Article I translated, in Shaman's Drum

[Woodpecker]

Hi All,

One of several cool things about being me is, you occasinally get to translate really amazing pieces of writing. Check this one out on the newsstand or bookstore if it's in your town. I'm posting the first half of the article here; perhaps this will help turn someone on to the great magazine Shaman's Drum, which has been the print media voice of entheogenic and non-entheogenic shamanism in the United States for about 20 years. I have a hunch a number of you know it already.

The author of this piece, Miguel Angel Cabodevilla, is a Capuchin priest, born in Spain and currently living there again, who spent thirteen years in the rainforest working in education and on preservation of native cultures.

In a way, Cabodevilla is an unlikely missionary, with his admiration for traditional indigenous thought. In Quito, I asked him, "So, when you were in the jungle, you talked to them sometimes about the life and miracles of Jesus?" He looked at me steadily and said, "I never MENTIONED Jesus!"

Fernando Payaguaje, the yage drinker of this narrative’s title, was the last of the shaman-chiefs of the Ecuadorian branch of the Secoya tribe, a group which today numbers about 350. For more about him, see "Ayahuasca Reader," edited by Luis Eduardo Luna and Steven F. White. His autobiography, "El bebedor de yage," which he dictated to his grandsons, and which Cabodevilla edited, is available in Spanish from Ediciones CICAME, Ecuador.

Love and peace,
Nathan Horowitz "Woodpecker"

The Drinker's Visions

Miguel Angel Cabodevilla

I knew I would never see him again, alive or dead. He had yielded me his hammock, with the exquisite courtesy that always characterized him. With a silence so close to grief, I observed all his movements, trying to make of them a photo album in my mind, trying to win over death the illusory victory of memory. The cavernous cough that sounded in his chest was like termites hollowing him out inside.

He shuffled across the dirt floor of his hut and let himself down on a low wooden stool. A silence fell, in which I could hear the rusty bellows of his lungs. The old man squeezed yoco vine scrapings in water in a gourd. The water turned dark red, like old blood.

"Drink," he said to me. "This awakens the mind and cheers the heart." It was extremely bitter, I drank it slowly. "Listen, it's the.…" He told me the Secoya name for a bird, which I didn't retain. I could hear its call near the hut. "It sings every so often. My grandson, who wears a watch, says it sings on the hour. Now it's singing for the last time before going to sleep. Night is falling."

Yes, I could see that on his face too. His eyes were dimming, and his movements had the slowness of those whom death has selected. The mind's light dissolves like mist; darkness is coming. Soon he will rest in the hands of the greedy shadows. If sorrow put light in one’s eyes instead of tears, mine would be glowing like fireflies.

"You know, even my great-grandson Adonis, who's still so young, wears a watch. I ask myself, what's the use of that jewelry in the jungle? Why do people try to control time, as if they were gringos? That's something the Secoyas shouldn't worry about. Machine time is not our time."

Again he squeezed the scrapings of the bitter vine over the darkened gourd of liquid. He liked it more concentrated, this stimulant that strummed his nerves like guitar strings and left them humming, so sensitive that he could feel the spirits passing by around him. On another occasion, he had told me, "You know how those things they call radios catch voices out of the air that we humans can't hear? A good drinker is like that. Even if he only drinks yoco, he can sense the movements of angels."

In those days I used to smile benevolently when I heard him say things like that. They seemed lovely and absurd, belonging to a quaint superstition that had found its last bastion in this stubborn old man. But in time, I found that the way he expressed himself was no stranger than the way we Catholics do, experts as we are in lost languages.

"Once a gringo tried to explain to me what a watch is for. He said the mystery of time is contained in there. He told me the first clocks were made with sand enclosed in glass chambers. They turned it upside down, the sand fell: that was time! 'What kind of game is that? I don't understand it,' I told him. What's the point of measuring that enclosed sand? It must be because those people love numbers. They love to count everything. They see a flock of parrots and they say, 'How many are there?' Truth is in numbers for them, it seems."

Fernando laughs, coughs again.

"The gringo saw I could barely understand him. He was a nice guy, but I didn't follow his way of thinking; he thought I was a little dense. So he put his hand on my chest and said, 'Whether you want to wear a machine for measuring time on your wrist or not, you have another one in here anyway: your heart. It ticks like a clock, counting time, and when the time runs out, you die.' I laughed really hard then, because that surprised me. Maybe he really thought I was an ignorant child. He explained things to me slowly, gesturing a lot, as if to a toddler. It was no use debating with him because we were talking without understanding each other. According to what I've learned, life doesn't depend on the heart, but on the spirits that can cut the heart's thread. When all is said and done, neither time nor even life ends, as the gringo thought, it's just that we have to leave things behind, we have to change in order to live somewhere else. We can't remain motionless in one place."

He looked me in the eyes and I knew he was talking about himself, about his next voyage. It was a leave-taking. Seated very low, his legs were dark, gnarled vines, like those of yage, *emerging from his faded blue tunic.

"The gringos are always in a hurry, just like the heart that beats endlessly. I told that gringo something I'd thought of, and he laughed a little, it seemed funny to him, though I’m not sure he understood. Many of those songs I hear on my grandsons' radios talk about love. According to the songs, whites love with that heart that beats fast and changes. Every so often they love different things or people. The gringo laughed when I told him this: the Quichuas *say that people love with the liver. It's calmer, without bursts of speed like the heart. Maybe that's why Indian love lasts longer, because we don't believe in that time machine. Well, I realized I was speaking a language different from his, it was hard for us to understand each other. But from time to time I remember that conversation. I don't think there's any reason to count all the sand on the beach—why bother?—or the minutes either. Could I possibly add one more to my life by counting them? We Secoyas say: Tomorrow is another day; every day the sun rises; we'll have time to live if the spirits don't finish us off."

A whole world populated by spirits is going to disappear with this old man. Few will know about it beyond the obsessive frontier of the jungle, within the brilliant and destructive current of Western civilization; perhaps it will be considered a minor loss, the weeding out of superstitions. Fernando is leaving as if on tiptoe. Perhaps we can perceive in him the solitude of the last tree of its kind in the middle of the jungle, feeling the impossibility of any resistance because progress has decreed its extermination without even stopping to include it in the file of extinct rainforest species.

Our civilization is less the accumulation of all forms of knowledge than their simplification. Fernando Payaguaje is the last healer of an innumerable dynasty of past centuries, but where does his wisdom fit among us now? His people numbered in the thousands at the time of the Spanish conquest, and now finds itself reduced to not many dozens. Fernando is erudite in three languages—Secoya, Spanish, and Quichua—and illiterate in all of them. He never learned to read or write. He had only the power of his mind and his words. Now his age has decreed his last days, which he accepts with the greatest dignity. With his death, an immense library of knowledge is going to be consumed in the fire of oblivion.

"I've told my daughter Maruja many times how I want to be buried. She's gone over to the preachers, the Evangelicals, and she doesn't remember our traditions. You have to prepare a drinker well at his death. Dress him in a new tunic, tie fragrant nuni *leaves to his arms, paint his face with the sacred designs. He's going on the great voyage and he has to look his best. Dig a nice deep hole beneath his house. Drive a wooden post into the ground at each end and hang his hammock between them. Lay his body there, and put some clothing and personal articles to one side. I've told her this many times, but I'd like it if you'd tell her as well, because she respects you too. Don't ever put my body in a box of nailed boards like a white man!"

"I'll tell her, Fernando. Your family will bury you like you told them."

"The roof over the hole should be of split bamboo, and over it, they should put some old blankets so dirt doesn't get in. This should all be done carefully, because a drinker with power is inside, a chief. I'm not just anybody, like those people who die and then linger on as ghosts. It's very important that the hole be as deep as I am tall, because I'm going to get to my feet and leave on my own. That's why they must put only a little dirt over the blankets, just enough to cover them."

The gentle rocking of my hammock symbolizes my vacillation. I'm afraid to ask the question that he might be expecting.

"Fernando, you've spoken to me on several occasions about death. You've told me how you want to be buried, but, are you afraid of the last moment?"

"I've said this before: why is it called the last moment? That's how the whites talk. I say, is the snake afraid to shed his skin? I don't think so. He just comes out more brilliant."

Fernando smiles at me. "I understand. You're white. You believe in God like I do, but your people's anxiety has got you down."

"Why do you say that?"

"I've always been a wanderer. Our people are like that. We lived free in the endless jungle. The Secoya didn't like to live tied to any one place, like a parrot tied by one foot in its owner's house. He was never able to be a prisoner in a village—those cages where they put men like domesticated animals. For us, the earth was never a prison. It wasn't just to cultivate, but to live on, too. If a man doesn't fly, if he doesn't walk, he doesn't know anything. Secoyas never liked to go around with their wings clipped. We're not whites, who live as prisoners of a field, of a village, of authority. They live like trees, planted, immobile. We walk around. They spend their days defending themselves from everything, so they're full of fear. We used to go around naked, and we could build our house anywhere we liked. They say 'This is mine,' and there they stay, planted, defending it, but in the end, they're prisoners. People who spend their lives imprisoned by something so small, how could they not fear death? All my life I've wandered the jungle. Now I'll travel beyond."

"You have no doubt of that?" I expected the old man's laugh before I finished the question. I'd asked it before and he'd always found it funny. This time, though, his cough cut it like a scissors and I heard the rasp of his lungs.

"You doubt because you haven't seen. The preachers only talk about what they read in a book. They say God wrote it. I don't know, maybe that's how their God is. The one I know doesn't write. I've spent my life trying to get to know the truth, what there is behind this appearance we live in, because we're little figures moved by the hidden threads of the spirits."

"How did you learn?"

"I studied with the greatest wizards when I was young. I followed all the rules for the apprenticeship. I suffered a lot, but worse than the suffering was the fear of going insane or dying from drinking those plant potions. Little by little I got to know the hidden side of life, of this fabric woven by spirits. But the truth was not even there, but beyond; there was a God beyond there. That's why I drank a lot. I drank the strongest and most dangerous potions to be able to reach the place of the dead, the land of God."

"You wanted to be a great healer."

"If I had the courage to suffer through it, it wasn't only to have the power to heal the sick. I also wanted to find the most direct path to that ultimate world. It makes me laugh when you ask if I'm afraid to die. How could I be afraid, when I've already been there so many times? I've had conversations with my dead relatives and ridden canoes with them along the infinite body of water on whose bank they live. To die is to travel, and I know the way."

Could this be called superstition? Certainly, if we admit that it has a definite resemblance to all other mental constructions with which people of all cultures laboriously try to close the black hole of nothingness. More than once, I've seen some tourist smile at one of Fernando's sayings. The passerby considers him as belonging to an ancient stage in the evolution of thought, precivilized, when people were content to elaborate their ignorance and erect absurd idols to it. This old man, who talks like a true mystic, and has made of his life such a marvelous exercise in equilibrium and logic, was reviled years ago by my fellow priests as a stupid, demented madman. "How is a drunk like you going to see God? You don't even know the true God exists! Get out of here, go home. When you're sober you'll talk like a human being," they said to him—that's written in the mission chronicles. I shudder again to think how close fanaticism is to religious searching.

"I think I have a strong enough spirit to leave the grave after death. That hole will be left empty, while I go off to meet the powerful spirits who live in the real world, the ones who never get tired or die."

Fernando is looking at me with a peace in his eyes that leaves me stupefied.

*

The night falls like a youth falling asleep: improvisatorily, and into a deep abyss. Some bats urgently weave the first shadows around the hut. Fernando silently bakes plantains on the embers of the fire. His wife Lucrecia does not arrive. Perhaps hers is one of the voices that drift through the air like a prayer of impassioned birds expressing fear, supplication, or fragility. It's the sound of the culto, the evangelical prayer meeting, to which most of the Secoyas of San Pablo de Cantesiaya are devoted. The songs are in their language, in their words, but for Fernando, they have none of the Secoya spirit. They sing, "Oh Lord, you are our refuge and our rock, you sustain our life!" The melody is from the United States, as are the concepts behind the words. Later it will be time for personal testimonies, then more hypnotic hymns with the hands held high in the air, then preaching by the pastor, Elias, the drinker's nephew. The songs resound among the shadows: "Hallelujah! You bring us to the fountain of life!"

Fernando seems not to be listening. He's sitting on his haunches, immobile, chewing slowly. I can barely see his silhouette before the low glow of the embers. "Lord, our shield in danger, honor and glory to you, hallelujah!" What solitude, that of the old drinker besieged simultaneously by civilization and the God of the whites, isolated in this decrepit hut by the Aguarico River. This hunched ruin is all that seems to remain of a spiritual edifice raised carefully over the course of centuries by a numerous people who occupied the fertile lowlands of the Napo, Aguarico and Putumayo Rivers. I feel an enormous sadness for this figure of a man in repose, in defeat; fragility so stubborn and lordly. When tourists and scientists approach him, they are usually solicitous, and they display the impenetrable armor of Western thought. They observe the old man, they study him, they photograph him, with the polite deference that entomologists employ before a fragile, unknown insect; perhaps with the fascination felt in the presence of a mummified culture, valuable above all for its rarity, as precious as it is absurd. He talks of life and wisdom, and they tape record his sayings for the collection of a museum.

"Hey, Fernando," I say. "What do you think about those prayers?"

"The Secoyas are in the hands of the preachers now."

"Could that be a good thing?"

"Yes, maybe so. But people should know their own spirit, and the world of spirits, instead of living so ignorant of everything. Our people had a knowledge they've forgotten today. The kids even joke about it. Will they be able to get it back somehow? *I wonder about that. My nephew Elias is a preacher. But his father was the yage cook when we all lived in the Cuyabeno lagoons. He'd cook all day. At dusk the clay trumpet would sound. That meant it was time for purification. Neither the body nor the spirit is always clean; then it was time for yage, the Secoyas' ceremony. Everyone bathed and painted himself, then brought his hammock to my home or to the yage lodge in the forest. We drank, we vomited: that's how you purify, that's how you improve yourself."

"Do you think this is the same thing?"

"No, because it's just words. They hear, but what do they see? Where do they voyage to? They talk and they talk, but they can't heal. They don't have the power because they haven't been to the dwellings of the demons that send sicknesses. The preachers talk pretty, but they've seen nothing and they don't have the power to transform anything."

"Do you argue with them?"

"Never. A healer doesn't fight. Plus, they haven't even been initiated. Which one of them has seen God? They only repeat what a book says. I, on the other hand, spoke about what I had seen with my own eyes. I didn't tell stories, I brought people with me on my voyages, learning, perceiving God. It can't be the same thing. But the Secoyas have chosen another path. Even my cook became an Evangelical. That's why I haven't drunk yage for twenty years."

Fernando observes me. Despite the darkness, I can feel the intensity of his eyes trained to look through bodies as if they were glass, that perception his enemies feared years ago because they felt it sometimes in their dreams with the murderous gleam of a predatory beast.

"Does the change make you sad?"

"I'm only sorry I have no one to teach. Sometimes that makes me sad. What I've learned could have saved the people from a lot of pain. I suffered a lot to get all that knowledge! I would have liked to teach one of my children or grandchildren, but they haven't wanted to learn."

The old drinker listens to the evangelical songs rivaling the peeping of the frogs, the chirping of crickets. Most of the village is over there. He is as solitary as one of those jaguars in which he could incarnate when he was a powerful drinker.

"Will they survive? I don't know. My old teachers used to tell me a lot about the Secoyas' God, before I was able to travel to his home, sit in his hammock, talk with him. It's not easy to find the way there, not even drinking yage. Your body has to be fit and ready. People who don't watch what they eat, or are gluttonous or lazy, never have good visions or travel far. The drinker's body should be used to suffering. I stayed away from my wife for many nights, observed strict dietary taboos and fasted for days before the ceremony. If your body's not prepared, you vomit up everything you've drunk and the visions aren't strong or sustained, just confused fragments. You lose the true path and the demons appear. That's why you have to suffer, drink a lot, courageously follow that long path that ends at God's door. Only then do you have real visions, sing the words of the living beings, converse with the dead, talk with the spirits of the animals and plants. We Secoyas used to drink a lot to learn the secrets of everything. Will they get it now just with words? I pity them."

He falls silent. The evangelical song surrounds us again, a strange musical aura that surrounds the drinker like a halo of isolation and exile.

"When the gringo preacher came to Cuyabeno he told us yage was poison, the devil's drink. He frightened people, and he gave away huge numbers of gifts to attract them to his teaching. He swore the drink caused death and put devils inside people who drank it. But, look, after having drunk whole gardens of yage, I'm the oldest one around. I've lived so long my hair's turned gray. I've witnessed the burials of many of those evangelical singers, including Cecilio, my old cook. And I cured many people before the foreigners' pills came in. Why would the preacher lie like that? I never said he was the devil's friend. I don't see anything wrong with our youth learning other customs, but they should learn ours first or they'll be dominated by the others. Then there will come a moment when they ask themselves, Who am I? And they'll suffer a great confusion."

"Maybe they already do."

"When I came here to San Pablo I missed yage. But since the Evangelicals came in, there's no one who can cook it well for me. I've drunk so much and liked it so much! Not for the sake of drinking it, as it's very bitter, but for the visions, for the knowledge. Sometimes these days I get to thinking, Why am I doing this? Am I just living for the sake of living, not knowing how to find the truth? Then I feel an exhaustion of the body, not wanting to endure any more. It's the need for yage."

Fernando gets to his feet, walks haltingly toward his sleeping place. On that hardened ground he places two soft pieces of llanchama, a bark that becomes a spongy fabric when pounded. He takes off his tunic, lies down on his back, and covers himself with a frayed blanket. "Do you want to talk, or are you going to bed?"

"Are you going to sleep?"

"Not yet. The older I get, the less I sleep. As in the old days of my apprenticeship as a drinker isolated in the forest, I witness all the moments of the night. When I drift off, my sleep is so thin that any sound can break the layer that covers me and wake me up again. I lie in bed or walk around the house while others sleep, always thinking. I bet my wife won't come home tonight, she'll sleep at her daughter's after that meeting they call 'culto.' What do you want to talk about?"

"Tell me one more time about your life, don Fernando."

[Matt]

Nathan,

Thank you for that! Excellent content, writing, and translation: Truly 'food for thought' on this day.

Matt

[gone]

I saw this over on the aya boards, where I merely lurk. Here’s to a magazine that’ll publish articles longer than 1200 words. It reads like mother-tongue, so good work. Maybe that would have been different if you didn’t already have an affinity with the vine – do you think you mapped any of your own images onto what might have been more of a machine translation?

[Woodpecker]

gelfer, "do you think you mapped any of your own images onto what might have been more of a machine translation?"--not sure what that means...?

My image of the translator's role is to be as clear a window as possible for the reader to see the material without any distortions, smudges or fingerprints.

Later in the article, Fernando discusses his visions, and my enthusiasm for the subject definitely helped me there....

[gone]

Yeah, I was thinking whether someone with very good *technical* translation skills but lacking in affinity would have come up with anything different. I could imagine being tempted to ‘beef up’ what was actually there to make it more as I think it should be/would like to be. Maybe the difference between ‘he saw a bird’ and ‘he had a vision of a bird.’ Different translations of the same text differ so wildly sometimes that I guess people have different policies. It’s quite fascinating, it’s a shame I have such awful language skills.

[Woodpecker]

gelfer, if you're able to make a living as an editor, I think your language skills are doing just fine. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

[Gyuri]

Thanks for sharing that, Woodpecker. Subscribing to Shaman's Drum has been in the back of my mind for the last 2 months... I now have a reason to sign up!

- Gyuri

[gone]

Woody, yeah, I can order a few drinks and reserve a hotel room in English, it’s just those pesky other languages that prove problematic.

[Proteus]

Woodpecker: Thank you so much for that. i'm going to have to get Shaman's Drum!

You have an amazing gift, friend--thanks again for sharing this.

[Em]

Hi Woodpecker (is 'Woody' too familiar, or ambiguous?! [img]smile.gif[/img] ), and all,

An interesting and well-translated article you posted there; and, to me, very, very sad.

I may be misreading it, but what comes over so strongly is the loneliness and perhaps disillusionment of Fernando, as he faces up to his 'definitive' journey. Alone physically (away from his wife and family), and alone with his knowledge, with no peers with whom to compare notes, or apprentices to pass on the knowledge to. Rightly, he wonders at the state of affairs that have brought the Secoya in general, and him in particular, to that pass. Was all his mighty striving in vain? Or should he be contented that at least he knows where he is going, and has no fears, even if the rest of his fellows now seem to march to a different drum? Or maybe he realises that few are cut out for the rigours and sacrifices involved in following a path of knowledge?!

And that brings me to an uneasy feeling that I have about all the 'psychonauting' going on all over the place.

I have many reservations about the quality of perceptions, and the 'knowledge' being made available to us from the 'other' side. I'm inclined to think that the really valuable content is severely limited, and then only useful to the individuals capable of profound self-discipline and application. Mostly it is interesting, and often spectacular, but only in the same sense that there is much in our earthly civilisation that is interesting and spectacular without being truly useful, or spiritually nourishing. Now more than ever I recall the warning that 'they have a rhythm, and it's not human; often it is inimical to our own interests'.

I don't want to be paranoid, and certainly wouldn't dream of denigrating those who undertake these potentially hazardous journeys of spirit. But I know that many on the 'other side' are users and abusers, even when actively helping us in certain areas, like healing.

It is relatively easy for them to beguile us with their worlds, and their 'wisdom' - so we should venture forth only under the strictest of conditions, and the most impeccable of intents, or we may find that, when our time comes, we had spent our lives chasing rainbows; and suddenly, at the end, we are faced with a fathomless and unknown chasm.

Just a thought...