THE MAGI OF CRAZY WISDOM

THE MAGI OF CRAZY WISDOM

The magi of crazy wisdom have delivered their gifts and separated to find their long disappointed ways back home as if it were any less amazing the star of Bethlehem in the house of bread turned out to be a supernova recorded by the Chinese or as close an approach the shepherd moons of Jupiter are ever going to get to a manger that would lead them to green pastures on high ground. Even if it didn’t before the first snowfall. A Palestinian 747 pilot for Japan airways once gave me a young ram for my birthday right out of the Koran or the Bible, and I called him Harouf Tajeen which is Arabic for Curried Lamb. I lived on a sheep farm that had gone broke because the coyotes mauled the flocks. A savage sacrifice in a rough school where hardly anything ever knocks and no one ever really graduates until they drop out. From a lamb to a butt-kicking rodeo clown of a ram I cradled Harouf in my arms like a prophet from the Old Testament or Jim Morrison in concert and instead of counting sheep I’d recite him the twenty-third psalm to get him to sleep with the dogs by the fire on extremely cold nights in the winter. And just to see him always made me feel kind of laughably holy as if my demonic gods had a divine sense of humour. Maybe holy isn’t the right word. Less damned would please a Zen master more. So less damned then, though I don’t mean that in a Byronic sense, but more in the way of being called upon to show respect for someone else’s colours though they don’t mean that much to you except as a source of danger. And here was the living word. Not the dead symbol. I could pluck the burdock out of his fleece as if I were reinventing velcro. And the dogs and I slept lightly at night with one ear cocked and our trigger finger on the crescent moon to run the coyotes off God’s little acre. We weren’t of Eden. But we were in it up to our jugulars. We were the black ops watchdogs of the Holy Land, and though my ram could, we weren’t allowed to enter the promised land armed with blood on our hands. Same god. Wrong sacrifice. Nature red in tooth and claw we were the bloods in the hoods and illegal settlements of Los Angeles and East Jerusalem. We were the Knights Templar of the pioneering communities that were settled here by temptation in the wilderness where they recorded the names of the wildlife that persisted in persecuting them like coyotes and wolves and bear and fishers in the Book of Heresies they were fond of quoting like the devil knows scripture at their revivalist prayer meetings to lift this heavy trapline off their shoulders and lay it upon another like a scourge of predators they couldn’t convert to vegetarianism. Think of the rabbits that would die for the lack of a carrot and the donkeys that wouldn’t have anything to look forward to if everyone gave up eating meat. And what was God’s original design for a trapline if not a wolf? Case closed like a koan with a crack. And it didn’t matter anyway if we shone with a deflected divinity while the angels were looking the other way distracted by the ricochets in the voice of God. We were the dragons and skeletal armies that guarded the Golden Fleece like the condottieri of late medieval Florence and the contractors of modern Iraq. But we weren’t the kind of cartel that would hold a sacrifice for ransom like a judas-goat. We’d do that for free just to prove we weren’t all mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Hells Angels sometimes stop to help people change flat tires. Farmyard dogs that have been crazed by the moon once too often after the porch lights go off sometimes look out for a member of a gullible species that they might otherwise prey upon. Who knows, maybe it was a vestigial hunting ritual to celebrate our symbolic gratitude for the generosity of what we killed to live? But we forbore until the score was Rams: one, Coyotes: none. And then the inconceivable happened like an anti-miracle drug. Harouf ate deadly nightshade and died. At least that’s what the neighbours told me it was. I had to rent a back hoe to keep the coyotes from digging him up. Put heavy stones on his grave. Said something soft and brave and open-ended about what a good ram he was. And how sorry I was we couldn’t save him from himself. And what did me and the dogs learn from all this to advance our spiritual enlightenment even so much as a shadow of what it’s supposed to be? Never run to the defence of a suicide on its way to a sacrifice without letting nature takes its course. That might sound callous. But weeping like broken-hearted blisters is worse. Sometimes the mountain just falls off the climber no matter how many sherpas he has around him to guide him up out of the valley of death one fragile foothold after another all the way up the goat path to the top of nothing with wolves to cover his ass, and when the moon asks about the horned one, mourn his passing.

PATRICK WHITE