Skinny Legs and All (58 page)

Everybody was shocked, even the unshockable. Yet nobody acted to stop the performance. Nobody. And Salome went on whirling and dipping and swooping and arching, and each time that she arched, they found themselves looking into the prettiest and pinkest little slit that anyone could ever imagine, its folds delicate and mysterious, its tiny stinger aimed at them like the gun barrel of a felonious orchid, the curly pelt around it as sleek and moist as the welcome mat at the Bermuda Triangle Hilton.

The veil had not lain long on the floor when Ellen Cherry began to . . . well, to receive ideas. Spontaneously, without preamble, things occurred to her; thoughts entered her mind, one might say, except that they were both more vivid and full-formed than the thoughts that she was accustomed to entertaining, and they were permeated with information that she hadn’t realized that she possessed. It was as if they were somebody else’s thoughts, zapped by ray into her brain, where instantly they took hold and became her own.

Earth, it occurred to her, was a sexual globe. Unique, in a solar system of dead rocks, snowballs, and gasbags, Earth was a theater, a rotating stage upon which a thin green scum of organic life acted out countless, continual scenes whose content, whether explicit or oblique, was almost wholly sexual. In the biospherical epic, the players were either Seed Packages or Egg Cartons (a few versatile actors such as the amoeba could perform both roles, but it was a dying art), and the scenery, props, and costumes were designed to enhance or facilitate the coming together of hero seed and heroine egg. The colors, the smells, and the sounds of organic things had evolved as sexual attractants, created to keep the trillion romantic plots moving toward a trillion more-or-less happy endings. Recent observations of the behavior patterns of bonding molecules showed that even on the molecular level, intricate and tricky courtships were constantly transpiring: there was molecular rejection, for example, and presumably molecular heartbreak. Within a broad age span, sexually inactive organisms—plant, animal, molecular, or human—could be said to be aberrations, freakish or pathological misfits out of tune with the harmony of life.

Despite an often ostentatious masculine display that would indicate otherwise, the sexual drama (or melodrama or farce) was largely, historically, directed by the female. That was particularly true among human beings, in which species the male had gone to ludicrous and often violent lengths to compensate for what struck the more insecure of men as an inferior sexual role. One of the lengths to which they went was the establishment of patriarchal religion and the recasting of a father figure as the producer of the show, although from the very beginning, the cosmogonic principal had been feminine. Those men, envious and anxious, not only fired the Great Goddess (who smiled upon all manner of sexual expression, including that which moderns were to label “promiscuous” and “pornographic"), but they also spent thousands of years and billions of dollars trying to conceal the fact of her existence.

And this further thought occurred to Ellen Cherry after the falling aside of Salome’s first veil: that whenever society demonstrated signs of rediscovering the goddess, of returning to more feminine value systems, the patriarchally conditioned psyche generated diseases, literal diseases such as syphilis in the hotly romantic nineteenth century and, in the wake of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, AIDS. Those diseases were caused not by sexual license but by the
fear
of sexual license, by the conservative DNA’s inability to adjust to hedonism; and they were compounded by guilt over the suppression of the Great Mother and the denial of the sensuality with which she so frequently underscored her coexistence with the void. Eventually, AIDS was destined to run its deadly course, however, and eventually every manner of carnal play would go back into full production, for like it or not, gentlemen, that was the way of her world.

Yes, that’s it!
thought Ellen Cherry Charles.

Yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh

Yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh

Zop de bango zee whee winga

Eh, eh-eh, eh eh haiii

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper. This is the room where the boys slept inside their blowguns to avoid being bitten by the bats, for whom the girls sewed tiny velvet suits.

Vulva exposed and sweetly agape, Salome danced on, whirling and arching, until, after another twenty minutes or so, a second veil was pulled loose and tossed gracefully to the floor. This veil had covered her waist and belly, a belly that seemed at once round and flat, a haptic demimound already familiar to her fans, although until that moment they had never drawn dew from the saucy well of its bare navel. Almost immediately, Ellen Cherry received another intellectual transmission.

“Human beings do not have dominion over the plants and animals.” That was the message that seemed to flash on her mental screen.

Human beings did not have dominion over the plants and animals. Every daisy in the field, every anchovy in the bay had an identity just as strong as her own, and a station in life as valuable as hers. To disrupt the daily lives of trees and beasts, to take the lives of trees and beasts (except when necessary for basic shelter and sustenance), to drive whole species of trees and beasts, to extinction was arrogant, profane, and ultimately a boomerang honed for suicide.

Plants and animals—perhaps even minerals and inanimate objects—were in partnership with humans. Moreover, they, not us, were the senior partners, as a result of their experience and their perfection. Plants, especially the psychoactive vines and fungi, had a great deal to teach humanity; in fact, if humanity hoped to evolve rapidly enough to keep philosophically apace with its technological advances, the expeditious and postverbal insights provided by psychotropic vegetation might well be its only salvation. In any case, the welfare and wishes of the inhuman must be taken into consideration by any civilization with legitimate chances for survival, although the issue was not merely pragmatic but moral and aesthetic. Humanity was a function of nature. It could not, therefore, live separately from nature except in a self-deceiving masquerade. It could not live in opposition to nature except in a schizophrenic crime. And it could not blind itself to the wonders of nature without mutating into something too monstrous to love.

Yes, that’s it!
thought Ellen Cherry.

Yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh

Yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh

Wop za zeena za-za

Eh, eh-eh, eh eh eeeng

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper. The room swept by a broom made from language. A room where the dust mice are as luminous as grapes.

The third purple cloth to float free from the whirling form of the dancing girl—Salome was whirling more now and arching less—had been wound about her neck and shoulders. Sure enough, as it settled upon the floor, like the filmy soul of a dirty sock landing in a polyester paradise where such earthly woes as toe jam and clothes dryers were only bad memories; sure enough, as it settled in a gossamer heap near the scuffed black shoes of the mesmerized Shaftoe, Ellen Cherry felt another brainful coming on.

She understood suddenly, and for no particular reason of which she was aware, that it was futile to work for political solutions to humanity’s problems because humanity’s problems were not political. Political problems did exist, all right, but they were entirely secondary. The primary problems were philosophical, and until the philosophical problems were solved, the political problems would have to be solved over and over and over again. The phrase “vicious circle” was coined to describe the ephemeral effectiveness of almost all political activity.

For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one’s holdings and legitimize one’s greed. But both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion.

The monkey wrench in the progressive machinery of primate evolution was the propensity of the primate band to take its political leaders—its dominant males—too seriously. Of benefit to the band only when it was actively threatened by predators, the dominant male (or political boss) was almost wholly self-serving and was naturally dedicated not to liberation but to control. Behind his chest-banging and fang display, he was largely a joke and could be kept in his place (his place being that of a necessary evil) by disrespect and laughter. If, for example, when Hitler stood up to rant in the beer halls of Munich, the good drinkers had taken him more lightly, had they, instead of buying his act, snickered and hooted and pelted him with sausage skins, the Holocaust might have been avoided.

Of course, as long as there were willing followers, there would be exploitive leaders. And there would be willing followers until humanity reached that philosophical plateau where it recognized that its great mission in life had nothing to do with any struggle between classes, races, nations, or ideologies, but was, rather, a personal quest to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain. On that quest, politics was simply a roadblock of stentorian baboons.

Exactly! Yes, that’s right!
thought Ellen Cherry.

Eeena eeena eeena eeena

Eh eh-eh eeena whop

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper. The room where volcanoes filled the ashtrays with their fine cinders, and the keyhole itself was a fumarole.

By her own admission, art was the lone subject in which Ellen Cherry was at all educated (unless one counted waitressing, and, of course, one could not count waitressing). It could be said that she was a specialist. Or, less charitably, charged that she was as much of an idiot savant as Boomer Petway. Outside of the realm of the artistic, she’d been a bit of a ditz. Yet, she felt now as if she had reached an understanding in several significant areas, had reached it suddenly, effortlessly; had reached it—and this was the queerest part—during the hour and twenty minutes that she had spent watching Salome dance. If there was a connection between the revelations and the dancing, she could not conceive of it. She had to admit that the girl, despite her snotty disposition and skinny legs, was amazing, whirling like that for well over an hour, but Salome’s impact certainly was not on the
mind
. In fact, the girl was making her rather horny, she who had never been tempted by other women before. And that made it all the more extraordinary that she was simultaneously entertaining big abstract thoughts. Only they weren’t self-generated thoughts so much as they were—Well, it was as if a coating of something was being peeled off of her corneas and she was seeing things for which the eye game had barely prepared her.

It occurred to Ellen Cherry then that not one customer had ordered so much as a glass of water in a very long while. She wondered if they, too, were receiving wisdom from the Dance of the Seven Veils; if anybody else was hosting those verbose epiphanies. From face to face she glanced. They were definitely absorbed. That surly old black detective appeared absolutely paralyzed, his can of Maccabee welded to his lips. And Dr. Farouk, who’d slipped in from the courtyard between quarters to take a quick peek at Salome, had frozen in his steps, his fez-topped bulk blocking the passageway. Above the sound of the orchestra it was difficult to hear clearly, but indications were that the Super Bowl crowd out back was hectic and merry compared to the almost reverential mood of those indoors. Still, it was impossible for Ellen Cherry to ascertain if anyone was sharing her insights. To do so, maybe one would have had to have been recently exposed to close encounters with a spoon.

Eeena eeena eeena eeena

Eh eh-eh eeena zop

A fourth veil came undone, circled several times the gyrating torso of the dancer (it had somehow been wrapping both of her arms) like a gaseous cloud of star stuff orbiting a galaxy, before finally breaking the gravitational attraction and wafting toward a new home on the edge of the bandstand. Ellen Cherry understood then that religion was an improper response to the Divine.

Religion was an attempt to pin down the Divine. The Divine was eternally in flux, forever moving, shifting shape. That was its nature. It was absolute, true enough: absolutely mobile. Absolutely transcendent. Absolutely flexible. Absolutely impersonal. It had its god and goddess aspects, but it was ultimately no more male or female than it was star or screwdriver. It was the sum of all those things, but that sum could never be chalked on a slate. The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren’t content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions (anger, jealousy, etc.) to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago.

The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world.

Thus, since religion bore false witness to the Divine, religion was blasphemy. And once it entered into its unholy alliance with politics, it became the most dangerous and repressive force that the world has ever known.