two shape-shifters, one bed

You probably know shape-shifters of your own, or you're a shape-shifter yourself. T would say that of course you are. That you shape-shift every time you switch consciousness from say, your corporate self to your personal self. Your social self, to your lover self. Your talking to mom on the phone self. To ... you get the idea. This being Thanksgiving, you may well have been shape-shifting all day and well into the evening, into an exhausting something you're not terribly happy playing at. Yah, T equates shape-shifting with performance. With performativity. Not that you're putting it on, exactly. No.

But that you can show others a different persona, at will. The at will part is important.

But not all shape-shifters agree that that's what it's all about.

The beautiful C used to live with me from time to time when she needed to. She had a house of her own across town but for 'complicated' reasons was having trouble staying there at the time. So. She had a room at my house she called her own.

C was a shape-shifter of extraordinary power. And people saw in her an antique man of her own lineage, who once had ruled Romania, and terrified the countryside by appearing to manifest as undead. C and her ancestor were in fairly constant communication, and I got to know him quite well. Nice bloke. Interesting family. Came to rule just after the Ottomans conquered Constantinople. He didn't take well to the Turks ...

The point is that C took responsibility when her audience saw this ancient ruler instead of her when she spoke. She took credit for his manifestation, as well as for the deeds that he might do and the things that he might say. When you spoke with C, you were in conversation with the lot of them. Especially him. (I later learned that this ancestor and others of his family manifested to many in Romania at the time, and that C's relationship with him was not at all uncommon).

But when he manifested for her, other people would see him! They could describe him! They saw his long black ringlets— and that thick handlebar moustache. They could describe his big eyes and the crownlike cap upon his head. The carmine jewel at his forehead. And on and on. They saw him. They did not see her.

I never saw this stuff, but I certainly was in the conversation.

So. C used to stay at my house when she needed to. Which means the whole bunch of her ancestors were there as well. She claimed her own room. And she claimed her own bed. Or maybe it was 'they' and not her at all.

But I had another friend of the shape-shifting persuasion.

And he too would stay in what by default was becoming the 'guest bedroom' — since calling it my 'study' didn't seem to be working out too well, with all the house guests at the time. His home was in Budapest, but he would visit every two to three months for two or three weeks at a time.

He called himself a scientist. And what he wanted was to build a computer that could do what he could do: read energy fields and heal folks by shifting their magnetic fields. Or something like that. That's what he purported to do. Whatever it was, his hands-on healing was powerful. And I never thought a machine could duplicate whatever it was that he did. I just thought of it as 'body work' — until I myself saw him shape shift.

Right before my eyes (and no drugs in sight) he transformed into an ancient mythical being documented from northern Europe. It's not a figure I'm familiar with, although just the other day I saw its image on an archaeological volume at the meetings in New Orleans. T recognized him. I still can't remember the name. He had two very large antlers. That I do remember.

The scientist from Budapest acknowledged the shape-shifting, but his explanation differed from that of C's. He said that what he did was 'normal' healing within a realm that would be able (at some point) not only to be explained by science but to be duplicated by it. He insisted that what people saw during his healing sessions were projections that they themselves manifested — and had nothing to do with him.

So. Two views of shape-shifting. His. And hers.

His: people see what they need or want to see.

Hers: people see what she purposefully projected for them to see.

I'm not here to say one of them is right or wrong.

I'm here to say that they were both periodic guests in my house. Staying in my 'guest room.' Which should have been my study. And it was bound to happen that at one point they would both be claiming that room — and that one bed — as their own.

Now, I know that I should have taken charge of the matter. So, in essence, this is all my fault. But my excuse is that I really don't like making decisions for other people. I didn't want to decide between them who got the room and bed, and who slept downstairs on the couch. I mean, these are after all, both powerful magical practitioners that I didn't really want to piss off. She, especially, had a vile temper — and she was also my best friend. But he would come all the way from Budapest, and surely could use a decent bed.

So. I did something you'll probably agree was pretty stupid. I left it up to them.

These are two intelligent, articulate, periodically rational adults, right? I figured they could decide which one of them would take the bed, and which one would take the downstairs couch. Or maybe they'd come up with alternating nights. Or weeks. Something reasonable and mutually acceptable.

I went to my own room, shut the door, picked up a good book, and went to sleep. Let them figure it out.

But no. They both claimed the territory to the end. They both headed for the room. Both planted their stuff in the room. Both washed up and brushed their teeth. Put on their night things. And both climbed into the bed, growling and snarling at each other in some inhuman-sounding form. It sounded like whatever creatures they were, were ripping the house apart. I felt dismay that all my books, fieldnotes, and computer were in the same room with them.

In the morning they both came down for breakfast, which I had made. They ate my grandpa's Macedonian Sephardi eggs still glaring at each other, and went off about their day.

They never overlapped again.

But now, when I think of it, I wonder: is there a kaddish for the undead? Did anyone ever in history say a kaddish for Vlad Tepes, Draculea himself, prince of Wallachia, who lived for a time at my own house?

peter pan and the indian

It's probably the nature of Peter Pan to be an asshole who thinks he's a hero — the excuse being that he's so thoroughly adorable, how could anyone fail to appreciate his preciousness, or not fall for the twinkle in his eye? It is (unfortunately) undeniable that he is also pretty good at what he does.

I happen to know Peter...

At the time, Peter was playing shaman. As you know, he flies around a lot, and so he had taken bits and pieces of the rituals, practices, music and songs of indigenous folk around the world, and put them all together into a powerful experience he could give others. He lit his feathered pipe. He warbled. He drummed. He was a digiridude, and a good one too. In the dark, and with your eyes closed, he could make you feel the forest. The dangerous four-leggeds brushed past you. The birds whisked past your head. you could smell the humidity, feel the leaves and feathers close in on you. Pretty neat, huh? He could turn a classroom into a full-blown vision quest in very little time. Sprinkle a little fairy dust and fly the whole lot of you off to Never-Never Land. Very effective. What matter that Peter was not a real Indian?

Until one night there was an Indian in the circle. He stood up tall, shaking with rage and said only, "I can't be here!" as he stormed out.

And Peter stopped. The spell was broken. Peter then gave a lecture on how he was given the pipe, given the digiridu, given the songs, the drums. That he was a Sun-Dancer. That he was allowed to do all this. He had permission. But the spell was broken. And everyone went home more than a bit down from the experience. All I could think of, was I wanted the Indian to come back again so we could talk it out.

And the next week he returned. And I turned to him, and this is what he said:

"That boy was singing my song."

And he told the story of the song, and how it is used in the Sun-Dance, and what a Sun-Dance really is, and what the song was for. For three hours. And as he spoke, he poured out the lore and practice of his people, and it became clear that singing that song in a university classroom was wrong, as was the display of his pipe.

And then he turned to me and said, "You wanted that to happen, didn't you?"

"Yes," I whispered. "If it was there, I wanted it to happen." And this revelation took me by surprise. Somehow, I knew exactly what he meant. And he understood me as well.

He had taken off the previous week and headed up to his People, up to his Land and his own Shaman (who, he explained, stayed on the Land, and didn't run off to play pretend in university classrooms. This was serious business.

Peter Pan flew off to Europe to play digiridude-shaman over there, build sweat lodges, give workshops, make some bucks, see the sights.

When he got back I got a call. He had been evicted. Lost his job. Car was wrecked.

"Did he do that?" he wanted to know.

So I emailed the Indian and asked. And this is what he wrote:

"I believe in IT. If you do wrong, IT'll get you." I gave Peter the message. He didn't like it.

I mean, in shamanism shouldn't you take these things as a sign? Cease and desist? But no, this was Peter. And Peter never takes no for an answer.

Maybe a year later, emails from the Indian. A picnic? A waterfall? We started hiking together. He poured out his lore at me.

"I'm the enemy, aren't I? Evil anthropologist! Stop telling me your tales! Watch me," I protested, "I'm not gonna write any of this down!"

"That's why I can tell you," he said. "Because you know who you are. Because you have your own People, Land, Identity — and you won't go out trying to steal mine."

His shaman had told him that the Peter Incident meant that he was supposed to give the talks. That he was gonna have to learn how to tell the tale himself. Properly. He wasn't thrilled. He became a spokesman. An advocate. An Elder.

More waterfalls...

Another call from Peter. This time his wife had been killed in an accident. (Yes, Peter had had a wife!)

More hikes...

I never saw Peter again. He's still out there doing what he did. Maybe he saw the suffering as what he has to endure to achieve authenticity, I don't know. Maybe he still blames the Indian for his terrible misfortune. But he still flies, he still crows... Nothing stops him. And I keep thinking, how strange that just maybe Peter changed the Indian. Peter. The hero? I asked my friend, the Voudou Priestess. She said, "Hell no!" He's just a fraud.

The Indian began to speak. Publicly. He's still pissed about it, to tell the truth.

And I still keep my silence about Indians. Their tales are just not my tales to tell. But I do like the waterfalls.

the concealed one, blessed be he

When Malkah, (the shekhinah herself!) was a little girl, the tzaddik used to tell her Bobo Stories at bedtime to calm her to sleep. And this was long before his journeys with Rav Gavriel rescuing artifacts in India.

The Prince and Bobo journeyed through the villages of central India, and through the fields outside the villages, and through the jungles outside the fields. And each night the Prince would encounter another mystery that needed solving, another treasure, another rescued child, a princess about to be burnt alive upon the funeral pyre of her young but very dead new husband. You get the idea. The Prince was tall and linear, with good posture. He was a handsome fellow, young and well-intentioned. Bobo, on the other hand was old, and gray and very very wrinkled. He had little eyes and enormous ears, more beard than he ought, and of course he had that enormous trunk that was the main feature anyone really saw when they looked at him — apart from his sheer size. The Prince discovered the problem, but it was Bobo who uncovered the solution each night. Although Malkah may well have fallen asleep before hearing how the case was solved.

When the tzaddik declared one day that he was off to India for real, Mrs. Tzaddik had a little shit fit of her own but, in truth, was happy to let him go. He was going, he said, to keep an eye on Rav Gavriel, and keep him out of trouble. Mrs. Tzaddik and Malkah had heard this one before. Malkah loved the tales the tzaddik brought home from Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and more. Rav Gavriel was always in one kind of trouble or another. The tzaddik managed to get him back safe and sound each journey — with rescued brittle manuscripts and other Judaica galore. A miracle!

This time, it was the aron kodesh itself that they were after. A community on the coast was disappearing fast, and there were only elders left. No young ones to keep the thousand year old community alive. They had written Rav Gavriel begging him to save their ark. This was the mission, so could the tzaddik refuse?

In truth, I think Rav Gavriel made at least half of it up just to lure the holy man off on another misadventure. But I think I'm not an objective observer in this regard.

To Malkah, this adventure conjured up no more and no less than Bobo and the Prince. In her young mind, surely the tzaddik's main goal would be to track down the sleuthing pair in order to get anything done at all. Surely only they could save the Aron Kodesh!

In India, (so the story goes) Rav Gavriel was a real hero. He was adorned with hallowed raiments and a golden turban that set off the pointy black beard upon his chin just right. He looked glorious! He bellowed and pontificated, he commanded and was obeyed — and they just gobbled it all up. The tzaddik stood in the background in his rumpled dark gray (unmatching) jacket and pants, pulled on his wise beard, and patted his big belly, and he kept an eye out. Rav Gavriel was in his element! He was proclaimed a sadhu and accepted the title (if not the role itself) with relish.

The community packed up all their treasures, and with joy in their hearts shipped the whole kit and kaboodle off to America to be saved.

Malkah always did find it strange that her poppa told Bobo stories. I mean, it's not like he told her midrashic stories, right? No lessons from the sages, no Rabbi Akiva as the hero, no Maccabees, no Queen Esther. Just Bobo and the Prince. In India.

I asked Mrs. Tzaddik about the Bobo Stories recently, now that I can't ask the tzaddik himself. She had no idea what I was talking about. But she was pretty clear that it must have been a secret transmission. I mean, what else could it be?

"Bo" she said, "means 'come here,' right?"

But there was really nowhere to go with it. She worked on the letters for a while. Shifted the vowels. Nothing.

"Who is the Prince?" Nothing. And more nothing. The only thing she was sure of was that the tzaddik was no prince.

All we learned was that there was not another living person on Earth who had ever heard the adventures of Bobo and the Prince. This was a transmission to Malkah alone and to no one else in the world. She was struck with awe at receiving such a gift. After all, anyone could study midrash, right?

So it was hers to figure it out.

And there it was, before her eyes. That her old rumpled poppa the tzaddik had in this way taught her the secrets of shape-shifting. Had given her lessons, night after night, year after year, in the art of concealment.

It was not until the Shekhinah had long disappeared from the world and was fully ensconced inside her own practiced occultation that she remembered Bobo himself. His largeness, his big belly, his long proboscis, his deeply wrinkled dark gray skin. And there was the tzaddik, mystery solved.

For if you've studied your phonology, you know that in the places of their travels, the voiceless sound is transformed to voiced. Mrs. Tzaddik was on the right track after all. In those lands, the letter /p/ is replaced by /b/. It took half a century to remember!

So the silence of the tzaddik was heard there loud and clear. Every word he had not uttered. The trickster and shape-shifter journeyed side by side. The unvoiced teachings of my poppa.

And if you've studied your Indology, Gajthar and Ganesh you'll remember. He's still adorned there with fragrant flowers. There is no silence like my father's.