& BY DONIPHAN BLAIR derstood my thoughts. Woman was the only object co <n .55 t. ® a » K F %'s1?®®' ■ * * V * * a S * ® 4 « • * 4 9 * ® • a « 1MDMING THE WILD MAN ^ A fh e n I was sixteen, I heard a story that inspired and impelled me into one of my most serious adventures. Even the rather V W long name of the protagonist stuck with me through the years — Tobias Schneebaum. Apparently he was a New York artist who had gone down to Peru and moved in with a “primitive” tribe. Not only did he immerse himself in their spontaneous, joyous existence, living naked in the jungle and sharing their homosexual intimacy, but he also witnessed a cannibalistic raid and partook of human flesh. Farfetched perhaps, but a close friend had heard the tale from Tobias’ own lips! So as I wandered the globe, though I hardly came close to such circumstances, I would remind myself in tricky situations that Schneebaum had weathered much weirder. By coincidence, I ended up in Peru not far from where he had explored a quarter of a century earlier. It was there that the thin second-hand description could no longer placate my awesome fantasies of “jungle morality. ” Not until I returned and read Tobias’ beautiful little book, Keep the River on Your Right, were my morbid doubts displaced by realistic descriptions of tribal life and death. Through his amazing adaptability, aided by his proclivity to interact deeply with the men, he has been able to observe and experience various aboriginal societies from the inside. In a tradition originating with Gaugin and Rimbaud, he has delved even further back into the primordial lifestyles of man and returned with equally eloquent observations of perhaps what it was like for all of us before we were kicked out of the "Garden of Eden," cemented together the bicameral mind, became civilized and neurotic. An Excerpt WILD MAN By Tobias Schneebaum ■ have always lusted after the Wild Man of Borneo, and my ■ earliest memories reach back to him. The picture I see now in my mind is of a caged creature in a sideshow, half man, half ape, human or orangutan I don’t remember. I was six or seven at the time. That first sight of him in the cage, his existence there, the context of him, the very presence of him, startled and confused me and filled me with the wildness of his look. He took hold of me, captured me, and turned my insides on end. I was in Coney Island at the time with my two brothers and my mother, she herding us along Surf Avenue into the dark shadows under the boardwalk. I took off my clothes and put on my bathing suit and ran down the beach to the water’s edge. The sun was hot, but I was shivering. He’d stayed with me, that creature, rattling around my heart and brain, and visions of him loaded me down with fear and terror, longing and excitement. I sat in the sand and molded shapes of beings with long hair, gorillas and yaks, men with long nails and bent legs, and unknowingly, I was molding a shape of him inside myself, with my body hurting, my mind unthinking, not sensing in any way that I was accepting into myself the eternal presence of pain and pleasure. On occasion, we went to the beach on dark nights, for my mother had skin cancer and had been advised to bathe naked in the salt water of the sea. The wild man could not be seen then, but his image appeared as soon as we neared the ocean and heard the roar of the surf. It is nowhere known to me that I ever understood who or what the wild man was, what he meant to me, and who I was in his connection; yet something of him insisted on pushing itself into me, moving me on; something was paining me, forcing me into a search, a yearning that had nothing to do with the life I was living then or with the life of later years or with the thought of any future that could come within the range of my imagination. My youthful years were agonizing. I felt a need to hold the wild man, to touch and taste him, but I never unof man’s needs, though I shied away from contact with all but my mother and remained frightened and tormented by my inabilities. I was thin and unattractive; I was silent and suppressed. I knew nothing of sex but the pages of Maggie and Jiggs, of Popeye and Olive Oyl that made the rounds from desk to desk at school. To pass the days and years, I turned the Hebrew alphabet into abstractions, sitting at the kitchen table, teaching myself to draw, learning to hide my fears and depression. I found myself contained in time, a time that enveloped me, enabled me to search out the world and the whole of my interior for the responses that gave me life. Inside there, I could look forward into my future, always the same, for I was always wandering, running, flying through the forest, sparkling, glistening, exuding water from my pores, my skin covered with beads of perspiration, lust welling up, beating its way through my bowels and glowing up my whole interior, lighting up my outer self so that I sometimes lived in marvels of exhilaration. And it was he who was the object of it all, the one that I would love. In a Cessna flying over mountains on my way to the swamps of > Asmat, I had a moment of panic when a vision appeared in front of me, like one I’d had in Borneo, this time of a man, ugly and beautiful, a Papuan with frizzy hair, deeply furrowed brows, his face painted red and black, his nose pierced by the tusks of wild boars, his ears stuffed with bamboo and bones. I could see only his face, wild and aboriginal. He was holding on to me, hugging me, making love to me. It was a terrifying moment, one that I had waited for and cherished, a moment that is still to come. Sometimes, I am the receiver in that relationship, sometimes I am the Papuan, a self of mine that I have reserved, one of the selves that I project, not only in dreams, but also into my living present. It is my future, as if that future existed now and I had only to arrive at the proper time and space to coincide with it; for the future is what I reach for, is what is already gone. The past is also there and I am living it; I am living it through sleights of hand and mind that blend my flesh and blood with his, the wild man’s. I am waiting; I am restless; I am going on; I am still. My eyes water and clear, and I see myself down there, far below the plane, running, running, with the forest around me, my cheeks streaked with tears, the image dissolving as we land in Ewer in a thick field of mud. New Guinea had stood out as my final hiding place. There was nowhere left for me to explore myself, to look for the wild man. I had evaded it with all my senses, not even permitting my eyes to rest on that area of the map north of the Australian continent. It was far too real to me for that. I knew that my time on other continents had been evasive, had been time that was no more than lives along the way, and that it was in New Guinea that I would find my first and final life. It was there that I would lose and fructify myself. The Muruts of Borneo, in spite of the savagery they could muster, had an amiable and ingratiating countenance, and the people of Peru were easily able to charm me. The wild man allowed no frivolities; he was ugly and in my concept of him was biologically, anthropologically, evolutionarily, paleontologically, Primitive Man. His surface was as violent as his interior was gentle, and the very looks of him were fierce. The rough features of the Papuans among whom I would live gave them an aspect that drove them back in time to primeval days when violence, hunger, and sexual urges were expressed without preamble. No timid, lonely creature existed then, and in their midst I would live out a life of heightened sensations, making friends, enemies, lovers, repressing nothing, carrying out my instincts to their natural completion. I could displace everything, rearrange my lives, replace my past with that of the wild man, instill his presence into my void, and stuff his integrity into my despair. I could reach out for him to enter me. ■ A CONVERSATION WITH TODIAS SCHNEEDAUM obias Schneebaum: It’s fascinating the changes that take place as you go upstream and you get closer to the foothills which are the outer limits of Asmat. There the people don’t have the great feasting and carving that they have on the coast. The Icoastal people are into ritual headhunting much more so than the people upstream, although they did have headhunting and do have Clinton St. Quarterly 5
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