SCENE: A CORN DANCE at the Taos Indian pueblo in the 1940s. There has been a long dry spell. The dancers invoke the kachinas (god-ancestors) of the West who will come at the winter solstice and leave at the summer solstice. The dancers supplicate the kachinas by a monotonous and rhythmic pounding of bare feet on the hard-packed earth.
It is not a notable festival. There is not much masking or face and body- painting, nor any sign of the flamboyant buffalo and deer totemism of the hunting dances. The costumes are dark, drab kilts. The dance itself is perfunctory, more light-footed and syncopated than most Pueblo dances.
But it is a magical place.
Over there is the squat adobe church of San Francisco de Ranchos de Taos. But here in the vast open plaza there is also the sense of the mysteries conducted within the old Great Kiva, of which hardly a trace remains.
The setting sun is already reddening the upper slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Not far away, nestled in the pines of the same Blood-of-Christ Mountains is a small shrine commemorating D. H . Lawrence, with a monstrance purporting to contain his ashes. Atop the shrine is a queer-looking epicene eagle with breasts: Lawrence as Phoenix rising from the ashes.
All manner of artists and writers, mystics, dropouts, and peyote-poppers live in the foothills. But a little farther north, at Los Alamos, an elite group of scientists is conducting an experiment which will fatefully alter the entire course of human history.
It is as if all the forces of the Cosmos had intersected here. The old cosmological gods remained even after the new God came. The new God remains after the transcending spirit of science and art has come. Even the old Brahman self-god of the East has lately arrived.
It is a haunted place, haunted by old gods and now by new people possessed by spirits all their own. Jungians from all over are drawn here as irresistibly as flies to pheromones, knowing that they can find in this enchanted sky-country the very incarnations of their archetypes and demons.
CAST OF CHARACTERS: Among those present at the Corn Dance are a nuclear physicist, his assistant, an old Pueblo Indian dancer, a young Pueblo Indian dancer, an English novelist, a divorcée, a tourist from Moline, Illinois, a Catholic priest, a radio repairman, a Marxist technician.
Some of the ten feel that they transcend the others. That is to say, he or she may feel that by virtue of a certain education, a certain wisdom, a certain talent, a certain gnosis, he stands in such a relation to the others that he can understand them and they can’t understand him.
For example , the English novelist can perhaps be said to transcend the Illinois tourist, understand him and his camera— in fact, has written about him— in a sense in which the tourist does not understand the novelist.
The physicist and his assistant, both of whom are amateur anthropologists, profess to have an understanding of both the Indian dancers and the Catholic priest which neither the priest nor the dancers profess to have of the physicist and his assistant.
The young Indian dancer believes that he transcends the old Indian dancer because he, the young Indian, has put behind him myth and superstition for a world of science and progress.
The old Indian dancer believes that he transcends the young dancer because he, the old Indian, has kept the cosmological myths by which the world, life, and time are integrated into a meaningful whole while the deranged Western society in Albuquerque goes to pieces.
A similar symmetrical relation of transcendence exists between the physicist and the novelist. The physicist believes that science—i.e., psychology— can at least in principle explain what makes the novelist tick by taking account of his early repressions, his later sublimations, and so on. Whereas the novelist, famous for his sharp eye and his knack for sizing up people and rendering them with a few deft strokes, has already “placed” the American scientist just as he has placed the tourist and the Indians.
There are three questions to keep in mind while reading the following summary of the various modes of transcendence and immanence of the ten characters.
Question (I ): Is there any sense in which it can be said truthfully that this or that member of the cast does in fact transcend some other member? Or are the ten no more or less than as described, a cast of characters, and therefore no judgment of transcending superiority or immanent inferiority can be objectively arrived at?
Question (II): But in a play it is sometimes fair to say that one character is better or worse than another. There are, after all, good people and bad people. Can you say, then, that some of the ten are better or worse than the others? If so, are the best also the most transcendent?
Question (III): Which character do you most nearly identify with? Which character would you rather be?
(a) A nuclear physicist: a youngish scientist, hard at work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He is having, as Freeman Dyson put it, the best time of his life, embarked as he is on a top-secret project set down in a wilderness with an elite of an elite, the best scientific brains in the Western world, even though he knows he is making a weapon which will almost certainly kill thousands of human beings and may very well spell man’s ultimate self-destruction. Yet he is no narrowly educated scientist. His interests are far-ranging. He is by way of being an amateur ethnologist, a student of Oriental philosophy, and a member of a competent if unprofessional string quartet. He can speak as readily of Ramakrishna and Beethoven’s last quartets as he does of Planck and Fermi.
As he watches the Corn Dance, he is engaged in an animated conversation with his assistant, a handsome blond girl. It is mostly a lecture, to which she gives her rapt attention. He compares the festivals and ceremonials of the different pueblos. Taos is rather ordinary. She ought to see the Corn Dance at Santo Domingo! On the feast day of the saint, the Catholic and tribal religions converge in a nice way characteristic of the tolerant pueblos. The statue of St. Dominic is taken from the church, paraded through the streets to the accompaniment of snare drums and gunshots, then stuck up on a cottonwood branch to enjoy the native ceremonial. In his low, earnest voice, he tells her of the pueblo equivalent of the Virgin Mary: “They call her the Spider Grandmother or Thought Woman, who created all things by thinking them into existence. Rather nice, don’t you think?”
“Oh yes! Oh yes!” murmurs his assistant, leaning toward him.
(b) His assistant, a tall striking blonde , a graduate student from Berkeley who shares the scientist’s every interest but one: she is deeply and frantically in love with him and therefore is both miserable for fear he may not love her and also ecstatically transcendent toward the crowd of tourists, feeling sorry for them not only because they have been transcended but also because they are not in love.
(c) An old Pueblo Indian dancer, who has never left the pueblo, who believes the cosmological myths of the pueblo and who further believes that the Corn Dance will invoke the kachinas of the West and that rain will come to the parched fields in consequence.
(d) A young Pueblo Indian dancer, a sophomore at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, a major in business administration, a promising basketball forward, for whom it goes without saying that the cosmological myths of his tribe are just that, myths, to be taken no more seriously than what he considers the Judaeo-Christian myths of the Catholic Church in which he was baptized. He joined the Newman Club of U. of N.M. to meet girls and did. It is with a complex good-natured irony that he paints his body and dons the costume and enters into the Corn Dance, an irony compounded of a gentle forbearance toward his elders and a sardonic contempt for the camera-clicking Anglos and tourists. He can also use the money he’ll make from the photography fees.
The young dancer feels that he transcends the old dancer. He sees into the old man’s credulity and the superstitious absurdity of the myth and rites of the rain god.
The older dancer is no less certain that he transcends the young dancer because the young Indian has left an intact society in which life and time and place are given meaning by belief for the deranged world of the latter-day Americans who clearly do not know who they are or what they are doing.
The scientist understands both and thinks that each is right in his own way. He sees the psychological “truth” of the cosmological myths of the old dancer. He sees the value of the skepticism of the young dancer. So he, the scientist, attempts the difficult feat of having it both ways— of not really believing in the kachinas of the West but of extracting the psychological value of the rite nevertheless.
(e) The English novelist settled here in Taos after sojourns in Italy and Mexico. His pallor and frailty— he looks for all the world like a non-conformist minister from his native Midlands—contrast with his writings, which celebrate savage good health, sexuality, and the dark gods of the blood. Self-contradicted or not, he has a miraculous eye for seeing into things, getting the hang of things, getting a fix on people. For him, no more than a single glance is needed to size up everyone here: the young Indian dancer with a quite conscious irony written on his Oriental-Pueblo face, as well as a deeper, darker inscrutability which he, the dancer, is not even aware of. He sees into the scientist and his girlfriend and their somewhat naïve, even callow, American lordliness— they think they’re the god and goddess of a new world, what with their secret science and their secret sidelong looks at each other, each with arms folded so that his fingers can touch hers.
(f) A divorcée from Westchester. Still young, her face ravaged by something other than years, she has left the dim sorrowful East and a sorrowful marriage for the bright clean sunlit purity of the desert. It seems to her that her very self has been transformed by the crystalline air, the rosy light of sunset on the Sangre de Cristo range, the tang of piñon smoke in the evenings. Surely she has come to the right place! She paints, has fallen under the spell of Georgia O’Keeffe , and for the first time in her life expects to come to herself, recover herself, make a new life in this place. She has talent, is taking lessons in oils, lives on a ranch, rides daily, and is becoming brown and strong. She is considering having an affair with a cowboy.
(g) A Catholic priest, assigned to the adobe church in the pueblo, an aging Hispanic -Irishman who watches the dance with an indifference amounting to boredom. He is thinking about his added chores for tomorrow— a Monday and therefore ordinarily a holiday, but this year a Holy Day, the Feast of the Assumption, entailing three masses, homilies, and confessions— and about his bad back and his broken radio, an old Philco console. Tonight , unless the repairman shows up, he won’t be able to listen to Lux Radio Theater.
(h) A radio repairman from Santa Fe, looking for the priest in the crowd. He has fixed the radio. The pueblo, the Corn Dance, the spectacle are old stories to him. All he wants is to find the priest, deliver the Philco, get paid, and get home in time for a cold beer or two before supper.
(i) A technician from the metallurgy lab at Los Alamos, a pale, plump, mustachioed, youngish man, native of Camden, New Jersey, employed by the Manhattan Project but also by an attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Only son of not impoverished but nonetheless dreary middle-class parents living in the dreariest double -house on the dreariest street in Camden. For him, revelation broke like sunlight through the Jersey winter when he discovered Marx and read him sitting there in a public library like Marx himself, constipated and alone and exhilarated among strangers as the light broke around him. All at once, he saw how it all worked, saw the very mechanism of his sadness and therefore the means of rising above it. Above it he was and above all this, the people whom now he understood, the Indians, the tourists , even the scientist whom he knew by reputation. They, not he, were puppets worked by strings they could not see. But he knew, could see the strings and, best of all, work them himself— for the good of the Soviet Union and therefore for world peace.
(j) A tourist from Moline, Illinois, who is too busy taking pictures with his excellent Leica even to take a look for himself, whose concern is only with lighting, focus, composition; who is already casting ahead in his mind to the slide show he’ll give at Rotary, and then perhaps he’ll take time to take a look at what he recorded— or will he watch the faces of the viewers to gauge his worth from their approval, the way a joke-teller watches the face of the joke-hearer? Yet by no means is he a discontented or unworthy man, being a good husband and father, operating, as he does, a successful chain of dry cleaners in northwest Illinois and even in Davenport, enjoying not only his family but his bowling team and his Masonic lodge. He is an American Legionnaire , a decorated veteran of World War I, holder of the Distinguished Service Cross, an authentic hero who risked his life to save a comrade and who has thought not much about it since.
(CHECK ONE)
Thought Experiment: Draw up an existential-semiotic self-profile or diagram indicating the self’s relation to its world (transcending? immanent? intact self among other selves?), identity of self (success or failure of self to perceive itself as a self), self’s relation to other selves (world community? elite community? loss of community?), movement of self vis-à-vis world (types of orbit, difficulties of reentry), placement of self in world as evidenced by mood and utterance.
Thus, each character can be plotted, so to speak, on a system of self-coordinates and a rough-and-ready profile of the self arrived at. Such a profile might be called an “existential semiotic graph” of the self. By means of such graphs, selves can be readily compared and contrasted in their salient features— and one’s own self more easily identified.
For example, four characters from the Taos Ten:
(1) The nuclear physicist
Self’s Relation to World: Transcending.
Self’s Relation to Other Selves: A restricted community of a transcending elite (scientific, political, philosophical, musical); also a modified transcendent-immanent sexual Jove-Europa community such as his relationship with blond grad student. E.g., she may not be quite fit to discuss the Bhagavad-Gita with or Planck’s equations with, but eminently fit to sleep with.
Identity of Self: A high degree of correspondence between self’s habitual mode of existence as transcending self and actual here-and-now life, e.g., scientific project at secret mountain installation, small elite community set down in an immanent world— pueblo, Indians, Corn Dance, tourists, priests— of which he is the onlooker.
Motion of Self vis-à-vis World: Traveling, orbiting, wandering; for a transcending self, one place is as good as any other place to the degree that it provides the immanent raw materials (climate, plutonium, Indians, girls, indigenous culture— Pueblo or Roman Catholic) by means of which the self can both arrive at scientific principles and satisfy its own immanent needs.
Placement (Mood) of Self: Overtly apocalyptic, covertly exultant. Covert exultation accruing from temporary appropriation of godhead by transcending self, e.g., “I am Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds,” “We have known sin,” etc.
(2) The radio repairman
Self’s Relation to World: Immanent , with intact elements.
Self’s Relation to Other Selves: Concentric social communities— family, business, social, marketplace, church (Presbyterian), politics (Republican), American.
Identity of Self: Unreflective, consumer-oriented, partly specified by being against them (Hispanics, Indians, Catholics), but also against those, the transcenders (scientists, Communists, professors, liberals); yet also to a degree specified as intact self by religious transcendence, i.e., he would say if asked that he believed in God , that he was not God but a son and creature of God, that other men were also sons and therefore his brothers.
Motion of Self vis-à-vis World: Placed in a place, once Texas, now Santa Fe, New Mexico, but not placed like the old Pueblo Indian at the center and navel of the Cosmos. Mood of placement: often aggrieved and frustrated, but also exhibiting a core geniality, reliability, and goodwill: “How you doin', son? Well, all right. You lookin ’ good. Let me give you a hand with that.” Etc.
(3) The divorcée from Westchester
Self’s Relation to World: Problematical, with elements of transcendence and immanence. She has left what she conceives as an immanent world of a failed marriage and the boredom of housewifery and is seeking a new world with some vaguely transcending components such as “art.”
Self’s Relation to Other Selves: Loss of old community; isolated, but with prospects of new community. She envisions both immanent and transcendent relationships, sexual adventures perhaps, but, more important, a meeting of minds with a certain person on such things as reading, ideas, and a co-savoring of local immanent features, e.g., the Corn Dance. Further, she has begun an expensive collection of primitive kachina dolls and regularly visits all festivals at the pueblos. She has also registered for a course in flamenco guitar.
Identity of Self: Tentative and problematic. Her own perception of herself is subject to others’ perception of her. For example, at this very moment at the Corn Dance she is aware that the scientist and his friend have noticed her, and so she is acutely conscious of not appearing to them either as tourist or as local dried-up leather-skinned dykeish Anglo. So she’s dressed casually in jeans (long before the current craze) and Eastern blouse. Her silver-and-turquoise jewelry is old, heavy, and oxidized and not the new tourist junk. Even her mien, her way of looking at the dancers, is both casual and calculated: I’ve seen this before, true, and some of it is hokey and put on for the tourists, but still it’s a fascinating spectacle, isn’t it?
Movement of Self vis-à-vis the World : Exilic. She’s left her old home for good, glad to do it, and newly arrived at her new home, where she’ll stay. She’s begun her new life but has not yet quite achieved total reentry into her new world.
(4) The Catholic priest
Self’s Relation to World: Specified by relation to God, i.e., self, world, and other selves seen as created by God; selves in the world yet capable of transcending world through love of other selves and of God. Yet this relation has for him grown perfunctory and quotidian over the years , giving ground to loneliness, dislike and fear of bishop, and consumership, e.g., Lux Radio Theater, Brooklyn Dodgers, a nip or two or three of Bushmills before supper. A humble and mediocre man, he is actually a better priest than he knows, a soft touch for beggars and drunks, and dutiful in the discharge of his priestly obligation.
Self’s Relation to Other Selves: Good-natured and dutiful, with tendencies to accept both the deferences accorded his social role as priest and the ambiguities of his priesthood as perceived by the Indians who accept him— and the kachinas of the West— with varying admixtures of indifference, belief, and unbelief.
Identity of Self: Intact and secure in its relation to God, yet hardly afire with love of God and fellow man. Secure also in his identity as a member of a special class of selves, i.e., the priesthood, with its promised reward in heaven, yet aware too of his failings and accordingly staking a great deal on the mercy of God. Differs from transcending community of scientists and artists in his recognition of his own creatureliness and limitations. His major semiotic self-deception is his acquiescence in the sign and role with which the world invests him, that of a priest with attendant mien and costume rather than the signified, a man who has a vocation and acts accordingly.
Movement of Self vis-à-vis World: Ambiguously at home; that is to say, he is at home in his homelessness in that he would assent to the proposition that, like all men, he is a pilgrim and wayfarer not at home in this world and bound for his true home elsewhere; but he is also at home in the worldly sense of being at home, e.g., like the radio repairman, he enjoys the comfort of his rectory, his good Indian cook, the companionship of two good friends, three Bushmills before supper, and above all the prospect of a Dodger-Yankee World Series. Though he accepts his identity as pilgrim, wayfarer, priest, and servant of God, he dreads the likelihood of being assigned to the Hopi reservation, the true boondocks.
Now, imagine that you yourself are present at the Taos Corn Dance, where the old gods are still remembered, plus the new God, plus the the new God, plus the competing spirits of transcendence of the modern age— something new in the Cosmos—plus the acceptance of the demotion to the pure spirit of immanence —also something new.
Chart your own semiotic profile.
