Crossing the Kalahari

I’ve written about Norman Rush’s book Mating extensively. I will try not to repeat myself, and I’ll just link to this post and call it a day, if you’re interested to catch up. That pretty much covers my now decades-long relationship to this book. Recently, I pulled it out again, and I’m not sure why. But there’s always a reason, with a book like this one. It’s not like any other book, and it has provided context for me in tough times more than once. I have read it cover to cover maybe three full times now – not sure the exact number – and each time, I have clicked into it on a different wavelength. It doesn’t appear to be the same book at all, each time I read it. Isn’t that extraordinary when it happens?

I think the first time I read it, I was so upset by the ending (and I hesitate to say too much, because the book actually ends on a cliffhanger sentence – and up until that point, you have no idea which way it will go – and I wouldn’t dream of ruining it) – but anyway, the first time I read it, the second to last section, called “Strife” – was so upsetting to me I don’t think I even really processed what was happening. All I knew was that this relationship I had come to care so much about was being destroyed. It hurt to read. I wanted to shake Nelson Denoon out of his spell. I was totally on her side. I believe the second time I read the book, I had a similar response to the “Strife” section. I was still feeling that Denoon’s remoteness, his conscious severing of their bond, seemed totally cruel, out of the blue, and man, what a waste. Couldn’t he see what he was throwing away? But the third time I read it, ah, the third time, something else happened to me as I was reading that “Strife” section, and it seemed so new to me, that I couldn’t believe I had actually read it before. Was this section even IN the book the last two times? How could I have MISSED what was REALLY going on? Suddenly, I could see what was happening (and it’s funny – if I read the book again, I’m sure I’ll have yet another response to this section – it’s a crucial section, the key to the whole thing) – I was still upset that this relationship was crumbling, and in such an awful way – but … I felt something larger, something more important, hovering on the outskirts of all the talk about the relationship. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it seemed crucial. It seemed to actually have NOTHING to do with this one relationship, but a real struggle between man and his own mortality, and also man and God. And this, oh this, was NOT something that the narrator could stand. Fine, cheat on me, I don’t care. Smack me upside the head. I’ll deal with it. Shut me out of your heart, fine, that’s fine. But have a religious experience that shows you the face of God in the middle of the desert? Oh no no NO, this cannot stand. She believes he has gone mad. He believes he has finally found his sanity. It is irreconcilable.

And of course, he would have this epiphany of eternity while stranded in the desert. The desert that he feels he knows, and has conquered to some degree. But suddenly, in my last reading, I saw that there was something lacking in her. In HER. She could not “go there” with him. She does not respect that which cannot be KNOWN. I mean, it’s interesting from an anthropological standpoint, but to live with it? To live with the knowledge that there is so much that CANNOT be known? It’s not just that she finds this intolerable, but that she also has contempt for it. She doesn’t RESPECT it, and in my last reading of the book, that was ALL that I could see in the Strife section. I wanted to shake HER, and say, “Just let him have his epiphany, please! Why can’t you just ACCEPT it? You’re ruining EVERYTHING.”

Now that is a great book that can give me two polar opposite responses in two separate readings.

“Strife”, the section, reminds us – especially us cerebral types – that there is so much you cannot know. To some of us, this is intolerable.

Briefly some backstory: (and some of the details are lost to me): Nelson Denoon is a brilliant controversial anthropologist, who has created a “utopia” (look out) in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, in Botswana. He thinks that two things could free Africa from the poverty and disease it struggles under: solar energy, and the economic freedom of women. So he has created a solar-powered utopia, where women have all the power – and he presides over the whole thing like a benevolent dictator, advising, standing back, suggesting, organizing. Our unnamed female narrator (it’s a first-person book) is an anthropologist as well, stranded in Africa, after her dissertation turned out to be a bust. She is sort of at odds, wondering what to do with her life, being vaguely promiscuous and hanging out in the capital of Gaborone, disgusted with her lack of purpose and drive. She feels cursed, academically. She feels mediocre. To make a long long story short, she encounters Nelson Denoon (a legend to her, already) at a party in Gaborone, and – on multiple levels she is drawn to him. Her soul reaches out to his, all that jazz – BUT it’s more complicated than that. She feels somehow that he can help her. Help her with what? Her career? Yes, possibly. He is an anthropologist who is actually DOING something OUTSIDE of academia – she wants in. However, she is not allowed in. The project is for Africans only. Her presence would not be welcome there. Denoon disappears from the party, after haranguing a group of men in the back about socialism and solar power and economics – and the narrator can’t stop thinking about him. She must get to him. She is not invited, remember. And nobody knows the way to this utopia (which is called Tsau). It’s in the middle of a featureless desert. But where? There must be food drop-offs, right? Could she bribe someone in the World Food Program to drop her off with the maize and sorghum? She runs into dead-ends everywhere. What Denoon has created is on the edge of the law, and nobody wants to take responsibility for it. The government, the volunteers, even the missionaries – who basically know everything there is to know about what goes on in Botswana. She starts to become desperate. She MUST get to Tsau. She is now operating under instinct only. She has had one or two brief intense conversations with Denoon, an intimidating very busy guy. He has told her, point-blank, “No. I don’t need your help at Tsau. It would be quite awkward if you came. The project is still in the beginning stages, and I really need to protect it from outside influence.” Our narrator takes this in, fine, fine, I understand, but begins to make her plans to cross the desert anyway, to look for this mythical female utopia. It’s so inappropriate! He doesn’t WANT you there, hon!

She doesn’t care. She NEEDS to be there. She needs to be there because
1. She has a huge crush on him, and something in her needs him – it’s pheromonal
2. She wants to know how things work in this world, and she wants to get close to the sources of power – Denoon is a source of power, and also INFORMATION – she is all about INFORMATION
3. She’s ready to actually up the ante in her own career. Enough with being marginal and safe. She wants a little danger.

Her trek across the desert gives her a little more than she bargained for, even with her strenuous planning. She puts together a map, based on her various conversations with people who have heard about Tsau and think they know where it is. She buys two donkeys. She is going to walk there, because there are no roads to Tsau, basically. She also needs to keep her expedition a secret. A foolhardy thing to do when you are about to set off on a dangerous mission. If she died out there, she would die without a trace, and no one would know where she had disappeared to. But she doesn’t want her expedition to somehow be foiled by those in power who don’t want her out there. There are “wells” that are marked throughout the desert, certain deserted outposts, where you can have pitstops and get water. She has marked those clearly. She is terrified of lions. She takes precautions. It is important to remember that this is not some silly indoor-girl heiress starting out blindly into the wild. Our narrator has just spent 18 months in the bush, by herself, working on her dissertation. She has lived in Africa now for a couple of years. She’s not an idiot. She takes all the precautions you should take, and she is familiar with the risks. She is used to living outside, to camping, and she estimates that her journey will take her four days (if Tsau is where it is supposed to be, that is). It ends up taking her “six-plus or seven-plus days” – she begins to lose track of time, and a day or so is lost in her memory.

This is early on in the book. We know she is driven to see what the hell Nelson Denoon is up to out there in the desert. We also know that she is not quite sure what it is she is doing.

Her expedition is an entire section in the book. Norman Rush (very much like his narrator) doesn’t skip over anything. Every moment of that terrible expedition is spelled out – her disintegrating mental capacity, the soul-destroying work she has to do to get a mere cupful of water out of this rusted well, her fears, her worries about going to the bathroom, her concerns for the donkeys she has bought, etc. But more than that: it is experiential. And Rush lets his writing be experiential too. I live that expedition with her.

It becomes a metaphor for love, without ever explicitly saying so. What are we willing to do for love? How far are we willing to go? If we know what it is that we NEED (not want, but NEED) – are we courageous enough to pursue it? To risk our lives for it?

At some point during her harrowing journey, she realizes, “This is the stupidest thing I have ever done, and if I die, no one will feel sorry for me, and rightly so.” It’s like people who die trying to climb Mount Everest. It’s sad for their families, of course, but it’s not a tragedy, because you have no business being up there in the first place. Be glad you died doing something you love! This is the life of an adventurer.

The most interesting part, now, about this whole expedition section, is that if she had really been paying attention, the fact that Nelson Denoon would have experienced a psychic crack after a week alone in the desert would not have surprised her. Because she experienced it too. It’s just that she processed it differently, created a different narrative for HER experience. But it’s there all along. Her capacity for understanding and connection is there – it’s just that she gives it a different name.

And THAT is their tragedy.

Here are some excerpts from her expedition:

A Brief Mania

…
On the second day the terrain changed. There were long dips and rises. I let the boys graze liberally anytime they seemed inclined. Around noon I had my first phenomenological oddity, having to do with light. It came suddenly. There was a surplus of light. I felt I was getting too much light, despite the fact that I was wearing sunglasses that were practically black. The sky was cloudless. An irrational sign or proof that there was too much light was that I thought I could detect a barely visible flicker in the sky just above the horizon. I tried to push this whole subject out of my consciousness, but it persisted. I thought it might be low blood sugar speaking, so I ate some raisins. Peculiar ideation about light continued.

My sunglasses began to feel heavy and irritating. They were preventing something significant from happening. I developed the conviction that they were keeping me from seeing the real colors of the Kalahari and that this was hazardous for me. I would be in danger unless I recharged my sense of the real colors of things by taking my glasses off at some regular interval. I yielded to this notion, mainly in order to exhaust it, but each time I pushed my glasses up onto my forehead I had a stronger sense of some suppressed vibration going on in the landscape which I would be able to see clearly if I looked more intently and for a longer period the next time. This is brain chemistry, I said, and squatted down and hung my head between my knees. I got up, pulled the visor of my kepi down tight, put my glasses back on, and thought about the hunchbacks of Kang.

I was then all right for twenty minutes, until the mania came back reformulated as the proposition that if I actually got rid of my sunglasses, and only if, I would be able to see the true and fundamental color of nature. I was to understand that what we perceive as beautiful individual colors are only corruptions and distortions of the true color of reality, which is ravishing and ultimate and apprehensible only in extremely rare circumstances. This was not a question of hallucination. It was analogous to dream knowledge, but different: I knew that for some reason at some deep level I was doing this to myself. But still I was tempted to act. I said aloud things like This is about self-injury, This is about self-worth, What are we to ourselves? and other pop-psych trash. The experience was strange in every way. Was I trying to get myself to turn around and go back to Kang before it was too late, because navigating in the Kalahari without sunglasses is one thing for Bushmen who have presumably been adapting their vision to a surplus of light for millennia and another thing for a lakhoa already in a state of anxiety? On any trip like mine there’s a point of no return. So was this some ideational response to the fact, which I was already having to fight to repress, that I was over my head? Had my brilliant unconscious chosen the one thing that if discarded would virtually disable me for making the long trip to Tsau but be manageable for a quick retreat back to Kang and safety? I think what broke the grip of this mania on me was firstly just hearing my own voice, whatever it was saying, and, secondly, remembering reading about someone who had been lost in the Kalahari and survived it reporting that he had had to get past a point when he experienced the desert as an organism or totality trying to get him to become part of it, as in surrender to it. This would make my sunglasses mania an analog of the feeling people lost in the Arctic get that they would be more comfortable if they took off their caps and mittens. The mania left, also suddenly, and we went on uneventfully.

That night I did everything right. I wore myself out collecting enough wood for a ring fire, got us all set up inside it, went into my tent, and closed my eyes, and immediately there were lions in the neighborhood. There may have been only one. I heard a roar like no other sound on earth. I felt it in my atoms. This is my reward for taking precautions, was my first thought.

I made myself emerge. I peered around. My boys were standing pressed together and shaking pathetically. I looked for glints from lion eyes out in the dark but saw nothing. Everything I did I managed to do with one hand on the flap of my tent.

Again I went through my lion lore. Lions roar only after they’ve eaten, for example. The paradox is that ultimately I slept better that night than I had the night before. I fell asleep clutching my bush knife.

In the morning I found it hard to eat. There was terror in me. I could die in this place, it was clear.

I dawdled breaking camp because I wanted to give any lions there were a head start at getting torpid. Lions are torpid during the day, was a key part of my lore package.

Music

Anyone who thinks crossing the Kalahari by yourself is boring is deluded. It’s like being self-employed in a marginal enterprise: there’s always something you should be doing if your little business is going to survive. For example, you should always be lashing a stick around of you through the thicker grass to warn snakes to get back. But this isn’t enough, because there are adders, who pay no attention to noise and just flatten themselves when they hear you coming, the better for you to step on them: so you have to be persistent about watching where you walk. Then you have to be careful not to walk directly under tree limbs without looking keenly to see if there are mambas or boomslangs aloft. You also have to keep resetting your level of vigilance, because your forearm muscles, the extensors in particular, begin to burn, the lashing motion being one you’re totally unaccustomed to. In addition to which there is the sun to be careful about. I was keeping myself smeared with something I bought for three pula at Botschem that was supposed to be a strong sunscreen, but I was turning red in strips and patches anyway. And you have to be watchful for ticks. In only one way was I in luck and that was in regard to dehydration. This was mid-April, that is to say mid-autumn, and perfect walking weather. In summer you could expect to lose about three pounds of water in a day of walking in the full sun.

You do need mental self-management, though, as I’d already partially learned, to get through solitudes like the Kalahari successfully. Fear itself is not enough to fully sustain and occupy you. On the whole I think I did well, which would have amazed certain lightweight women at the American embassy whose name for me, I learned much later, was Party Lights, based on their interpretation of my way of life – lifestyle to them, no doubt – in Gabs.

I was nervous and so were my animals, postlion. I stumbled on singing as a means of calming them down. I was singing for myself, initially, and then noticed that it seemed to help the boys too, especially Mmo. This is ridiculous, but they seemed to prefer complete songs to fragments of songs strung together with humming. I discovered how few songs I knew in full and how few songs of the ones I did know I knew more than one verse of. I think I must have a more complete sense of my total song inventory than anyone else has of theirs, except for professional singers. I know roughly which songs I know only the choruses of. I know which songs I know but discovered I couldn’t stand to sing in the desert, You Are My Sunshine being a prime example of a song I loathed suddenly to which I had never had any objection previously. And there are other songs you have sung only halfheartedly in the past which in the desert suddenly give you peace and seem indispensable, like Die Gedanken Sind Frei. You are astonished at the number of separate songs that have gotten fused together in your mind in some manner that makes it impossible to separate them, a la What do you want for breakfast my good old man? What do you want for breakfast my honey my lamb? Even God is uneasy say the bells of Swansea. And what will you give me say the bells of Rhymney? And there were songs I knew in full and perfectly but which I had no recollection of ever paying attention to when they were popular, like Heart of Glass, now a favorite of mine forever. Songs help when you’re under duress, which is undoubtedly why the Boer geniuses of cruelty forbid people in solitary confinement to sing.

I was singing so continuously that I began to find I disliked it when I stopped – I disliked that ambience. I was briefly an aide in a nursery school for neglected children, and the best-adapted, happiest, and smartest children in the place were three sisters who had been taken from a mother who kept them chained to a radiator so they would be safe while she was out circulating, and who when I asked them what they did all the time when they were alone said We sang. The inspiriting effect my singing had on my animals was not an illusion, and it reminds me now of the period when I was feeling depressed at how commonplace and rudimentary my dreams were compared to Denoon’s. He claimed to dream infrequently, but when he did, his dreams were like something by Faberge or Kafka in their uniqueness. He would have noetic dreams, and when they were over he would be left in possession of some adage or precept that tells you something occult or fundamental about the world. One of these was the conviction he woke up with one morning that music was the remnant of a medium that had been employed in the depths of the past as a means of communication between men and animals – I assume man arrow animal and not ducks playing flutes to get their point across to man. Living with me made him more provisional about his dreams, especially after I compared one of his adages to a statement some famous surrealist was left with after dreaming, which he thought important enough to print up: Beat your mother while she’s still young. I would always make Denoon at least try to reduce his insights to a sentence or two. The fact is I laugh at dreams. They seem to me to be some kind of gorgeous garbage. I have revenge dreams, mainly, in which I tell significant figures from my past things like You have the brains of a drum. On I sang.

Is it absurd to be proud of your dreams, or not? Denoon was.

Poetry let me down. I elided into poetry from time to time and discovered that I knew a lot of it. My attitude toward rhymed poetry changed utterly. Respect was born. Except for Dover Beach there was almost nothing unrhymed in my inventory. I know quite a lot of Kipling. I know some Vachel Lindsay. Finally one stanza of Elizabeth Bishop got hold of me and kept inserting itself between pieces of other poems, truculently. It maddened me both by its tenacity and by what it said: Far down the highway wet and black, I’ll ride and ride and not come back. I’m going to go and take the bus, and find someone monogamous. I used opera to drive this way.

Serious Trouble

Serious trouble began on the fourth or fifth day out. It happened because I was doing a thing I had been warned not to do in the desert: I was reviewing my life.