Back for a moment to the Turners' theory of Anasazi cannibalism. It's beyond my concern whether or not they're right. We'll never know for sure, and it doesn't matter except to a very few people in Arizona. Instead, Man Corn strikes me with its exhaustively presented research. Two thirds of the book is devoted to hard dry data: details of excavations, carbon dating of skeletal remains, endless pictures of bones with inserted arrows that point to evidence of cuts, boiling, and tooth marks. Page after page of it. It is just like the exhaustive documentation of Cambodian prisoners at S-21, and the glass stupa full of skulls at the Killing Fields. The Turners' data may be more "scientific" but it proves nothing more or less. People died violently; they still die violently. We kill, are killed. But what to do with the dead? The obsession won't go away, not from the ancient Anasazi or their modern anthropologist interpreters, not from modern Cambodia or my ruined love of Eve. And at that moment before death, at the perimortem, the question cries out for an answer.
A last note of interest to me from Man Corn is its last sentence:
It makes me think of Pol Pot, of course, of Osama bin Laden and any number of misfitted powermongers who took the boat of human history and towed it into deep, perilous waters. But before I think of any of these maniac avatars, I immediately remember where I went from Old Oraibi. I headed west on US 264 through Hopi country, and stopped at a crafts shop. The guy running the place was a bahana -- Hopi for white man -- which was odd enough, and he seemed to be married to the Hopi woman behind the counter with him, which was odder. After I chatted with him briefly, he dragged me out to his truck and lit a cigarette and started playing me a CD by an Indian rock group named Chester Night and the Wind -- they sound like a Navajo version of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. He started talking, almost raving, about the wonders of the Hopi world. And I thought, who the hell is this guy? How did he wind up here? What does he want with me? He managed to sell me, the easy mark, both the CD and a book called In Search of the Old Ones. (It's a good book, actually, about the Anasazi.) Perhaps that was his only goal, but there was something demoniacal in that man. He had renounced all tradition and cultural propriety. He was invigorating and enthusiastic, but weirdly frightening. I got the feeling he'd seen something horrible -- like his own death -- and fled to the oldest place in America, where the dead have lain longer than anywhere else. He had a truck and a shop and a wife and something to espouse. He was an American type, I suppose: an untrustworthy but exciting frontiersman, as in the cinema Westerns and the great jazz movements. Maybe life's only real spark comes from people like this, who jump ship and are white Hopis or African Catholics or gay Republicans -- self-inventing, synesthetic shamans who turn their backs on their own heritage and forge something new and strange. I was rather on the lam, too, from myself and from San Francisco, from Eve's persistent missives; so I couldn't help but wonder what life was like for the white man in the Hopi craft shop, living so doggedly in the margins of America, chainsmoking Marlboro Lights and selling Navajo rock CDs.
I think of him and I think of Gerry Caputo, vacuuming and roasting coffee beans up in the Sierras, sending bags of it out into the devouring world. Darkness fell. I paid the bahana for my purchases and drove 90 miles an hour down Highway 87, back to Winslow. I had a drink and then found a motel run by an Indian -- not a Navajo or a Hopi, but a man from India. The lobby reeked of curry. Porous borders: between India and Indians, between Anglo and Hopi, between me and the world. Between Eve and me. My whole world was in perimortem, it seemed. The walls of my room were so thin I could hear every boring detail of the conversation in the next room, and the television that yammered its tired plot through the sheet rock: words, it seemed, to drown out the anxieties of the newly dead. Tomorrow I planned to go back up to the quiet villages on the Hopi reservation and listen for them. My cell phone had no service in Winslow, and I didn't know that Eve was trying to call me. Next WeekThe extraordinary quality of the Southwestern cannibal events should make us think more about what individuals did in the past, rather than focusing entirely on abstractions such as cultures, systems, spheres of influence, and traditions, which obscure the chains of events that can stem from a single individual's actions. [Italics in original.]
At the Hopi Villages: Proustian Shopping, Indian Running, and Sleep in a Wigwam!
