For some reason this startles me more than the grass skirts and painted faces. They don’t know how old they are? At the Shangri-La Hotel, one whole wall of the lobby displays digital clocks giving local time around the world. The Shangri-La Hotel has twenty-four-hour telex and secretarial services. Here the people don’t know the time. They don’t know their age. Their age doesn’t matter to them. I have trouble conceiving a world where your age doesn’t matter.
This world is not what I expected in any case. I had arranged to spend some days in a hut in a native village. I imagined a semicircle of huts in the jungle, one of which would be used by me. The visitors’ hut. I expected to be smack in the middle of village life. But this hut stands alone. When I go outside, I cannot see any other huts, only surrounding fields owned by Rose where kai-kai, vegetables, are grown. There is apparently no village at all, but Nemo explains that the “village” of the Tari people refers to the neighborhood, to all the other, similarly isolated houses in an area covering several sq
uare miles.
In fact, each Tari house and field is hidden behind massive sculpted dirt bulwarks fifteen feet high. As you drive down a road, you see only these bulwarks on all sides. With overhanging vegetation, the road is a kind of tunnel.
The ramparts are built for defense, to prevent surprise attacks. For the tribespeople of New Guinea are continually at war, and always alert to the possibility of attack. Like the Sicilians, they live in an atmosphere of perpetual vendetta.
Before we arrived, we had some vague concern for our safety. Nemo assures us there is no problem. Killings are carried out according to tribe and clan; as outsiders, we belong to no tribe or clan, and therefore are exempt from hostilities unless we happen to get in the way. Meanwhile, I have difficulty matching the cheerful personalities of the Tari men with their readiness to kill.
Anne-Marie and I retire to the next room, crawl into sleeping bags. In the light of a kerosene lantern, I look at the beautiful pattern of thatching on the walls. Mice squeak and scamper within the walls. We hear the bats flap outside, and flying foxes. In the adjacent rooms, there are arguments, crying infants. Fleas hop around in the sleeping bag, bite, fly up my nose.
Finally I manage to go to sleep. My last thought is: What am I doing here?
After Greenland, New Guinea is the largest island in the world. Its land mass is roughly equivalent to Sweden. Three million people live here. It is a mountainous country, which means there is great diversity of habits and language. People separated by intervening mountain ranges develop their own customs and language; seven thousand languages and dialects are spoken here, although pidgin is the lingua franca.
In fact, New Guinea consists of three entirely separate environments. There is a coastal environment, which is very like nearby Pacific islands, such as New Caledonia and New Britain. Then, in the north, there is a flat, hot jungle region, where life is organized around rivers, principally the Sepik and its tributaries. But the majority of the population lives in the mountainous interior of the New Guinea Highlands, and these people were not even known to exist until the 1930s. Although much has happened in the subsequent half-century, parts of the country remain remote. Here tribal life continues more or less as it always has.
I wanted to be among tribal people, to experience what life was like for man for thousands of years before what we call civilization, and so I have come halfway around the world and now find myself in a thatched hut in a mountain province, trying to go to sleep with fleas hopping up my nose.
* * *
I am here in New Guinea wrapped in layers of romance.
The romance of the anthropologist: I will talk to these colorful natives and learn their ways. Many of them speak English, which is a convenience for the visiting anthropologist on a tight schedule. But I quickly discover that everybody tells me a different story. This is particularly noticeable when it concerns that subject dearest to my heart, me. For example, if there is a fight in some other place, such as the city of Mount Hagen, and one of Hebrew’s relatives kills someone from another tribe, then the dead man’s kin may come looking for Hebrew to pay him back. Under those circumstances, am I, the innocent visitor, in danger? Most people say no. Some people shrug. Some people say yes: if the war party can’t find Hebrew they will kill his wife or his children, and if they can’t find the wife or children they may decide to kill me.
Naturally I am interested to learn which of these answers is correct. But I never do. I don’t even find out how Hebrew will learn of a fight in Mount Hagen, which is more than a hundred miles away, over a range of rugged mountains. How does he find out?
Hebrew laughs: “Don’t worry. I will hear of it.”
It turns out that clans intermarry so that each village will have its spies, to report back to their families about anything that is being planned. Furthermore, children take the clans of both father and mother, so a Tari person may end up belonging to seven or eight clans. Everyone thus has multiple allegiances, and it is extremely confusing.
Then there is the romance of the visiting sophisticate, Bwana Michael in his khaki shirts with epaulets. Photographing the colorful tribal rituals with his trusty Nikon. I am particularly interested in their methods of warfare, which are traditional—axes and bows and arrows. The men avoid modern weapons such as guns, because such killings can be traced by the police. But I cannot conceive that bows and arrows are really dangerous, really lethal.
Hebrew and his friends laugh at me. One morning they show me their arrows, which are straight pieces of wood, without feathers, the tips hardened in a fire. The arrow might bring down a bird, but can such arrows really kill a person? Hebrew sets up a bamboo stalk, perhaps four inches in diameter, in the middle of a field. From a distance of fifty yards, he invites me to shoot at this slender target. But I am clumsy; the unfeathered arrows fly off in all directions.
Hebrew draws the bow. His wooden arrow entirely pierces the hard bamboo. I am stunned: that arrow would pass through a human body easily. The other men shoot in turn. They all hit this narrow target fifty yards away.
Then there is the romance of the pastoral primitive. A little time among Rousseau’s noble savages. The uncorrupted natural man, unburdened by the junk of materialist civilization. Unfortunately, Hebrew and his wife fight constantly. Their infant screams. The younger children look unhappy, try to stay out of the way.
One day the betrothed wife number three shows up at the hut, armed with a baseball bat. Her arrival constitutes a provocative act; Rose immediately attacks the new wife with a kitchen knife. Friends and relatives surge in to separate the brawling women; there are shouts and traded insults; Rose’s knife is taken away from her; the third wife is relieved of her baseball bat and urged to leave, but she refuses. The situation is ugly and we visitors are the audience. Nemo proposes we leave for a while, to let things cool down. We climb into the Land Cruiser. As we drive out, Rose flings herself, with her infant, on top of the car. We stop, get out, argue some more.
To a modern sensibility, all this seems to take hours. But the participants are unhurried. There is no need to resolve disputes quickly. There is no need to resolve them at all. There is no reason why we shouldn’t spend all day in front of the Land Cruiser, arguing about things.
Finally the provocative third wife departs, taking her cudgel with her. Rose is calmer. We leave, going out into the countryside.
Ah, the romance of primitive nature. Unfortunately, everything in New Guinea is owned. All the land, all the trees, all the animals. If you touch or take anything, you can be killed for it. The high earthen ramparts transform the landscape into something that looks like the Maginot Line. There are no open vistas, no untouched spaces. You are in a war zone, and although people are friendly, the atmosphere is one of perpetual suspicion.
A hike to a waterfall will set things right. There’s a lovely waterfall we must see. We drive to a farm, then spend half an hour finding the farmer to ask his permission to enter his lands. There is no thought of entering the lands without such permission; if we can’t find the man, we must go home again.
We see a wooden sign that shows a red human hand, with the words ITAMBU NOGAT ROT. I ask what this means, and Hebrew looks at me oddly: can’t I read simple English? (It means “It Taboo No Got Right”—in other words, “Keep Out.”)
Finally the farmer is found, permission is granted, and we set off for the waterfall. Almost immediately we are descending a sheer forested incline. I slip and slide and stumble down this muddy jungle track. Hebrew points out local sights, the pandanus tree and something called “plenty-nut,” which is like coconut, and particularly favored by the cuscus, or possum. Or the “lipstick plant,” a fuzzy red shell containing seeds that produce a red dye for painting the warriors.
I am grateful for all these interruptions, any excuse to catch my breath and my balance. We continue down for about an hour, but, as Hebrew says, “Down is easy. Up is hard.” Eventually I hear the roar of the waterfall. Another fifteen minutes and the fol
iage is soaking wet, the ground sucking mud. We are sinking to our knees in the mud. The trail is still vertical.
At last we emerge at the base of an incredibly powerful waterfall. We cannot see it well for the dense mist it throws up. We slip over giant rocks to stand at its base, unable to speak to one another over the roar. This is not placid nature. This is raw power. It is like standing too close to the speakers at a rock concert. I am uncomfortable and soaking wet. We head back.
It takes an hour to climb back up to the top. The mud drags. My feet are heavy. Frequent stops to remove the leeches. I stagger back to the car and collapse on the seat.
“Quite a vertical country,” Nemo remarks, in what I find extreme understatement. “No wonder these blokes are fit.”
We drive back to attend the sing-sing.
A sing-sing is what most people associate with New Guinea. Warriors paint themselves with elaborate designs, dress in traditional headgear, and dance and sing together. The Tari men have one of the most beautiful decorative motifs: the men paint their faces bright yellow, and wear elaborate headdresses involving everlasting flowers, and feathers from birds of paradise. While they are dressing, a large crowd of local people gathers. An air of expectancy settles over the watchers. Soon the sing-sing will begin.
But the dance itself is oddly disappointing. The men form lines and chant and stomp for about thirty seconds. Then they stop, talk, smoke, laugh. After a minute or two, they sing again for a brief time. Then they stop again. Then they sing again. The whole procedure, with its abrupt starts and stops, has a desultory quality that is startling to Western eyes accustomed to a performance at least as long as a three-minute popular song. But that is the way it is done, and the enthusiasm of the crowd indicates that nothing is wrong. I take pictures. By now I know many of the men, but in their paint and costumes their demeanor is entirely changed, and they pose fiercely.