The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

From Exotica

From Exotica Exotica is the art of ruins, the ruined world of enchantment laid waste in fervid imagination, the paradox of an imperial paradise liberated from colonial intervention , a golden age recreated through the lurid colors of a cocktail glass, illusory and remote zones of pleasure and peace dreamed after the bomb. Nothing is left, except for beaches, palm trees, tourist sites with their moss-covered monuments, shops stocked with native art made for the invaders, beachcomber bars, and an absurd perception of what may once have been. Just ruins and a spell, repeated endlessly to provoke fading memories: lust and terror, chainsaw bikers, sultry tropical airs, Aztec spells, x-ray eyes and hot pants, sunken cities, lost cities, singing sea shells, electric frogs, bustin’ bongos, wild stuVed bikinis, jungle jazz, sacred idols, space escapades, switchblade sisters , pits and pendulums, tabu, taboo, tabuh, tamboo, taboo, tabuh, tamboo, tabuh-tabuhan. The Vending Machines The French author and translator, Arthur Mangin, published a romantic study of wilderness in 1872. The Desert World defined its subject as “all the regions where man has not planted his regular communities or permanent abodes; where earth has never been appropriated, tilled, and subjected to cultivation ; where Nature has maintained her inviolability against the encroachments of human industry.” This may have been true in the nineteenth century, particularly for Mangin, who promoted the colonial view: “[the] one incontestable fact, the superiority of those races that have acquired civilisation over those which are incapable of so grand a work.” In our time, wilderness is a place where the grand works of the civilized races have done their worst. I found myself in such a wilderness, stumbling into a central encampment during the dry season. Was encampment the word? I don’t think so. This was a city, but a city like none I had ever seen. Loud, complex, fluid, terrifying; a city of extraordinary possibilities. Before entering the inner walls, I took my bearings. In one direction, the suburbs, surrounded by whipping fences armed with deadly voltage. Blackened animals sat [ 169 ] david toop ⢇ at electrical throwing distance from these banshee defenses and wondered why they had died. In another direction, sand without boundaries, chaotic with strange lifeforms . There were legends of a subsonic boom that paralyzed sidewinder snakes as it rolled across the dunes, hurling trapdoor spiders out of their burrows and high into the air and causing instantaneous diarrhea in all two- or four-legged creatures unlucky enough to be caught without nappies. In the encampment, pornographic raconteurs delivered circadian monologues from open-fronted shops, thin plastic microphones held delicately between thumbs and forefingers in the manner of lounge singers. Speaking quickly, without pause, in disconnected fragments, they described colorful incidents of bestiality, torture, exotic auto-erotic devices, industrial accidents, the histories of dismemberment and cannibalism. Their listeners—children and old people, dogs and empty chairs—accumulated a mass of dismembered knowledge. Their dreams were disturbed by the arcana of the raconteurs, a rich brew of sexual fantasy fortified by references to Samoyed hand-cutting spirits, Mayan priests playing flutes and rattles to decapitated heads resting in pots, the bat god Tlacatzinacantli with his skulls and gourd rattles, itinerant Tantrics conversing with the dead through skull drums. As the monologues droned on past the witching hour, nocturnal cult ceremonies weaved through the streets, faces of the initiates hidden behind masks beaten from obsolete household labor-saving devices. These were known variously as the Flashing Night Spirits, the Society of Faces, the Spore Diviners, the Boneless. Their secret speech mixed borrowed expressions from so many diVerent languages, all transformed through partial understanding, that even the cult leaders found themselves lost in a sea of alien tongues. I had arrived, I discovered, at the moment preceding a burial rite. No child was exempt from the forage during these rites. More than fifty cavity beetles had to be collected. Their mating song was unique. They would burrow backwards into the sand until vertical, then open their abnormally wide mouths and wait for the wind to catch the edges of their jaws. For those few travelers who had heard it, the sound was said to be as haunting as a wolf howl. I was reminded of the potoo or wood nightjar, an ugly bird cursed with a body like a fungus and a gaping mouth like a surgical operation. Found in the West Indies, Haiti, and...