He’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when He comes
When He comes
O He’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when He comes
When He comes
O He’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain, He’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain, He’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when He comes
O when He comes
He’ll be ridin’ six white donkeys when He comes…
As for this mountain she’s singing about, listen up: in our lifetime it’s winding down, eroding, been sanded away…today, it’s just another mesa, if a mesa made special, sacred, not in its appearance under any light whether of night or day or else in any other apparency, but only as it’s a landmark spiritual, a placemarker, as it’s said — the site of an emergence, onto the shores of our world. You following. Stay with me. Now, be you chaver or chazer, this here is the harder world, be ye warned, a dimensioned world, textured, heavy-fingered and greedy of palm, it touches all surfaces, strokes: its topography one of pain, of sorrow and suffering, but it’s also another opportunity, after those of their worlds previously squandered — realize the plan or prepare for yet another destruction. All of you with husks in your ears, with shells over your eyes, you’ve been warned. Ignore at your own peril, gringo, Bahana — you White Mensch from Across the Water whose appearance, it’s said, means the end of this world, marks the beginning of the next, whatsoever it be, they hope good and soon.
In the beginning of it All how they, too, had their own void, believe it, space without form, everyone did, each to their own, the same, equal and endless. Then — we appeared…we appear only in order for the world to have appeared to us, and so it follows — dispersion; their Eden already a diaspora: they emerge from the water onto the land to be robbed. Their womenfolk raped. Their legacy up in unproverbial smoke. A noise comes from behind a star: a siren, civilization’s cry, which destroys, decrees future governance; over the mountains, the bleat of the cavalry’s horn — it’s the voice of the God of the Universe, Nature Itself saying to them, go forth: follow each your own star…and then when that star stops, wheresoever it might end or fall, settle there, this is what I’ve decided. And so they make their migrations, four ways to the wind. That’s their myth, no stranger than any other, admit it. They’re the Hopi, the unchosen chosen. Welcome to their world, dwell in peace. Reservations unnecessary, hunt yourself into a quarter, gather, and settle. Pitch your wander. Make yourself at home.
What you should expect: to begin with, the color of this world is yellowed white, its tree the juniper, its bird the owl as wise as age, perched on its winged laurels; its animal the mountain lion that paces starving and droughted, inexorably tracking its prey elusive if not yet extinct through what are called the pasos, which are the four directional arms of the Great Swastika, north, south, east, and west: these the very routes of the Hopi dispersion, their camp to be centered at this, the apex of the bent cross, the dead middle of this peopled line. Here is the seat of the planet’s rotation, the spiritual magnet that once attracted the New Aging rabbis’ sisters and thinhaired, wireglassesed aunts out from Angels, Desert Hot Springs, Arizona’s rocks Bell and Cathedral, Sedona and its outlied environs, and even parts aged further east — here the intersection of the vibrations of the Twins, the Hopi deities of our fallen equator. From here, the middle of the map that is the Swastika, the migration can be mirrored in two directions: there were the Hopi who’d turned right, the clans of the Bear, the Eagle, Fire and Water, Whatever, That One, Why Not, and Sure; while those who’d turned left provide for the reflection of the form: the clans of the Crow, the Bluebird, the Butterfly, What He Said, Without a Doubt, Definitely, Absolutely, You Got It…others still splintering off from the Swastika, to live apart, in inhuman cities and outerboroughs, in godless Developments scattered to the judgment of every scarcity’s wind. This reflection into four arms symbolizes, too, the quadrants of the worlds, those quadrantworlds destroyed — all of us living despite our wander within the meaning of the last square, its intent the greater, the darkest. Cradled in the bosom of the swastika. Confined by the total wall of this cross.
Among us, her…Kuskuska, otherwise known as Jane. In Hopi, it means Lost: named after the locus of our previous existence, the world from which we’ve just fallen; known, don’t ask why, as Kuskurza. She waits in the line, which is according to many, if you ask them and even if you don’t, the longest, most crowded arm of the swastika, to the liquorstore and from it, impatient for it to open after its enforced Shabbos closing, sitting sidesaddle on the recliner in the flatbed its tire now replaced, her feet surrounded by wildflowers, sienna and sepia dead. She stops her singing only to mock a yodel at Kokuiena, also known as Dick, her kin at the wheel and not going anywhere, idling, wasting gas, exhorts him to just honk the horn, will you, spook the horses, those strawberry roans and pregnant rasps she’s sure are to blame for slowing everything down up ahead; how she won’t turn around, though, and face front to get an idea of what lies in store, or else to envy, to covet those closer: how she only faces the rear and smiles her fortune despite bad dentistry at the poor parching behind her. A noxious wind’s up, waft of el chupacabra’s stank breath, the icy abrego of a season displaced, thick with sand and debris, fear and hate, and, God, when you think about it, the next world isn’t the last of the worlds or her problems, they won’t be…there are more to come, too many, she’s had it already, enough. We’ll never make it, not us. Kokuiena leans out the window and turns to Kuskuska and asks her with his sorrel eyes, pleadingly, like I know all that myth shtick and the government and the wars, hymn, unemployment, privation, martyrology’s ganze geschichte but, nu, sis, how’d we ever end up like this. Worlded. Take a number. Get in line. But Kuskuska’s lost in her own, thinking maybe, just maybe, give me one good why not and she’ll light out for Phoenix: temping receptionist, secretary, maybe get into the hospitality racket, a moon or two getting settled and who knows she might even make waitress or maid, the aboriginal who checks coats; anything to get out of here, far enough away from Hotevilla and environs and, gevalt, she has no idea how to even begin telling her brother a thing like that.
Kokuiena, bareboned, knifecheeked, with sockets shadowing the pale, the rashraised stubbled chin, the shallow chest heaving its fluish sigh, paws his ponytail, then takes it around his neck to his mouth to suck on its tip; it helps him remember the prophecy: how he’d been called, by the Chief over to the public telephone eavesdropped upon by the immortal operator, She of the 0 sunning out over Holbrook, frozenly nooned in the sky a hundred or so unmarked unmade miles away, past Oraibi Old and New and its mesas and their secrets he was told what would happen and then, the extension just died, beep beep beep and please press # for interpretation, a pounding…how a voice he’d never heard before deep and grave, yet un-characteristically white, had told him about a member of a foreign tribe headed this way, and had mentioned a reward, said it would be a formidable service, then described a Bahana named Ben, a Redeemer, a white mensch who, and it’s not like he’s sure how, is not a white mensch: a paleface with a red heart and lips blue from the cold who’d one day arrive in the plaza, who’d show up when one notch knifed into the stick — the last line past the last day, a moon from now with the tribe entire, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters all out to welcome this Messiah, imagined, their arms out laden with greetings, with gifts, here at Yellow Stone, there at Pointed Rock, Where the Ray of the Sun Goes Over the Line to the Place, south of Oraibi proper. He’s been tasked to search for this Ben, He Who Comes In Peace we’ve been waiting for for so long — and so what, to scout around, to ask questions, follow trails, which is futzed: tradition says He’ll come to us, not us to Him…how unexpectedly, He’ll arrive in the Plaza, which one you’ll know on that day when, middance and with the fire tamped down, the Tourist Kachina will remove its mask in front of the uninitiated kinder: a star shining brightly blond, the elders all masked in their finest white rubber, their eyes’ slits rounded and rung in corny plastic, threechinned husky, falsified faces grinning widely to expose an endless imitation ivory dentition, their dark naked torsos below bedecked in photographic and video equipment, bandoliers of film canisters, in their hands they’ll wield rainbow umbrellas while dancing dementedly, opening and closing their thrusts and parries upon thuds of foot raising the dust of the earth — this Kachina an advanced incarnation of their only spiritual future, lately channeled to this world not out of a wanting for myth, or from any metaphysical need, but because that’s what the audiences pay for, that’s what the tourists demand; and then, how there will be no more ceremonies, there’ll be no more faith, and, after a time, the elders say the wheel will renew itself, that it must, and then…how it’ll begin all over again, shakily spoked, the crossed axle of the baldest tire — another emergence, meaning other migrations…and these outlining an even greater swastika, another settling — and yet another death. Would you believe it. Who ever heard.