Euphoria

19

3/15 The celebration of Xambun’s return does not end. Each morning I think surely they have fished out every fish & shot every fat bird & wild pig, surely they have exhausted their own bodies if not their food supply. And each night I think surely tomorrow everything will return to normal, the women will go out on the lake at sunrise, my morning visitors will come back, the traders will go off trading, but it never happens. They sleep all day because they have been up all night. Just before sunset the drums start up again and the fires get lit and it all goes on for another night: feasting, drinking, dancing, screaming, singing, weeping.

Someone from the next hamlet just returned from the coast having brought several new beach dances. Until now beach dances had been forbidden by the elder generation here but everyone has learned them this week. Given that their standard dance includes swinging the penis hard & fast & imitating copulation with precise & lengthy accuracy, the new dances seem to be as harmless as the Hokey Pokey. The men have painted each other in an intricate design that I haven’t seen on their most expensive pottery. Everyone is festooned in their fanciest shells, strings & strings of them, and you have to shout over the din they make.

I have gone through about 50 notebooks in 5 days and yet I feel on the cusp of death by boredom. I know I am a strange bird, fatigued by frenzy, visions, and public fornication. I know as an anthropologist I am supposed to live for these opportunities to see the symbolism of the culture played out. But I don’t trust a crowd — hundreds of people together without cognition and only the basest impulses: food, drink, sex. Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain you find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is my point exactly.

Not to mention my impatience to get to X, to talk to him, to assault him, as Bankson would say. Malun promises she will secure me an interview as soon as the ceremonies are over. She keeps thanking us, and I can’t seem to convince her that we had nothing to do with his return.

I wish B hadn’t left before X arrived. I could use someone to talk to, someone who is not a mile high on morning glory seeds & something called honi & who knows what else. I have given Tadi a note to give to the Kiona when she goes to market, but she has not gone. No one has left the lake for over a week.

I have come to think of this celebration for Xambun as a wild animal that shifts & eats but might never go away.