Tribal Rites

A primal thing sometimes happens in the middle of the city in the middle of the night and a tribe is formed, if only for a wishful while, if only in a wishful place.  Sometimes, that is, if you're very lucky, and the karma goddess is wantonly smiling your way and the moon is just right and the air caresses and you let your hair down far enough to tickle the small of your back.  This is where it comes from, dyads and triads of ephemeral might, the tribe of them added together, dancing in an asexual ecstasy that cues the sexual, banded together against the common threat, heads bobbing, breathing like the air is too thick.  We are the multitude and those who have not come to us we will represent in a voice loud and true.  Do they trust us?  I cannot decide.

By way of forming our tribe we prayed, first to Dionysus, then to his Bacchus incarnation, all in good time.  Last and best we prayed to goddess Moon, and, I'll admit, bayed to her a bit too, we in the frenzy of bakcheia. 

This modern day watering hole has a purpose not far removed from those of the Savannah, and the place itself, the guts of the building, not so different from the caves of Magdalenian art.  We tribe sit on the raised deck behind, a fortunate place to watch for marauding bears and lions, and keep each other transcendent company.  We kiss with words and caress with looks and dare anyone to ken our craziness.  There are maybe forty of us, a goodly size, and we are in this moment the center of the universe.  Many of us don't know each other, being brought together by friends of friends, but this is an advantage, the glue for our society.  One, a dark and hard-eyed Wiccan of guileless art proclaims leadership, and we obey.  I am shaman, others become story-tellers, observers, messengers, hunters, and priests.  We are all warriors, young and old, women and men, warriors for the night.

There is music, loud, the kind you feel in your chest.  I don't know the tune, but it doesn't matter, the driving beat an echo both of a mother's heart and the urgency of creation.  Thump...Thump...Thump...  Anton Mesmer is at work here, he of mesmerize fame who coined "animal magnetism" as a tribute to the gravity of the Newton he loved so well.  Ah well, mesmerized it is then, and I am...Thump...Thump...Thump...animal magnetism...Thump... Thump...Thump...

Even in this place, in this state of my doing, I think.

It's said that if you had an imaginary childhood friend and regularly attend religious services that you are more easily hypnotized.  I tried this on volunteers but don't have enough data for verification.  Actually, I don't know if I genuinely hypnotized anyone, not truly, except for one.  There was this man I plied with my trickery and afterward he sat quietly amidst us, disturbed in some way unknowable to me.  But I envied him his belief and looking at him I thought of Jaynes' words: "We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and tomorrowing our resolves.  And so we become practiced in powerless resolution until hope gets undone and dies in the unattempted.  At least this happens to some of us.  And then to rise above this noise of knowings and really change ourselves, we need an authorization that 'we' do not have."  "Well then," I thought, "fuck you gentleman Jaynes, I authorize myself, I have that, I always have that."  And I went back to my studies of living.

The tribe thrived for a few brief hours, and things went to and fro between and among us, weakening our fear of the bears and lions.  Brothers and sisters were met and made, love kindled, flamed out, and then rekindled more times than an outsider might guess.  A taxi came from out of the dark and transported a few away, the rest walked of a sort to a nearby park, there to await both the sun and the inevitable chemistry of intoxication to run its course.  This is where I went, glad for the chance to see Ra with a fresh eye, glad to see Moon slide to her bed, glad to sit heads on shoulders with my tribe for a few fleeting last moments before the return to the ordinary.

It was a good night.