Back into America

Starting from an uneventful place and time and trying not to escape America (thrice upon three times in America is what we together are doing here, one belying another), I shall first speak of Lawton, Oklahoma, where I spent most of my years, also a place to which I will never return. By the time I was born into this family of Braum’s employees, it was already a town populated by cows, college football players, pretty little houses, junkies, featureless landscapes, Chinese buffets, good Wayne, casinos run by Indians, drive-through banks, Indians in teddy bear pyjamas, and uniformed soldiers from Fort Sill saluted by star-struck grandmas. With these soulless figures I shared experiences, stories, memories and histories—most of these were too dampened to retell, none of the stories were enjoyable, not a single moment with this hideous crowd was memorable. A nameless person or an anonymous monster made it clear to me early on that it was my job to forget all about America and head back to Lawton whenever I have a chance, because Lawton didn’t miss me—a city that is named after Henry Ware Lawton, the only U.S. general officer to be killed during the Philippine–American War in 1899, and the first general officer of the United States killed in overseas action.

I have never visited Fort Sill, which was a major military institution not far from Lawton. As beautiful and romantic as it was—a kind of Americana, if you will—it was known to me as the notorious Apache military leader (“worst Indian who ever lived”) Geronimo’s prison, and the birthplace of the soldiers, well-built, coarse, impeccably attired and groomed, ugly, and white. I could not decide whether they were raised by humans or actions. They were remarkably statured and quietly assertive, ready to give you the response that you asked for, but were not to please you by offering a right answer. They were as plain and stubborn as Fort Sill and the land on which it stood, infinitely vast and impatient, caught in an endless horizontal expansion. Bootlickers, cocking their asses up as the Great Plains do, calmly stroking the panhandle, moulding nature into a monument of noise. It is impossible to hide yourself in a cloudless, motionless place like this, although you could be sure that you are safe and therefore need not to hide (from whose trackers and scouts?), allowing the distance between you and the ground to secure the anxieties one needs to survive. On the other hand, the maddened prairies manage to leave, whenever they are prompted to run from one location to another, a number of ghastly groundhogs behind. A different community of mobile, solemn monuments that is later devoured by isolated, fiery, chipper trees.

Alas, it’s a beautiful landscape where there was nothing in sight, me myself merely intimidated by the spongy, desolate horizon that was on the verge of disappearance. The blue skies were also dumbfounded, as much as I was, when the torched horizon totally and magically vanished; they became speechless, and was giving me a menacing, anal look, for I was the only thing that was left beneath them, the only (clairvoyant) one that was there to witness their immaculate clarity. In solitude I was ushered into Lawton.

Among all the spectral, stellar, animalistic, mundane and futile returns, the one that touched me the most was the Indian warrior Massai’s return ten years before he was finally shot dead in 1906. Massai’s daughter Alberta Begay told his glorious story: “My father, Massai, was a Chiricahua Apache, the son of White Cloud and Little Star. He was born at Mescal Mountain, the home of my grandparents.” Massai and his friend Gray Lizard joined Geronimo’s army in a war against the invading White Eyes. Preparing for the war, Massai and Gray Lizard made a journey to the west in search of food. It was a fruitful trip: “Loading all four horses with food and buckskin, they left for home. Massai spoke to his friend as they rode away: ‘Now we must remember this place and how to return. If you should come alone the supplies are yours, and the same for me; but I hope we are always together.’ ‘It shall be as you say,’ replied Gray Lizard.” They were later brought by Chiricahua scouts who betrayed them to San Carlos, “the worst place in the world,” (Gray Lizard: “‘Don't you know of the terrible heat, insects, and sickness at San Carlos? The soldiers could not live there. They are putting the Apaches there to die!’”) driven onto a train to join Geronimo, who also had been captured in Florida. As the two were planning their escape from the train, which involved loosening bars on a window, 

… a Chiricahua scout went through the car. A prisoner himself, he taunted the other prisoners. “When you get to Florida, the soldiers will chop your necks off,” he gloated. “All who wear red handkerchiefs around their heads will have their necks chopped.”

“You wear a red cord,” retorted Massai. “If the soldiers do not get you first, I will strangle you with it!”

All the scouts wore the red head cord. 

When food was brought at noon Massai pretended to eat, but he concealed most of his portion in his breechclout. His wife gave him her share; she would get more that night. Gray Lizard, too, did not eat.

At a point when the train slowed to almost a stop, the two slipped through the window and dropped to the ground. Then the two men started walking, from a place some 1,200 miles (some 2,000 miles according to other sources, including The New York Times) from home. The Big Dipper was their guide. They reached the Capitans and, soon after, the two went separate ways, never to see each other again. “Massai stood on the slope above Three Rivers and watched Gray Lizard walk away toward the White Sands.” This is the last that is known about Gray Lizard, one of the Tonkawa people from Oklahoma and Texas (“It is well known that the word Tonkawa means coward”). Massai finally returned home with a new wife—Zan-a-go-li-che, Begay’s mother—and was shot dead and burnt ten years later. Apparently, he was mistaken for Apache Kid, another Apache outlaw, and there are conflicting accounts about what happened to Massai’s severed head. Some said it was donated to Yale University, others said it was boiled—curiously similar to stories about Geronimo’s head, who was on view in many exhibitions across the country (including the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition in Omaha in 1898; the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York, in 1901; and the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904) after he gave up the war path. The whitewashing film Apache, inspired by Paul l. Wellman’s novel based on Massai’s life was out in 1954. The New York Times was once again mouthy and said the film was “slow and dull.” Some 30 years after, Baudrillard visited the US before coming up with his breathtaking book Amérique, about a country that is radically speedy and radically dull:

The only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance? A theoretical question here materialized in the objective conditions of a journey which is no longer a journey and therefore carries with it a fundamental rule: aim for the point of no return. This is the key.

…

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe.

Drive blind homie, is what Baudrillard could have said on the road. It is clear that Baudrillard’s America’s not Massai’s, nor mine. America is this magnificent desert: “Culture, politics—and sexuality too—are seen exclusively in terms of the desert, which here assumes the status of a primal scene. Everything disappears before that desert vision. Even the body, by an ensuing effect of undernourishment, takes on a transparent form, a lightness near to complete disappearance. Everything around me suffers this same desertification.” It could be Massai’s secret) It is blinding, “or some indifferent area,” which deems it appropriate for a visitor to return a kind of indifference, to return a kind of blindness. So indifferent is he, that it is not quite useful for him to examine or appreciate the particularities of this astral thing. It was not urgent or relevant to tell one sand from another, or to be guided by the stars.

Baudrillard despised a certain American move, as he should:

‘Breakdancing’ is a feat of acrobatic gymnastics. Only at the end do you realize it actually was dancing, when the dancer freezes into a lazy, languid pose (elbow on the ground, head nonchalantly resting in the palm of the hand, the pose you see on Etruscan tombs). The way they suddenly come to rest like this is reminiscent of Chinese opera. But the Chinese warrior comes to a halt at the height of the action in a heroic gesture, whereas the breakdancer stops at the slack point in his movements and the gesture is derisive. You might say that in curling up and spiralling around on the ground like this, they seem to be digging a hole for themselves within their own bodies, from which to stare out in the ironic, indolent pose of the dead.

I would never have believed that the New York marathon could move you to tears. It really is the end-of-the-world show. Can we speak of suffering freely entered into as we might speak of a state of servitude freely entered into? In driving rain, with helicopters circling overhead and the crowd cheering, wearing aluminium foil capes and squinting at their stop-watches, or bare-chested, their eyes rolling skywards, they are all seeking death, that death by exhaustion that was the fate of the first Marathon man some two thousand years ago. And he, let us not forget, was carrying a message of victory to Athens.

Fully acknowledging the stupidity intrinsic to breakdancing and marathon, I have to imagine Massai, a wanted man who walked with his friend for over a thousand miles in order to return, must have a different opinion. Three of Massai’s holes: 

Gray Lizard, who was carrying the water, fell against a prickly pear and tore a hole in the bag. Now they had no water, but they kept moving. They hoped to kill an antelope but did not see any although they were in antelope country. Massai was making medicine, and so was Gray Lizard. And Ussen heard, for soon a heavy rain began to fall. They made a hole in the ground to catch it.

…

In the Rinconada there is a little stream, grass, piñons, mesquite, and greasewood. Game abounded there. Difficult to reach from any point, it was a good place for Massai to hide. He found a cave near a little pool where the deer came to drink and began preparing for winter… He knew that he was not out of danger even in this wild, lonely spot… He was free—but terribly lonely. He knew that he would never see his wife and children again and also that his wife would think him dead and marry again.

I would like to, therefore, ponder the different spiritual and physical positions one assumes in relation to cavity, in both the breakdancer’s case and in Massai’s case. I would also like to, for the sake of experiencing a post-ancient America that is not pure and empty, think about Massai’s journey—an anti-marathon, anti-automobile journey that involves crawling, walking, starving, thirsting, fatiguing, spying, stealing, hunting, departing and returning. Returning, for example, as a married man, alive:

Massai may have slept, for a splash in the pool suddenly alerted him. Three young women were bathing in it. He did not move, for according to age-old tribal law spying upon women was punishable by death. Yet he watched fascinated as the girls bathed; they got out of the water, dressed, and took down their long hair and braided it. An idea possessed Massai. Already he had forfeited his life; he would take one of these young women. He jumped from his place of concealment and reached the startled girls.

Returning into disappearance, as a master tracker who followed directions and trails without leaving traces behind, whose trip was not as infinite as Baudrillard’s rides:

They headed ever toward the west, walking until they were tired and hungry, traveling mostly at night until they were out of the wooded country. Still sleeping or resting during the day, they moved on at night through open country. They found a trail where the deer came to water and killed one. They took all the meat they could carry and buried the rest. The stomach of the deer was cleaned for use as a water bag. I do not know how long it took them to get back to Rio Pecos, but it was a long time.

Baudrillard does not dream of Massai’s journey. He does not dream of climbing a mountain, hunting for food and praying to Ussen for water, while staying alert to make sure that he is not being tailed. He does not dream of approaching an antelope or a deer in order to cut it open and taste its warm flesh. He does not dream of being able to tell it’s the Pecos by the bad taste of the water. He does not dream of hunger (he sees poverty, however, as “a man eating alone in the heart of the city”), of an America that is not caught in the dichotomy of hedonistic versus ascetic (but Baudrillard knows danger: “You stop a horse that is bolting. You do not stop a jogger who is jogging. Foaming at the mouth, his mind riveted on the inner countdown to the moment when he will achieve a higher plane of consciousness, he is not to be stopped. If you stopped him to ask the time, he would bite your head off… Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him. He will either hit you or simply carry on dancing around in front of you like a man possessed.” Baudrillard’s America does not stop and does not return). I am not concerned with America or the Americans, but only with Lawton and Massai; mayhaps, America is the distance between Massai (did he ever dream of Baudrillard, or of me?) and Baudrillard, who was prompted by the advertisement industry to ask: “Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.” Unlike Massai who was surrounded by approaching, tangible threats and died in the hands of those who were determined to hunt him down, Baudrillard speaks of a peculiar kind of defence that has to do tangentially with Liu Guangli’s work:

In the end, they defend themselves with a lack of imagination. Even attempts to stimulate that imagination in films like The Last Day have not worked. Nothing has ever been able to make this nuclear scene—or obscenity—credible. With delicate matters like this (as with cancer), imagining death has the effect of bringing the fatal event closer. The masses’ silent indifference to nuclear pathos (whether it comes from the nuclear powers or from antinuclear campaigners) is therefore a great sign of hope and a political fact of the utmost importance.

It could be unfortunate that Baudrillard was not able to experience Massai’s odyssey (odyessy, what an ugly word. Baudrillard: “Tomorrow it will be Minneapolis with its sweet-sounding name, its gossamer string of vowels, half-Greek, half-Cheyenne,… What an amazing place America is! All around is Indian summer, its mildness presaging snow. But where are the ten thousand lakes, the Utopian dream of a hellenistic city on the edge of the Rockies? Minneapolis, Minneapolis!”) and die a slow, struggling death on the way (“The extermination of the Indians put an end to the natural cosmological rhythm of these landscapes, to which their magical existence was bound for millennia.”). It is clear to me today that I disconnects America (nothing was more American than a room full of computers and games), and it is finally not something I helplessly and restlessly think of. I implore Lawton to be the place where there is no love and even less death.

Chiricahua Apache warriors. Left to right: "Massai", "Apache Kid", and "Rowdy" pictured in a March 1886 photograph taken by C. S. Fly at Geronimo's camp

Obviously a map of Apache Prisoner-of-War Camps, 1886-1913