setting sun.
And I venture that Kathy, an erudite woman with a library of wildlife manuals in her knapsack, is still puzzling over the blank stare the aging guide M’sengala had given her when she’d asked whether the rare hartebeest we’d spotted was Lichtenstein’s hartebeest or one of the other varieties. After that, M’sengala cracked up every time Jim and I inquired if we were looking at Rauschenberg’s wildebeest. Rosenquist’s bushbuck. Wesselman’s waterbuck. Catskill’s borschtbuck. Or Goldberg’s variations. Knowing not ten words of English, he couldn’t possibly savvy the cultural references, but M’sengala got the point.
Certainly M’sengala, with his goofy, infectious laugh, is in
my
thoughts. I’m remembering how shocked he’d looked when Curt had slipped the Sony Walkman headset over his leathery ears and turned up Huey Lewis and the News, and how quickly he’d begun to grin and then to dance, as if he could not stop himself from dancing. M’sengala got down! The Selous, itself, gets down. Down to basics, to the curious if natural rhythms of life.
And death. For if there’s abundant life in the Selous, there’s abundant death as well. We’d seen a pack of wild dogs cripple and devour an impala; a bloated hippo corpse being ripped to shreds by twenty crocodiles; the remains of a feline-butchered wildebeest, black clouds of flies buzzing like paparazzi around its instant celebrity of blood. We could hear those flies from thirty yards away.
Yes, there are ongoing dramas of death in the Selous, but except for the small amount imported by poachers, there’s no unnecessary violence, no greed, no cruelty. Nor is there politics, religion, trendiness, ambition, hype, or sales pitch. Perhaps it’s the very purity of the Selous that makes us cling to it, reluctant to let go.
For two weeks, we have traveled in the realm of the eternal. There is escape from the prison of the past, disinterest in the promise of the future. There is no other place. The Selous is
here
. There is no other time. The Selous is
now
.
And as we lie in our tents on the grassy plain of eternity it must occur to each and every one of us that the Selous is the way the world was meant to be—and that everything else is a mistake.
Nonetheless, we do return to carpeted home and electronic hearth, and I have to tell you, folks, now that I’m back, I’m ready for a nap. If it should prove that a tsetse fly has, indeed, drugged my vital fluids, then, O river gods, grant me a graceful fall into the sleep of the Selous. The bright slumber of Africa. The snooze of Kilimanjaro.
Esquire,
1985
TRIBUTES
The Doors
A s clueless as Rome before the barbarians stormed its gates, as oblivious as Pompeii on the eve of Vesuvius’s genocidal belch, Seattle was totally unprepared for the rape and pillage to which its youth were subjected at Eagles Auditorium last night. Neither was it ready for the anointment, the empowerment, or the sanctification that were also part and parcel of a rock concert cum psychic ordeal cum full-blown ecstasy rite.
For some time now, Seattle’s adopted “house” bands have been The Youngbloods and Country Joe & the Fish, groups whose electrical bananas may shock straight society but who, to their fans, are as folksy and affectionate as psychedelic puppies. Accustomed to having their faces licked, Seattleites were caught off guard by a band that, while it might sniff a crotch or two, definitely does not wag its tail; by a band that embodies the prevailing zeitgeist, with all of its political optimism, spiritual awareness, and liberating transcendence of obsolete values, but embodies it with an unprecedented potency, concentration, and theatrical vehemence; a band that flaunts rather than soft-pedals the threat that the new culture presents to the old culture—and that leaves both cultures rather reeling from the experience.
When, dazed but fomented, we staggered at last from the hall last night, we
And I venture that Kathy, an erudite woman with a library of wildlife manuals in her knapsack, is still puzzling over the blank stare the aging guide M’sengala had given her when she’d asked whether the rare hartebeest we’d spotted was Lichtenstein’s hartebeest or one of the other varieties. After that, M’sengala cracked up every time Jim and I inquired if we were looking at Rauschenberg’s wildebeest. Rosenquist’s bushbuck. Wesselman’s waterbuck. Catskill’s borschtbuck. Or Goldberg’s variations. Knowing not ten words of English, he couldn’t possibly savvy the cultural references, but M’sengala got the point.
Certainly M’sengala, with his goofy, infectious laugh, is in
my
thoughts. I’m remembering how shocked he’d looked when Curt had slipped the Sony Walkman headset over his leathery ears and turned up Huey Lewis and the News, and how quickly he’d begun to grin and then to dance, as if he could not stop himself from dancing. M’sengala got down! The Selous, itself, gets down. Down to basics, to the curious if natural rhythms of life.
And death. For if there’s abundant life in the Selous, there’s abundant death as well. We’d seen a pack of wild dogs cripple and devour an impala; a bloated hippo corpse being ripped to shreds by twenty crocodiles; the remains of a feline-butchered wildebeest, black clouds of flies buzzing like paparazzi around its instant celebrity of blood. We could hear those flies from thirty yards away.
Yes, there are ongoing dramas of death in the Selous, but except for the small amount imported by poachers, there’s no unnecessary violence, no greed, no cruelty. Nor is there politics, religion, trendiness, ambition, hype, or sales pitch. Perhaps it’s the very purity of the Selous that makes us cling to it, reluctant to let go.
For two weeks, we have traveled in the realm of the eternal. There is escape from the prison of the past, disinterest in the promise of the future. There is no other place. The Selous is
here
. There is no other time. The Selous is
now
.
And as we lie in our tents on the grassy plain of eternity it must occur to each and every one of us that the Selous is the way the world was meant to be—and that everything else is a mistake.
Nonetheless, we do return to carpeted home and electronic hearth, and I have to tell you, folks, now that I’m back, I’m ready for a nap. If it should prove that a tsetse fly has, indeed, drugged my vital fluids, then, O river gods, grant me a graceful fall into the sleep of the Selous. The bright slumber of Africa. The snooze of Kilimanjaro.
Esquire,
1985
TRIBUTES
The Doors
A s clueless as Rome before the barbarians stormed its gates, as oblivious as Pompeii on the eve of Vesuvius’s genocidal belch, Seattle was totally unprepared for the rape and pillage to which its youth were subjected at Eagles Auditorium last night. Neither was it ready for the anointment, the empowerment, or the sanctification that were also part and parcel of a rock concert cum psychic ordeal cum full-blown ecstasy rite.
For some time now, Seattle’s adopted “house” bands have been The Youngbloods and Country Joe & the Fish, groups whose electrical bananas may shock straight society but who, to their fans, are as folksy and affectionate as psychedelic puppies. Accustomed to having their faces licked, Seattleites were caught off guard by a band that, while it might sniff a crotch or two, definitely does not wag its tail; by a band that embodies the prevailing zeitgeist, with all of its political optimism, spiritual awareness, and liberating transcendence of obsolete values, but embodies it with an unprecedented potency, concentration, and theatrical vehemence; a band that flaunts rather than soft-pedals the threat that the new culture presents to the old culture—and that leaves both cultures rather reeling from the experience.
When, dazed but fomented, we staggered at last from the hall last night, we
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