You do need mental self-management, though, as I’d already partially learned, to get through solitudes like the Kalahari successfully. Fear itself is not enough to fully sustain and occupy you. On the whole I think I did well, which would have amazed certain lightweight women at the American embassy whose name for me, I learned much later, was Party Lights, based on their interpretation of my way of life — lifestyle to them, no doubt — in Gabs.
I was nervous and so were my animals, postlion. I stumbled on singing as a means of calming them down. I was singing for myself, initially, and then noticed that it seemed to help the boys too, especially Mmo. This is ridiculous, but they seemed to prefer complete songs to fragments of songs strung together with humming. I discovered how few songs I knew in full and how few songs of the ones I did know I knew more than one verse of. I think I must have a more complete sense of my total song inventory than anyone else has of theirs, except for professional singers. I know roughly which songs I know only the choruses of. I know which songs I know but discovered I couldn’t stand to sing in the desert, You Are My Sunshine being a prime example of a song I loathed suddenly to which I had never had any objection previously. And there are other songs you have sung only halfheartedly in the past which in the desert suddenly give you peace and seem indispensable, like Die Gedanken Sind Frei. You are astonished at the number of separate songs that have gotten fused together in your mind in some manner that makes it impossible to separate them, à la What do you want for breakfast my good old man? What do you want for breakfast my honey my lamb? Even God is uneasy say the bells of Swansea. And what will you give me say the bells of Rhymney? And there were songs I knew in full and perfectly but which I had no recollection of ever paying attention to when they were popular, like Heart of Glass, now a favorite of mine forever. Songs help when you’ve under duress, which is undoubtedly why the Boer geniuses of cruelty forbid people in solitary confinement to sing.
I was singing so continuously that I began to find I disliked it when I stopped — I disliked that ambience. I was briefly an aide in a nursery school for neglected children, and the best-adapted, happiest, and smartest children in the place were three sisters who had been taken from a mother who kept them chained to a radiator so they would be safe while she was out circulating, and who when I asked them what they did all the time when they were alone said We sang. The inspiriting effect my singing had on my animals was not an illusion, and it reminds me now of the period when I was feeling depressed at how commonplace and rudimentary my dreams were compared to Denoon’s. He claimed to dream infrequently, but when he did, his dreams were like something by Fabergé or Kafka in their uniqueness. He would have noetic dreams, and when they were over he would be left in possession of some adage or percept that tells you something occult or fundamental about the world. One of these was the conviction he woke up with one morning that music was the remnant of a medium that had been employed in the depths of the past as a means of communication between men and animals — I assume man arrow animal and not ducks playing flutes to get their point across to man. Living with me made him more provisional about his dreams, especially after I compared one of his adages to a statement some famous surrealist was left with after dreaming, which he thought important enough to print up: Beat your mother while she’s still young. I would always make Denoon at least try to reduce his insights to a sentence or two. The fact is I laugh at dreams. They seem to me to be some kind of gorgeous garbage. I have revenge dreams, mainly, in which I tell significant figures from my past things like You have the brains of a drum. On I sang.
Is it absurd to be proud of your dreams, or not? Denoon was.
Poetry let me down. I elided into poetry from time to time and discovered that I knew a lot of it. My attitude toward rhymed poetry changed utterly. Respect was born. Except for Dover Beach there was almost nothing unrhymed in my inventory. I know quite a lot of Kipling. I know some Vachel Lindsay. Finally one stanza out of Elizabeth Bishop got hold of me and kept inserting itself between pieces of other poems, truculently. It maddened me both by its tenacity and by what it said: Far down the highway wet and black, I’ll ride and ride and not come back, I’m going to go and take the bus, and find someone monogamous. I used opera to drive this away.
Serious Trouble
Serious trouble began on the fourth or fifth day out. It happened because I was doing a thing I had been warned not to do in the desert: I was reviewing my life. Actually I was thinking about an aspect of my life, to wit, who would miss me the most if I was reported lost. Also I was thinking in general about how easy it would be to vanish physically in the Kalahari, how quickly you would turn into dust and be distributed, the usual. I had been advised by people like the lion man to keep my consciousness in my superfices, my skin and eyes and ears, my legs, to be a scanning mechanism and nothing else while I was in the desert. Also I had been told not to try to figure out everything that was odd that might happen to me, like an impulse to stand stockstill, which I had in fact had a couple of times but, naturally I need to point out, only after I had been apprised that this might happen to me. The reason I think I was letting my mind drift in these directions was that I was tired of the singing and chanting that had served me so well during the first leg of my madness. Also I had been told to forget all the Bushman notions I knew, the bizarre items. I hadn’t known what these were, but I was curious to know, so I’d bought more drinks for the lion man, whose face was lined so authoritatively you could faint. Apparently Bushmen say they can hear the sun burning, to which I say So what? The lion man had been touted to me as the ultimate authority on the Kalahari. He did look like an authority, but he was an authority who was living to drink, insofar as I could tell. The Bushmen say they can hear a faint hiss from the sun, he said, as I wondered if this was something he had thought up because he had me in front of him squinting for the truth about the Kalahari. There was a woman who knew everything I wanted to know, someone I would have trusted, she had lived in the Kalahari, but she was no longer around. She had become unwelcome to the government. One thing I am sure of is that the lion man dyes his hair. I had been oblique with the lion man about whether I myself was actually going into the Kalahari, but he knew.
Just after breaking camp in the morning and going through agonies over whether I was giving enough water to the boys — we had missed at least one water point and were doing rations — I thought I heard a short sharp noise that must be a gunshot: like the lion roar, just the one event. Was this an everyday natural thing no one bothers to investigate? We were in a very barren area. When the sound came I felt faint. But then nothing. We proceeded again.