Bassanda Correspondence

The Bassanda
Corresponding Society

Being a collection of archival & more recent material on the topic of Bassanda's history, culture, and musical folklore, from a variety of sources and learned correspondents. Post queries & commentary to the Friends of Bassanda Corresponding Society here

President emeritus:Dr Homer St John, PhD, DD (Kcing's College); Yezget Nas1lsiniz Chair of Oriental and Musical Studies, Miskatonic U.

Correspondents:
The Right Reverend R.E.C. Thompson, DD, Colonel, Army of the Confederacy (ret.)
The General, BM/MM, Music and Oriental Studies, General, U.S. Army (ret.)

S. Jefferson Winesap, secretary to the Society

More from Bassanda: The Janissary Stomp

Collection of Bassandan folkloric styles, from the archives of Radio Free Bassanda: link

S. Jefferson Winesap’s entry on the ESO for the revised virtual version of Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Further Musical Invective

The Elegant Savages Orchestra arose from the ashes of the Soviet Era Bassanda National Radio Orchestra. Founded by Yezget Nasilsinez some time in the late 1940s, when Bassanda National Radio first went on air with funds from the State Directorate, the BNRO drew its personnel from all over Bassanda, in addition to various adventurous expatriate musicians from the West. Until the 1930s, when the Central Committee finally brought all regions of the mountainous interior and rocky coast under state political control, Bassanda had been the home of a wealth of highly regionalized and distinctive music, dance, and song traditions.

Recognizing that centralization of state communications risked the erosion of regional styles and resulting “cultural grey-out,” Nasilsinez, who came from a family of traditional bards but who had also trained in Paris in the ‘20s with Boulanger, and had been an early informant of John Lomax senior, argued passionately for the recognition and protection of these local traditions, both through an ambitious though underfunded field-recording program and through the foundation of a state ensemble showcasing these idioms.

The BNRO board and programming committee were the site of ongoing, sometimes contentious debates between Nasilsinez, who fought for the integrity and inclusive presentation of the regional idioms, including those which came from Bassanda’s often-persecuted ethnic minorities, and state commissars, who insisted that the Orchestra must present a unified, “sophisticated” and culturally-competitive face of the Nation to the rest of the world.

By the late 1980s, with the growth of glasnost and perestroika, and the example of the Bulgarian and Cossack state ensembles before them, the very elderly Nasilsinez and his musicians’ leadership committee made the decision to divest of the last vestiges of state funding and control, and go into exile in the West. They began a peripatetic “never-ending tour” of the rest of the world, as a cooperative and collective enterprise, under the name of The “Elegant Savages Orchestra” (the new title was a paraphrase of a possibly-apocryphal quote from one of Nasilsinez’s anonymous musical sources, who, upon hearing his lyrical description of the BNRO’s mission and plan, commented sardonically “well, yer a foine buncha elegant savages, are ye not?”).

Over time, the personnel evolved as elder musicians retired or deceased, but the ESO’s core principles, as envisioned Nasilsinez and evolved and carried forward by his musical lineage and the musicians’ cooperative committee, continued:

‘fierce dedication to the traditions and to one another.’

Reply from the Rev. Col. R.E.C. Thompson, LLD, Army of the Confederacy (ret.)

[in response to initial query from Dr Coyote]
The Rev. Col. writes:
4.30.13

Dr. Chris!

Funny you should bring this up just now... I've been doing some studies on-line and I serendipitously bumped into original research by Homer St. John and S. Jefferson Winesap (editors and publishers of the ground-breaking Yoknapatawpha Howlsman's Quarterly) at Five Tribes University in northern Mississippi.

Apparently, some time around 1879, eccentric, disgraced, and exiled Duke HM S. Owsley-Smythe of Throbshire Isle (which is as you know a tiny island lying at a point of almost perfect triangulation between Ulster, Scotland, and Baja California, the ancestral seat of which sits at Droole-On-Xthlan) travelled (as was the fashion of the times) to the nether reaches of the far east to study with so-called "ascended masters," at least one of which claimed to be able to transform his human shape into that of a small, spotted dog, which sometimes wore a fez and spoke in plain English. Owsley-Smythe was exposed to ancient texts describing the more arcane aspects of distillation, bookbinding, and - most pertinent to your essay - the construction of musical instruments.

It is not known exactly when Owsley-Smythe returned home (where in addition to his many other hobbies and diversions he attempted to create, as he wrote, "...a respectable Highland Scotch, nice and peaty, but using Agave and the heart of the Peyote cactus and filtered through - of all things - the most delicate films of mummy wrappings...") but it is almost certain that after his lengthy eastern tenure of possibly more than a decade, he met on his way home Madame Blavatsky, Rasputin, and - again, most pertinent to your essay - Yezget Nasilsinez's grandfather (or father - the records are not clear) Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez.

Diaries of Owsley-Smythe clearly show that he spent several weeks in the company of Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez at his great house in Irkutsk. Given the love of music that Habjar-Lawrence passed on to his grandson (or son) it is almost certain that he and Owsley-Smythe discussed the manufacture of musical instruments. It is further almost certain that Owlsey-Smythe passed through Bassanda at some point in his travels; perhaps even personally escorted by Habjar-Lawrence.

Owlsey-Smythe sailed from an unknown port on the Baltic to Boston and from there travelled by train back home to the Baja coast where he took the ferry home to Throbshire. However, he detoured on his homeward journey to northern New Mexico, and there came into contact with one General L., Esq. and one C. Thompson, Esq., who based on scanty clippings from territorial newspapers were veterans of the American Civil War (from opposite sides, the General fought for the Union, Thompson the Confederacy) who became fast friends in their mutual disillusionment with the war and "...flight from the insanity of the eastern establishment..." as Thompson apparently once wrote. There is in the archives of ethnographic collection at Miskatonic University a single faded photograph of HM Owsley-Smythe with the General and Thompson as well as some others which is labelled "The Young Gentleman's Oriental Society of Talpa, New Mexico: ca. 1892. The most interesting aspect of this photograph is that the General is holding what under high magnification appears to be Turkish saz, but one with distinctively Bassandan architecture and appointments! It could be possible that the instrument belonged to Owsley-Smythe or that he constructed it after his eastern studies and gave it to the General . The saz is rumored to be in a private collection in California, but so far its exact location is unknown.

Connections, connections! You never know what this kind of synchronistic research will turn up. Those desperate gentlemen St. John and Winesap should probably be in an asylum instead of co-heading the department of a major university! Let's stay in touch about this... I have little doubt that given their researches Five Tribes U. would be thrilled to host the Elegant Savages Orchestra. I'll do some digging here in New Mexico and see if I can find any remnants of the "Young Gentleman's Oriental Society..." If they have any archives... my God! What I might find!

Yours, The Right Rev. Col. C.

Winesap responds

Colonel: There's simply no telling. In the 21st century, the material from the Bassanda Soviet Central Committee's archives (c1926-84) has become available, but it is heavily redacted. ESO founding director Nasilsinez was effusive in his advocacy on behalf of Bassandan regional and ethnic vernacular autonomies, but very reticent about his grandfather Habjar-Lawrence's Tsarist associations. Curiously enough, there are recollections of Nasilsinez, and his complex associations in post-WWI Paris, in the memoirs (unpublished) and tour diaries of the Studio der Fruehen Musik, which ensemble at the behest of vocalist Andrea von Rahm appears to have made sub rosa field trips to Bassanda during the early 1960s Brezhnev era. It is thought that these field trips may have yielded the stylistic influences which, in the period, sometimes caused Anglophile medieval specialists to refer to the Studio as "Radio Bassanda". Thomas Binkley, founder of the Studio, appears to have known Nasilsinez comparatively well, and the ESO's first, early 1980s tours in the West appear to have been based upon touring networks and contacts pioneered by the Studio 20 years before.

The Colonel replies...

R. Smythe-Hinde's connection to all this is unknown, St. John told me. From his name, it seems possible that he's a relation of HM S. Owlsey-Smythe, but it might also be just more weird synchronicity. You know that R. Smythe-Hinde's father studied in Southern Italy when A. Crowley had his "abbey at Thelema" in Palermo around 1922, and Crowley had also spent almost a year in Mexico "... trying to make his image in a mirror disappear..." so he might have had contact with an elderly Owsley-Smythe as well. There might be a causal chain between the Sr. Smyth-Hinde, Crowley, and Owsley-Smythe, but at this point, who knows? St. John can't even figure it out, and it seems unlikely as best that an archive of New Mexican musical occultism should end up in a New England University. Except that... rumor has it that both some of Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez's papers are at Miskatonic, as well as some of the arcane books that Owsley-Smythe studied in the far east with the ascended masters! Jung would have a heart attack...

C.

To: The Right Reverend R.E.C. Thompson, DDS, Colonel, Army of the Confederacy (ret.)From: S. Jefferson Winesap, graduate student in music, ethnology and cultural alternatives, Miskatonic School of Oriental and Musical Studies, for Professor St. John
Re: The Bassanda Corresponding Society
Date: 2 May 2013

Dear colleague:

It has occurred to us (myself and Professor St. John, who represent the small but dedicated curatorial staff of the Bassanda archives-in-exile at Miskatonic University) that, with the advent of the new millennium and its remarkable communications tools—what would Yezget Nasilsinez have been able to accomplish with Web 2.0 and social media: the mind reels!—that the time might be right for a reinvestigation and reinvestment in public advocacy on behalf of the lost world of Bassanda. With the unexpected but very welcome interest shown, across a wide diversity of clienteles, in the activities and possibilities of the Elegant Savages Orchestra—who in exile on the Never-Ending Tour, continue, as you know, under Nasilsinez’s motto “fierce dedication to the traditions, and to one another”—we think that there is a distinct window of opportunity here. Though the massive gaps in the Bassandan historical and archival record resulting from the redactions and cultural reawakenings of the Soviet era can never be entirely filled, it does seem possible that, through the pooling of resources and insights from contributors around the globe, a remarkable amount of data might be collated and disseminated. We envision a “Bassanda Corresponding Society,” admission to which would be on the basis of invitation and special aptitudes, and which, through the magic of the social media which could never have been imagined by the first generation of Bassandan scholars (I am thinking here for example of the c1890s Young Gentleman’s Oriental Society of Talpa), could assist in recovery and new appreciation of our beloved homeland’s culturally and musically diverse riches.

This moment of opportunity as represented by social media and new technology, and by the interest in the ESO, is further enhanced by the presence now, here at Miskatonic, of a remarkably visionary yet practical Dean of Oriental and Musical Studies, who has pledged and demonstrated commitment to artistic inclusivity to a degree that the Professor and I (who remember the bad old days of previous administrations—and as you recall I have been a graduate student here, with the Professor as my supervisor, for nearly three decades) find almost unnervingly positive. In point of fact, that level of support, both financial (modest) and philosophical (vast), and the presence of a pool of enthusiastic students too young to have ever heard, or heard of, Bassandan music, has led the Professor and myself to conclude that we would be remiss in our debt to all that Bassandan culture, and our revered founder Baba Yezget Nasilsinez, gave us, if we were to decline this opportunity.

Colonel Thompson, please do be advised that the Professor and I recognize that your myriad obligations to extended family in the Mountains of New Mexico, and (forgive my mentioning a painful subject) the physical infirmities that have plagued you ever since the War, make it difficult or arduous for you to undertake travel. But we have had communications from Correspondents in Kansas City’s Fair Missouri Command, and from a Buddhist monastery north of you in Colorado, and even from the riverine environment of the Cincinnati river landings, which suggest that all memory of Bassanda is not lost, and that, in a wounded and suffering modern mass-media world, the message of Bassandan musical, cultural, and ethnic inclusivity may resonate more powerfully than ever.

Moreover, though no one could ever have predicted it, the General (B.M., M.M., Oriental and Musical Studies) has proven to be an absolutely exemplary “mature” student since his return to Miskatonic’s ivied halls, yet his tenure here is gradually drawing to a close.[1] We will be very sorry to see him depart, as he has provided such invaluable service to Miskatonic’s department of Musicology, Ethnology, and Cultural Alternatives, but we do feel an obligation as a result to take maximum advantage of his remaining time here.

That being the case, the Professor has directed that I inquire of you on two fronts: first, would your familial obligations and (again, forgive me) physical constraints permit your attendance and participation, in person, at a concert of Bassandan and related music, some time in January of the next year? The General , the Professor, and I all agree that your presence would provide an enormous inspiration and authentication to the young and developing musicians who are the next generation of ESO personnel. We do hope you will take this under consideration.

Secondly, and more immediately: would you believe it might be possible for us here at Miskatonic to take advantage of these new 21st century communications technologies, to author and host a “Bassanda Correspondences” section on the ESO’s website? As you’ll recall, Baba Yezget always believed that both technology, communications, and even modern bureaucratic/administrative structures could, in the right hands, yield personal, humane, imaginative, and creatively inspiring results. And, as I have said, there appears to be a network, largely incommunicado, of Bassanda friends and scholars in locations heretofore unknown or unidentified, with whom contact and collaboration might be initiated.

Do let us know your thoughts.

We remain, Sir,
Most respectfully,
Professor Homer St. John, PhD/LLD, etc., etc
S. Jefferson Winesap (graduate student in music, ethnology, and cultural alternatives)
Miskatonic U

CC: The General, BM/MM, Music and Oriental Studies, General, U.S. Army (ret.)

(1) He has demonstrated a celerity as student and scholar from which, I confess, I myself should perhaps draw a rueful example.

The General weighs in...

Cariños:

It is with abounding pleasure that I read yours of the 2nd inst.

Verily, my heart leaps at the prospect of an impending, if temporary, reunification of the "Bassandan Separatist Front," or, viz., the "Bassandistas." It is my sincerest hope that the price the Reverend Colonel continues to pay for service to his Southron People can be somewhat mitigated* and ameliorated, or, if not then, at the very least, then, indeed, negotiated, so as to permit his travel to these parts, during the first month of the year following.

Please forgive my brevity of response: I simply wanted to express my support for your excellencies' brilliant guidance of this reunion and the proposed use of said Social Communication Tools. At this time the duties of an (elderly) graduate student demand my complete attention.

The concision of this epistle should in no way be taken as commensurate with the esteem and regard in which you are each held, the honor of which is entirely mine.

I will leave you with this epigraph from the Bard:

'"Cry havoc!", and let slip the dogs of war.'

and, finally, this, which the Reverend Colonel will remember from our brief respite in the Land of the Khevsoor:

"Mahdjek, na sahlkhir neem jarood!"

Until we meet again on the Field of Friendship,

I am and remain,

Your brother in arms,

The General, BM/MM, Music and Oriental Studies, General, U.S. Army (ret.)

*([{It has come to my attention that there is a Doctor of Phyzik pursuing his craft in the village of Dixon, in the environs of the Rev. Col.'s Northron New Mexico, who, if the intelligence recd here is to be believed, has made, so the stories tell, great progress in the treatment of such ailments as those plaguing the RevCol, with the use of certain emetics and unguents, the true nature and composition of which he is loathe to reveal. His name is, or that which he goes by, (one can never be entirely sure with these leechmongers), "Julio al Din." I am sure if the RevCol sends one of his lodge brothers to the trading post in Dixon, and has that brother say to the proprietor there, "I am a stranger going to the West to search for that which was lost," he will be taken to meet this "Mr. al Din."})]

From the Colonel

My Dearest Gentlemen:

My joy knows no bounds at the pleasurable prospect of an ongoing correspondence with you all regarding our glorious Old Bassanda. Ah,the homeland... I grow misty at the thoughts of the verdant valleys, the trackless deserts, the snow-capped glory of the mountains; not to mention the bustle and clatter of the brasseries and the damask and silk of the houses of ill repute. And of course, our old comrades long since lost, Goddess rest their souls.

As with The General , my present communications must be brief; for I am off to attend a reunion of the old regiment in Santa Fe, and as waggons are being loaded and beasts draped with harness, I have little time before departure to converse.

Nonetheless, I know with all my heart that we will all gain most heartily from this endeavour; Mssrs. St. John and Winesap at Five Nations down in Mississippi will no doubt unearth untold riches for us with their ongoing researches, and of course we all know the deep and dark archives at Miskatonic have hardly been tapped.

My most grateful thanks and appreciation to the General for his references to Julio al Din; no doubt the good sawbone's concoctions will fully restore me to the best of my humours; my ongoing attempts to maintain my martial abilities have, as you know, led me to study the ancient and arcane ways of the far-eastern sword, and the Nipponese version of consensual reality combined with the shocking skill level of the "young bucks" I must face on the dojo floor leave me in a continuous state of bruised-ness. Al Din's emetics will indeed be welcome.

I will write you again at the first opportunity, fair gentlemen, and until then I of course remain

Your humble and obedient servant

The Rt. Rev. Col. R.E.C. Thompson

More from the Colonel

S. Jefferson Winesap
Miskatonic University

My Dear Professor:

So fine to receive your latest correspondence! The renewed interest in Old Bassanda, always lurking under the surface of so many academic studies, and obviously getting a jolt from the newest social media, gladdens my soul and quickens my breath. Who would have thought that in this day and age the young folks would take such old geezers as us to heart? Well, you'll be happy to hear that I've caught the fever myself and it's roused me from my normal torpor. I was trolling through a cardboard box, filthy with dust and reeking of mildew, that I excavated from my basement the other day, and to my delight I found one of my favorite childhood relics and another fragment that I think you'll find most amazing. The old magazine I thought I remembered wasn't just a figment of my imagination: there it was, almost crumbling in my hand. Indeed, several pages are missing entirely. I can't remember where I got the thing; I think my father might have used it to line an old cedar chest or something, and when I found it as a boy I claimed it for myself. Funny how we forget things - now that I reread it after all these years I can say with near-certainty that this article might be the wellspring from which my love of all things Bassandan flows. How I longed to reinvent myself in such a way! And the other fragment… my God! The possibilities! Regardless, I think you'll find them both fascinating and pertinent as deep background to the present Bassandan explorations, so I'll stop rambling and copy them in their entirety here:

(obscured by a rip) 2, 1947
Taken As A Whole Magazine
American University of Beirut

The Mysterious Never-Ending Journey of Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez by (obscured by stains)

One looks back to the great days of Victorian exploration, and names leap to mind with ease: Stanley and Livingstone, Burton and Speke, Franklin. But even the most enthusiastic historians seem to have forgotten one name that, in its day, was on par with the above-listed gallery of immortals: Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez.

H.L. Nasilsinez seems to have been born in or near Foyers, Scotland about1845; the repository where birth records were stored for the surrounding area burned to the ground in 1858, thus Nasilsinez's life is a mystery from the very beginning.

Clearly, few Scottish natives are dubbed with the surname Nasilsinez; nor is a Nasilsinez tartan extant (though it is rumored that H.L. Nasilsinez commissioned one during his second and final visit home in the late 1800's. No evidence of the pattern exists). There are Lawrences, however, even though the name is more commonly encountered in England. H.L.'s parents were Angus Gaughan Lawrence, listed in a late-eighteenth-century census as a "lesser gentleman" and Melissa Cocker, about whom little or nothing is known. Family stories say that A.G. liaised with a much younger Melissa, who was probably a maid or cook in the household, and that Melissa was soon dismissed with a generous severance. Shortly thereafter Melissa and her furious sister Gertrude appeared at the door of the estate with babe-in-arms: the infant Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez.

Habjar's given Christian name at birth was lost in the flames along with the records thereof, but again family tradition claims he was always called "Boobles" as a child. (Habjar's highly public eccentricities and behavior as a young man suggest he did all he could to obscure his "true" name in favor of his self-adopted one. As he was about thirteen when the birth-records fire happened, it is even possible that in one of his more delinquent phases he set the fire.)

Angus, overcome with guilt at turning Melissa out while with child, took her back in and claimed young Habjar as ward, giving him the family name, to the deep resentment of Lady Lawrence. But only months after her return to Foyers, Melissa was struck low by a vicious hemorrhage and died shortly thereafter. Habjar was raised by his aunt Gertrude and Angus, and never knew his birth mother. Lady Lawrence hated the child and refused to have anything to do with him, banishing him to the servant's quarters with his aunt.

The only room in the house where young Habjar was allowed other than the kitchens was his father's extensive library. Reportedly, Habjar could read from a very young age, and was said to have virtually memorized every book in the house by age eleven. He was particularly taken, in a typically Victorian way, with geography and ethnography, and by the time he entered sixth form, he was calling himself Habjar. He claimed he took the name from one of his father's collections of literary exotica, but this has never been verified, and it is certainly possible that it is a pastiche he himself invented. There are some books we can verify Habjar read from the fact that he took them from the library and kept them the rest of his life - guarding them among his most treasured possessions - and those are the complete writings of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. It is also certain that Habjar met the great man himself, however briefly; Burton signed two books for his young acolyte: The Book Of The Sword and The Kama Sutra. No doubt, Habjar's proclivities in later life were deeply influenced by these books, as we will see. There is also some evidence that H.L. met Elisha Kane, the great searcher for the lost Franklin, and it is certain that H.L. possessed a fine portrait of Kane. Since Kane died in 1857 when H.L. was only around twelve years old; this claim may be spurious.

Habjar walked out of school in disgust some time around 1861-2, claiming the "…scabrous professors of dung-eating cannot teach me a thing that I cannot better teach myself…" and, against his father's wishes, promptly boarded a steamer for the continent. The young explorer, longing to emulate his hero Burton, headed east as soon as his feet touched the soil of France, and one of his few letters home reports his presence in St. Petersburg in 1864. It is not known exactly where Habjar went on his first journey, but we can must speculate that he penetrated the mountain fastness that was Old Bassanda. All we know for sure is that in 1867 Habjar journeyed home to Scotland - Angus and Lady Lawrence had perished in a train accident, and Habjar inherited the estate at Foyers.

Had the young man not inherited the property and mantle of his father, it is likely that no one would have even noticed him. Young men often dashed off to real or perceived adventure in far-off eastern locales, usually never to be heard from again. But there was money in the family coffers and the local papers took notice of Habjar's return to the fold, and it is thus that we have the first official description of him. He was said to be of bizarre appearance, with long hair and an even longer beard with various beads and trinkets braided into it. He wore a strange hat with a pointed topknot and long, dangling ear-flaps, and a colorful robe said to have "…so many pleats it is impossible to speculate what may hide within other than the young man's person." His shoes were as pointed as his hat, and of a bright, iridescent material that appeared both red and green depending on the angle of the light, and there were two long, curved sabers on his back. In other words, Habjar had adopted what we now call the dress of the Bassandan warrior caste Jianiczari. Habjar stayed in Foyers several months, long enough to turn the great house over to his aunt Gertrude and set up a self-perpetuating account to keep her in comfort the rest of her years, then as they say, "took the money and ran." Once again, he was off to central Asia.

H.L.'s book Warriors, Mystics, Musicians, And Dancers Of High Bassanda and several surviving extant letters to Gertrude attest that Habjar stayed some time in Bassanda on his second trip, and in fact the third of these letters is signed "Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez," the first such appellation on record. H.L. mentioned in passing his esoteric, martial, and musical studies in a few letters, but there can be only conjecture about the nature of his new surname. "Nasilsinez" is hardly a rare name in Bassanda, especially in the mountains on the eastern border which is considered the most difficult and mysterious terrain of that country. The postmarks on many of H.L.'s letters are from Vrdunkos, called by many "The Vienna Of Bassanda" owing to its many schools of music and numerous native composers (Denisova, Kostenki, Batumongke, and Tughtu-Kayisi all come to mind).

Eventually, H.L. moved on, ever-eastward, and his aforementioned book - his only volume of travel and adventure - bears the 1874 imprint of a publisher in Irkutsk, when H.L would have been about twenty-nine years of age. The diaries of the disgraced minor royalty HM S. Owsley-Smythe contain the most extensive written notes of Nasilsinez in this period. Owsley-Smythe visited Nasilsinez about 1880-81, and there is some passing commentary that Nasilsinez fought in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, as well as mention that H.L. was walking with a cane. Most interesting is Owsley-Smythe's writing about a small boy who "…clung to Habjar's legs like a pet, never wanting to leave his side and hanging on his every word." (Owsley-Smythe expresses mystification that Nasilsinez never introduced the boy by name despite his obvious devotion to the youngster. Old Bassandan etiquette dictates that one never ask a name or refer to a person by name unless it is offered, and apparently Owsley-Smythe abided by that rule. The young man's name and identity remain unknown, nor is there any mention of a woman living in Nasilsinez's household.) There is also a mention of "…that bastard Nasilsinez…" and a passing comment about a dispute over a courtesan and possibly a duel, in a presently-unpublished packet of the papers of Harry Paget Flashman covering the period in 1879 when Flashman was at Rorke's Drift but it is unknown how or why H.L. would have found himself in Africa, or if the reference is even to the same person we find ourselves concerned with.

At this point, Nasilsinez largely drops off the map for many years except for his final visit to the United Kingdom. He returned to Scotland for unknown reasons and stayed almost a year. There is speculation that Gertrude had died and estate matters needed attending, but no death certificate exists. Villagers in Foyers commented that H.L. sulked in the local pubs, drinking heavily and consorting with the musicians until long after-hours, all the time complaining that he couldn't get "home" to the east. The social columns of London newspapers report his presence at various concerts in the city, particularly those smaller, darker venues that catered to patrons of "the exotic." The same columns report a "family reunion" where H.L. allegedly appeared, and it is possible that the "…precocious young man with a proclivity for boast…" that "…fawned over Nasilsinez like a long-lost uncle with prizes in his pockets…" may have been a young T.E. Lawrence, but T.E.'s own extensive writings never mention Nasilsinez.

Official records show that the (Angus) Lawrence great house at Foyers was sold in late1897, and with only a few scant exceptions Nasilsinez disappears forever. Again, the London papers made great hay out of H.L.'s melodramatic departure by private yacht on May 12, 1898, but once Nasilsinez was out of British-controlled waters there are only two more mentions of him whatsoever, and one may not even refer to him. H.L. himself wrote a letter to Le Figaro in Paris in 1902 announcing that he was abandoning Bassanda "…and that milkmaid… that half-shilling whore…" and returning to Irkutsk with "…sword and saz in hand…." This is the final confirmed location or report of Nasilsinez. The sensational American adventurer and author Richard Halliburton wrote in 1920 of "…witnessing with my own eyes the equine and martial prowess of the great warrior-poet-bard Nasilsinez…" but these particular comments are only to be found in Halliburton's private papers, and were never published in any of his books. H.L. would have been nearly 75 years old by this point and unlikely to have been demonstrating any martial prowess at all, and of course it is not certain that Halliburton even penetrated the Bassandan border, or that the Nasilsinez that he claims to have "…watched gallop his horse at full speed while cutting apples from a tree with his saber…" was even the same person, or even exactly where Halliburton was when he witnessed the alleged event.

It is maddening to the modern scholar and reader that copies of Warriors, Mystics, Musicians, And Dancers Of High Bassanda are so difficult to obtain, and further maddening still that the prose is not only stiff and stilted and almost entirely neglects Nasilsinez's artistic and musical explorations or meaningful ethnography of Bassanda. It is largely dedicated to borderline-sensational anecdotes of duels and sexual conquests that H.L. (or his shoddy editors) seemed to think would sell books like his hero Burton's. This was a gross miscalculation, and so few books were sold that it is conjectured that many of the overstock were destroyed or abandoned in a Siberian warehouse. Noted Prague bookseller Vaclav Klusoz sorrowfully claimed that he found a "trove" of water-stained but readable copies in a weatherbeaten granary in Tehran but the owner, speaking in Persian and pidgin French proclaimed them "merde" and refused to sell them, saying his wife used them to stoke the kitchen-fires.

We may never know what became of Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez. He seems to have literally ridden into the sunset - or sunrise, considering that he was bound for the east. One can only hope that his daring and imagination have passed to his illustrious offspring, and that his worthy line may continue for the benefit of musicians and warrior-poets the world over.

Well. I have no idea if Yezget Nasilsinez ever visited Lebanon (future research for you, my friend? Imagine the revelation if it were confirmed that he met the great Matar Muhammad!) but 1947 seems about right for a possible early tour by a fledgling BNRO… As I said, several pages are missing from my magazine, and even though if the above article were written in conjunction with or in honor of a visit by Y.N. or a tour by the orchestra, a mention thereof might be missing from my copy. Perhaps a duplicate could be found in some archive… and now… an even more tantalizing, and more vague clipping:

* eenville (Greenville?), Mississippi, 18 August 1938

"…liamson, said that one detail of the night stood out other than the conflict that ended Johnson's life - the strange and shadowy presence of a white man in the juke. The man "…was funny-looking…" said Williamson. "He had a pointed mustache and a crazy red hat that looked like an organ-grinder's monkey would wear." Apparently the man was well-dressed and also carried a musical instrument, but Williamson could not identify its type, only that is "…weren't no git-tar like I've ever seen. Had a long skinny neck and a belly like a tater-bug mandolin, and the frets was all messed up."

Other patrons confirm the odd man's presence at the juke but have no comment other than to confirm his unusual dress and that he seemed very interested in the music. One woman said the odd man left before the trouble began. The woman in question, one Mae-Ida Pettigrew, was questioned at her home the day following Johnson's death, but adamantly denied involvement, or the involvement of her boyfriend, Harold "Little Joy" Carter. Carter's current whereabouts are yet to be establ…"

Given that Y.N.'s whereabouts from late 1937-1939 are unknown, I don't have to point out the rather explosive possibilities of this fragment. I think you should put some of your interns on this IMMEDIATELY and see if the complete original can be found, not to mention any further notations of the "odd man" in days subsequent. WOW!

I know the magazine article does little to conclusively add to our knowledge of Yezget's early life, and doesn't even come close to solving what seems to be his greatest biographical mystery - whether he was the son or grandson of Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez. Oh well. More digging to do.Well, my friend, I'm off to attempt something productive. God knows how much more I'll find around here… I've got boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling and if I don't expire from hantavirus I'll keep on going through them and who knows what I might find. Until we meet again you of course have my highest regards and I remain

Your humble and obedient servant,

The Rt. Rev. Col. R.E.C. Thompson

The following forwarded under separate cover from The General:

Gentlemans,

I am honored Doctor Selim Yakznuroffitov. I work with sad poor skinny childrens in mountains region of beautiful homland of Bassanda (Longz May She Wail!). As you have no doubt hearing on world news broadcasts of televisions we have major serious bigtime probelem of many mountains childrens drinking water from streams in mountains which haz been pissed in by DEGENERATED mountain dwellers INFIDELS and PIG FORNICATORS from UPSTREAM!!!

For to making these situation less shitty more goodness, it is my pleasure and indeed my HONOR to offer to acquaint you with most efficacious and salubrious opportunities for finances advancement by investing in Bassandan National Bank Transfer Accounts. For a one-time fee of $250 paid to the following PayPal account <[email protected]> we will authorizing payment of Bassandan National Bank to yours accountz (be certain to include your bank rauwting numbers and accountz numbers or fee is non-refundable).

Yours in godly working on our times here terrestrially,

Doctor Selim Yakznuroffitov
Chairmen
Bassandan National Piss-in-Water Relief Fundz Bassandan National Governermont Krazdurchillyan, Bassanda 1EZ7 N22O

Dr St John's response:

dEAR WINESAP

PROF ST JOHN HERE. DESPITE THE FACTL THAT i DESPISE ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS – SO MUCH LESS SATISFACTORY THAT CIVILIZED DISCOURSE – i AM TYPING TO YOU ON THIS UNDERGRADUATE PERSON’S “TABLET” TO EXPRESS MY STRONGEST DISAPPROBATION REGADING NEGELCT OF THE ABOVE FORWARDEDD COMMUNICATION YOU WILL WELL RECALL MY STRICT; INSTRUITONS THAT ALL SUCH APPEALS FROM bASSANDAN NATIONALS ARE TO BE TAKEN VERY SERIOUSLY WE HAVE A MORAL OBLIGATION TO USE OU LIMITED FINANCIAL RESOURCES TO HELP THEM!!1 NO DOUBT THE “DEGENERATED MOUNTAIN DWELLERS” RFEENCED IN THE ABOVE ARE THOSE DAMNED xLBITIANS - YOU KNOW THE AGE-OLD CONFLICT BTWEEN bASSANDA ND xLBIT. i EXPECT ACTION ONT HIS HEARTFLET APPEAL FORTHWITH!

sT jOHN

Winesap replies:

Dear Professor

Yes sir, I do understand and I do recall your very many repeated instructions as regards humanitarian aid from the Institute to Bassandan nationals. However, I must tell you that, in the world of global electronic communications, it is not unheard-of that opportunistic and unethical persons will sometimes impersonate others, especially those in need, in order to run a kind of “confidence game” upon them in order to relieve them of banked funds. Modern communications experts refer to such missives as “spam” and there are electronic safeguards in place to identify and quarantine such communications; that is why you only saw this from “Doctor Yakznuoffitov” in the “spam folder.”

With all respect, Sir, I believe it is appropriate and most desirable that we avoid responding to this confidence trick.

Respectfully,

Winesap

PS: Would you please give me the name of the undergraduate who facilitated you in accessing your email on her or his tablet? I need to have a word with that student.

The Doctor replies:

The Dr responds:

WINESAP:

SPAM? tHE BASSANDANS LOVE SPAM! DONT YOU RECALL THAT IT WAS A CORNERSTONE OF THE HUMANIATIAN AID SENT TO THEM AFTER THE wAR AS PART O THE MARSHALL PLAN, THE bASSANDA LEG OF WHCIH i WAS INOLVED IN SETTING UP?!? I EXPECT ACTION ON THIS FORTHWITH!

sT jOHN

PS; NO IEDA OF UNDERGRADUATES NAME THEY ARE ALL SO YOUNG NOWADAYS

scribbled Winesap note on Archive letterhead:

Colleagues: a moment of incredible excitement and (possibly) earth-shaking significance in the annals of 20th century Bassandan high-art culture--I *may*be on the trail--in the Archive--of primary source material from the legendary, formerly thought to be undocumented premiere of "Xblt Op. 16": the "Bassandan Rite of Spring"! Materials include score sketches; cryptic notes which appear to be for choreography, in a queer and prototypical Laban notation; and fragmented press clippings which suggest that abortive Bassanda premiere may have received nearly as tumultuous a reception as Stravinsky's more famous (and notorious) work! More information when I am able to delve further back into the Archive!

--Winesap

Audio finds in the Archive!

More news: further searches in the Archives have uncovered what appear to be acetate dubs of Radio Free Bassanda shortwave broadcasts, from all periods of the radio era. These materials are in extremely fragile and, in some cases, quite deteriorated condition, but our interns at Bassanda Audio Neurons Group (a/k/a B.A.N.G.) believe that they have the means to resurrect at least a sampling of these archival broadcasts. More information as the reconstruction proceeds.

Typescript from the Archive: unproduced USIA commercial King of the Hill for Bassanda market

....[obscured]...

DALE: "Steering Committee"? That would imply "direction."

DALE: "Hank, I could take care of that Bassandan infestation for ya."

HANK: (deep sigh) ...Dale!..."

BOOMHAUER: "Dang Ol' <mumble> 'Ssandans. Dang Ol' mess."

PEGGY: "Why yes, it just so happens that, as a certified substitute teacher, I AM an authority on Bassanda. Now let me just see if I can find it on this map..."

LOU ANNE: "Unca Haynke, Do Bassandans live in houses?"

BOBBY: "Dayd, kin I join the Bassandan junior folkloric ballet troupe at school?"

HANK: "<deep sigh> ... Bobbeh, someday I will grow old, and I will die... then you kin join the <pause> Bassandan folkloric <pause> ballet <deep sigh>..."

BILL DAUTERIVE: "I have Bassandan on muh momma's side."

COTTON HILL: “Heckfahr, I ‘member them Bassandins! They’iz inna next foxhole ta me on Iwo Jimer. They’z NEAR as tough as a 'Murrikin!"

Leon Avventoros Anderson, former OSS / CIA analyst (1947-74); journalist/author/presenter (1968-92) [image: Bassandan coast, c1956]

Deposition (excerpt--redacted under FOIA 2012)

(...)
just
"OK, I’m trying to cast my mind back to the height of those Cold War days—we’re talking almost 60 years ago now, and some of this stuff is awfully foggy. At that time, we all accepted that the mission was to try to understand these places: it was a point of pride for us as analysts that we absolutely resisted pressure from the political establishment to cook the data and give them what they wanted. But Bassanda was tough, because so few of us had been there or knew anyone who had been, and the reports we got were massively conflicted. I guess I got assigned to this task (around 1954? somewhere in there) because my great-grandmother had married into a Bassandan family, even though most of my mother’s side were from Crete and the southern Greek islands. Progiagiá (Ed: “great grandmother”) had that Bassandan longevity thing: she lived until 1942, and we know she was born before 1836, because her name appears on a census roll from Heraklion in that year.

Anyway, I’m digging around for some of the notes I made when I came onto the Eastern Med theatre around 1953. It was kind of a backwater—although Palestine was a mess, Dulles was mostly interested in Indochina and in that total clusterfuck that toppled Massadeq in Iran. Looking back, I’m glad I had the Eastern Med, because those assholes were playing nation-builder elsewhere. They figured, because of my family background, my language skills, and the fact that I was interested in folklore and ethnology and music, I might be able to get on with the Bassandan contacts, because those were the same things the contacts cared about.

What we knew at the time was that, because Bassanda had a relatively small square mileage, with few natural resources like precious metals, spices, minerals, or oil, it had never been a principal target for imperial conquest. On the other hand, its location meant that it had been an imperial transit zone a la Afghanistan: everyone from Alexander to Suleiman to Peter the Great to Nicholas I had tried to annex the region so as to control access, and usually gotten their asses kicked in the process. Because its landscape was so fierce—for a country with small square mileage, they managed to pack in high-altitude steppes, old-growth alpine forests, mountains, rocky seacoast—nobody was really interested in colonizing there either. And the locals had been a tremendous headache for any outsiders with imperial ambitions: they had that tribal loyalty thing going, they absolutely hated to be told what to do, they had this oral tradition of epic poetry that went back at least 2000 years, and they prided themselves on their skills as horsemen and sailors. So sometimes they fought as mercenaries for surrounding states, sometimes they showed up in ships’ crews in the Med, the Black Sea, or even into the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, but mostly they stayed home, farmed, fought, and smuggled. Lot of subsistence farming, some pastoral stuff on the high steppes. They had an incredible sense of their own history, a lot of which was carried in epic poetry—I had learned scraps of old Bassandan from my great-granny, and my grandfather loved to sing his mother’s songs.

The Czars were always interested in controlling Bassanda, just as they were with all the border states on the fringes of the Empire, especially those with any kind of access to warm-water ports. That’s why they meddled in India (well, that and the incredible wealth that Britain took out of there all the way up to 1949), that’s why they tried to horn in on Tibet and Nepal, and that’s especially why they kept locking horns with the Turks. Ivan the Terrible tried to go into Bassanda in the 1570s and it’s one of the only places he decided just wasn’t worth the cost of conquest. That’s not to say that later, dumber Czars didn’t try the same thing: Peter the Great was smart enough to stay out, but Catherine tried to go in in the 1720s and they got the shit kicked out of them again. The Bassandans rejected Czarist “civilization,” though they developed a taste for rifled muskets and vodka that they looted from the pack trains of Imperial troops. Also liked Imperial-issue boots—you could usually tell who had knocked over a pack train by how many barefoot Russian corpses were left behind. It got so bad that the Imperial Cossacks refused to serve there: they didn’t like that their horses were no good in the high mountains, and they hated sailboats, and they were scared shitless of those Bassandan wolfhounds—anyway those were the reasons given by the Cossacks for making themselves scarce.

As was the case in a lot of the satellites, the Bassandans actually welcomed the fall of Nicholas II in March 1917; like those other states, they figured that a progressive, socialist, representative government was preferable to the Czarist bullshit. And they weren’t totally wrong: some people don’t realize just how politically and artistically and socially progressive the Lenin government was, in that brief period between the October Revolution and Stalin’s accession in ’24, but there was great interest in maintaining and celebrating ethnic and artistic diversity. Bassanda actually welcomed Leninist “liberalism”—that was before the CHEKA got going.

When Stalin came in, the Bassandan Soviet Socialist Republic experienced the same kind of social and economic constriction, programs of cultural standardization, Socialist-Realist dictates regarding "appropriate" state arts, and oppression of ethnic or cultural minorities. Pretty much everything both economic and artistic was subsumed under the heading of “progress,” and anything that deviated from the norms and means established for testing progress was regarded as decadent and “anti-proletarian.” For the arts, especially in an ethnic minority republic like Bassanda, this peaked with the repression and show trials of the late 1940s and early ‘50s.

After ’55, there was a gradual, very slow liberalization under Kruschev. Throughout this period there would have been fierce, essentially tribal resistance by geographically and topographically isolated groups, "never fully Russianized". I mean, there are some of those deep valleys, at the head of the coast’s fjords, where nobody ever learned to speak Russian and the census commissars didn’t dare go—because when they did, sometimes their motorcycles came tumbling back down the hillsides with headless corpses tied on them.

I wouldn’t have really grasped everything that Yezget Nas1lsinez was involved in; by the time the Agency became aware of him, around ’47, he was already corresponding with George Orwell but he was also pulling away from the Central Committee. And, in the context of the time, that made him some kind of a good anti-Communist (Orwell published 1984 in 1949). And we knew that he had been involved with organizing anti-Nazi partisans during the War. Beyond that, we just knew that the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra was heavily involved in broadcasts by the BSSR networks. But he always seemed to be a guy you could do business with—smart as hell, and capable, especially in official correspondence with USIA, of conveying that he knew a lot more, and could get a lot more done, than he was willing to spell out. I always had a surmise that his primary loyalty was to “old” Bassanda, the kind of regional and musical diversity that had been in place before the Soviets ever went in. Maybe it was an intuition—my Bassandan great-granny’s instincts for recognizing a countryman and an ally.

Anyway, when I was editing various journalistic fronts for the Agency, in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, I always tried to make sure the BNRO got a fair hearing. And I would have been absolutely deluged with requests from US and NATO-pact agencies, presenters, and musicians for chances to interact with Nas1lsinez and his orchestra: I don’t know how these folks heard the BNRO’s music, but they seemed to have an incredible amount of information about what Yezget-Bey was doing and they wanted to meet and work with him—in a lot of ways, the Western artists and musicians realized the power of art and music to dismantle Stalinism long before we analysts did. I think some of those westerners were sneaking into Bassanda when they could, because they were so interested in the regional musical cultures.

I guess I can admit this now...I was always kind of more sympathetic to Nas1lsinez and his orchestra and to Bassandan artists & musicians than the Agency might have wanted me to be. I saw how deeply rooted they were in love of country, but the way they managed to love their country and their country’s arts, without getting sucked into that whole Cold War paranoid flag-waving covert bullshit act, and I wished my own Agency and my own supervisors had paid attention to what the arts could tell us and the bridges they could build. When Yezget-Bey got into it with the Bassandan authorities in ’62 during the Missile Crisis, and again ’68 in Prague, I basically told my opposite number in the KGB, through back-channels, that if they snatched Nas1lsinez into the Gulag I would burn every single Soviet agent in the West I knew of--and I knew a lot them. I like to think that I had a little something to do with the fact that he was able to keep recording and touring, even when money got really tight during Brezhnev.

I kind of lost track of Yezget-Bey in the ‘70s—Indochina had become completely insane, and I was actually trying to get out of the Agency by then: pardoning that fucking criminal Nixon convinced me I didn’t want to work for the US government anymore—but I kept up through mutual friends via various means. No, I don’t really feel like talking about who they were...some of those folks are still around and they’re still my friends.

He came back onto my radar in 1980, when the BNRO did that Independence celebration concert in Zimbabwe. I might have known a little bit about that through Joshua Nkomo’s people; I always thought Mugabe was a megalomaniacal asshole, and I was sorry to see that coalition come together. Actually, I might have been there in Harare at Rufalo Stadium that night that Mapfumo and Bob Marley and the BNRO all played. I was there visiting “friends”—the Agency didn’t know anything about it, and by then I was a journalist--a private citizen, and I didn't give a shit what the Agency wanted or didn't want. That was a helluva night, and I'm glad I was there.

I was proud to know Yezget-Bey and the musicians, and to play a bit of a role in facilitating what they did, all the way from ’47 up to his death in Finland in ’85. We could have learned a lot more from him than we did.

Hope that helps.

LAA"

Notes on Algeria Main-Smith (1862-1947)

Possibly a distaff relation of HM S. Owsley-Smythe of Throbshire, but the connection is unconfirmed.

Paternal grandfather was John Smith (c1795-1872), Salem Massachusetts-based tea clipper captain. Starting as a sailmaker’s apprentice, but running away to serve before the mast at age of 14, John Smith made a fortune in the China tea trade in the 1850s and ‘60s. Widely regarded as one of the canniest navigators in the American Age of Sail, with a “nose for wind” which flummoxed more scientific sailors and competitors. Particularly notable because he categorically refused the standard practice of trading opium for tea, insisting upon paying fair market value in silver—a moral nicety only possible because of his astonishing record of swift passages. He also appears to have introduced his second-eldest son Jacob (born 1835), father to Algeria, to Japanese and Chinese arts and philosophies in the voyages of the ‘50s, and Jacob appears to have been a quick study: the family mansion on “Captain’s Row” in Salem displays a wide variety of porcelain, jade, and rare books, which represents only a small portion of the very large Main-Smith trove in the Oriental collection at the Peabody Museum there. Jacob married a daughter of Salem, Rebecca Dudley, who, coming from an old Ulster Presbyterian immigrant family, was widely credited with the Second Sight. Rebecca, Algeria’s mother, died tragically in 1869, when the only child was not yet nine years of age, and the girl was raised by her father and a succession of beloved African American nurses, at least two of whom were manumitted slaves of Haitian and Georgia Sea Islands ancestry. Tutored by Jacob and her nurses, Algeria learned to read Latin, Greek, French, and Aramaic before she was twelve years of age, to speak Haitian Krio and fragments of Gullah, and like her father maintained a strong interest in Eastern literatures and esoteric philosophies.

At the age of 18, she eschewed the conventional bourgeois New England model of a “debut” in society, and opted instead for a year overseas; though it was given out that she would be making a “Grand Tour” of Europe, as was not uncommon for educated and well-off (and well-chaperoned) young women, in fact Algeria persuaded Jacob to permit her to make a tour of Ceylon and India, with whose ancient literary language of Sanskrit she had a more than passing acquaintance. Accompanied by Colette San Jacques, a mixed-race companion who was the daughter of one of her Haitian nurses, a fine horsewoman and adept with edged weapons through the training of her French planter father, and Li Bao, a young Shanghainese sailor and bodyguard, expert in unarmed combat, who had served on the Smith Line clippers, Algeria departed for India, and landed at Gujarat in January of 1881.

Particularly interested in Buddhist and Hindu scripture and sculpture, she and her traveling companions spent four months traveling in the northwestern provinces of the Five Rivers (later, “The Punjab”); her journals and sketchbooks are a wealth of closely- and sympathetically-observed information. In these late stages of the British Raj, she was a vocal, articulate, and politically sophisticated reporter on the tides of reform and modernization spreading across the nation. The Second Afghan War had ended with the Treaty of Gandamak the year before, and, with the withdrawal of the British Army from Afghanistan, the Northwest Frontier was simultaneously more open and more fluid than it had been for centuries. Following the trail of Buddhist and Sufi teachings, and the influence of Muslim culture, Main-Smyth and her traveling companions San Jacques and Li managed to travel north, past the Khyber, and still further north into Central Asia. In her journal, she records their intention to seek “the mystical land of Shambala,” which she (quite erroneously) believed to lie northwest of Afghanistan.

On one such day, in the spring of 1883, as they were making their way along a mountain pass in the wild country between Herat and Ashgabat (in Turkmenistan), they espied a small hermitage on the steep hillside above the one-mule trail (Li was apparently an expert horse coper, in addition to his skills with small boats and unarmed combat), and a small man in orange and red robes outside the hut, waving to the travelers below. Tethering their mules, they climbed to the hermitage, where the holy man greeted them in a language which Algeria, despite her linguistic skills, did not recognize, yet found herself able to understand. The monk asked “Are you looking for the light-skinned Brethren traveling to Bassanda?” Intrigued both as a linguist and an amateur ethnographer, she asked “who are the Brethren?” and the monk replied “They came from the West, and they travel to the East. They are two: one mightily bearded and skilled with all weapons, and the other of many instruments and great historical erudition. They act like brothers, though not of the same mother, and their eyes have seen sorrow and suffering. They said they sought Bassanda, and peace.”

Algeria and her companions did not know what to make of this tale of light-skinned Western pilgrims heading east, and were even more taken aback when the monk produced two small pieces of black slate, of a sort common in the high mountains of Central Asia, etched by an unknown process with the likenesses of these Brethren. When she pressed the holy man for more information on those depicted in the images, he smiled gently and said only “You are to follow them. Where you find the Brethren, there you will find Bassanda.” Beyond this, though he was open and forthright in speech, sharing freely of his hermitage’s hospitality, the monk would say no more of the Brethren. In the morning, he gave Algeria’s party the Mountain Traveler’s blessing (“May you seek the road you desire, yet find the road you need”) and sent them on their way.

There is no direct evidence confirming that Algeria and her companions ever found the Western Brethren who had preceded them into the High Hills, or indeed that she ever found Bassanda. Her traveling journal breaks off just after the encounter with the holy man—presumably a packet of materials, held in the family collection at Salem, has been mislabeled or mis-shelved (although see the fragmentary correspondence, reproduced below)—but it is clear that she, Colette San Jacques, and Master Li Bao returned safely from their journey. It appears, in fact, that they took ship from Qingdao on the East China Sea in December of 1884, and arrived back to Salem, via San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston, in June of the same year.

Miss Main-Smith never married—though there are rumors of liaisons, or at least fervent friendships, with, among others, Big Bill Haywood, of the IWW; the journalist Jacob Riis; and playwright Eugene O’Neill; it is confirmed that she was present at the deportation trial of the socialist Emma Goldman in 1917, and she may have met the young J.R.R. Tolkien, invalided from the Western Front, in London in November of the previous year. She appears to have visited Europe again in the 1920s, and to have been a significant mentor and patron of both the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company and the American exotic dancer Josephine Baker (who debuted in Paris in 1925); Baker later commented “Miss Main-Smith was one of my heroes. She helped me in Paris, but, even more, she inspired me: she said Bassanda had taught her that we should be proud of who we are, as women; that I should be proud of who I was: dark-skinned, a dancer, a revolutionary. She gave me courage.”

Main-Smith largely retired from public life after 1936, and seems to have spent much of her time assembling a collection of primary source materials and a long narrative sketch for a history of Bassanda, which remained incomplete, and largely in disarray, at her death in 1947. There is a small and simple headstone in Broad Street Cemetery, in Salem, not far from the grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne, while her public papers lie in the Widener Library in Harvard University. A family story, not substantiated in any formal records, says that she was cremated, and a portion of her ashes traveled West, to the East, again. The inscription on the gravestone reads “Algeria Main-Smith, 1862-1947. Friend of Bassanda. May all Beings experience Liberation.”

Below, we reproduce a fragment from the 1881-83 travel journals, which break off before the (presumed) visit to Bassanda; also a brief exchange of correspondence between Miss Main-Smith and Colonel Thompson, undated but appearing to come from the mid ‘90s; and the crude daguerreotypes which Li Bao took of the slate images of the Brethren in the mountains of Central Asia:

“Dear Colonel...

Notes on Bassandan ethnography (CIA World Factbook, Huston Smith, British Admiralty, undated sources)

(...)

BASSANDA:

DNA pool quite diverse, as a result of 4000 year history as imperial highway
Historical trade in spices, timber, sheepskins, horses, (on coasts) fish, sailing commerce
Adept navigators
Children raised communally: “the child is the child of the village”
Inheritance through the female line
Marriage at will—dowries exchanged must be adjudged by the community to be of equal value. No arranged marriages. A son or daughter pressured to marry may appeal to the village elders, whose deliberations must be public and whose decision is final.
LGBQT accepted: sex recognized to be a positive personal experience separate from procreation. Not uncommon for village children to be raised by single parents or by same-sex parents, especially if children are orphaned
Men & women recognized to have separate spheres, but “the universe rolls in circles and all parts of the circle are essential”

Pre-literate spirituality was a sky religion: steppes/horses, sea/winds. Worship of animals, topography, and weather leads naturally to pantheism, interceding saints, calendar rituals dedicated to gods of the seasons. Christianity taking root in Bassanda from very early (around 300CE), in tandem with Zoroastrianism (from c800 BCE), Buddhism, Judaism, later Islam. Bassandan cultural attitudes from the pre-literate era tended toward high acceptance of spiritual diversity, this a product of the region’s very long history of cosmopolitan/traveler experience. In the pre-literate era, shaman/healers/seers occupy very important social role; the Gods’ transmitted approval being required for tribal chieftainships. Council of chieftains ruling each tribal group or region: military, agricultural, linguistic, naturalist and/or poetic acumen all accorded leadership roles. The monotheistic religions (Zoroaster, Buddha, Yahweh, Allah) all strongly impacted by these cultural and historical factors, yielding various Bassandan sects particularly flavored by regional beliefs.

Christianity’s contributions: redemption, poverty/generosity, love, forgiveness; Buddhism: karma, the transformation of energy, the evidence of empirical knowledge & the natural world; Zoroaster: aspiration, group consciousness, sacrifice & courage as merit; Judaism: history & literary knowledge, respect for wisdom, love of family; Islam: music & dance as transformative, hospitality, loyalty, self-sacrifice.

Overwhelmingly, however, Bassandan spirituality most strongly shaped by the influence of the natural world: the region’s topography, vegetation, micro-climates, and weather are quite diverse, in places quite fierce (high altitudes, heavy storms, extremes of heat and cold), and quite dramatic. The result appears to have been that, long before the “Religions of the Book” (whether Rig Vea¸ Bible, Koran, or other) found their way there via trade and conquest, Bassanda had developed a deep, abiding, instinctive and remarkably resilient love of nature, which tied directly into their very ancient tradition of oral poetry. Even into the 20th century, Bassandans resisted lumbering, mining, factory farming or fishing, or other capitalism-driven mass-production activities which changed the face of the land. A Bassandan proverb (translated) reads roughly: “The Land is our Mother. How could we scar her face?” During the Soviet era, when attempts were made to import Stalinist collective farming and industry, the Bassandans responded very favorably to the idea of “from each according to his ability”—they were natural communitarians, artisans, and cottage-industrialists from the tribal era—but actively resisted major alterations of the landscape: mines and lumbering operations were sabotaged, political activists published samizdat essays and poetry decrying “the rape of the land,” and so forth. It is thought that Edward Abbey, the great anarchist author and environmentalist of the American Southwest, may have visited Bassanda in the early 1950s, on exchange study from the University of New Mexico, making contact with underground environmental activists; it may be no coincidence that the antihero of Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, George Hayduke, shares a number of physical characteristics and intellectual aptitudes with Bassandans: of modest stature, hirsute, strong for his size, very comfortable in the outdoors, somewhat introverted, and a passionate activist on behalf of wild nature.

Music, poetry and dance played an extremely significant role in Bassanda spirituality since the pre-literate era. In the sky (steppes) and wind (sea) sects of the old religion, life-cycle transformation ceremonies were often focused around the performance of music, song, and dance rituals: in the various sects, an adolescent boy might dance his way into manhood, an adolescent girl might spontaneously compose and sing a mother’s birthing song. As was common with many steppe peoples, elders would spontaneously compose and sing songs upon (expected or unanticipated) death. Names were conveyed through songs sung in dreams: dances enacted the great stories of wind, sea, sky, and land. In the period following the influx of the various outside poly- and mono-theistic religions—Zoroastrianism was in the region by around 600 BCE, and Christianity by around 300 CE—those other sects experienced considerable influence from indigenous beliefs: Bassandan Buddhism, for example, as was the case in Tibet and western China, absorbed the local nature pantheons and employed masking and sacred dance extensively at temple ceremonies; while Bassandan Hinduism, on the other hand, absorbed local aversion to aristocracies and theocracies, and became a much more family- and community-, rather than hierarchy-oriented religion. At the same time, those later “Book”-driven religions, in Bassanda, were greatly enriched and humanized, and their focus upon doctrine was recalibrated by indigenous concepts of community and communal obligation, toward an emphasis upon attention, hospitality, open communication, generosity, and compassion. “Bassandan religion” is thus a very diverse, rich, memory-driven, landscape-conscious way for the individual to perceive her/his place and obligations in the world, the community, the cosmos, and in time.

Bassandan busker, c1900, with Heliophone mobile radiophonic playback device. Below, General-Winesap conversation re/ this image and the electrical traditions of Bassanda.

Bassandan busker. These street musicians were found throughout market towns and country fairs.

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The General: Ah yes, the four-wheeled Heliophone
5 hours ago · Like · 1

The Elegant Savages Orchestra Yes, precisely: Edison would have anticipated it, but the hand-spun Bassandan bearings in the carriage’s hubs made it particularly durable and navigable in the high country; this is an example of the adaptability of Bassandan armaments (ball bearings developed for the Bassanda Bicycle Corps) to peacetime applications. The Heliophone II could actually be disassembled and carried in a pack frame, before reassembly at the point of performance. It is possible that the Archives at Miskatonic contain one or two unique discs from the special line of radiophonic recordings released on high-impact shellac for the buskers’ usage.
4 hours ago · Like · 2

General: And, IIRC, the Heliophone’s flat black gutta percha bell collected solar energy which was harnessed to run the mechanism somehow, wasn’t it?
22 minutes ago · Like

The Elegant Savages Orchestra My god, I’d forgotten that bit. I seem to recall that the Bassandans re-engineered the Edison mechanism so that it could run either from the factory-supplied spring-loaded crank, or from photo-voltaic panels. The Bassandans, as with many other farming and pastoral cultures, had practiced what we would now call “passive solar energy” in building for centuries: heat sinks, white canvas roofs for the summer steppes, black slate shingle to collect winter sun, etc--but it was not at all uncommon to find active electrical engineering very early, as well: Alessandro Volta had invented a functional battery around the year 1800. Due to the very high altitudes and impassible terrain in which many Bassandans lived, batteries (as opposed to direct or alternating current) had been the major source of electrical energy all the way up to the 1950s. I believe I also recall seeing photos in Smith-Hyde’s collection of Bassandan buskers and pedlars who had developed simple, bicycle driven generators for recharging such battery arrays. More on this in the upcoming Dispatch from the Archives, concerning the Bassandan Bicycle Corps.
13 minutes ago · Like

The Elegant Savages Orchestra Actually, I’ve just taken a preliminary glance through the Professor’s card catalog (yes, friends--the Professor continues to eschew any more modern data-keeping tool) and found a scrawled note that suggests William Cruickshank (d1811) had sent a prototype “trough battery” with his son Robert, who “went out” to the East around 1797, charged to prevent Napoleon’s further expansion eastward and northward from Egypt. The younger Cruickshank appears to have introduced the stationary “trough battery” to Bassanda, having fought with the Turks at the Battle of the Nile, mustering out of HM forces and continuing eastward. The card catalog contains several fascinating cross-references re/ Robert Cruickshank--his presence in Bassanda around 1804 may go to explain how Messrs. Landes and Thompson later found the route there--but dissertation obligations preclude my looking further: I am supposed to have a chapter for the Professor to look at and am hoping to avoid his requiring an eighth revision. Apologies.
2 minutes ago · Like

The Elegant Savages Orchestra
See http://canov.jergym.cz/objevite/objev4/crua.htm
In haste, Winesap

Cruickshank
http://canov.jergym.cz/objevite/objev4/crua.htm

"With this battery Dr. Cruickshank was able to extract metals out of their soluti...See More

Notes on Bicycle culture and the Royal Bassanda Bicycle Corps (see also "Gallery" for archival photos)

...Ethnographic notes, CIA Fact Book

In the mountain & seacoast culture of Bassanda, ponies were valuable and primarily reserved for carrying persons: mules would buck and were more sure-footed on their own, so they were better employed for carrying cargo. In the high mountains, especially in the winter dry season, fodder could be a problem, even for mules (ungulants were never used as pack animals in Bassanda). Especially in the partisan era—essentially, from approximately 1890, through the last days of the Soviet hegemony in the early 1980s—bicycles were a particularly common and useful cargo vehicle: simple, inexpensive to repair, capable of nearly infinite adaptation, able to travel nearly anywhere foot traffic could do so, and, when paths were too narrow or rutted, capable of being carried on the human back.

Bicycles had been explored for military applications throughout the late colonial era (c1879-1890): it is ironic, then, that the most effective use of them in combat was by resistance and guerilla forces opposing colonial troops. An early inspiration for the RBBC may have come from the activities of Lieutenant James A. Moss in the late 1890s, who served with the 25th Colored Infantry at Missoula Montana, and developed mountain bicycle techniques in Glacier and Yellowstone National Park. In 1897 he led his volunteer corps on a 1900-mile, 41-day journey from Fort Missoula to St Louis, Missouri, averaging over 40 miles per day (roughly comparable to a fast pace for cavalry troops) with full combat gear.

Bassandan partisans reached similar conclusions to those taken by North Vietnamese in the various Indochinese wars on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. So effective were bicycle smuggling routes that, for a period, the unregistered importation of bicycles or bicycle parts was itself prohibited. Eventually (late Tsarist era), a secretive cottage industry in bicycle parts grew up: blacksmiths learned to braze steel tubing, shot towers were repurposed to forge ball bearings, rubber smuggled from India was vulcanized for tyres, and so forth. This home-grown engineering tradition would play out again in the 1930s with the occasional importation, by Bassanda smugglers, of Indian motorcycles, which were broken apart, hidden in cargoes of blacksmithing tools, and carried on mule-back up into the high hills. This was the origin of the “Bassanda Hill Climbs,” which to this day pit homegrown mechanics and their lightweight, supercharged cycles against the narrow trails and steep precipices of the hill country.

Almost all Bassandans, even handicapped persons and the aged, were naturally equipped for bicycle expertise: their mountaineers’ high lung capacity, strong quadriceps, and remarkable sense of balance (and absence of fear of heights) serving them in good stead. Given that petroleum products were always in tremendously short supply, human-powered push-bikes, treadle sewing machines, pedaled reapers, and so on, were the standard technology.

By the 1930s, at the height of the Stalinist oppression of ethnic minorities in nearly all the satellites, Bassandan avocational cyclists had developed a corps of bicycle commandos, not dissimilar to the bicycle-equipped paratroopers of the D-Day landings (see British and US Army sources).

In contrast to the cyclists of Operation Overlord, Bassandan partisan forces never had air superiority, but they did prove adept at exploiting their knowledge of the high terrain, and the indigenous hang-glider tradition, in order to fly at night silently into enemy-controlled flatlands zones (what would now be called “base-jumping”), inflict sabotage and guerrilla damage, and then employ folding bicycles to ride back up the steep mountain trails where fascist armor could not follow. The occupiers learned early that using motorized vehicles to pursue the Bassanda Bicycle Corps commandos, especially in light of the latter’s virtually superhuman aerobic capacity, or at night, when the roar of diesel engines made it impossible to track the deadly, swift and nearly-silent cyclists, was a recipe for ambush, booby-traps, disorientation, vehicular breakdown, and death from exposure.

By the end of the Soviet era, the vast majority of the Bassandan population was so fit, and so comfortable with bicycles, that it proved remarkably easy to repurpose military cycles as transport and power generators. Most Bassandan village homes had a bicycle-powered turbine, an hour’s pedaling upon which was sufficient to charge satellite telephones and tablets. In the 2000s, emissaries from various bicycle-friendly European and North American cities (Amsterdam, Portland, London, Chicago) were trekking to Bassanda to observe a fully-fledged bicycle economy in situ. The Bassandans professed themselves amused by the foreigners’ obsession with Lycra and space-age technology, but were not averse to leading expeditions into the high hills; as the first president of the Bassandan Bicycle Trekking Consortium, Hafi Sari Mayoyu (“Hafi of the Yellow Jersey”) put it: “No one is shooting at us? Then it’s a perfect day for a mountain ride!”

Pedlars, patent medicines, and “sono-pictographs”

Bassanda had supported vibrant trade for traveling peddlers, performers, physicians, and amateur folklorists for over a millenium. The combination of extremely craggy coastline and steep mountain valleys meant that travel by macadamized road came to the countryside very late—in many cases, during or even only after the Second World War. Anti-fascist Bassandan partisans made a specialization of destroying new-built roads; there is a folk saying which, roughly translated, reads “they unroll it [e.g., the road surface], and we roll it up behind them.” The partisans developed a technique for mining roads, creating improvised explosive devices fired by timers or pressure fuses which could only be detonated by heavy trucks and tanks and were unaffected by foot, horse, or cart travel: by late 1944, motorized troops employed by the Nazis, in an eerie recollection of the Cossacks of the Tsarist era, categorically refused to ride on troop carriers or armor—this in turn essentially confining occupying forces to the few towns of size.

But prior to, during, and (in some areas) even after the War, there were very extensive networks for mounted, horse-drawn, and bicycle-mobilized trade. The visits of the peddlers to the mountain villages (on mule- or pony-back) and fjord towns (in small sailing smacks—many peddlers were also expert sailors and, indeed, smugglers) were occasions for celebration, exchange of news, and sharing of new tunes and dances. When Bela Bartok served as host and local “fixer” for Ralph Vaughan Williams’s little-known visit around 1906, just before the latter’s Paris sojourn studying with Ravel, the dapper young Hungarian and bearish Briton both rode the tough strong little Bassandan ponies, with mules to carry along their baggage, which included the early, spring-wound Edison wax-cylinder recorder which each had separately realized could revolutionize both musical ethnography and nationalist compositional sources. On several occasions, entering smaller, more isolated villages, locals presumed that the two were particularly wealthy peddlers carrying particularly rare and diverse wares. Loath to disappoint the locals, Bartok proposed that the two (both violinists) should provide a series of duets, as well as opportunities to hear playback of cylinders recorded elsewhere in the mountains. As Vaughan Williams later told the tale (typically, only after the fourth or fifth round of pints at his local, the King’s Arms at Dorking in Surrey), the “concert by visiting scientists” quickly turned into an extended music-and-dance session, fueled by cross-cultural performances and the firey Bassandan raki.

What Vaughan Williams may not have fully understood—though one should never underestimate Bartok’s cross-cultural insights—is that the occasion for any peddler’s visit, at a fair, wedding, or simply by fortuitous chance, was regarded in Bassanda as an opportunity for multi-day celebration. Peddlers brought not only goods and news, but also patent cures, new music, dancing, and quasi-theatrical entertainments. The local puppetry tradition Birbirlerine Isabet Kuklalar (“puppets hitting each other”) was widely disseminated by peddlers and traveling players, which in turn led to remarkable diversity and individuation of their classic tropes of mistaken identity, inappropriate love, double-entendre wordplay, and low slapstick comedy. The Mjekësia Trego (“Medicine Show”), in its brightly-painted, pony-drawn caravans and featuring its small traveling casts of multi-talented singers, players, dancers, acrobats, magicians, and comic actors, was thus a beloved feature of rural life, and iconic of the traditional May 1 Bassandan Carnival. Small hints of its vibrancy are also captured in the first Tableau of Stravinsky’s Petrushka (set in “primitive Russia,” but containing key elements, and not a few tunes, “borrowed” from Bassandan tradition) and in the folkloric elements of his L’histoire du soldat and in Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. And there is a tale in the countryside that the imported banza tradition (a four-stringed banjo, tuned to various natural-tempered modes and played with a complicated array of polyrhythmic right-hand techniques) may have been introduced to Bassanda via foreign adventurers touring with the Mjekesia Trego.

From a correspondent to the Archive:

"Found this image going through an old trunk in my great-aunt's house. Black Cowboys, 1913. Many of these guys had enlisted in the US Army in the wake of the Civil War, and gone west. Sometimes they fought Indians, sometimes they joined. But they were a core part of the history of the West. There is some evidence suggesting that black ex-"Buffalo Soldiers" may have accompanied shipments of pinto and Appaloosa ponies from the US to the steppes of Bassanda--part of the quixotic and long-term engagement of the American branch of the Habjar-Lawrence family with Bassandan independence at the end of the 19th century. Dianthe Habjar-Lawrence, a daughter of the widowed Countess Lucretia MacPherson, who married James Lincoln (Habjar-) Lawrence in 1886, may have met Armenia Main-Smythe during a year at Harvard (1902-02), where they were both members of the seminars of the adjunct teaching professor of English and folklore Olive Dame Campbell. The young Dianthe had learned dressage in Ipswich, Massachusetts, but exposure to the "Indianist" music of the Boston Nationalist composer Edward MacDowell and others had piqued her curiosity about the American West. Eventually, Miss Habjar-Lawrence spent time in the small pueblo community of Questa, in Northern New Mexico, where she may have met homesteading ex-cavalrymen like this pair, in turn persuading such experienced horsemen and former soldiers to join her in the cause of Bassandan independence.

Jackson Lawrence-Smyth, c2004.

“Taking the Hippie Trail to Bassanda”

Report from Dolphu Village border station (Nepal—29.507. 82.82)

Date: 1 January 1979

Author: [redacted] Head of Station, CIA, N Nepal district

Re: Jackson Lawrence-Smyth [unconfirmed; no record of individual US passport or other government-issued documentation under this name]

Subject appeared at Agency front operation (Ganesh’s Kozmik Tea-House and Herbal Emporium), Shey Phoksundo national park, approx 0530 hours on 1.7.78. At that hour, Ganesh’s typically only occupied by Sherpas not currently on trekking contract; the few Westerners who visit Dolphu (many seeking “a sight at the border”) not typically about in the streets at that hour.

Subject entered Ganesh’s at opening time; as Head of Station, I was manning samovar, as Tea-House staff had inexplicably failed to appear for morning shift. Subject was tall, slender, Caucasian appearance, long dark hair and thin beard, dark eyes, deep Himalayan high-country tan. Wearing Nepali cap, very worn but high-quality Création Baumann boots, carrying trekker’s pack. Despite cold temps for the season (approx 12C at 0530), appeared completely comfortable in thin desert fatigues. No obviously visible weapons, though subsequently was established that he carried and was adept with the Pesh-kabz or Khyber knife and may have had firearms training. Spoke Nepali with a Tibetan accent in opening conversation. Nationality not immediately apparent, though his Western origins were obvious and unconcealed.

HOS, initiating conversation while the samovar heated, asked in English (Australian cover) “So, mate, where’ve you come from?” Subject, who introduced himself as “just Jack”, smiled, pointed northeast, and said “Up yonder.” Over the course of several cups of milk tea and a subsequent meal of soup and roti, Subject chatted—in a mixture of Scots-accented English, Nepali, and Hindi—about Himalayan folkways, religion, food, and especially music, but largely deflected questions about the route that had brought him to Dolphu.

Later in the day, Subject, having departed Ganesh’s, was observed in the village square speaking animatedly with a mixed group of Sherpas and exiled Tibetan caravan drovers, gesturing, laughing together, and scanning a map Subject removed from pack. At one point, Subject was observed to clasp hands with and then embrace leader of the drovers, an old Khampa called Aten—subsequently they mounted ponies and rode north out of the village. While HOS had recruited heavily among these Khampas for informants or cross-border spies, past history (’51-’71) of the Chushi Gandrug (Four Rivers, Six Mountains) resistance fighters appears to have eroded Agency credibility in these areas; the day before Subject “Jack” appeared in Dolphu, Aten had told HOS conversation with the Nepali reply सफेद आंख, भाड़ में जाओ तुम (unprintable). Despite this very dismissive and insulting response to well-funded American, Subject “Jack” was seemingly able to establish an immediate bond. Subsequently, other Agency informants among the Sherpa and Khampa-expat community refused to respond to subtle queries regarding “Jack’s” identity, and in fact a marked fall-off in Ganesh Tea-House business appears to date from this same period. Sherpas tended instead to patronize a local Khukuri rum shop across the square; the Khampas visited Ganesh’s only long enough for their yaks to dung on the Tea House’s veranda.

Subsequent inquires by HOS and Station staff amongst the (small) English, German, and American hippie population in the Province also brought little quality intel. Most claimed never to have met “Jack”, though he circulated freely amongst the ex-pats for several weeks in July and August, between mounted journeys, apparently north and east, alone or in company with the Khampas.

HOS did observe one interaction in a side alley off the village square, in which hippie ex-pat leader “Big Darrell” (Darrell Hennessey, 542761898 USMC L, see Agency file appended: a deserter from the secret war in Laos who had followed the opium trail to Kathmandu) appeared to confront “Jack” and threaten him. Dialog not recorded (the listening post in the rum shop having inexplicably failed) but Big Darrell seemed to attempt to grab “Jack’s” lapel. Poor lighting obscured the result, but within less than two minutes Big Darrell was observed to limp from the alley, cradling an obviously broken right arm. Impossible to document subsequent contact between “Jack” and the ex-pat hippies, among whom it had previously been relatively straightforward to establish contacts with small bribes of drugs or threats of prosecution, but who thereafter avoided both “Jack” and conversation about him.

It seemed that Agency SOP for developing informants in Central Asia—particularly in light of tensions with PRC after the fall of Saigon in 1975—would be atypically unsuccessful; these techniques have yielded quality intel amongst the ex-pat communities, though regrettably failed to yield arrests or insights into PRC inner-border activities. In contrast, “Jack” as both subject and topic of conversation appeared to be largely impervious to investigation.

Subsequently, however, on a night in late August 1978, when the cold season was already well-advanced, HOS was returning from a late-night shift at Ganesh’s (the local population having seemingly become quite averse to working at the Tea House), passing the Khukuri rum shop, when “Jack” appeared on its veranda, fell into step alongside me HOS, and said “So, Wild Bill Donovan, you want to know what I’m really doing down here?” Guardedly responding, I HOS replied “hey, mate, I’m ready to listen if you’re ready to talk.” “Jack” chuckled and said “C’mon inside; Madam’ll keep the shop open when she sees it’s me.”

Having seated themselves at a rear table in the dimly-lit shop, over ceramic cups of the firey Khukuri rum (distilled from millet), “Jack” unfolded an unbelievable tale, whose credibility would be virtually nil, were it not for the fact that there is extensive confirmation of the events, and that his tale is consistent with public information on related topics.

“I’m telling you this because my friends among the Khampas think it’ll encourage you to leave us alone. They all know you’re Head of Station here, and they don’t mind the Agency being up here—makes ‘em feel like, if the Chinese do come over the border, Langley might know a little earlier and react a little more effectively than they did in Tibet in ’56. So you’re not finding out anything classified from me—I’m just telling you what I’m doing here so you’ll stay out of the way. I think you’re gonna find that your case officer back home—that’s Leon Avventoros, isn’t it?—is gonna be happy with what I tell you to pass along to him.

“I’m from the States—northeast USA actually—and my family’s been in and out of Central Asia for a long time. My great-uncle ran a radio orchestra in a place called Bassanda in the late ‘40s—my mama was his concert-mistress, and that’s the family connection with your buddy Leon—and I actually did some gigs when I was a teenager with his orchestra: sometimes shooting photos, sometimes playing congas, things like that. Draft Board was gonna call me up in ’74—those assholes in Saigon still kept demanding more bodies for the shredder, and that moron Ford kept believing that somehow he could pull the thing out of the shit—so I just left. I figured if I was gonna help people and causes I cared about, it wasn’t gonna be by getting blown up by a plastique at the Constellation Bar. ‘Nother one of my great-uncles was pretty damned good with edged weapons, and I had a bunch of different languages from my mama, so I wasn’t too worried about traveling in the high places on my own. I figured that there might be some places where my skills with ordnance, if not music or a camera, might let me fight on the good guys’ side.

“So I caught a USMC plane out of Dulles in October of ’74—Uncle Leon got me press credentials—but I jumped ship in Bangkok. Never got on board for the last leg into Tan Son Nhut. And then I just kept following the river traffic north up the Chao Praya: I had enough languages that I could get by, and not too many people were checking IDs anyway. Came overland through Burma—shot a lot of film as a stringer—and then north from Arunachai Pradesh.”

I interrupted this tale at this point, because it was just becoming too fanciful: “Well, that’s all very interesting, ‘Jack’, but it’s also completely impossible—the only thing north of Arunachai is the border. With CHINA. Don’t tell me you crossed the border with your worn out US press credentials, in 1974?”

He just smiled and said: “My great uncle’s people were smugglers and bandits in Bassanda. We know about how to get into and out of the high places. And there’s friends of Bassanda everywhere....So do you wanna hear this story or not? I promise you, your case office, my cousin Leon, he’s gonna be pleased with the document I’m show you you.” So I controlled my exasperation, confident that at some point this wandering amateur would reveal intel about the border situation that would make the conversation worth my time.

“The Tibetans and the Bassandans always got along with each other. There’s a family story that my grand-uncle Yezget—the orchestra director I was telling you about?—actually tracked Heinrich Harrer’s nutzo Nazi trekking trip to Tibet in ’38, and so when I said my family names, people recognized them. And they appreciated that I could handle the mountain altitudes and hold my own on a horse. By Spring of ’75 I was in Lhasa, staying with friends—I darken up pretty good in the sun, and I’d let my hair and beard grow, so the Mongolian troops in the Chinese occupation force just thought I was a tall Tibetan. I was traveling with yak traders, and those guys never really carried any ID, and the troops knew they were never going to be able to track ‘em anyway. So I was able to get into and out of Bassanda, to the west, pretty easy.

“See, I was heading into Bassanda for a reason—matter of fact, that’s why I’d taken on the press junket from DC in late ’73 in the first place. My mama was touring with the Orchestra, but she’d told me the name of a shaman I needed to see in Krzbet, in Bassanda—she said “the Lama holds our families’ inheritance in safe-keeping.” She didn’t tell me what it was, beyond saying it was some documents “that can serve the cause of Bassanda’s and all peoples’ liberation.” I’d learned to trust my mama—she was one of the toughest, smartest people I ever met—and I had the skills and the aptitude, and I wanted to get the fuck out of Gerald Ford’s America anyway, so I went.

“On the first of May in ’75, I rode into Krzbet with a caravan of Khampa and Bassanda traders—really, they were more smugglers, and they appreciated my navigation and language skills, when it came to bargaining or fast-talking border guards (I learned that practically in the cradle, watching my mama talk her way across frontiers with the Orchestra). I knew the name of the ashram where the Lama lived—uh, no, cowboy, I’m not gonna tell you his name—and when I knocked on the door frame of his hermitage, he looked up from his reading and smiled; he said “हैलो” –means “Hello, son” in Hindi—a lot of the Lamas spoke Hindi as well as Tibetan and Bassandan. He said “have you come for your family’s inheritance?” I said “yes, Geshe, but first, here is a tsog gift for the monastery. My mother sends it from Budapest, in the far West”—it was really good plum paninka, and the Lamas aren’t averse to the occasional distillate.

“We drank the paninka, and then about 7 cups of milk tea and ate tsampa, and then he smiled at me again and said ‘I am happy to share with your family the inheritance. The Bassandans have always been protectors of the dharma, and we know that this information will be used to enhance liberation.’

“He pulled out a folio of loose sheets, bound in yak leather; it was embossed on the cover, in what I think was some weird Tibetan/Bassandan creole dialect, using Sanskrit letters. He motioned me to sit down next to him, and said,

“‘These are the records of the great Bassandan electrical experiments. Before Kroog-sheng ever came from the south with his batteries, lamas in the high mountains had found secret caverns of ancient artifacts; we do not know their origin, and many were plundered, or even destroyed, by misguided ‘protectors’ of the Buddha dharma. But we know that these are diagrams which can be used to create machine of great power—machines that can focus or block energy, that can bend light beams, even quell explosions or turn firearms into dead sticks of melted metal. When the Chinese came to Tibet in the time of Tenzin Gyatso, the Khampas fled with these records from the soldiers and their slaughter, and brought them over the mountains for safe-keeping to Bassanda. The geshes tell us these may only be used to prevent suffering and killing—they must be kept away from governments and generals. You are to take these to the West, and find enlightened individuals who may be trusted to build these machines for the cause of peace. Will you do that?’

“Well, I’m my mama’s son, and great grand-daddy’s too, and folks in our family don’t fold—when good people ask us for help, we give it. So I took the sheets (told the Lama I better leave the folio behind, and maybe he could find some other manuscripts to replace the ones I was taking), and wrapped them in a dirty sheepskin, and tucked them away inside a sack of barley on one of the yaks. I made my prostrations to the Lama, and left him all the money that was my share from the trading trip, and me and the Khampas and Sherpas got the hell out of there—didn’t want to draw any more attention as outsiders than we already had. After that, it was back east through Lhasa, to stay with friends—and no, junior, I ain’t gonna tell you who they are, either. I been back and forth a bunch of times since that first journey and I’ve been able to bring out a few more manuscripts, and even some objects, that the Lama says came ‘from the high mountain caverns of the ancient Visitors.’

“So now, cowboy, all you’re gonna have to do is take a look here, and then ask yourself, do you want your case officer back in Langley to know what’s in these documents?”

“Jack” laid a piece of parchment in front of me, beautifully embossed with gold leaf and black-ink designs which looked equally like electronic schematics and astronomical diagrams. He said “This’n yields a directional circuit which can shut down a TNT or powder explosion to a distance of two miles.” Another sheet, of similar appearance, but with lettering in an unknown orthography and more complex diagrams. “This one’ll shut down an internal-combustion engine at a distance; it’s even got a rheostat so that you can gradually dial-down the explosions in the cylinders. You can make an engine fail & stutter just enough that some Russian or American chopper pilot will abort and run for his home base.” Another sheet, another set of diagrams. “I don’t even know what this one does; the Lama just said ‘the Dharma teaches us that existence is a product of motion and fission. This machine will make atoms whole again when war-mongers seek to split them apart.”

As a career professional intelligence officer and a patriotic American, I HOS was simultaneously deeply skeptical—this was, after all, an exponent of the “hippie” values and lifestyle who gave the Agency such trouble domestically in the ‘60s—but also, almost against my will, impressed and persuaded. “Jack’s” obvious command of the languages and terrains of the region, the high degree of trust which he enjoyed with the Khampa traders, the coincidence of the documented events in his account with the historical record, and the sheer force of this young man were undeniable. So, thinking strategically and with awareness of political ramifications, I HOS asked him what would be necessary to “see that these documents get into the right hands.”

He grinned and then chuckled, and then poured me another cup of rum. “I tell you what, cowboy. Let’s you and me think about this, and then we’ll talk again. Drink up, now, and then I’ll walk you back to the Residency.” Thinking strategically, I sought to prolong the contact, asking “Well, where can I get in touch with you tomorrow?” He replied “Oh, I’ll come find you when I’m ready. Drink up, now.”

At a loss to explain precisely what happened next: I do not HOS does not recall finishing the final cup of rum, and have little memory of the next 4 hours. Awoke at 0530, as first light crossed the window sills of the rum shop, to find the room deserted, and both “Jack” and his dirty sheepskin of manuscripts gone. Stumbled to the door, observed that Sherpas and Khampa riders were entirely absent from square—since that time, they have not returned. Looked back into the room, and noticed one piece of parchment on the floor beneath the table where the previous evening’s drinking had occurred.

Scribbled on the parchment was the message:

“Tell you what, cowboy. You go away and think about this, use the pouch to get in touch with Leon back at Langley, find out what he wants you to do. When those psychotic assholes at the Pentagon and the NSA decide they’re ready to get serious about peace, tell ‘em they can get in touch with us through Leon at Langley to Madame in Budapest. Meantime, y’all might advise the Pentagon and those asshole kingmakers in the DCI’s office to start tamping down the imperialism abroad, or they might find out that the Bassanda machines get shared with local resistance movements instead.”

“Jack” has not returned to Dolphu since that time, and any Sherpas or Khampa drovers who pass through deny either English, Hindi, or knowledge of the Western stranger. Moreover, pursuant to his note, there has been no further communication from him.

I HOS acknowledgement that this is not an ideal course of events, and accepts possibility of recall from posting. However, Case Officer and Upper Management should probably be aware that “Jack” made an extremely persuasive case for the reality, concreteness, and practical applicability of the “ancient Bassandan technology.” Respectfully urge strongest and most serious consideration of “Jack’s” warning re/ access by local anti-imperialist forces to these machines.

HOS awaits directives.

--ENDIT--

Members of the Trinidad Banjo, Mandolin & Guitar Orchestra, c1912.

It is at least remotely possible that the mandolinist on the far left of the middle row is Jefferson Washington Habjar-Lawrence (born Boston Massachusetts, 1888), elder brother of Dianthe and Anthea, though there is no documentation to accompany or substantiate the inferences implicit in this photograph. Family histories tend to omit J.W., as he was called, for he largely eschewed the cause of Bassanda in favor of playing plucked-string instruments in Caribbean contexts. On the other hand, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited Trinidad in 1936, the then middle-aged J.W. appears to have made a passionate appeal to the 32nd President of the United States in favor a "global t'ing, man...lahk, GLOBALL conscience." FDR appears to have been quite struck at refusing sophisticated geopolitical insight from an obviously transracial individual playing mandolin in a Port au Prince society band, but it appears to be from the same period that we can date Roosevelt's significantly enhanced communications with British, French, and Bassanda diplomats wary of the rise of Fascism. It is possible that the "disreputable" JWH-L thus performed a significantly greater service on behalf of Bassanda than family lore conventionally understood.

JWH-L may also have been a significant conduit of the Bassanda banjo tradition, later cited by Habjar-Lawrence Nas1lsinez in conversation with David Lindley in Southern California in the early 1960s.

Bronislava Nijinska (1890-1972), sister to Vaclav Nijinsky and an enormously creative artist in her own right, photographed c1908 just after graduation from the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, where she won medals for both academics and dance. Within 2 years she would create her first breakthrough choreography, for A breakthrough came in 1910, when she created her first solo, the role Papillon in Le Carnival. Though the manuscript & choreographic notations are anonymous, it is distinctly possible that the recovered dances for "Xlbt. Op. 16," the so-called "lost Bassandan Rite of Spring", were by Nijinska herself.

Between 1908-10, when "Le Carnival" was created, Nijinska was a corps dancer in St Peterburg, but may also have traveled with the company as well, especially eastward. Certainly it is true that she met dancers of other backgrounds in the eastern Mediterranean, in the last halcyon days of the Empire, when Nicholas II's generals were seeking to expand into Central Asia.

Some inspiration for "Le Papillon" may come from a meeting in September 1909 between Nijinsky and the young Creole ballerina Celeste Roullet, who was working as a tea-dancer aboard luxury cruise liners after a summer studying at the Paris Opera. Not much is known of Roullet, as she (apparently) never danced a prima role outside of the America South, but there is some evidence to suggest that she was the grand-daughter (distaff) of the Irish dancer and adventuress Lola Montez, who was born Eliza Oliver but became the lover of Ludwig II, who created her countess of Landsfeld.

Nijinska & Roullet appear to have spent several weeks in rough sketches & workshop activity for "Xlbt Op. 16", which, in its aggressively anti-classical and "creolized" movement vocabulary; complex and polyrhythmic musical language; and earthy topic materials served as inspiration for the much more notorious Diaghilev/Stravinsky collaboration of two years later.

An image of Roullet costumed as her "grandmother" is also to be found in the Archives.

Recent find in the archive: the New Orleans-born Creole dancer Celeste Roullet (c1890-1948?), possible inspiration for Bronislava Nijinska's (unfinished) choreography for "Xlbt 16: the Bassandan Rite of Spring." Image taken around 1912, 1-2 years after she met Nijinska while working as a tea dancer on a cruise ship touring the eastern Mediterranean. More information about Roullet may be found as hitherto-uncatalogued boxes in the Archives' attics are discovered and unpacked.

Roullet in a production still from a later solo choreography.

Alexei Andreevitch Boyar (1922-2010), Bassanda recruit to US Army 101st Airborne paratroop regiment, at the folding organ for non-denominational worship service prior to D-Day landings. Boyar, an inheritor of the Bassanda pipe organ tradition through his mother (b1880), an informant of Bela Bartok c1906, had fought with Bassanda partisans during the Anschluss of 1939, when Nazis blitzkrieg forces drove into Bassanda after overrunning Czechoslovakia. Boyar fought with the partisans (he is credited with at least a half-dozen tank kills, using hang-glider tactics and "sticky bombs" against armor), but by January 1940 he had escaped to Britain and was endeavoring to enlist in the Allied Forces. The RAF was skeptical of hang glider tactics and the pilots who had flown them, and eventually Boyar jumped ship on a Bassanda-crewed frieghter to Canada, where he trained US and Dominion pilots and paratroopers. In addition to his skill as pilot and hand-to-hand combat expert, he continued to play the Bassanda and sacred repertoires on pump organ for worship and relaxation. There exists an instrument, in a Canadian museum, which appears to have belonged to him: it has been modified and its reeds re-pitched to play quarter-tones. Boyar dropped with Canadian forces during Operation Overlord, and was with the Screaming Eagles during the breakout from Omaha Beach.

After the war, he returned to Bassanda, where he devoted much of the rest of his life to teaching the pipe organ and to collecting and cataloging old manuscripts and oral-tradition tunes. His materials are still held in the State archive at Xlbt and scholars are only beginning to discover the fascinating treasure trove that is both the MSS collection and Sergeant Boyar's biography.

Fragment of pre-literate shamanic chant, translated from Old Bsssandan by Professor St John. Shamanism, which appears to have come to Bassanda very early from Central Asia, continued in the Imperial era to make significant contributions to regional cosmology, and may lie at the root of the culture's high sensitivity to nature, weather, landscape, and the spirit world.

"...And sometimes in Bassanda, the poetic trance comes upon the seeker. The Eagle's Vision it is called, when all the boundaries of the world below dissolve and one sees to the farthest horizon. When that which is far is experienced as near, and those things which are separate are made whole. When all beings are recognized as connected and crucial element in the world mind. When distant times, places, and experiences are found in the blink of an eye, the flap of a wing, with a turn of the head. When, soaring and wheeling and spinning and turning and coasting on the high currents of rhetoric and emotion, the poet finds the sight of the eagle and brings that soaring vision to earth, held tenderly, if only for a moment, in the net of words..."

Members of the Bassanda Young Men's Pennyfarthing Expedition Club, c1900. An extremely short-lived organization, formed by members of Bassanda's (relatively miniscule) petit-bourgeois classes. While bicycles were a valued and extremely common form of practical transportation in many echelons of society, the pennyfarthing (which, prior to the invention of the cogged gear and gear-shifter, attempted to increase speed by greatly increasing the ratio of wheel circumference to crank) was almost comically ill-suited to Bassanda's mountainous terrain: unstable, prone to crashes, conducive to significant injury in the case of falls, and so forth. The BYMPEC became a kind of catch-phrase in Bassanda for impracticality and the foolishness of privilege; hence the folk-proverb for such spoiled naivete: onun pahalı bisiklet düşme ("falling off his expensive bicycle").

Anthea Habjar-Lawrence (1892-1961), cross-country rally driver, mechanical "boffin", Bassanda freedom fighter, A remarkable mechanical savant, she had served as her father Habjar-Lawrence Nas1lsinez's co-driver and preferred mechanic since the age of 14. In the 1920s, she had been a feared competitor on the international Grand Prix circuit, but retired from competition as fascism loomed in Italy and then Germany.This photograph, taken around 1941, shows the then middle-aged Anthea astride an Indian motorcycle on the edge of the Bistringa Moor. She had crossed the frontier into Bassanda around 1936, and spent the next several years teaching partisans to adapt and super-charge captured Soviet staff cars into "Anthea's"--four-wheel-drive open vehicles, generating the extremely high torque necessary to climb slopes of 30-40 degrees and to function in the Bassandan winter's muddy, snowy conditions. During the Anschluss, when Nazi tanks, half-tracks, and staff cars were unable to move due to these conditions, partisans driving these "Anthea's" were able to raid almost with impunity, striking damaging blows even when vastly outnumbered and outgunned. A favorite strategy was to locate routes through otherwise impassable country by following frozen or dry streambeds: the 4-way independent suspension of the Anthea's permitted them to climb rocks and fallen trees in an almost prehensile fashion, while their engines' very high torque and sealed, overhead venting made it possible to drive them, literally underwater, to a depth of 5 feet. The Indian motorcycle ridden here by Anthea has likewise been adapted to Bassandan conditions, with blacked-out headlight and tail-light and a matte black paint job making it invisible to nightmare air surveillance, customized fuel tanks increasing range, and a triple muffler of AH-L's own design rendering it almost silent. In addition to the 4WD vehicles, Habjar-Lawrence also taught partisan bicycle mechanics how to adapt smuggled motorcycles to Bassandan conditions: the Bassandan Motorcyle Corps, which grew out of the experiences of the pre-internal combustion Royal Bassanda Bicycle Corps (see op cit, elsewhere in these Archives), specialized in navigating mountain paths and goat tracks in areas the invaders ignored as impassible. A decade later, with the War won and Bassanda on the slow path toward independence from the USSR, AH-L was in Northern California, rebuilding Volkswagen mini-busses as mobile clinics and libraries, and using her wealth of experience to design the first prototypes of flexible-framed, fat-tired "mountain bikes". Visited around 1959 by the young Air Force veteran and sportswriter Hunter S Thompson, she said "There was enough killing, enough conflict, in my life. Too much. Now I build machines that help people live, instead."

More on Anthea Habjar-Lawrence (1892-1961): recently unearthed, previously-unknown image of the mechanical savant and Bassandan freedom fighter, as a suffragette in London around 1912. Having served as her father's mechanic in multiple Grans Prix in the 'Oughts, it appears that Anthea was also involved in the battle for women's rights in the early 'Teens in the U.K. Not much is known about the small 2-wheeled motorized scooter she is riding, but there is a penciled note on the back of the image which reads: "Anthea H-L on 'Ant' self-designed vehicle. Crucial in street actions against Bow Street Runners suppressing our right to vote." Though not confirmed in any documentation yet uncovered, it is distinctly possible that Anthea, with Edith Margaret Garroud (1872-1971), a jiu-jitsu expert, was also involved in the early martial-arts training of "The Bodyguard", female unarmed-combat specialists whose mandate was to physically protect the Pankhurst sisters and other movement leaders from abuse by police. Certainly the Habjar-Lawrences' long family tradition of combat expertise and female agency makes Anthea's contributions to The Bodyguard plausible and consistent with the known facts.

A.P. ("Pappy") Lilt, Mt Airy NC fiddle contest, around 1926

Alcaeus Papandreou (A.P. a/k/a "Pappy") Lilt (b Charleston SC 1871-d Mt Airy ?)

Born SC to an immigrant mother, Constantina Papandreou, who came from the Peloponnesian village of Arachova in Central Greece, as a teenager, to Charleston around 1860. She was affianced to an older Greek immigrant peanut-seller but for unknown reasons the marriage was never celebrated. Instead, Constantine worked for two years as a seamstress and sail-maker of the city, where she appears to have learned a substantial body of Anglo-Celtic ballads and play-party songs from the mountain women who worked alongside her. Around 1867, in the welter of the post-War period, she met Cameron "Cam" Cannon Lilt, a fiddler and sign-painter from the piney wood uplands around Asheville, which had been populated by Scots-Irish immigrants since the early 18th century. Cannon Lilt appears to have been the offspring of such Scots-Irish mountain stock, and served, if only briefly, as a drover in the Army of the Confederacy. It is certain that Alcaeus had as extensive an inheritance of Border ballads and piping tunes from his father as he did of Cretan and Peloponnesian tunes from his mother. The elder Lilt’s repertoire also included proto-blues songs learned from black trail gangs engaged in building the narrow-gauge railroads which would eventually ensure Northern victory and open the southern Appalachian interior.

Alcaeus was born on the waterfront of Charleston, but the family returned to the hill country of the western region while he was still a child so that his parents could find work in the timber camps. He often summered with his father's people in the hills, where it is clear that he absorbed a very wide range of musical influences, both Anglo-Celtic and African American. He also accompanied his father on annual journeys over the mountains to the west, where he would first have encountered the creole riverboatmen who were one source of his very large repertoire of minstrel and medicine-show songs and facilitated the addition of banjo and guitar to his musical arsenal. In 1890, he was briefly resident in a Utopian community in New Harmony IN, from whose Moravian musical practice he acquired both the bass viol and the pardessus de viol. It is probably also there that he developed expertise in a range of practical skills, including especially sign-painting, carpentry, and agriculture: the New Harmony community experimented widely with such cottage industries as a source of hard currency. Lilt is reputed to have been an expert rope-waulk and an authority on the cultivation and uses of hemp.

In the autumn of 1892, seemingly on a whim, Lilt took leave of the New Harmonyites and, banjo and pardessus strapped to his back, hopped a freight train north, through Indianapolis and Gary; in his oral memoir, he is quoted as saying “the brethren and sistren tol’ me ‘bout this’yere Parlymint in Chicagerr—figgered I mought go’n see what’s about.” He can only have been referring to the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago, in that year, which convened in anticipation of the opening of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, a watershed moment in American cultural consciousness, which built an entire city of plaster and lath on the South Shore of Lake Superior, introduced ragtime pianists, Egyptian dancers, Berber musicians, and Thomas A Edison’s creative team to one another, and heralded what was predicted to be “the American [e.g., 20th] Century.” The Parliament brought religious leaders and scholars from all over the world, particularly including North America, Europe, South Asia (India & Java) and East Asia, in a remarkable spirit of mutual respect, exchange, and enlightenment. It marked the first public introduction, particularly, of Buddhist teachers and practitioners to the West; the Ceylonese Buddhist scholar and author Angarika Dharmapala (1863-1933) gave addresses and participated in public lectures and private conversations with many other leaders. Lilt claimed that, while busking at the front entrance of the Chicago Public Library in October ’91, he was overheard and engaged in conversation by the Japanese Zen Buddhist roshi Soyen Shaku (1860-1919), who later said, from a lecture platform at the University of Chicago “I have met one Bodhisattva in Chicago already. His is the music of Han-Shan and Shih-Te, the poet-fools of Cold Mountain. This man comes from the mountains as well, and the mountains are in his music.”

Equally significantly, if less notably, Lilt is confirmed by independent sources to have met Algeria Main-Smith, who, then aged 30 and a keen student and “friend” of eastern philosophies, was in Chicago to meet clandestinely with representatives of the Iliot lineage, the shamanic indigenous religion of Bassanda, then under threat of Czarist political and religious repression. The Iliot shamans were seeking both moral and financial support from American progressives in their fight against Czarist hegemony, and it may have been during this same trip that the muckraking journalist Jacob Riis (1849-1914) and the I.W.W. organizer Big Bill Haywood (1869-1928), both intimates of Main-Smith, were introduced to the cause of Bassanda. Certainly there is a photograph of a party at a South Side Chicago tavern which is purported to depict Main-Smith, Haywood, Riis, the Iliot shaman Anakan Imir, and Lilt himself, listening to the “scientific” ragtime music of Scott Joplin (1868-1917).

There is a parchment scroll in the Main-Smith archives at the Harvard Peabody Museum, in Salem Massachusetts, in an obscure Tibeto-Bassandan dialect not easily translated, but annotated in an untutored block handwriting with commentary and notes in Greek, Tibetan, German, and English. It has tentatively been identified as one volume in a hitherto-unknown Fourth Vehicle in Buddhism, the Bassanda-Yana. The outside of the scroll, whose parchment appears to be at least 600 years old, bears a wax seal imprinted with the Main-Smith crest and, in the same block capitals, the inscription “Chicargo, 1893. Notes by A. P. Lilt, fer Miss Main-Smith.”

The biographical sketches for Lilt in the decade between 1895-1905 are sparse and incomplete, but it is certain that he traveled very widely, working as musician, carpenter, signpainter, and ironworker, and that he had experience of the Midwest, the Northeast, the Southwest, and the West Coast. He appears to have participated in a number of actions by the I.W.W. and related proto-unions, and most definitely associated with both Joe Hill (1879-1915), prior to his “legal” murder by Utah police, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964), “The Rebel Girl” of Hill’s song: Lilt is said to have been the source of some of the melodies which Hill employed for his widely-sung parodies and organizing songs.

As he aged, into the 1920s, Lilt appears to have spent more and more time in the southern mountains of his birth, especially in winters, but he continued to wander widely, both across North America and, seemingly, Europe and Asia as well. He met Colonel Thompson at the latter’s retreat in the hills of Northern New Mexico in the early ‘20s, when the tiny Anglo colony of Taos included Mabel Dodge Luhan, D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, the folklorist Juan Bautista Rael, and, periodically, both Alfred Steiglitz and Georgia O’Keefe, and it is known for a fact that he accompanied Miss Main-Smith on a return visit to Asia, most notably to Kyoto in Japan, where he renewed Buddhist acquaintances made 30 years before at Chicago. Though unconfirmed, there is a story told in the high hills of Bassanda that a “Mountain Man” had come “from the East,” “bearing songs and strange instruments and the friendship of Bassanda,” some time before the Second World War. Certainly this would appear to accord with the introduction of North American songs into the repertoires of the Bassandan medicine-shows, which for centuries had combined music, song, dance, juggling, and physical comedy in troupes who traveled and performed throughout the country. Lilt’s influence may likewise account for the presence of certain Appalachian tunes and songs in the repertoire of Yezget Nas1lsinez which then recur in the corpus of the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra.

By the 1930s, Lilt was mostly headquartered in and around his birthplace of Asheville, at the family homestead in the hills, where he painted both signs upon commission and renderings of “imaginary” scenes, including animals, dancers, warriors, musicians, and artisans. Though highly personal and eccentric, the topics and techniques of these paintings—which were eventually purchased by the Main-Smith Family Trust for preservation—may represent, not fiction, but rather a mélange of persons, events, mythical characters, places, and deities encountered in Lilt’s long life of wandering.

A single confirmed photograph of Lilt exists, taken at the age of 57, when he is recorded at the 1928 banjo contest in Airy, where he later met Clarence "Tom" Ashley (1895-1967), to whom he may have given the classic banjo song "The Coo Coo," itself based upon very ancient Scottish antecedents. Much of our biographical information on Lilt is derived from an extensive fieldwork interview at Airy, conducted by the young Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress as part of the Farm Security Administration folklore project. Though Lomax, scion of a noted American intellectual family and a Harvard student, was in no wise naive, the young folklorist appears to have been completely swayed by Lilt’s storytelling and “special blend” of hemp tobacco—certainly Lomax’s questions betray none of his trademark critical analysis. Unfortunately, the Lilt interviews are print only: there is no musical notation or other ephemera; yet even a simple list of the song and tune titles he references, from a 50-year career as wandering artisan, teacher, and musician, includes hundreds of pieces in dozens of genres—and presumably represents only a sampling of a musical repertoire which must have been staggering in its depth and diversity.

Though there is no record of the date or circumstances of Lilt’s death, there exists a torn, weathered photograph of a wooden headstone, possibly in the Mt Airy cemetery, which reads simply “A.P. Lilt, 1871-[obscured]. Thus have I heard.” The headstone, and the precise site of the photograph, have never been recovered, but Lilt’s repertoire and expressive ethos lived on in the repertoire and tribal family of the BNRO/ESO.

(left) Cecil Percy Smythe-Winn (Professor of Moral Philosophy, Balliol, 1947-63).

Homer St John & the BBC in the 1950s
On a seemingly unrelated note (though it may go to help explain how these ancient head-pieces, constructed using techniques at least 400 years old, appear to have survived neglect, damp, and mold without damage), there is a tantalizing reference in the Archive to an article by Bassanda-born, Berkeley-trained specialist Dr Ibrahim Hazzard-Igniti entitled “Quantum Drift and Apparent Time Displacement in the Bassandan Rift Valley,” in the 1926 edition of the Journal of Speculative Geographical Metaphysics (Paris), whose brief one-sentence abstract (obviously not authored by the Doctor) references the “complex fourth-dimensional quantum mechanics found at certain tectonic and magnetic nodes in the Bassandan high hills.” Notes on the single index card (from a card catalog evidently gone missing) in Habjar Lawrence’s handwriting read “Thompson & The General paradoxical chronologies? Would this explain the Tentacled Ones?? What of K'whulthu'm??”

In the BBC archives is a short fragment of film, misfiled in a bin of video tapes which had been “wiped” (remagnetized) in order to permit new recordings, of a panel of Oxford scholars around 1956 debating the "likely scientific explanation for the quite wild claims made by various Americans ‘scholars’ regarding this putative 'Bassandan Rift Valley'.” Also participating in this debate is a visibly frustrated and impatient Homer St John.

After listening to a lengthy peroration from Cecil Percy Smythe-Winn (a philologist and “Professor of Moral Philosophy” who subsequently was dismissed in disgrace for stealing vintage port from the Senior Common Room’s cellar), to the effect that “perhaps American scholars, more familiar with the Wild West than the distant East, can be forgiven for believing in imaginary phenomena like so many bumpkin Baron von Munchausens,” St John finally interrupts and leaps to his feet, to exclaim ‘None of you panty-waists has ever even been to Bassanda! Do you have any comprehension of how little you know, sitting in your study in Cambridge?!? You imbeciles, this isn’t the Inklings’ fey little fantasies—Bassanda is real!!”

After which the panel abruptly breaks off. The segment was apparently never aired.

Syuzanna, Federica, Teresa-Marie, Kristina, Lisle

Орла Сердце сестры (“Orla Serdtse sestry”) – The Eagle’s Heart Sisters

Small 5-member women’s modern/folkloric dance company consisting of female relations of Teresa-Marie Szabo. Largely of Romany gypsy (and other) ethnic creole extraction; they appear to have been siblings, or possibly nieces or cousins, or even aunts, of Madame herself. Precise ages and family relationships are not readily recoverable because, as was common with many Central European persons of Romany extraction, Madame was extremely reticent about documents, legal records, and genealogies: one dance critic, interviewing the “sisters” for a French periodical around 1947, asked “and so, Miss Szabo, precisely what is the relationship between you young ladies?” and Madame, with that blood-freezing glare which made hotel managers and corrupt border officials fear her, and journalists carefully review in advance their interview questions, replied simply and forbiddingly, “We are Sisters.”

Their troupe style was noted for its ferocity, intensity, and sense of collaborative inter-group loyalty: another critic, slightly more poetic, and slightly less influenced by the patriarchal biases of the period, said “they are Amazonian warriors of the creative heart, and in them Bronislava Nijinska has found her archetypal collaborators.” The Sisters, in turn, fiercely protected Nijinska and each other, and it was not unheard-of that a naive or overbearing masculine admirer (or prima danseur), in café, nightclub, or in the studio, were he to intrude, might find himself knocked cold. They brought this same intensely female physicality to the choreographies created for them, and their collaboration with Madame, though unrealized (until tonight’s premiere), represents what could have been a watershed moment in the liberation of the dancing female body from its passive domination by masculine ballet masters.

The Legend of the Five

Xlbt Op. 16, the so-called “Bassanda Rite of Spring,” a collaboration of Bronislava Nijinska and Orla Serdtse sestry (“The Eagle’s Heart Sisters”) was sketched in 1909 but has apparently never reached the stage until tonight’s world premiere. It began in conversations on-board an Eastern Mediterranean cruise ship between Nijinska and the New Orleans dancer Celeste Roullet, wherein Nijinska’s Russian avant-garde primitivism and Roullet’s Creole movement vocabulary met in service of a compelling new vision of female-empowered dance. The piece was further developed by Nijinska in collaboration with the Sisters, who she met through the offices of Yezget Nas1lsinez in the chaotic ending years of the Second War, the early days of the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra.

This myth employs folkloric motifs associated with the pre-literate Iliot shamanic tradition, referenced in a chant translated by Professor St John, and previously published from the Archive, “The Eagle’s Vision”:

When all the boundaries of the world below dissolve and one sees to the farthest horizon. When that which is far is experienced as near, and those things which are separate are made whole. When all beings are recognized as connected and crucial element in the world mind. When distant times, places, and experiences are found in the blink of an eye, the flap of a wing, with a turn of the head. When, soaring and wheeling and spinning and turning and coasting on the high currents of rhetoric and emotion, the poet finds the sight of the eagle and brings that soaring vision to earth, held tenderly, if only for a moment, in the net of words...

The myth of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters, as it is carried in the matriarchal Bassandan folkloric traditions, tells the tale of five sisters who were the daughters of a village chieftain in the pre-literate era. In this period, very old elements of indigenous pantheism, animism, and sympathetic magic still held sway. The tale says that it was the annual practice, in the high hills, for a daughter of the village to volunteer herself as a sacrifice, to propitiate the nature gods and avert the illness or death of the community’s infants. At the winter solstice, the young woman would climb to a high clearing above the village and, as the sun rose, low to the southern horizon, she would begin to dance—and would dance throughout the short daylight, in more and more frenzied fashion, until, as the sun struck the horizon, both the light—and her life—would be extinguished. She would be cremated that same midnight, as an honored warrior who had “saved the village’s future” and assured new life and growth would come in the new year.

The tale says that these five sisters—whose attributes and appearance are known through Bassandan frescos, but whose names are not—upon reaching womanhood, each individually volunteered herself as the year’s sacrifice. But their father, headman of the village, repeatedly refused to permit them to be considered, and so their lives were spared.

Finally, in the year of the youngest reaching puberty, and considering themselves dishonored, the five left the village on the night of the summer solstice and climbed together into the high hills. They seated themselves on a cliff edge facing east, and as they awaited the sunrise, they clasped their hands and prayed to the Old Gods for guidance. Though they did not speak as dawn broke and the sun leapt slowly up over the eastern horizon, at full daylight they rose and looked in one another’s eyes with a single purpose.

They climbed back down to the village and addressed their father with one voice: “Father, it is not just that we should be spared this duty on behalf of the village’s future. We are all five grown, now—you must permit one of us to assume this burden.” Their father bowed his head and acceded to their wishes.

On the morning of the winter solstice, the five sisters, joined by their father, the balance of the village, and the nursing mothers, with babes in arms, who would honor the sacrifice on behalf of their children, climbed again the cliff-edge meadow. As the eastern sky began to lighten, from black to purple to rose to azure, one after another the girls began to dance.

But the dance was not to yield the sacrifice of a single life to save those of the village’s many: as each danced, another would leap forward into the circle, clasp her hand or wrist, and cast her out of the ring—seeking to save her sister’s life through the sacrifice of her own. Through that long day they danced, first one and then the other: the Youngest, the Tallest, the Smallest, the Darkest, the Fairest—each after the other would dance her way into the circle to cast her sisters free from the burden of death. Through that winter solstice day they danced, one after another: the Youngest, the Tallest, the Smallest, the Darkest, the Fairest, and none would permit that her sister should be sacrificed in her stead.

Finally, as the sun was dipping toward the western horizon, the old gods of the wind and the sky, the earth and waters, the trees and steppes and animals, took pity. As the dance whirled toward its pounding climax, the five girls clasped hands and danced clockwise, spinning and circling in tandem, like birds of a single mind. Faster and faster they danced, silhouetted against the red disc of the setting sun, leaping almost beyond the bounds of the body and of earth’s gravity, until, at the moment that the sun kissed the western horizon, they leapt in an arching circle and left the ground entirely. And, with a flash of red light from the west, they were transformed into a flock of five golden eagles, who together, in tandem and with one mind, whirled upward into the roseate sky, freed finally from the bonds of earth.

The sisters were never seen in the village after, but it is said that no child ever again sickened or died there. Moreover, a transformation appears to enter Bassandan gender conceptions from around this period, through which women are significantly empowered as tradition bearers, arbiters of law and conscience, and champions of the underprivileged. It is difficult to assess whether the myth is simply a metaphor for that transformation—or whether there is a core tale, perhaps even loosely rooted in oral history, to which the myth gave convenient metaphoric clothing.

But it is indisputably a fact that flocks of golden eagles still nest, hunt, and fledge in the high hills of Bassanda, that no hunter no matter how skilled will ever agree to fire upon them, and that the hill people still describe courage and self-sacrifice beyond death as “the Heart of the Eagles.”

Newly unearthed documentation re/ Bassandan FILM

[undated but evidently recent fragment from the Correspondence. Winesap, perhaps at the request of Professor St John—or simply out of a naive and immature impulse to “promote” the Bassanda Brethren’s unique “artful and scientific” folkloric music—and in contradistinction of the repugnance explicitly expressed by the Colonel to the idea of “promoting” music—appears to have queried the Brethren regarded the possibility of generating some film footage of the two old Comrades upon their reunion at the Colonel’s retreat in the High Hills of Northern New Mexico. The Correspondence picks up with the General’s reply to Winesap’s query.]

General, to Winesap, re/ film

Jefe,

Yo soy en el pueblo de San Fernando de Taos even as we hablar. I will be within back-slapping distance of the Rev. Col. tomorrow night. I suppose we could make some moving celluloid photographic image strips of the type that you describe, that is, those that would suit your purposes, but, in this I feel certain that I must mention the incredible expense that the exposing and then (developing?) such sequential time-lapse exposures entails, as well as the considerable risk should elements of our enemies' secret police forces gain access to said moving images. You will, of course, be cognizant of the risk, therein, to mineself, and the esteemed Rev. Col., should said elements gain said

The fore-written notwithstanding, I think we may, perhaps, forthwith, be able to avail ourselves of one of Mr. E.'s mobile moving photograph image capturers and make the requested image exposures that would suit your specialist needs.

I will advise as to our progress on the morrow.

Winesap to General, re film

Yes sir, General, Professor St John and I are cognizant of those issues of risk. It's our perspective (or, at least, my humble perspective, and the Professor has conceded that I may, "for once and only on this occasion, have a valid point") that, with the recession of the Soviet era into the 30-years-and-more-distant past, said risks may have been materially decreased. Certainly, with the demise of the Nazi, Soviet, and American Empires between 1945-2000, the capacity for fascist states to trouble themselves with small expressions of artistic or scholarly free-will has materially eroded. Of course, the modern petrochemical empires might present a significant threat, but given Bassanda's remarkable--and, we now recognize, extremely fortuitous--dearth of oil, oil shale, natural gas, or extensive underground water depots, there is little interest from those modern corporate empires in suppressing Bassandan free speech. Of course, there are certain superannuated members of the US Congress (those who spend the most time pandering to public media, as opposed to actual legislation) who persist in referencing our beloved homeland as the "BSSR" and wondering aloud, to journalists, about "the Soviets' [sic] ongoing influence in Bassanda," but it is now generally accepted that such individuals may be regarded as senile--hence, not a serious threat for breaches of security—and woefully ill-informed regarding Bassandan responses to Soviet influence (we recognize also that the same could be said of the “expertise” of virtually every member of the US Congress regarding virtually every former Soviet Satellite).

There might be concern expressed in the High Hills of Taos regarding the Russians' post-Soviet intentions in Bassanda, but, despite Chairman Putin's proliferation of shirtless photographs riding horses, dolphins, and camels, and wrestling bears, we do not view the Chairman as a significant threat either. In the sealed sections of the Archives are certain early 1970s documents, and even (allegedly) one or two photographs, that suggest the Chairman might, as a young university student "on civilian-alternate service" during the Afghan war, have found himself in a number of compromising "positions" vis-a-vis Bassanda drag culture; as you know, polymorphous sexuality was always accepted in Bassanda, and testimony from more than one Bassandan glisaÈ›i regina suggests the Chairman's image of hyper-machismo might be a rather fragile edifice, the desire to preserve which against embarrassing photographic revelations from the Archives, might ensure his discretion.

I recognize that the Colonel might also, quite reasonably, feel some concern about residual risk in light of Badenov's notorious 1948 diktat regarding "Bassandan Realism in Music" and the "decadence" the Commissar alleged to find in certain of the Col's compositions (certainly, his later Penny Dreadfuls could never have been issued in the Stalinist era of the BSSR). However, we are pleased to report that, in the most recent editions of Music in Bassandan Cultural History (the now-standard textbook employed in our homeland's mandatory 6-year Music & Fine Arts public school core), compositions like "Out in the Sticks" and "Batis Puttali" are presented as watersheds moments in our Music, when the phobic Romantic / Euro-centricism which had obtained in the late Czarist era was collapsing and, in the turmoil and unrest of the Leninist progressive period, a brief window opened for the growth of a truly organic "Bassandan nationalist music", which in turn connected to experiments by Vaughan Williams, Copland, Carlos Chavez, Bartok and Kodaly elsewhere. While this window eroded and then collapsed in the long authoritarian twilight of Stalinist Socialist Realism (exemplified in the 1948 diktat), the memory of the compositions and early recordings reissued in the 1990s on your The Janissary Stomp, Sirs, remained alive in the Bassandan countryside, and in the ears of young dissident composers.

We feel that the time may be ripe for a triumphant return to the Homeland, heralded by this moving-picture document, by the long-exiled Colonel and General--and, who knows? perhaps by the Professor, by Director St John, and even perhaps your humble correspondent--in celebration of those visionary underground and guerrilla compositions and performances in the BSSR so long ago.

In hopes that the above addresses some of your expressed concerns,

Winesap

Thompson, to General & Winesap inclusive, re/ film

The actual shooting of said footage will be the least of our worries. We will, without doubt, take some time to situate our shots so that we won't inadvertently reveal the location of the entrance of our most valuable Upsidasium mines at the foot of Taos mountain… the trouble we go to for those young people! Haruuummmph!

The Rt. Rev. Col. (Druid, Swami, Magus, HooDoo-Man)

Unknown handwritten annotation on the Correspondence, perhaps appended by a young student transcriptionist (though almost certainly not Winesap himself)

“Upsidasium” lulz

PRESS RELEASE, TTU COMMUNICATIONS & MARKETING, 1.21.14

1. What is the purpose of the event? Is it the first time this has been performed here?

This is the inaugural performance of the "Elegant Savages Orchestra" (http://elegantsavagesorchestra.com) , the post-Soviet transformation of the Soviet-era "Bassanda National Radio Orchestra," founded in the lost nation of Bassanda in the late 1940s by the distinguished conductor Yezget Nas1lsinez. They will be performing a repertoire of symphonic arrangements of folkloric tunes, including both Bassandan and other traditions, and drawing heavily upon the watershed archival recording The Janissary Stomp (http://janissarystomp.com) , by the Right Reverend R.E.C. Thompson, Colonel, Army of the Confederacy (ret) and The General, MM, General, US Army (ret). It is the first time this program of music has been performed anywhere.
2. Who is involved?

In addition to he aforementioned Colonel Thompson and General, we will also be graced by the presence of Madame Bronislava Nijinska, choreographer and sister of the famous dancer Vaclav Nijinsky, as we perform, for the first-time anywhere, her choreography to Xlbt. Op. 16, the so-called "Bassandan 'Rite of Spring'". We will also welcome guest conductor Fernando Wai Kin Ma / 馬偉健, in one of his final appearances before he departs Lubbock. We will also see reconstructions of traditional Bassandan line-dances by Madame Teresa-Marie Szabo, concert-mistress and dance captain, and a performance by the Eagles' Heart Sisters dance company (Terésa-Marie Szabo, Śamū'ēla Jaṅgalī, Federica Rozhkov, Kristina Olenev, Lisle Goncharov)

In addition, personnel for the orchestra are:

Krzysztof Arczewski (bass); Részeg Vagyok (percussion); Rahmani Boenavida (piano, guitar, brass); Zoya Căruțaș (song, guitar, whistle, reeds); Jérome Courvalle (cello); Etxaberri le Gwo (fiddle); Jason Dendy (guitar); Syntiya Strilka Vyrobnyk (song, dance); Thorvaldur Ragnarsson (trumpet, accordion); Kaciaryna Ŭitmena (song, dance); Dzejms Rasel Srcetovredi (viola, banjo); Viliyam Daviv Srcetovredi (fiddle); Séamus Mac Padraig O Laoghaire (percussion); Žaklin Paulu (percussion, dance); Elzbieta Purves (cello); Jakov Redžinald (fiddle); Mississippi Steve Stokes (guitar); Terésa-Marie Szabo (fiddle, song, dance captain); Binyamin Biraz Ouiz (saxophone, song, dance); Federica Rozhkov (fiddle, song, dance); Chaya Malirolink (flute, song, dance); Морган Ŭitmena (whistle, brass, dance)

3. What time and where is the performance occurring?

Sunday January 26 2014 Hemmle Recital Hall, TTU campus. Also streaming over the web Sunday 26 8pm (-6 GMT) at http://new.livestream.com/accounts/2674485

4. What are you most looking forward to for the event?

Very much looking forward to the response of the audience to these program of hitherto forgotten music from our beautiful homeland of Bassanda. Also the presence of the General and the Colonel, who last appeared onstage together some time in the 1890s, and to Madame Nijinska, for the premiere of a work she sketched over 100 years ago with Celeste Roullet

5. How is this different than other performances hosted at Texas Tech?

The BNRO has never appeared before at Tech. In addition, the quaint folkloric dancing, the powerful modernist avant-garde choreography illustrating the "Eagles' Heart Sisters" myth in Xlbt. Op. 16, the traditional costume are all new and unique for TTU/Lubbock audiences. In addition, many members of the Orchestra have never appeared before in the West. Finally, to have the General and the Colonel onstage with Nijinska, the dancers, and the BNRO will be a worldwide premiere and most exciting for all.

Feel free to add anything additional.

website: http://elegantsavagesorchestra.com
Band bios at: http://www.elegantsavagesorchestra.com/personnel.html
FB page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Elegant-Savages-Orchestra/359738340792720
FB "Event": https://www.facebook.com/events/1413682752202088/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming

Professor Homer St John
Miskatonic U

[NB: there is no ready explanation which adequately accounts for the significant variation in the Professor's written idiom as it emerges from northern New Mexico versus his writing style at home on the campus of Miskatonic. The least-implausible inference appears to be that simple entry into the Rev Colonel's orbit in the High Hills exerts some kind of low-frequency, sound-driven alteration of brain waves. No other explanation is any less implausible.)

"My Dear Winesap:

Well, you know how tight these bastards holding the Miskatonic purse-strings are, but I finally twisted their scapulas and bit their knuckles until they released enough funds for me to head to the New Mexico State Archives. You know how long I've wanted to do this; I've only been begging them for eight or ten years. The frankly bizarre history of the General and The Right Rev. Col. Thompson and their Young Gentlemen's Society Of Talpa have so long fascinated me, but you of all people are aware of how scanty the physical evidence is. I've combed the catacombs (pardon the pun) in so many places, but other than one family trip to the Grand Canyon as a boy I'd never been to the southwest. New Mexico seemed like the first place I should have been looking and the last place I actually made it to. Oh well. My old bones gamely endured the flight (let this be your warning: never NEVER fly out of Newark. My viola de gamba barely survived…) but I made it to Santa Fe at last. The chopped green chile alone was worth the trouble, I'll tell you!

Still, I excavated the stratus of the archives until my back was wound tight as a leaf-spring and my eyeballs were distended and weeping from the dust and the ancient, tiny medieval Spanish script and all the usual blurry photos; I was exhausted and despairing when I found the most filthy file encrusted with the calcifications of the ages… it had literally fallen behind a set of heavy industrial shelves and might have been eaten by rodentia and lost forever if I hadn't seen the edge of it sticking out. (I tried to get the librarians to buy me a decent tequila and maybe some posole and a few sopapillas for my trouble, but you know how these things go….)

Anyway, though initially exciting just to discover, the folder contained a fairly humdrum sheaf of Civil War era inventories, waybills, muster rolls and so forth, and though valuable, nothing of interest to me. The next-to-the-last sheet, however… I'd better just quote it in full. Try to restrain yourself from looking at the name at the end!

1 December 1861
To: General George McClellan
Headquarters, Army Of The Potomac
Also: General L., at large

Dear Sirs:

I am firmly ensconced here at Fort Bliss with General Sibley and fully expect him to march on the New Mexico Territory at once. The journey from San Antonio was difficult and a fair number of men fell by the wayside. Our force is ill-equipped and poorly, but most determined, and it remains to be seen how Gen. Canby will deal with us; for we are a desperate and savage lot.

You know of course that I am fluent with this geography from my time north in Ute territory at Fort Massachusetts and my most happy days with "Paints-Her-Moccasins." In fact, my ongoing grief at her loss made me wonder if I would ever be able to endure a return to this country, but our true and just cause is more than enough reason to weather the sadness evoked by the sandy soil of this ground, and I must confess my pleasure at seeing the churning mud of the Rio Grande once more.

Know that my dispatches to you may become scanty from this point on; the perils seems beyond counting: I could be found out, I could be lost to this dismal and difficult territory or sickness, or I could even be felled by one of our own boys trying to defend this great country! The irony is not lost on me, Gentlemen, nor would I be the first to perish so. Still I seek no glory only a rapid end to this righteous conflict.

My only hope of providing you with more intelligence is to connect with Cap. Graydon's spies, God willing, and if you hear from me no more know that I am sleeping forever under a fine cottonwood with hawks, ravens, and magpies circling above me and the waters rippling nearby. I only hope they will bury me with my banjo since the troops seem to groan when I take it out but I do love it so. My regards to the President should you see him, and until we meet again in this world or heaven,

I remain,

Your most humble and obedient servant
Rev. Thompson

Well, Winesap, I don't need to tell you how important this is. Included with this letter (the last sheet in the folder, in fact) was a detailed inventory and description of General Sibley's force attacking The New Mexico Territory. The conclusions are obvious: The Right Reverend was a Union spy!

This would account for almost all the mysteries we've wondered about in the blank space of the Reverend's pre-and-early Civil War biography. Of course we knew about his childhood in Baluthahatchee and learning music from the slaves and all that, but the obscuring clouds of his later youth leading up to the war may finally be clearing. I'd suggest most emphatically a re-examination of Gen. Landes' war-era papers at once. I'm going to extend my working vacation (on my own checkbook, I might add!) and head north to Colorado. Fort Massachusetts is only a hole in the ground, as you know, but Fort Garland, which replaced it, may have something worth looking at in their collections. And it goes without saying how excited I am by the never-before-heard-of mention of "Paints-Her-Moccasins!" Can you imagine?!

Well, I'm off. I may stop in Taos on the way north; they have the best ice cream known to all mankind if I can just remember the name of it, and well… there's a reason they call it "America's Tibet." A emarkable place. No wonder Landes and Thompson spent so much time there. I'll stay in touch, my friend, and until then,

Yours,
Homer St. John

Winesap to St John:

Dear Professor St John:

My most respectful congratulations, Sir, on a remarkable find--one more kudo to be added to your remarkable career as scholar and archivist of Bassanda. I well remember, on the only occasion upon which I had the opportunity to meet your great friend, BNRO founder Yezget Nas1lsinez, how he clasped your hand with tears in his eyes and exclaimed that "Bassanda never had a better friend". I was but a lowly first-year graduate student (would it have been around 1983, Sir? That is the year I matriculated at Dear Old Miskatonic), but I remember the force of your shared friendship.

Regarding your remarkable find in the New Mexico Archives--I am almost speechless at the vistas of new research this seam opens. We know have a means to rationalize continued investigation of the Rocky Mountains / American Southwest connection in the Colonel's career. I even wonder if his "journey to the north" might have led, eventually, to the northwest, and possibly this accounts for his eventual appearance (see your note of 1992 in the Archive, regarding Algeria Main-Smith and "The Brethren of Bassanda"). Of course, this is just my most respectful suggestion: I recognize the limits that you have put upon my own research speculations until such time as I have defended my dissertation.

Concerning that, Sir: I wonder if I might just inquire--have you perhaps had the opportunity to review the penultimate chapter, the 16th revision of which, at your instructions, I had turned in four months ago?

I look forward very much to your return to the Archive, and tender most respectful congratulations again upon your remarkable find.

Winesap

Partial schematic of Habjar-Sonic pickup.
Internally illogical: the reverse windings
on the two pole-pieces would
render the pickup inoperable and
productive of nothing but
a very loud 60-cycle hum.
And yet they worked.

The Habjar-Sonics

The fabled and mysterious Habjar-Sonic hand-wound cottage-industry electric bouzouki pickups.

An addendum to a footnote to an appendix of the supplementary material in the sixth (abandoned) chapter of Winesap's dissertation (tentatively re-re-re-re-re-titled “Passing the Times in Bassanda: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Dissertation Process”) provides tantalizing informtion on the hand-wound "roll-your-own" H-S pickups and the very odd and atypical results when they were played within the complex ley lines of the Bassandan Rift Valley.

These were prized by players around the world but only available through the clandestine Bassandan women’s cottage industries: they used ferrite gleaned from meteorite strikes in the northern Alps, and hand-drawn copper wire created with a secret annealing process. The Central Committee closely controlled access to this technology, but certain adventurous (or avaricious) western players managed to find ways to get them.

Bassandan buskers and pedlars had developed simple, bicycle driven generators for recharging such battery arrays. Over time, these generators themselves developed magnetic fields, and long-time pedallers insisted that one hour on the cycle was worth three hours of other cardio-vascular exercise.

An early and important forerunner of the Habjar-Sonic’s ferrite poles (which lent them the tone that the songwriter Tom Waits, a Friend of Bassanda, called “Bassandan Mojo”) was the trough batteries developed by Robert Cruickshank, son of the inventor, who “went out” to the East around 1797, charged to prevent Napoleon’s further expansion eastward and northward from Egypt. Having fought with the Turks at the Battle of the Nile, mustering out of HM forces and continuing eastward, he arrived in Bassanda around 1800. A crude electro-magnetic “one-string” built over a trough battery, and stopped with an iron railroad spike, may have been the source of the “unearthly howl of banshees” which drove Imperial Cossacks from Bassanda’s northern frontiers around 1825.

As confirmed by the 1979 testimony of Jackson Lawrence-Smyth in Dolphu Village, Northern Nepal (see “Taking the Hippie Trail to Bassanda”, elsewhere in the Correspondence), it may be that the schematics for these pickups were developed as early as c1800. Quoting the scrolls Lawrence-Smyth took from the Bassandan lamas: “Before Kroog-sheng ever came from the south with his batteries, lamas in the high mountains had found secret caverns of ancient artifacts; we do not know their origin, and many were plundered, or even destroyed, by misguided ‘protectors’ of the Buddha dharma. But we know that these are diagrams which can be used to create machine of great power—machines that can focus or block energy, that can bend light beams, even quell explosions or turn firearms into dead sticks of melted metal.” Evidently, some of those same schematics—which in other contexts have been likened to “alien diagrams”—may provide clues to the early history of the Habjar-Sonic pickup.

Those schematics, a few of which appear to have been in Col. Thompson’s possession at his mountain retreat in the High Hills of northern New Mexico, are internally paradoxical but the results were nearly supernatural in their manifestations. It appears to have been the case that these pickups, when played within the electro-magnetic fields of the Rift Valley, had remarkable capacities: there are accounts of all-night modal “drone sessions” (a part of Bassandan pantheism which emphasized the cognitive transformations that could be effected through the combination of complex overtones at high volume over non-harmonic pedals) at which players using prototypical Habjar-Sonics levitated, flew through the air, broke-open logjams, and even changed the perspectives of visiting musicologists. Outside the Rift Valley, these same pickups did not have the same telekinetic capacities, except that players—most notably, the General, an early exponent, claimed that, while playing them, he could “feel his way back to Bassanda”—almost as if the pickups’ magnets were themselves drawing him back toward the Valley. And it is possible that the great Jimi Hendrix—another Friend of Bassanda—did not in fact decease in September 1970 (lurid British press accounts to the contrary), but was rather “called home” through the use of Habjar-Sonics in his trademark “backwards Stratocaster.” There is reportedly still a cargo cult in the northeastern Alps dedicated to “Santo Djzimi”, which believes that, like the Cornish legend of King Arthur, he is “not dead, but only sleeping, and will return when his people need him the most.”

As Waits himself once said “Jimi wouln’ die. Not s’long as anybody’s playin’ his songs on them pickups. The Genr’l and the Colonel, on them pickups? That’s the Bassanda Mojo, right there.”

Posed studio shot of the Eagle's Heart Sisters dance troupe (Terésa-Marie Szabo, Śamū'ēla Jaṅgalī, Federica Rozhkov, Kristina Olenev, Lisle Goncharov; see the Correspondence for individual biographies) and Madame Bronislava Nijinska, on a theme evocative of their notorious "Casting Out Serpents" choreography, which was widely interpreted as Madame's political allegory upon Bassanda's underground resistance to Soviet oligarchy.

The piece was legendary and only seldom performed "legally"; much more common were clandestine or "guerrilla" performances which were promoted by word of mouth. In the piece, the Five Sisters would do battle with the Serpents of "Greed," "Power," "Centralization," "Socialism," and "Capitalism," taking up and then striking down each Serpent in turn. When queried about the inspiration for this particularly reptilian political metaphor, Madame tended to reply, rather cryptically, "Inquire upon Sand Mountain for the answer. The Colonel can reply." Whether this is a reference to Colonel Thompson or another, or to the "Great Sand Mountain[s]" or sand dunes on Bassanda's eastern steppes (proximate to the Gobi Desert) or to another place called "Sand Mountain," is unclear.

What is clear is that the "Serpents" piece had some kind of shamanic, incantatory power. Accompanied by particularly subtle and evocative music from the Orchestra, the piece built very slowly upon sub-sonic bass notes (achieving by over-blowing sub-tones on low-C tubas) to an earth-shattering roar which, according to Yezget-Bey, replicated St Patrick's use of bronze horns to drive the snakes from Ireland. The Founder said, "this piece can eradicate all manner of snakes. And so it should."

Qrystynʼa region dancers
Bassanda, around 1928

The St. Grydzina Correctional Institute Afternoon Drill Team
(with acknowledgements for the essential primary-source research of Wee Ellen and Captain Death of the Caprock Morris Border Morris side, Lubbock TX USA Terra)

Exhibition-dance team practicing the traditional Bassandan sword-dance spectacle of the northern Alpine iron-miners. These individuals, who made an essential contribution to the Bassandan cottage industry in hand-wound Habjar-Sonic electric bouzouki pickups, worked in arduous and dangerous conditions deep underground. Ever since the Middle Ages, the northern Alps’ iron deposits had provided particularly high-quality ore essential to the Bassanda magnet tradition, but, because the region was part of the country’s sacred folkloric geography, no power tools were permitted to be used (as the folk proverb had it, “How could we scar our Mother’s face?”). The miners took great pride in their strength, stamina, and expertise with pick and shovel, hammer and chisel, and they were well-regarded and –compensated.

However, a corollary of this was that at certain seasons—and particularly after the first “deep frosts” of late August and September—it became hazardous to work deep underground: the cycle of freeze and thaw meant that veins of underground water froze and expanded, which in turn made the tunnels and other underground diggings highly prone to shift or collapse. In such seasons, as in mining country elsewhere in North Europe (especially England, Scandinavia, and northern Germany), it became the custom for teams from these diggings to dress in motley, paint their faces in disguise, and go out dancing in the streets to cadge for food and money. Conventional folklore scholarship held that the motley and disguises were to conceal absenteeism from any pit owners who might be encountered “on the guise”, but in the case of Bassanda, where the mines were small co-ops owned by the workers themselves and administered by village councils, there were no “bosses” to be avoided. It seems more likely—pace Cecil Sharp—that the motley and face-paint were more closely related to the pre-modern mountain animist traditions which also informed Bassandan Buddhism. Certainly sacred and magical dance were part of north Bassandan mountain folklore as well; these traditions continued as part of the BNRO’s world in the inherited shamanic dances of the Uitmena Sisters (see elsewhere in the Correspondence and Personnel files). Bassandans themselves believe that the sword-dancing retains its magical capacities and will call upon dancers to sanctify festivals and holidays and to purify new living spaces.[1]

In the Soviet era, the sorcerous and magical implications of the dancing were downplayed as displaying “feudal backwardness, rather than the enlightened empiricism of the socialist workers’ paradise,” and troupes were encouraged to standardize and athleticize their performances. Rather in the manner of post-Mao “Shaolin kung fu,” Bassandan sword-dancing, at least as sanctioned by the Central Committee, became more athletic, flashy, and theatrical, while losing (at least in the minds of long-term aficionados and practitioners) the ferocity, individuality, and combat efficacy which had marked the style in the pre-Soviet era. Those troupes which adapted according to Soviet mandates were rewarded; those which refused were suppressed and, in the most extreme cases, fined or arrested.

The members of what would become, one day, the St. Grydzina Correctional Institute Afternoon Drill Team all came from a small cluster of villages on the far western border of the northern Alps; the villages were said to have been founded due to the proximity of a spring sacred to Qrystynʼa, a syncretic Coptic Christian saint of the 3rd century. In this region, which was marked by extremely high altitudes and a generally arid climate, the dancing that developed did not display some of the most spectacular elements common in the eastern and central region: the aridity of the west meant that it was typically possible for miners to work much later in the season without risk of tunnels’ freezing or collapsing, and so practice time was much more limited. As a result, the style never became as iconic as those developed elsewhere, but in the western villages it did retain its athletic, shamanic, and combat applications; as with many other subaltern communities elsewhere (for example, kongo stick dancing in Central Africa and capoeira in Brazil), the dance forms also contained within their choreography the seeds of a potent unarmed and edged-weapons fighting style.

The locals who eventually entered Bassandan political legend as the St. Grydzina Correctional Institute Afternoon Drill Team comprised Морган Ŭitmena, Chaya Malirolink, Jakov Redžinald, Çiş Eleyna, Uzunboylu Mischa, Uzun Yaron, and Holly Terör. Морган, Chaya, and Jakov were all members of the BNRO, but had danced or played with the Qrystyn’a Side, before joining the Orchestra; the Ŭitmena Sisters were actually born in the region. After the departure of these three to the capitol to join the Orchestra, between 1950-52, the Side languished—the long twilight of Stalinist standardization certainly contributing to their lack of exposure or opportunity—but Mischa, Yaron, Eleyna, and Holly continued to carry the choreographic tradition, practicing alone or in secret.

With the arrival of Kristina Olenev, at the end of long wanderings, in the Qrystyn’a region with a Mjekësia Trego (“medicine show”) troupe from the capitol at the end of the summer 1953 season, the Side was temporarily revitalized—having participated in the workshops that led to the completion of Bronislava Nijinska’s Xlbt. Op. 16 choreography, Kariss carried news of fantastic and very exciting new collaborative projects revolving around the BNRO. The Qrystyn’a Four were nearly persuaded to uproot themselves and relocate to Ballyizget, but in October 1953, in the wake of the power struggle which followed Stalin’s death (probably by poisoning ordered by KGB head Lavrentiy Beria), massive secret police crackdowns dictated by the BCP swept up “cultural dissidents” all across the country. Mischa, Yaron, Eleyna, and Holly were arrested and confined at St. Grydzina’s Correctional Institute, a former convent converted to a secret prison and interrogation center, whose director Uli Kunkel, a Beria appointee, was a feared and sadistic figure. The prison population consisted entirely of “incorrigibles”: singers, dancers, musicians, folklorists, poets, authors, and other political prisoners.

Initially housed in solitary confinement as “unrepentant and resistant” (Mischa had crippled three of the secret policemen who attempted to arrest him at his mother’s mountain dacha, Yaron was an electrical savant, and Eleyna was notoriously well-versed and verbose in the labyrinthine arcana of pre-Czarist Bassandan law and custom), the Qrystyn’a Four were visited by Kristina Olenev, who used a falsified passport supplied by Teresa-Marie Szabo’s Romany contacts to gain entrance. Throughout the winter of ’53-’54, the “elderly crone” “Katcharinya Orlov” visited, bearing baked goods and messages, and by early Spring Mischa, Holly, Yaron, and Eleyna, reversing earlier behaviors, had become “model prisoners”, assisting with the prison’s crude electronic record-keeping, inventing new cuisine in its medieval kitchens, and supervising the reconfiguration of the herb and vegetable gardens. By May 1954, when the BNRO opened its second annual Spring tour of the satellites, with performances first in Ballyizget and then in the provinces, the Four had gained permission to practice their “reformed proletariat patriotic sword dancings” in the dawn outdoor exercise period. While other inmates expressed some interest in the dancing, few were willing to rise before the sun in order to participate in the dance practices. And so the Four danced on, practicing and evolving their figures, despite the absence of the crucial and essential fifth member.

ON June 14 1954, which (though not recognized under the Soviet calendar) was actually the feast day of St Grydzina, the BNRO played a concert in the prison of the Institute for a mixed audience of local and visiting dignitaries, villagers, and prisoners. At the concert’s end, Yezget Bey stepped forward and announced a “special rehabilitative collaboration” between the Orchestra, special guests, and “several model prisoners from the Institute.” Accompanied by the Orchestra, the Qrystyn’a Four, dancing the classic quintet figures with one “ghost” (absent) dancer, presented a short program of adopted and adapted traditional pieces which were model examples of the “modern” Soviet-folkloric style: quaintly costumed, carefully synchronized, largely devoid of mystical or shamanic allusion. The applause was polite but became particularly more animated—and significantly more random—after the audience was served complementary cups of Eleyna’s potent “green herbal infusion tea”, compounded by her from ingredients planted in the prison gardens under her supervision.

At the conclusion, Yaron spoke privately to Yezget-Bey, who in turn addressed the audience of dignitaries:

Honored guests, villagers, and comrades: the Side has prepared one more piece of traditional choreography, seldom performed any longer but much beloved by the local peasantry, which they would wish to share with you. However, Yaron informs me that it is the traditional custom that the fifth place in the figure must be taken by the most eminent and intelligent of all dignitaries present, as the figure concludes with that Fifth garlanded with a necklace of steel. The St. Grydzina Correctional Institute Afternoon Drill Team humbly entreats that Comrade Kunkel, their respected and admired supervisor and baba, might do them the honor of participating in the dancing? They hasten to say that he need not engage in complexities—as the central linchpin of Qrystyn’a’s revitalization, it is enough if he will simply stand in the center of the ring as the Team dances.

Kunkel, a notoriously narcissistic egomaniac as well as an authoritarian and sadistic individual, flushed to his fourth chin with pride, and proudly took his place in the center of the figure. As the Orchestra struck up the traditional tune St Christina Fikrinizi Değiştirebilir (“May St Christina change your mind/head”), the dancers, gripping their flexible steel “swords” at each end, began to dance in a circle around him, their manacles and bellpads both jingling (though model prisoners, neither Uzunboylu Mischa nor Uzun Yaron were trusted in the general population without restraints). As the music of the Orchestra, augmented by the tribal percussion of “Katcharinya Orlov”, accelerated and intensified, first one musician and then another began to play the loudest, lowest sub-tones they could: the effect was of an ever-intensifying and amplifying low polytonal drone. The drums beat louder and louder, slowly but inexorably accelerating the tempo, as the Four danced faster and faster, never dropping their swords, in flexible steel knots that rose and fell and contracted and expanded and exploded outward through the figures.

The Orchestra played louder and faster and lower and in the vocal section the Ŭitmena Sisters and Žaklin Paulu began the bitonal ululations they frequently employed to accompany the Sisters’ shamanic dancing. The music played louder and louder and faster and faster, as the knot of swords swirled and rose and fell and flashed in the afternoon sun. Spectators subsequently reported a “kind of transformation”; several reported that as the drones increased in amplitude and plunged toward the subsonic, they began to experience double vision, heart palpitations, and an almost “electrical” tingling in fingers and toes.

At the climax of the dance, as the walls of the prison yard themselves appeared to have begun vibrating with the sub-sonic tones, with the dancers whirling faster and faster around Warden Kunkel, his face flushed and his head appeared to grow bigger. At the climatic chord, the Sisters’ singing rose to a shriek, the Team turned a simultaneous four-sided somersault, the swords clashed together into a single lock, which Yaron swept up and over his head as the Team continued dancing….

…and Uli Kunkel’s head trundled away across the exercise yard like a lopsided bowling ball, leaving his decapitated figure sprawled on the beaten earth.

The immediate aftermath of this shocking event is extremely obscure, as there appears to have ensued collective amnesia and/or hallucination: by the time Stasi detectives arrived several days later, investigating the “Death by Accident” of Warden Kunkel, the villagers denied any presence or knowledge of the events, the inmates (who had quietly and voluntarily returned to their cells) claimed to been in lock-down mode during the concert, Yezget Nas1lsinez in his official report to the State Touring Agency denied that “any such composition is part of the Orchestra’s repertoire,” and the prison guards, who appeared to have begun hallucinating shortly after ingesting the “magical tea,” all swore that, at the climactic moment, they had seen Kunkel’s body flash with orange light and dissolve in five different directions into the ether. The Institute’s primitive computer-documentation system was found to have entirely shorted out (the electrician who examined the damage commented “It’s as if a bolt of lightning blasted right through the circuits”), so it was not possibly to recover any of the vital statistics, distinguishing marks, or details of sentencing for any inmates.

Finally, the cells of Çiş Eleyna, Uzunboylu Mischa, Uzun Yaron, and Holly Terör were found to be empty, and there were six freshly-dug graves in the prison cemetery, marked “CE, UM, UY, HT, UK-I, UK-II”. All six graves contained cheap prison-work pine coffins.

Upon successive exhumation, all six were successively found to be empty.

Influences—especially instrumental dance melodies—of the Team continued in the BNRO repertoire for decades. Though the Four never appeared under their birth names with the Ensemble, elements of their movement vocabulary continued as well. Most notably the dance, which was only ever performed by masked and anonymous guest artists when the BNRO toured the western Qrystynʼa region, and appears to commemorate the mystical (or at least hallucinatory) anecdote of the Four’s transfiguration.

It is entitled “Afternoon at the St. Grydzina Correctional Institute.”

[1] For other, analogous magical music-and-dance usages, see the Sufi Gnawa musicians of Morocco and Algeria.

Eliektryčnyja Drevy big band (with brass),
about 1978, with Kelemen Misha Forsàidh (far R)

Cold War agit-rock: Eliektryčnyja Drevy

The seminal Bassandan folk-rock band Eliektryčnyja Drevy (“The Electric Trees”) was founded c 1968 as an outgrowth of the Kamuna Liasami Eĺfaŭ (“Wood-Elves’ Commune”), a collectivist “back-to-the-land” community of poets, students musicians, political activists, and ethnographers. Both band and commune were initiated by Robin Dobar Momak (1938-89), who had trained as a hochschule professor in Vienna and Budapest but was strongly influenced by the proto-environmentalism of John Muir and Aldo Leopold, and who was emphatic about what he saw as the essential connection between creativity, nature-based spirituality, and close-to-the-land work. An avid gardener, birdwatcher, and amateur ethnographer, he was contemptuous of “armchair revolutionaries,” and once said “If you’ve never planted a garden, don’t tell me you love the earth”.

Basing his insights partly in his readings of the Wall Street Journal and smuggled copies of North American underground newspapers, partly in a close listening to shortwave broadcasts from Southwest Asia, and partly on his readings of Tsarist history and culture, Dobar Momak with remarkable prescience predicted both the wave of progressivism of the late ‘60s and the inevitable Eastern-Bloc backlash. In April 1967, at the spring thaw, at his insistence , a group of Commune members who had been sharing an urban squat in an abandoned warehouse on Ballyizget’s waterfront pooled their meagre resources to buy 250 acres of cheaply-priced rocky alpine pasture in the foothills of the northern Alps, about 60 miles outside of the capitol. While formal land-use policy in the 1960s satellites was still governed, in principle, by Soviet collectivist philosophy, in practice such small, relatively informal purchase-and-sale of properties were not at all uncommon between subsistence farmers and city-folk seeking space for a dacha or retirement home. The dairy farmer who had sold them the pasture-land, Samiel Yasgureyivitch, a descendent of Russian Jewish progressives who had fled the pogroms of the 1880s, continued as a friend of the commune and the Trees: dressed in yarmulke, overalls, and Wellington boots, he was an honored though incongruous presence at dozens of performances over three decades.

Commune members were originally drawn from graduates of Dobar Momak’s classes at the Hochschule, in which he had, largely under the Education Ministry’s radar, taught an innovative informal curriculum strongly influenced by Kodaly, John Dewey, and Paulo Freire—experiential, empirical, and aesthetic. Students learned vernacular crafts (sewing, gardening, cooking, carpentry, auto mechanics) from and working next to master practitioners—art, poetry, storytelling, dance, drama, and music likewise integrated into the curriculum and learned under an apprenticeship model. Such training provided a crucial kernel of practical and applicable skills suitable for a “back-to-the-land” communal model. The community was also fortunate to include a number of students from the indigent provinces, many of them the first in their families able to benefit from formal education, due to Dobar Momak’s aggressive recruitment and fundraising on behalf of such students.

In contrast to many similar, much more problematic rural experiments in 1960s America, the Commune was almost immediately successful, aided by the expertise of the student recruits, Dobar Momak’s own ability to understand and think strategically about land use, climate, and crops, and a surprisingly healthy and resilient social organization. They interacted effectively and constructively with their neighbors, and their brightly-painted, repurposed vans and trucks, many of them retired from the BNRO’s fleet and some burning wood or used cooking oil, became welcome sights on the streets of Ballyizget and at regional market fairs: it is said that the capitol’s vibrant present-day food-truck scene—which in the 21st century draws “foodies” from all over Europe and the UK—owes its roots to the Commune’s innovations. They were likewise pragmatic and innovative in terms of farm practices, drawing on Dobar Momak’s folkloric and ethnographic research to recover traditional crop-rotation, heirloom seed, and recycling/environmental sensitivities. They were largely vegetarian in practice, raised no animals for meat, and willingly taught city-dwellers backyard farm-and-garden techniques adapted to the urban environment—a very welcome innovation during the food shortages of the early 1970s.

The Tree’s first front-woman was Polli Kilotona (“Polly Kiloton”, b1952), an outspoken teenaged political activist, natural-born daughter of a graduate student in political economy (her father later became a high official in the BCP) and an avant-garde Romany painter, a distant relative of Madame Szabo, who later defected to the West, settling in Tallinn around 1965. Polli, who described herself as “a child of the streets,” was largely self-educated: as a child she begged and stole for food, slept in the houses of sympathetic relatives, and constantly changed her name and appearance: clothing, hair, physical and verbal mannerisms. This “changeling” quality would later be remarked in her ferocious, trance-like stage performances, during which it was regularly presumed she was channeling other, possibly older personalities. Offstage, she was gentle, thoughtful, and introspective, but onstage—as a particular reflection of her idols Iggy Pop/Stooge and Fela Anikulapo Kuti—she could become a larger-than-life, towering figure of righteous rage and empowerment; it was said that the prototypical political punk-rocker, Joe Strummer, was mesmerized by Trees performances he saw while hitchhiking in Eastern Europe in 1970.

The band’s musical mastermind was the self-effacing multi-instrumentalist and composer Lyov Varushkin (b1950), son of a wandering Romany jazz guitarist and an Argentine concert flutist, who from his early teens had been a prized collaborator in a host of Ballyizget experimental, quasi-theatrical musical examples. A virtuoso guitarist, keyboardist, drummer, and trumpet player, a powerful bass singer and voice percussionist, and an astonishing, acrobatic dancer, he preferred to eschew the front-man’s position, and instead held together the ensemble from the rhythm section. Many of the players who eventually passed through the Trees’ ranks first joined the band simply because they wanted to work in proximity to Varushkin’s talents; decades later, an endowed chair at Ballyizget Conservatory, organized by a consortium of former band members who had gone on to leadership roles in orchestras, big bands, and the worlds of composition and arranging, recognized his impact.

The first musical performances by what would become the Electric Trees originated in their unamplified street and coffeehouse performances; often they would play music, sing, and dance as part of their market activities as well. Their politicization and rapid transformation from a rather slight, affected, and “easy-listening” pop/folk ensemble (Melody Maker in 1966 had called their first single Svetlost Kroz Lišće / Svi Mi Treba Da Volimo Jedan Drugoga (“Light Through the Leaves” / “We Should All Love One Another”), released while they were still in the Ballyizget squat, “twee”), was also inspired by the notorious visit of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to Prague in May 1965, when he had been crowned Kral Majales or “King of May.” Though Ginsberg was shortly thereafter expelled from the country, his revolutionary synthesis of poetry, political activism, and “the performance of personality” was a powerful influence upon Polli Kilotona and upon the Trees’ general integration of theatre, music, and revolutionary comment.

The Trees’ creative ferment was quickened also by the contributions of wandering expat rock musicians, most notably the remarkable Finnish bass guitarist Jakov Biskopsstav (1952-76), who had, under the influence of BNRO double bassist Krzysztof Arczewski’s 1962 recording Zamknij ryj, Donnie and early ‘60s “Gray Sleeve” recordings, developed a virtuosic approach inspired by the kantele (zither associated with the recitation of the Kalevala). Biskopsstav’s complexly polyphonic and polyrhythmic style (a much later influence on the Icelandic “mood-rockers” Sigur Ros) provided inspiration and underpinning for Kilotona’s political rants—the saga of their on-again/off-again romantic partnership itself quite separate from their intense musical bond.

The heartbreak of the Prague Spring—Dubcek came to power in April of ’68, but by October the Soviet tanks had rolled into the streets, and the last resistance was broadcasting “Goodbye, friends—pray for us”—cemented the Trees’ evolution from “twee” folk-band, playing tinkling folk-pop versions of Bassandan shepherds songs and rustic dance tunes, into a much harder-edged, aggressive performance style. Now fuelled by Varushkin’s raging electric guitar and effects-laden trumpet, Kilotona’s amplified violin (a former student of Teresa-Marie Szabo, she quickly became a firey electric soloist, specializing in aggressive and spacey sound effects driven by a set of hand-wound Habjar-Sonic pickups, adopted for her Romany grandmother’s violin), and the storming bagpipes of Rogov Szczur Lądowy, a virtuoso traditional player who, by his own admission, “wanted something more,” they became an overpowering performing entity, whose ferocity in live concerts is only hinted at by distorted, 4th-generation reel-to-reel recordings sometimes made from samizdat radio broadcasts, and in the recollections of young fans; Bassanda’s first democratically-elected President, Voloshkya Khabalov, later said “I think every youngster who ever attended a Trees show either started a band or a progressive organization—or both.”

They were repeatedly banned from performance by the BCP, but would pop up at “guerilla concerts” in barns, village squares, market town cinemas, and university dining halls. Like their spiritual brethren Juluka, in apartheid-era South Africa, the Trees’ members were regularly fined, imprisoned, or castigated by Party functionaries, but their home base in the hills, their finely-honed strategies of subaltern elision and “assumed obtuseness,” and the impassioned advocacy of Yezget Nas1lsinez, whose international stature with the BNRO gave him a certain political cachet, enabled them to avoid the worst of the Soviet era’s authoritarian excesses. During periods of their prohibition by the government, Yezget-Bey composed a series of instrumental big-band arrangements of Electric Trees anthems, saying “there’s not a commissar in the country who’ll recognize your songs by the time that I get through with them!”

By the ‘70s, especially with the publication in West Germany of the “Charter 77” (a watershed anti-Soviet document), it was becoming apparent that the Moscow government, especially as it became more and more mired in Afghanistan and Central Asian colonial wars, was withdrawing resources and emphasis upon the eastern European satellites. The Trees continued their clandestine and underground, rather nomadic existence, and a number of innovations-by-necessity actually resulted: most notably their incarnation as an atonal “free-jazz” marching band, held together by the percussion innovations of Kelemen Misha Forsàidh, who had reappeared in Ballyizget in late 1976, and brought insights from the worlds of both Afro-Cuban music and military drum corps. This powerful yet strictly acoustic (hence portable), brass-and-percussion ensemble made a brief but considerable impression via bootlegged recordings to the West, and helped introduce the world of Romany gypsy brass bands (another of their influences) to Western listeners.

In 1979, Polli Kilotona “publically” renounced her formal affiliation with the Trees in order to run for the shadow Parliament (though she continued to perform with them, in masking face-paint and under various outlandish assumed names), and in early 1980, she won election from the borough of Takacs, the home ground of the Kamuna Liasami Eĺfaŭ. Before she could be seated, however, the last Bassandan Soviet Central Committee disbanded the Parliament entirely, but the tide of history, colonialism, and post-Cold War economics was clearly against them.

In 1980, a few members of the Trees, including Varushkin and Kilotona, traveled to Harare in South Africa to appear with the BNRO during the Zimbabwe Independence Celebrations. And in 1985, when the BNRO, along with families, staff, and assorted DP’s, defected by tramp steamer after a concert in Talinn, they were met, the morning after the crossing, by a radiant Polli KIlotona, wearing her parliamentarian’s sash, who embraced Yezget-Bey, tore the hated BCP hammer-hoe-and-sickle insignia from his lapel, and hurled it into Helsinki harbor. And, when the BNRO’s 86-year-old Founder collapsed after an epic retrospective concert, she sat at his bedside, refusing to leave, joined by Lyov Varushkin and, though himself white-haired and -bearded, weather-beaten, and nearly crippled by arthritis, the Commune’s patriarch Robin Dobar Momak, who stood ramrod-straight in Nas1lsinez’s hospital door, to bow and salute before embracing his old comrade.

At the memorial ceremony for Yezget-Bey, at which a portion of his ashes were scattered in the Baltic before going home for interment in the hills of Bassanda, the Trees’ surviving founders—Varushkin, Kilotona, and Lądowy (Biskopsstav had died tragically of a drug overdose a decade before)—joined by the BNRO, played a stately, elegiac version of their 1960s anthem Plima Istorije (“The Tide of History”), which was broadcast via massed car-radios in the streets of Ballyizget during a spontaneous, unofficial, nation-wide day of mourning.

Said one Ballyizget resident, interviewed on the street during the broadcast performance, whose battered taxicab, long graying hair, tattoos and faded outmoded clothing marked him as a veteran of the ‘60s Culture Wars: “how could any of us know, twenty years ago, that when the Electric Trees rocked the Kremlin’s foundations, they’d rock so hard that, twenty years later, the Wall itself would come tumbling down?”

[Those knowledgeable in the ways of Eastern Bloc rock will of course recognize parallels between the careers of the fictional Bassandan Eliektryčnyja Drevy and the beloved, true-to-(larger than)-life Plastic People of the Universe, the Czech revolutionary band, named after a Frank Zappa song, formed in the wake of the Prague Spring: their real-life exploits, persecution, and eventual triumph is a story so powerful that it would be unbelievable as fiction, even for Bassanda. The fictional history of the Electric Trees is thus offered in humble homage to the PPU (to whom Vaclav Havel himself gave credit for the Velvet Revolution), in celebration of their artistry and courage—and in memory of the founder, Milan Hlavsa. Počiva U Miru, Milan. Hvala.]

[caption: Eliektryčnyja Drevy big band (with brass); about 1978, with Kelemen Misha Forsàidh (far R)

The Kráľa Family Band, c1947
(Davit/violin; Anatoly/double bass;
Sofia/accordion; matriarch Zhenev'yeva
Durham Kráľa: vocal, dance, logistics)

The Kráľa Family Band

Descendants of Fife-born Admiral Philip Charles Durham (1763-1865), honored for conspicuous heroism at the Battle of Trafalgar, a noted raconteur and tall-tale-teller; died at Naples. His illegitimate daughter, Ann Bower (1789/90 - 1858) later married into a Sicilian smuggling family working the Adriatic coasts of Albania and Croatia, who in turn intermarried with Romany gypsies.

Zhenev'yeva Durham Kráľa (b1917 in the port city of Vlore, Albania) had been trained as a dancer in the Sicilian Tarantella and related traditions, but—consistent with her Romany heritage—was also widely skilled in music, fortune-telling, and related itinerant arts (both licit and otherwise). The child virtuosi of the Family Band were Davit (born c1935/violin); Anatoly (born c1932/double bass & piano); Sofia (born January 1941/accordion & voice), and, eventually, Natalya (born May 1947/drums & percussion).

Madame Kráľa served as impresaria and tour manager, negotiating contracts, booking travel and accommodations, and fending off inquisitive State education managers and public school officials, who repeatedly harassed the Family with allegations of smuggling or of child truancy or—most fancifully—accusations that the two boys were not in fact Madame’s offspring at all. The first claim has perhaps some basis in fact, as the Band did regularly and rather informally cross borders, sometimes bearing an inordinately large number of “instrument cases” (there is some evidence that Madame masterminded an accordion smuggling ring dealing especially in the rare and valuable Bassandan bayan). The second accusation, of child truancy, was much more difficult to argue, as even in the worst years of the Stalinist repression, Bassanda’s Romany people were permitted to maintain their itinerant wandering lifestyle and traditional modes of childhood education; this despite the fervent attempts of the BCP Minister of Education to standardize education and that same Minister’s conservative resistance to alternate pedagogical methods.

The third claim—that Davit and Anatoly were not in fact Madame’s offspring at all—appears to have arisen from an allegation, never proven, by a Romanian drug dealer named Ceaușescu who briefly appeared in Ballyizget during the Nazi Anschluss of 1940. This man, while serving as local liaison between police and those Quisling school officials who had opted to co-operate with the invaders, caught a glimpse of a café performance by the Band in October of that year, and raised a great furor, alleging that the two boys (aged 3 and 7 at the time) were in fact his own sons. Madame hustled the children out of the nightclub, while Ceaușescu was confronted by Signor Kráľa, a former sailor, who informed the drug dealer he would be leaving “with or without your teeth.”

Yet, though Ceaușescu was a notoriously unreliable and unsavory informant—in 1941, not long after these events, he was killed in a Piraeus back alley during a failed drug deal—there may ironically have been some factual basis for his allegations: three years before, in the hills of northern Bassanda, a young mother traveling with Ceaușescu’s mejekësia trego (“medicine show”) had, after repeated abuse at his hands, struck back before fleeing the troupe; see “Kristina Olevna” in the Personnel Files. When, in 1937, with the assistance of the wandering monk/musician A.P. “Pappy” Lilt, Olevna escaped, she took her toddler son by Ceaușescu, who she had named Iskander, with her.

She drops off the map between 1938 and 1943 (though she may have met Lisle Goncharov in Mexico City near the end of that period); in September of the latter year, she reappears in occupied Bassanda, working with Yezget-Bey and the Resistance in their “folkloric collecting” and first concerts as the “People’s Liberation Orchestra”; documents unsealed in the post-glasnost era have confirmed that these activities, while essential parts of Bassandan cultural defense against the Axis, also served as cover for the development of clandestine escape routes for Jews, Romany, leftists, LGBTQ persons, morris dancers, and others targeted by the Nazis, into western Europe.

It is not known precisely when or why Davit and Iskander Olevna joined the Kráľa Family—if “Davit and Anatoly Kráľa” were in fact Kristina’s offspring—but some fragmentary coded messages in a folder labeled “PLO, ’42-’43” in the Archive would seem to suggest that Kristina had concluded her Resistánce activities in these years were too risky to permit involving her young sons. Even as late as ’47, when this photograph of the Family Band was taken while Madame was pregnant with daughter Natalya, the conceit was maintained that the two tow-headed boys, by then aged nine and eleven, were the sons of Madame & Signor Kráľa.

This represents nearly all documentary or anecdotal evidence regarding the persons and personal histories captured in this photograph (again, only tentatively dated as having been taken in 1947), but those few factual details are consistent with other circumstantial evidence. Sofia and Natalya Kráľa went on to collaborate with their mother in theatrical and dance productions for decades: Sofia was a youthful guest soloist, at the age of 11, with the Eagle’s Heart Sisters modern dance troupe led by Bronislava Nijinska, and both Kráľa sisters, in the 1970s, were scions of Ballyizget’s cabarets and torch-song nightclubs.

Less is known about the boys Davit and Iskander Olevna—or “Davit and Anatoly Kráľa”—as by 1954, when they would have been in their late teens, they were no longer touring with the Family Band. Yet there is some circumstantial corroboration, both for the above biographical reconstruction and for their eventual reunion with their mother: by early Spring 1954, when Olevna was collaborating regularly with the BNRO and EHS (after the triumph of the 1952 Ballyizget premiere of “Xlbt Op. 16”), and when she, disguised as “Katcharinya Orlov”, facilitated the jailbreak of the Qrystyn’a Four (Çiş Eleyna, Uzunboylu Mischa, Uzun Yaron, and Holly Terör) from the St. Grydzina Correctional Institute, she was accompanied by a tall, fit, tow-headed young player of the bębna basowego (“drum-bass”) whom she called ”Alix.” And in October of ’56, in the chaos of the Prague Uprising, Olevna and “Alix” were in turn united with the firebrand young radical who called himself “Laszlo Olafia”—but whom Olevna and “Alix” called “Davey.”

http://www.elegantsavagesorchestra.com/bassanda-correspondence.html#IndependendenceDay

: Last known image of Vassily Uel’s
Ainḍarsa-kō-chōrā in Bassanda,
taken at the Bassanda North-Central
Fantastical Zoological Menagerie, Auto
Detailing Shop, and Ice Cream
Parlor, circa 1986--
maybe, or maybe not.

[From the papers of Kelemen Misha Forsàidh, b1882, sometime percussionist, Bassanda freedom fighter, adjunct faculty at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, c1972)

Vassily Uel’s Ainḍarsa-kō-chōrā
(born c1969 ; film-maker/auteur)

While being possessed of one of Bassanda’s least compelling and mysterious back stories, Vassily Uel’s Ainḍarsa-kō-chōrā has nonetheless emerged as Bassanda’s leading expatriate filmmaker and an ardently staunch advocate for pro-Bassandan legitimacy in the post-Cold War West

A beneficiary of Dobar Momak’s rigorous campaign of “provincial learning recruitments,” Vassily received formal schooling first at the Ballyizget Arts Magnet Orphanage for Indigent and Creative Children but later was transferred to the dubiously-illustrious Podgotvitelnata Akadamiya Kantarion, a Center of Somewhat Middling Learning housed in an outbuilding at an armed checkpoint on the Bassandan frontier.

He received early informal training in the dramatic arts through the study of Wayang Kulit puppetry by apprenticing with an itinerant iron-miner, a known “character of local color” and noted Purveyor of Morally-Questionable Substances, who also happened to be an experienced and once-respected Dalang in his native Bali.

Ainḍarsa-kō-chōrā was later brought back into the fold by Momak and was immediately tapped by Lyov Verushkin to administrate—but notably not to participate in—the theatrical elements of the music-theater experiments of Veruskin’s Really Late Period with the Eliektryčnyja Drevy. Much of what we know of the post-1980 history of that group is based on his clandestinely-filmed documentary evidence (although how that information came into the possession of the archives remains unknown, perhaps for the better). Disenfranchised over the sad state of the Heavy Metal music genre and the continued fallout of the Falklands War, Ainḍarsa-kō-chōrā went on the lam sometime in the mid to late 1980s. He never, however, lost his zeal for Bassandan cultural archetypes.

Vassily next resurfaced in the Great Suburban Plains of America sometime around 1990 (in the approximate vicinity of Houston, Texas), long of hair and pale of skin, and operating under an Anglicized version of his name. It is thought by his pallid complexion that his journey from Bassanda to the US may have taken him through the Northern latitudes for several years, perhaps by way of Skara, a small logging town in central Sweden that was the birthplace of his grandmother’s second cousin, twice removed and thrice re-married. This possible sequence of events lends credence to the supposition that Vassily may have served as the urn bearer at the memorial ceremony for Yezget-Bey prior to his desertion.

His films are often considered whimsical in nature, but, while awkward and unusual by Western standards, are decidedly tame in the context of Bassandan Cine-Theatro-Drama, particularly as it is practiced in the provinces. Exposure to the traditional Balinese shadow play is often thought to be but one source of inspiration for the stilted and semi-rigid movements of many of his film characters, and his droll cinematographic charm is suspected to be exaggerated by the use of a smuggled and highly modified Habjar-Sonic electric bouzouki pickup. Modern film experts theorize that the device must be placed in close proximity to the film canister so that its unique magnetic properties may exert their maximum effect on the film within.

The subjects of Ainḍarsa-kō-chōrā’s films are often drawn directly from Bassandan mythology, history, and folklore, although the source material is often heavily veiled in allegory and altered for the modern Western film audience, sometimes to the point of being straight up fictitious. An early project saw him adapt a Manx-Bassandan cautionary tale about a precocious Ashkenazi Jewish student of Irish extraction, set in the evocative and picturesque Podgotvitelnata Akadamiya Kantarion of a bygone era. Unfortunately, the Hollywood studio overseeing distribution of the project in the English-language market grossly mishandled the translation of the title from the perfectly descriptive and vivid Russe Mhor to something much less intelligible and far more confusing.

Despite that setback, the film was considered a moderate success, and Vassily’s technical skill was widely lauded in the international press. Since that time, Ainḍarsa-kō-chōrā’s films have tackled, among other things, such patently-Bassandan subjects as an oral history of the grossly dysfunctional family that formerly ruled a fiefdom adjacent to his home village, a (modernized) biographical portrait of one of Bassanda’s leading 19th Century naturalists (although the portions regarding the pilot from Kentucky are thought to be accurate), a recounting of the legendary Bassandan fable of The Three Brothers and the Train, a coming-of-age tale involving a member of a local Khaki Rozvidnyky outfit (that organization often being acknowledged by Lord Robert Baden-Powell as a direct inspiration for his own Boy Scouts of America movement), and most recently, a meticulously-researched and historically accurate accounting of a caper occurring during the interbellum years when the Eastern Bassandan Uplands were considered a fashionable vacation resort location.

Ever the advocate for the depth and universality of story-culture, Vassily Uel’s Ainḍarsa-kō-chōrā effortlessly disguises the morals and values of Old Bassanda such that they are rendered entirely hidden in plain sight.

Celebrating Bassanda's National Independence Day

Radio Free Bassanda Aurophonic Disc and Talking Engine Co. Announces A Ground-Breaking New Collaboration!

For Immediate Release:

Radio Free Bassanda, the record company that “takes one step forward and two steps back,” is pleased to announce a new ground-breaking collaboration between ace bouzoukists General L. and Thompson of The Janissary Stomp, fame, with an international cast of crème de la crème artists, such as The Chieftains with Lady Gaga doing a cover of T Rex’s “Bang a Gong”; Metallica w/Jerry Reed (through the miracle of archived audio recording) on “Chicken Thrashin’”; Sandra Bernhardt, Jay Leno, Tim Roth, and Stephen Wright doing a Mamas & the Papas cover; The Carolina Chocolate Drops ; Natalie Cole, Nat King Cole, Kenny G., and Louis Armstrong; Ricky Skaggs with Earl Slick; Elmore Leonard and Leonard Cohen; and The Chicken Who Crossed the Road (to Play with The Chieftains); as well as many others.

The new project entitled Le Bassande de Mon Coeur,* features almost ten hours of music on eight CDs. It explores the origins of the roots of the background to the roots of the various musical traditions that came together to comprise the roots of American Roots Music (which, as we know, can be very “rootsy”).

Recent research by musical anthropologists Homer St. John and S. Jefferson Winesap has revealed many heretofore unknown “connections behind the connections,” sort of a secret history of the Eastern roots of the Western roots of Western Music. For instance, the famed Bo Diddley beat attributed to the R&B and early Rock and Roll artist Ellis Otha Bates (1928-2008) has now been shown by St. John and Winesap to have originated with Habib Didli, who was one of the first to record on the then new Edison cylinder in Istanbul during the late Ottoman Empire.

French music journalist Jacques Mourganourga, after listening to an advance copy of Le Bassande de Mon Coeur, exclaimed, “C’est comme si Eric von Däniken et Indiana Jones a découvert la véritable histoire cachée des musiques du monde!” which translates to “It is as if Eric von Däniken and Indiana Jones have discovered the true hidden history of all the world’s musics.”

Le Bassande de Mon Coeur will be available online and in record stores (if you can find one) beginning on Tuesday, April 8th, 2014: http://www.janissarystomp.com/

Hourly temperature-change report, US National Weather Service, 4.13.14

"Sixty Degree Temperature Drop Overnight Blamed On Bassandan Rift Valley" --by Hazmat Malingarian

Monday, April 14th, 2014. Lubbock, Texas.

An overnight temperature drop of sixty degrees is being blamed on the inadvertent opening of a portal into the Bassandan Rift Valley during a performance of the reconstructed “Bassandan Rite of Spring” ballet last night by The Elegant Savages Orchestra at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

“We premiered this piece in January with no complications. I don’t understand why this would happen now,” said Elegant Savages Orchestra director Dr. Christopher J. Smith, who was visibly shaken.

Orchestra members recounted seeing the patterns in the wood floor in Hemmle Recital Hall shift inexplicably during the performance of the piece. One performer said he saw the audience “go all wavy” and that they seemed to shimmer and disappear for a few moments.

This west Texas town was rocked this morning by unseasonably low temperatures and high winds. The high on Sunday was over ninety degrees and the overnight low was thirty degrees.

Lubbockians woke to a semi-apocalyptic scenario with disparate items being picked up by and blown through the frigid air. Lawn chairs, small pets, mail boxes, and even one above ground swimming pool, were hurled by a vicious northwest wind that also carries with it many acre-feet of soil from the cotton fields surrounding this town, the birthplace of singer Buddy Holly.

The National Weather Service could not be reached for comment on today’s abrupt downward temperature shift.

United States Rep. Rickie Nozzleblower, in whose district the affected area lay, said “I reckon it’s a goldurn ‘xperiment by the gummint. Obamacare! Benghazi! The Deficit!”

Bassanda is a former Soviet satellite state that achieved independent nationhood after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Since then it has been the subject of limited but intense scrutiny by a dedicated cadre of scholars, one of whom, Dr. Nelson P. Criminy III, attempted to publish ‘scientific’ papers and a book making the case for the existence of the “Bassandan Rift Valley Effect,” which he claims can open a portal in the space-time continuum (see http://elegantsavagesorchestra.com/correspondence.html)

The Elegant Savages Orchestra at Texas Tech University (Mk. II) was formed by Smith, in tribute to the original Orchestra, a post-glasnost outgrowth of the classic Bassanda National Radio Orchestra of the 1950s. Smith cited the need for performances of reconstructed “Bassadan masterworks.”

[Post updated to add]:

Reached for comment early the next morning outside his suburban dacha on Lubbock's outskirts, Smith replied "Of course! (slaps forehead) The BRVRoSHI! ("Bassandan Rift Valley Rite of Spring Hemispheric Inversion") What was I *thinking*?!?!?"

Thereafter, he hurriedly excused himself to reporters, saying only "I'm sorry, I...I have to make a few 'phone calls," and fled.

Col. Thompson &Maritjie Tiedtgen, about 1898, at their hacienda
above Taos, saddled and ready to depart on one
of the Colonel’s “Rio Grande Gorge Rides”

"Col. Thompson's Golden Era Rio Grande Gorge Rides"

At war’s end, Colonel Thompson appears to have returned to the West, though his role in the late conflict would be obscured literally for decades—it was not until the next century that new historical documents, previously unidentified in War Department records, confirmed that the Colonel, despite his high rank in the Army of the Confederacy and service in the New Mexico Territory under Silbey, in fact was an operative for McClellan’s spy chief Allan Pinkerton throughout the conflict (see the decoded secret communication “1 December 1861, Thompson/detached to Sibley (Army of the Confederacy), to McClellan/Army of the Potomac”, New Mexico State Archives; reproduced elsewhere in the Correspondence).

Having permanently rejected the east (“There was nothing for me back there”), the Colonel became part of the extremely small community of Anglo’s living in the northern Rio Grande Valley, forging close and mutually respectful relationships with elders of the Taos Pueblo and leading members of the Nuevomexicano community, most notably journalist and scholar Ezequiel Cabeza De Baca (later the State’s second governor). While he traveled widely, those journeys are poorly and incompletely documented, but there is indirect evidence that his adventures even took him overseas, in the early 1880s—see the biographical sketch of Algeria Main-Smith, who is alleged to have met “The Brethren” (Col. Thompson and the General) in the mountains of Turkmenistan, in 1883.

Gradually, in the last decade of the 19th century, a small circle of like-minded Anglo and international musicians, craftsmen, and artists gathered around the Colonel’s fortified hacienda on the mesa near the Rio Grande Gorge, some living in the town of Taos, others in the surrounding mountain villages. It was out of this circle, and their combination of diverse interests in esoteric knowledge and the powerful local geo-magnetic influences, that the Young Men’s Oriental Society of Talpa arose in the early ‘90s. Charter members included Col. Thompson and the General, as well as Oriental scholar/linguist Mason Brown, the luthier H.M.S. Owsley Smythe, the electrical “boffin” Athanais Salamone, and the young Patrikios League. This was the circle with which Dianthe Habjar-Lawrence, a former student of folklorist Olive Dame Campbell at Harvard, expert horsewoman, and sharpshooter, interacted, in her quest to persuade former U.S. Cavalry “Buffalo Soldiers” (African-American recruits) to enlist as mercenaries and drill instructors for Bassandan partisans fighting the Tsarist occupation (see Habjar-Lawrence, Dianthe, elsewhere in the Correspondence).

Some younger members of the so-called “Thompson Society,” walkers and riders with the Colonel, alleged the existence of a secret 4th-dimensional portal that connected directly from somewhere in the north end of the Rio Grande Gorge to the Bassandan Rift Valley, this explaining why the Col., the Gen., Browne/Lilt, and various others could suddenly "manifest" in Bassanda at short notice. And certainly the Colonel was highly selective regarding participants in these Gorge Rides, which varied from 3 to 7 days’ duration: many Anglo members joining the early Taos colony requested to participate over the decades but he was elliptical and evasive in announcing or recruiting for these rides: D.H. Lawrence, for example, complained bitterly regarding the Colonel’s categorical refusal ever to include him.

The location of the alleged portal is not known, though Rides typically departed in the pre-dawn dark from the ruins of Simeon Turley’s Mill in Arroyo Hondo north of Taos. Turley had made a name for himself in the 1840s through the production of “Taos Lightning” corn whiskey for trade with the trappers and mountain men who made summer rendezvous at the River. During the Taos Revolt, in January 1847, a small party of mountain men was besieged in the Mill by a very large force of over 500 Nuevomexicanos and Pueblo Indians. Only John David Albert, a former keelboatman and employee of the American Fur Company, and Tom Tobin, an Irish-American mountain man from St Louis, escaped. Though there is no record of Col. Thompson’s presence at this fight (his name is not among those of the mountain men besieged, and little is known of his background prior to his Civil War Service), Albert, who fled north, in three days walking coatless 140 miles to the trading post at Pueblo, later commented

Tom Tobin an’ me, we mought niver have ‘scaped, ‘thout that midnight hailstorm th’ Rev callt daown. He warn’t thar, but in th’ middle uv th’ night I heerd him in mah head say ‘Naow Sean, ye wait ‘til th’ hailstorm cum, an’ then you cut on out’tn hyar and don’ ye look back!’ So I done what th’ voice tol’ me, an’ when the hailstorm com, and that big loud hummin’, it scairt them Meskins an’ Injuns ‘way long enough, an’ me an’ Tom, we got out safe. Colonel, he com an’ visit’n me, yars later, in Denver, an’ I thankt him thin.

In the years after the Revolt, superstitious Taosenos tended to avoid the ruins of the Mill and the memory of the slaughter there, which may partially account for the Colonel’s use of the site as a jumping-off point for the Rides.

As mentioned, he was more likely to decline than advance permission to participate, and there were stipulations even for those invited: no technology involving magnetics, wheels or gears, even a watch, was to be carried, and all participants were required to display adequate horsemanship, stamina as walkers, and camp discipline. There was also a clear expectation that Riders be competent, reticent, and able to hold their liquor: though production of “Taos Lightning” corn whiskey had ceased after the Revolt, the Colonel evidently had maintained either a reserve or a production source: “Lightning” was a cornerstone of his hospitality at the hacienda, and a ritual “stirrup cup” at the beginning of a ride.

Participants were reticent about events or itinerary, but third- and fourth-hand accounts have suggested that the descent from the mesa down into the Gorge, at different locations, could take both far more and far less time than more prosaic journeys, and the Colonel appeared to have the ability to call down fog or rain nearly at will to obscure the terrain. Moreover, the Colonel had located a number of hidden caves, typically shielded by rock slides (some intentional?) or steep overhangs, and entrance into these “shortcuts” further confused travel times. It may be that “Taos Lightning” also played a role in riders’ confusion, as well.

It is also thought that this Rio Grande Gorge portal might possibly offer a partial explanation for the acoustical phenomenon called the “Taos Hum,” a near-66 hertz “buzz” or “hum” heard by a small segment of the population in the vicinity of Taos Mountain. That hum, first widely documented only much later in the century, may in its infrequency and unpredictability reflect the only occasional opening of the portal between the Rio Grande and the Rift Valley—where centuries-old experiments with trough batteries and magnetic pickups had led to the use of the “Bassandan One-String” whose “unearthly howl of banshees” drove Imperial Cossacks from the northern frontiers. The “Hum,” then, may actually represent a faint echo of the sound of Bassanda, entering through the Rift Valley – Rio Grande portal, and resonating even in Northern New Mexico.

By the same token, it should be noted that the north end of the Rio Grande Gorge has been independently and repeatedly documented, since Col. Thompson’s time, as the site of quite mysterious and possibly paranormal events. Dr J. Allen Hynek (1910-86), an astrophysicist who was employed by the US Air Force in the late 1940s as a “debunker” of UFO sightings for Project Sign, Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book, over the course of a long career became much more agnostic, and even simpatico, towards the idea that some of those “unexplained” experiences might in fact represent paranormal realities. In an unpublished memoir, Hynek commented:

I looked at so many thousands of examples over the decades that, when I had finally winnowed out the vast majority of obvious errors or intentional misrepresentations, the small portion that were left were truly inexplicable. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but when I met Col. Thompson while a student at the University of Chicago in the Thirties, through Maritjie Tiedtgen’s family, that planted the seed. Thompson and I shared an interest in natural phenomena and the workings of nature, and he was an invaluable informant for the grad students in Southwest Indian ethnography at UC. So he’d come into the City from the West, he’d speak to our seminars, we’d visit the Art Institute or the Midway, and he would listen to my theories, not saying much. He did tell me, more than once, that I should visit him in Taos for one of his Trail Rides—said it might “clarify some things.” Never got to do that…always regretted it.

I realized, years later, that Thompson might have been suggesting to me that the UFO’s weren’t actually extra-terrestrial—that instead they might be electro-magnetic manifestations of previously-undocumented natural phenomena, native to Earth. The psychic realms, so mysterious to us today, may be an ordinary part of an advanced technology. So when Spielberg recruited me for that scene in his Close Encounters film, just for a cameo, I told him that I’d only do it if he wrote in something that acknowledged Thompson’s impact on my own thinking about alien contact. By ’77, the Colonel wouldn’t leave his hacienda at all. So that character of “Farmer,” the old radical who claims to have seen Sasquatch? That’s my own homage to Thompson and the way he freed up my own sense of the world.

[caption: Col. Thompson and Maritjie Tiedtgen, about 1898, at their hacienda above Taos, saddled and ready to depart on one of the Colonel’s “Rio Grande Gorge Rides”. He is mounted on “Sam”, a brindle Kentucky Saddler staying almost 18 hands high. Like the Colonel himself, “Sam” exhibited remarkable longevity: aged approximately four years in this image, he had also been, according to the Colonel, his principal mount in the War. When questioned by skeptics who refused to believe any equine could live over four decades, the Colonel would smile, pat Sam’s neck, and say “me and this old boy, we been a few places together. And we got a few miles, and a few more destinations, ahead of us yet.”

Persian image of Legend
of Majnun and Leyla, now in
a Ballyizget gallery, but originally
hung at Smythe's coffeehouse,
in the Old Quarter.
Commemorates first meeting
of Binyamin Biraz Ouz
and Meyodija Zöld Mezők

The story of Binyamin & Meyodija

The coffeehouses of Bassandas have been bastions of culture, conversation, and political progressivism ever since the 17th century. In the narrow cobbled streets of the walled Old City, gastronomic traditions inherited from the Ottoman Empire and all over the Muslim world held sway; it was possible, within a single block, to buy halvah, tobacco, mint tea, majoom, croissants, baklava, ceviz sucuğu (walnut candy), newspapers in six languages, and the thick-textured, finely-ground Bassandan coffee called Tanrıların Uyarıcı (“stimulant of the Gods”). The beverage had originated in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen and had been described in the 16th century by the German physician and traveler Leonhard Rauwolf as follows:

A beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach. Its consumers take it in the morning, quite frankly, in a porcelain cup that is passed around and from which each one drinks a cupful. It is composed of water and the fruit from a bush called bunnu.

By the 17th century, enterprising individuals had smuggled the plants back from Vienna to Ballyizget; the first roaster and coffeehouse in the Old Quarter was opened by an expatriate Russian soldier called Matthias Yordaniya--a conical Zaporozhian Cossack fur cap, commemorating his early manhood, still serving as the signpost of a coffeehouse.

Although the coffeehouses had flourished during the WWII Nazi occupation, whose officers had learned their caffeine habits in Vienna and Berlin, the immediate wake of the War brought a significant downturn in the fortunes of the кофейня (“kafeynya”); due not only to the tremendous economic hardships of the post-War Depression, but also to coffee’s very immediate and negative associations with German culture, and the Russian preference for sweetened mint tea. So by 1946, the oldest of the kafe-houses, even those known worldwide amongst aficionados, were vulnerable to intermittent openings, questionable roasts, and the occasional misuse of—horrifyingly enough—American Nescafé.

One shop that did manage to survive through the worst vicissitudes of postwar depression and Stalinization, on a quiet square in the Old City, had been known in various periods as Jerzy’s, Suleiman’s, Bit'sya Uyezd Ostrov (“The Throbbing Island”), and Smythe’s. By March 1946 however, even Smythe’s was barely keeping its doors open, subsisting on a desultory trade of morning cappuccinos (sometimes made with chicory coffee or other discredited substitutes) and croissants, and a steady if tight-fisted stream of piroshky-and-tea-consuming Russian soldiery.

It was a narrow, deep room, with window-bays that opened out to the street in fine weather and which could be shut up in damp. Inside, under pressed-tin ceilings and creaking fans stained with nicotine, antique samovars hissed and hand-cranked whole-bean grinders rumbled as backdrop to the quiet conversations and rustling newspapers of the clientele. In this post-War depression, almost no hard currency was available, so the slick-haired politicians, paint-smudged artists, decadent poets, short-tempered and hard-drinking editors, and silver-maned heroes of the Revolution(s) stretched their café au lait and espressos and free refills as long as they could.

On an old couch in the least-trafficked corner, furthest from the massive Victorian coal stove which heated the center of the room and whose stovepipes stretched to the four corners of the ceiling like a great tin umbrella, sat a young girl dressed in dark worn clothes, a Red Army greatcoat bundled around her, an old carpetbag and a bundle of books at her feet. After five months of daily visits, the baristas all knew her and now seldom objected when she stretched a single pot of black tea through the coldest part of the early spring mornings—and the eldest of the staff, the motherly kahve uzmanı known as “Madame Altura,” having begun by slipping the girl the previous day’s beignets, was now bringing her soup and spare socks. Calling herself мелодија (“Meyodija”), the girl had appeared on Smythe’s doorstep one snowy morning in late November 1945, ragged and clutching her carpetbag and books.

Now, on a morning of early sunrise and springtime warmth, as the buds on the silver birches along the squares were swelling, she sat with a volume of Rimbaud’s poems open on her lap, scribbling notes in the margins, the soles of her combat-booted feet resting on the sunlit sill of the open window, through which crept the aromas of horse, roasting chestnuts, and wood smoke. The breeze stirred her dark hair and fluttered the pages of the old copy of Les Effarés when she stopped to sip lukewarm tea. Behind the counter, Madame rattled the knock-block and chattered with the old men who came in for their café and Gauloise cigarettes, while sparrows pecked at the crumbs brushed off the sidewalk tables and scattered on the cobbles, the boldest occasionally hopping up to quarter the windowsill around the girl’s feet. A table of boisterous Soviet soldiers—conscripts from Ukraine, by their shoulder-boards—talked and laughed loudly, shouting in broken Bassandan for service when the supply of tea and piroshky ran low.

Behind her, the worn green-painted double doors of the café’s entrance banged back against the door-frame. She glanced sidelong to see a dark-haired young man carrying a worn backpack over one shoulder, and an aluminum suitcase in one hand, dressed in muddy corduroys, hiking boots, and a faded fisherman’s sweater, leaning over the counter, talking animatedly to Madame, who laughed and responded “welcome back!”

Plumping down on a sofa diagonally across from her, he pulled a small wooden flute and a pocketknife out of his shoulder bag, and began painstakingly to carve away at the instrument’s mouthpiece, nearly cross-eyed with concentration. When Madame set the quadruple espresso down next to him, he smiled and said “Teşekkür ederim” while barely looking up from his work. Periodically he would brush the fine shavings from his lap onto the concrete floor, and try one or two soft, disjointed notes on the flute, barely audible over the clatter of the café.

Gradually an aroma drifted across the table, subtle and elusive, an aroma that she recognized but couldn’t place. Finally abandoning all pretense of reading her Rimbaud, she spoke directly to the young man:

“What is that?”

He glanced up with a teasing smile, under a shock of black hair: “It’s a flute.”

She rolled her eyes. “I know that. What’s the smell?”

He smiled again, and held the instrument out to her across the table: “That? Oh, that’s beeswax—you use it to shape the mouthpiece so you can get just the tone you want.”

Taking the flute gingerly, her fingers brushed against the knuckles of his right hand: the skin was rough and calloused, tattooed under the nails with old grease or dirt, but his touch sent a shock up her arm. She raised the instrument to her nose and sniffed the mouthpiece: an aroma like the beeswax candles of her grandmother’s kitchen. Putting it to her lips, to blow a tentative note, she caught an additional aroma—something masculine and unique—and realized that the mouthpiece was still warm with his breath. She glanced up, to see him draining his espresso, smiling at her.

“What’s your name, girl?”

Before she could answer, the double doors banged again, and two tow-headed young men, both obvious foreigners, tumbled into the café. Looking around and spying the flute-player, one called, in a broad American accent, “Benjy! Baba and Madame are outside, with the Jordan—we got to go!” The other glared at the party of Soviet soldiers monopolizing the biggest table, and turned away toward the pastry counter.

Without looking, “Benjy” called over his shoulder “I’ll be right there. You get Bellows away from the pastries and by the time you settle the bill, I’ll be ready.” Leaning forward, he spoke swiftly and under his breath, “Tell me quickly—are you here, at Smythe’s, every day? Will you be here at the weekend?”

She hesitated, and at the same moment, the double doors opened for a third time, and a pale-skinned, slender young woman of Romany appearance, with bangles on her arms, bare feet and henna’d hair, but an unmistakable air of command, stepped inside. Her gaze went round the room like a laser, flicking over the old men hunched on barstools, the other patrons, the café staff behind the counter. Beyond her, a tall, dark figure with a shock of tousled hair stood silhouetted in the sunlit doorway.

Taking in the table of soldiers, she caught “Benjy’s” eye, while speaking aloud over her shoulder to the two young men “Jamey—Bellows—get your drinks and let us go. Yezget-Baba has someone to meet at the Marwah junction by dusk, and that’s eight hours distant, and you’re driving.”

Crossing to the window-seat with light swift steps, watching the soldiers across the room, she spoke quickly and very quietly to the dark-haired young man: “Benjy—we must go. There is a package to be recovered at the Marwah monastery, and there is not much time left. Bring your gear—and hurry.” Her gaze flicked over Meyodija, and she said “Is this a friend?”

Benjy replied: “I think so, Madame Therese. I think—a new friend of Bassanda.”

“Then tell her how to find you again, and come along. Baba thinks we are at risk here.”

The young girl found her voice and said “Yes—yes I’m here almost every day, in the mornings. The baristas give me pastry, and it’s warm.”

By this time the Romany woman Therese, snapping “Go! Go!,” was herding “Jamey” and “Bellows” away from the pastry counter toward the exit doors, cuffing them, ignoring their complaints, and a deep masculine voice took up the command. мелодија turned her head, and saw Benjy looking down at her, his brow furrowed.

“What is your name, then, girl?”

Suddenly dry-mouthed, for reasons she could never later fully explain, she said,

“Meyodija. It’s….it’s Greek. I mean, Macedonian—from the North. It means ‘Melody’.”

Looking up from her deep couch, she saw his face go blank, with a faraway look, and then a slow smile grow upon his face—a smile mostly in the eyes. It was a smile she was to come to know very, very well, in the years to come.

He said slowly, in a deep soft voice, “Yes. Yes, of course it does.”

He extended his hand. Flustered, she held up on her open palm the small flute he had been carving.

But he caught her hand, and with long, strong, musician’s fingers, closed it gently over the flute, and said “No, you keep it. I’ll come find it—and you.” Then he stooped swiftly, caught up his backpack and aluminum case, and was gone.

Outside, on the pavement, she heard a succession of slammed doors and the roar of a revved engine. Jumping up, she leaned out through the open window, past the sill, and saw an oversized car with a truck-like cab bumping up the cobblestoned road that ascended out of the town square.

Hanging out the passenger door, one foot on the running board and one hand bracing himself upright as he looked back, she saw Benjy. Even at two hundreds yards’ distance, as their eyes met, she felt the force of his gaze. He smiled, and raised his other hand in farewell.

Decades later, when BNRO chroniclers interviewed Binyamin Biraz Ouz and Meyodija Zöld Mezők, the “Majnun and Layla” of ESO legend, Meyodija would smile and say “he had me by the espresso. The flute simply sealed the deal.”

As Yezget-Bey commented, on the topic of their epic story, “Love is the only rebirth that matters.”

[caption: Persian image of Legend of Majnun and Leyla, now in a Ballyizget gallery, but originally hung at Smythe's coffeehouse, in the Old Quarter. Commemorates first meeting of Binyamin Biraz Ouz & Meyodija Zöld Mezők

Closing and Opening the Rio Grande Rift Portal

Report of John David Albert: keelboatman, mountain man, scout, mail rider, on events of circa 1883

Transcriber’s note: Subject Albert was an extremely articulate and surprisingly well-read man, born in Maryland c1805, orphaned at age 12, raised by a sister in Pennsylvania. The transcription, taken in Denver in 1898, seeks to render his distinctive idiom and the patois the Mountain men called “plug-a-plew”]

That’s the night we come out of the Rift tunnel fastest. We had to return swift—we uz only three days out on a five-day Gorge ride, but somehow Colonel gotten word, in the Rift Valley, that there uz danger to the Gorge. On the morning of that third day—don’t know what time: we wadn’t ‘lowed to carry watches—but ‘fore the sun, he woke us up quick, shaking us in our bedrolls. The marmots (Ed: Marmota baibacina Bassandiensus) uz already awake, an’ I see one sittin up on its hind legs next to Colonel’s bedroll, chitterin at him like it was talkin.

Anyway, we saddled up swift, ate some tsampa an’ tea while we ‘uz doin it, doused the fire, an’ Colonel had us in the saddle ‘fore the sun had all-the-way cleared the eastern mountains.

Rode most of that day, an’ it uz hard to keep track of time. Not just ‘cause of the “no watches” rule on the Gorge rides—Colonel said magnets, gears, an’ wheels were “bad medicine” in the Rift Valley—but also ‘cause, up ‘ere, the light plays funny tricks. Think you’re heading west, an’ south, an’ the mornin sun climbs up an’ over your shoulder, an’ ten-twelve hours later you think it’s still westerly whin ye see it “setting” in front a ye. But then you come ‘round a bend in the valley—all single-file on horseback, or even on foot, up on them narrer Bassandan mountain paths—and all of a sudden the sun’s behind your left shoulder an’ aint settin, seem like it’s risin again.

You been on a Gorge ride, you know Colonel doesn’t like talk on the trail; always say “shut up and use your eyes and ears.” In the daytime, there’s always wildlife: marmots, burro, lot of Bassandan eagles—not to mention the snakes an’ giant scorpions an’ the jumping spiders that like them damp crevices down by the river. Night-time, it’s even spookier, ‘cause in places the trail’s so deep in the Rift Valley that the starlight or moonlight gets cut off entire; have t’ trust your mount knows the trail, an’ got the ability to sniff out cougar or wolves.

On this one ride, even though we uz s’posed to be out five days—Colonel making a run for Syntia’s Peach Brandy, he sometimes sold it ‘stead a Taos Lightnin—he woke us ‘fore dawn, like I say, on the third day. An’ he hurryin: shook my shoulder where I lie near the campfire, say fast, under his breath, “Quick, Johnny—get ye up an’ get the horses saddled,” an’ then he was on to the next person. We’d already collected the brandy from the Khampa riders who brought it north up from Syntia’s farm—had the kegs swaddled in canvas an’ lashed onta the pack frames—so it didn’t take long f’r us to saddle up an’ head out.

It uz lucky they wuz six of us, an’ we’d all made the ride before. Tom Tobin an’ I had got out of Turley’s Mill safe after the ’47 Revolt—Colonel had a hand in that too—and though we’d split up to various an’ sundry places, we kep’ in touch, an’ we tried to mek ronny-voo at the Colonel’s hacienda least wunst every two years. ‘Sides me an’ Tom, an’ the Colonel, there uz four: Jerry Elk-Foot Mirabal from the Pueblo; Cisco Guevera, he was a riverman an’ trail-rider both; David Little-hand, he was a teenager the Colonel was fostering, an’ Matty Teegan—she was Colonel’s common-law wife an’ ridin partner. Like I say, they’d all made the river, an’ they all could handle themselves on horseback an’ on the river. An’ they knew their mounts too: was all ridin horses had made the journey before likewise, so they didn’t have to worry ‘bout thim spookin on the trail. Jerry an’ David had Pueblo ponies, an’ Cisco had a mule named Buck he’d rode for years; Matty had a 3-year-old she called Amigo—kinda young, but Matty was amazin with horses an’ Amigo trusted her; an’ Colonel was on Sam a’ course: skinny old Kentucky Saddler Colonel’d had as long as I knowed him—and that went back 15 years at least.

Anyways, we tuk up an’ out of camp s’quick as we could, with the risin sun at our backs, an’ we rode for hours an’ hours—cold bright day, not much wind. Had to go easy on the water ‘cause the Valley’s walls wuz so steep in most places we couldn’t get down to the River—awfu’ hard bein parched with thirst an’ you can see that cold clear Izget water down below you but you caint come at it. Colonel was breaking’ trail, holdin the lead line of a 2-year old Bassandan colt he was tryin to acclimate to the trail, an’ we ‘uz strung out along behin ‘im. Didn’t talk much—single-file didn’t help, an’ Colonel had to concentrate on findin the route, but we all had the feelin there ‘uz something behind, or somethin ahead upcomin, an’ we didn’t feel like we wanted to draw attention anywheres more’n we had to.

Colonel allus rode in front—even for those of us who’d made the trip before, the trail was different ever’ time, an’ I don’t just mean ‘cause of rock slides an’ changin seasons. No: you’d come out of that high pasture where we’d meet the Khampas, an’ you’d swear that last trip, the trail led downhill toward the Valley to the southeast, an’ then this trip, you’d leave the same valley headin northwest, an’ damned if it wadn’t the same trail, ony kinder inside-out or backkerds, like you’s seein it in a mirror or somethin. That’s one reason Colonel was real selective about who he brought along on the rides: if you hadn’t been before, had to just trust Colonel knew what he uz doin when he led you in the opposite direction t’ last time, an’ not every tenderfoot or Easterner could handle that.

They’s times when I bin ridin that route, second in the string after Colonel in the lead, an’ I’d see him sittin Sam, hunched up in the saddle like a jockey the way he used to set his stirrups, an’ he’d have like his eyes closed, an’ be talkin to someone who wadn’t there, an’ damned if Sam didn’t follow the route all on his own, ‘thout the Colonel’s hands even touchin on the reins. Useter happen specially at night or in the fogs: if we ‘uz comin down out of the hills, an’ we thought them Cossacks uz on our scent, Colonel’d drop the reins, an’ whisper in Sam’s ear, an’ then close his eyes, an’ c’mence to talkin to the thin air. More’n wunst, I seen a mountain fog, or a real bad mountain thunderstorm, come down outta the hills just behind us, an’ damned if it don’t wash away our tracks, an’ sometimes even the trail itself behind us, ‘fore them Cossacks could ever come up to us.

But this time’uz in daylight—leastwise, started out thet way, with t’ sun risin behind my left shoulder as we headed down outten the hills southwest toward the River. I knowed where in the Rift valley Colonel usually tried to take us through—though there’s times I couldn’t’a rekkernized the cavern that was the doorway, one time to the next—but damned if I knew which direction to travel ‘thout the Colonel’s there. I left that to Colonel, a’ Sam. We on’y stopped to rest the horses, or tighten girths or the lashings on the cargo, or when the trail dipped down low enough we could get water—in that cold weather, we knew them horses needed to drink.

‘Long about mid-day, or just after, by the sun, while Colonel was hunkered down in the trail ahead, lookin at some old spoor he didn’t rekkernize, Jerry Elk-Foot sidled up ta me an’ said “Johnny, we should go—I can feel there is pursuit behind us.” I knowed better’n to question Jerry when he “felt” sumpin—you don’t live in the Pueblo all those generations ‘thout you get pretty damned sensitive—but I figgered Colonel already knew, an’ that’s why he’d rousted us out so early. So I just said “I know, Jerry…Colonel knows too. We’ll go, quick’s we kin.”

Colonel had us back in the saddle fast, but he wheeled Sam back toward the end of the pack-train long enough to talk quick with Matty. Didn’t hear what he said, but she reined Amigo aside, an’ set him at a path climbin the canyon wall, an’ the two of them went up that wall like a jackrabbit—well, she ‘uz pretty light, an’ ‘Migo was strong an’ had young legs. I see her slip off him when they’d climbed maybe hundred-fifty feet up ‘bove the trail, an’ then Colonel uz on us again, hustlin us forward an’ quirtin the pack mules to hurry them up, an’ we uz ‘round a bend in the trail an’ Matty uz out of sight behind.

Long afternoon, an’ like I say it ‘uz hard to know what the time was—we kept doublin, an’ doublin back s’ much, an’ losing the sun behind the canyon walls, after a while it just felt like time was standin still—like we five just bin ridin in circles forever, under that cold bright sun. Gradual, sky clouded over, an’ it got colder still—we pulled ponchos an’ serapes out of our saddle bags ‘thout slackin pace, an’ the sweat dried on my horse Saoirse’s neck. Didn’t feel like one of the Colonel’s fogs or storms, though—I see him look back wunst over his shoulder, from his place at the head of the column, an’ I swear he looked at those clouds like they uz enemies chasin us.

Come to a place where the canyon walls started droppin, an’ the river got narrower an’ quicker in the twilight, an’ we could hear it rushin as it picked up speed—bend in the river where the current had silted up a beach, an’ the doorway to the Portal cavern just beyond. By now, what with the clouds an’ what you woulda thought was dusk, it uz gettin hard to see details as the color drained outten the daylight, an’ I uz relyin more an’ more on Saoirse’s ability to see trail better’n what I could. Could hear Colonel’s voice up ahead, talkin, but it wadn’t any language I could rekkernize an’ there wadn’t anybody I could see him talkin to.

Comes a clatter of gravel an’ a rush of wind behind me, an’ I felt, more’n heard, Matty go by me on Amigo, an’ she wadn’t dallyin. Colonel reined in as she come up, an’ broke off his foreign talk, an’ I heered her say, with urgency in her voice, “They’re coming, and coming quickly. And they’re not alone.”

Colonel didn’t tarry neither: he yanked Sam around, an’ spurred back up the length of the line, to the mules at the end with Cisco mindin ‘em, an’ snapped out “Go, boys! Go quick, now! We’ve got trouble on our tail!” an’ smacked the lead mule Jonathan hard across the rump with the flat uv his Khyber knife. That mule hated ‘most everbody (Colonel callt him ‘Jonathan Not-So-Swift’), but the Colonel a little less than most, an’ he tuk off runnin up the trail with the rest of the string at his heels. Tom an’ Cisco an’ Davy an’ Jerry did likewise, holdin onto their pommels for dear life, but Matty & Colonel held back. An’, though they musta seen or felt “somethin” comin, they held there behind, lookin back up the trail, an’ Amigo an’ Sam stood like statues, waitin as well.

I didn’t much feel like stayin, but the boys had the string under control an’ they ‘uz gallopin for the beach an’ the Portal, an’ I didn’t much feel like turnin my back on whatever it was Colonel & Matty uz waitin for, an’ I didn’t much like leavin ‘em behind, neither. So I pulled out my old Army-issue Colt with my left hand, an’ drew my saber with my right. Dunno why I did that, like most ex-cavalry I hadn’t no use f’r the saber, but I just had this feeling that whatever might come outta that cloud at us might be a better target for cold steel than hot lead. By now it ‘uz nearly dark, an’ the stars wadn’t comin through the cloud, an’ the cloud was droppin so low I could practically feel its moisture blowin past my cheeks. But still Matty & the Colonel sat their steeds, an’ looked back up the Valley, listening.

Comes a low rumble, a kind of grinding moan, like big rocks rolling downhill, isolated, upstream, an’ Amigo moved nervously under Matty. She didn’t flinch, but I sensed more’n saw her grip tighten on the reins. Her voice was calm, though, comin out of the dark: “Dear…we should go. If they’re coming, here is not the place to meet them.” Colonel turned his head, an’ I saw the profile of his beard an’ the brim of his campaign hat ‘ginst the sky; there was a glint of dark eyes under the brim. “I know. I just—I hate to lead them from here through the Rift into the Gorge. It will make for more trouble in the future.” The grindin rumble from upstream was growin as she replied “I know. But wherever we meet them, we have to stop them. Here—or in the Gorge. And we have allies in the Gorge.”

I saw him nod his head. “You’re right, of course. We’d best go quickly.” They wheeled their horses like one, drove in their spurs, an’ were gone down the Valley, toward the beach an’ the Portal. I followed fast’s I could, but honest it wadn’t me who kept up: it was that little mare Saoirse got me there, goin hell-for-leather after her fellows an’ dancin down that droppin trail like she had eyes in her feet.

We come skiddin onta the open shingle of the beach, an’ saw Davy an’ Cisco an’ Jerry already drivin the pack-train into the shadows under the Portal’s stone arch. Colonel came down off Sam like an otter slippin off a rock an’ I saw him throw his reins to Matty with one hand an’ yank the Winchester repeater out of his saddle scabbard with t’other. The rumbling was growin louder an’ louder, comin from around the dark bend just upriver, an’ now I thought I could hear bass voices mixed in, almost like the rocks theirselves uz speakin. I slapped the saber back in its scabbard—I didn’t figger I wanted to get too close to whatever uz makin that damned noise, an’ if the Colonel was fallin back on firearms I reckoned I might oughta do the same—but damned if I knew whether to stay or go. Colonel was movin awful fast, but I heard him say, in a calm steady voice: “Johnny, you get back toward that Portal, an’ you wait just inside the door. If you need to go without me, you go.” I didn’t much like leavin him, but he’d taught me not to second-guess in a crisis, so I ran for the Portal, an’ underneath it there’s Matty: she’s got t’other Winchester braced agin the timber of the arch—an’ I stopt jist inside the door, t’ look back.

Colonel uz standin in the shallows of the river, water rushin’ past his knees, peerin aroun’ the bend upstream. An’ I see him bend over the Winchester, workin the lever fast ’s he could pump, an’ I see the copper-jacketed .44 shells flippin up an’ splashin in the runnin water around ‘im. An’ I see him reach into a pouch at his belt, an’ feed another load of cartridges inta the magazine. An’ even at that distance, in the changing light of the clouds that uz rolling an’ breaking up overhead, I see the dim moonlit shine of silver. He slammed home the last rounds an’ threw the rifle to his shoulder, aiming upstream.

I looked where he uz aiming, an’ for the life of me I caint describe what I saw. It wadn’t the dark—the clouds was still breakin up, an’ a three-quarter moon uz startin ta show through, an’ I could see the shining silhouette of the Colonel, the stream foaming around the knees of his buckskins, hat pushed back off his head, beard jutting, an’ the motionless shine of the Winchester’s barrel. But I looked upstream, and—despite the lightning sky, an’ the moonlight, an’ the backwash of reflected light from the river, it was like a great black cloud came rollin around that bend. Like black coal-smoke, rolling an’ tumbling along the rushing surface of the stream like it was heavier than the air an’ floatin on the water. An’ it was moving faster than the stream, against the wind blowin upriver, an’ in the middle of it I could see these red glints, almost like veins—and two red oval pools, like it might be eyes. Behind or beyond it, I could hear pounding hooves an’ shouting Cossack voices.

Colonel didn’t hurry but he didn’t tarry neither. As that black cloud rolled down toward him, an’ the rumbling voices of the rocks seemed to swirl all aroun’ us on the beach, he took careful aim, an’ then squeezed off four shots.

The cloud broke apart for a minute, an’ rolled back, an’ the two red pools blinked out. But the hooves an’ the shouting Cossack voices wuz still comin on strong, an’ then the cloud began to swirl back together like a whirlpool on top the river. Colonel ran outten the water up the shingle onto the beach, but the cloud was rolling toward us again, an’ I saw them red eyes gettin bigger. ‘Longside me Matty fires four more rouns’ over his head toward the cloud but this time hit don’t slow down atall.

Then Colonel uz runnin in under the arch, an’ turning to look back. I see a flash of somethin shinin as he pulled it outta his breast. His voice come outten the dark beside me: “Matty, Johnny—we can’t hold them here; we have to get in through the Portal.” Matty says “I’ve called out to the Others but I don’t know if they’ve heard me.” Colonel says “Cannot wait to find out. Go!” I felt his hand on my shoulder, pushing me forward, an’ I hear him saying more words behind me in the unknown language.

Then, as I uz stumblin forward inter the dark under the Portals low ceilin, behind me, I hear Colonel shout somethin in his foreign tongue, an’ then the grinding roar of the tunnel c’lapsin. I was feert Colonel mought been caught in it, but he come runnin up ta us, loomin’ outta the dark, an’ he snaps out “That slide’ll stop the Cossacks, but it’ll barely even slow the One. Go, boy! Go!” an’ we commenced ta run, the feert horses snortin an’ pullin and bangin us into the tunnel walls.

Naow, Tunnel through the Portal uz never the same way twicet: sometimes ‘twas twisty, sometimes straight ’s a ruler, sometimes all rockslides an’ water chutes; sometimes tuk almost no time atall, other times seemed like days. Don’t think I ever run any faster in ma life than thet night, but the tunnel uz sure quick even so—seem like I see the lantern Cisco had lit in just a few minutes, an’ we caught up to the pack train a minute after. B’yond, I see the big arch leads outta the Tunnel into the Rio Grande Gorge.

We come poundin up the slope toward the opening, an’ I see first Davy, then Cisco an’ Jerry, leap into the saddle on the run, an’ the mules an’ that Bassandan two-year-old uz pilin along helter-skelter b’hind ‘em. Matty comin past me, clinging to one side of Amigo’s shoulders like a ‘Rapahoe, one heel hooked over the saddle, duckin under the low ceiling of the arch, an’ then we thunder outten the tunnel an’ up into the Gorge.

Twas night there too, but a clear night, with a moon, an’ bright enough you could see the stardust of the Milky Way spilling down the sides of the Gorge, picking out juniper an’ pinyon. Moon uz behind us an’ I could see the River shinin at the wide places. Uz all ca’m there but we come tumblin up outta that Tunnel pretty loud an’ hurried: mules brayin an’ Cisco yellin as he tried to slow ‘em, horses neighin and fightin, Jerry an’ David shoutin to know what ‘twas that’s chasin us. Colonel calls to ‘em “You go on! On—you go on!” an’ they continues south down the canyon, more-or-less towards Arroyo Hondo and the Pueblo.

But Colonel reins back so hard that Sam almost sat down on his haunches, an’ flipped a leg up over the pommel an’ come off him, that Winchester still in his right hand. I uz lookin back, tryin to see if the pursuit uz comin outten the Tunnel after us, er what the pursuit wuz, an’ I see Colonel look up past my shoulder toward the Gorge rim an’ the shine of his teeth in the moonlight as he smiled through his beard.

I turn an’ look an’ see some figgers silhouetted agin the sky, up on the east Rim, maybe a long pistol shot away, lookin down at us. They’z three on’ ‘em, kinder bigger’n humans, but they looks more er less like people still: tall man in a stovepipe hat, holdin a guitar; a woman with long wild white-streaked dark hair an’ a ragged skirt an’ a tamb’rine in ‘er hand; an’ a littler feller wi’ a big ol’ bass fiddle, bigger’n him. They’s these big ol’ black boxes ‘hind ‘em, kinda like big ol’ steamer trunks, with glowin red eyes to ‘em agin the night sky, an’ they’s a buzzin an’ a hummin loud, comin down to us by the river’s edge.

But even louder’n that buzzin, they’s a rumble comin up outen the archway to the Tunnel, an’ I see Colonel turn an’ look back toward the Portal. Jerry an’ Davy an’ Cisco uz well down-stream, almost out of earshot, an’ Matty’s down off Amigo’s back, holdin his bridle, tryin to ca’am him as he’s shakin an’ tremblin an’ wantin to run. They look at each other, an’ Matty says to Colonel, “No. Your collapse stopped the Cossacks. But not the One. He’s gotten through…you know rocks and dirt can’t stop him.” Colonel grins, an’ looks at her, an’ then up t’ the Gorge rim, an’ he say “No. But I know what can.”

He swings int’ the saddle, an’ says “You and Johnny get up to the rim, on the west side, with the silver rifle,” an’ throws his Winchester to her. He skins off his bandolier an’ tosses it ta me, an’ t’other rifle, an’ says “Go with Matty, John. Keep her loaded!” an’ ‘thout waitin for a reply, he wheels Sam an’ sets the spurs to him an’ they take off up-trail toward the Trio on the east rim. Rumblin from the Portal’s getting’ louder an’ wisps of black smoke commence tricklin upward outten the openin. Matty and ‘Migo’s already half-up the west side an’ I tuk out up after. The rumblin b’low’s getting’ louder an’ I ‘most feel like I kin hear some kinda monstrous voice comin outten it. An’ it feels like they’s heat comin up outten the Portal too—like a big ol’ coal furnace firin up an’ startin throwin off sparks.

Me an’ Saoirse an’ Matty an’ ‘Migo come up over the top of the trail, over the Rim, into the moonlight on the Mesa, an’ comin skiddin to a halt. She slides off ‘Migo, an’ drops down prone in the dirt at the edge, puttin the Winchester to ‘er shoulder, an’ snaps out “here, Johnny—now! Get that rifle loaded!” I kneel down next t’her, an’ work the lever on the Winchester, an’ start feedin shells outten the bandolier inter its magazine. An’ I seed they wadn’t them copper-colored Henry cartridges, an’ lookin closer under the moonlight, I seen they’se got bands of Bassandan yaller an’ white an’ green around ‘em, an’ the slugs are shinin like silver.

Matty says “Now, Johnny!” an’ I look down an’ I see that black greasy cloud pourin outta the Portal, an’ it’s bigger’n what it wuz, an’ it starts rollin up the side of the Gorge away from us, toward Colonel on the east rim, an’ now I think I kin see a monstrous head an’ two arms reachin out ‘head of it. Matty sights in an’ fires three rounds down toward the cloud, an’ it checks fer a minute, an’ I see them red eyes, shot through wi’ red like veins, an’ it’s like they’re turnt lookin up to us. Matty fires agin, an’ the eyes blink but they get bigger an’ the cloud’s come down off the east wall an’ crost the canyon floor towards us an’ it don’t look like the silver slugs’re gonna stop it. Matty throws down the Winchester an’ grabs t’other an’ snaps “Reloads! Reloads!” an’ fires again, but it don’t look like the cloud is getting’ slower or smaller but faster an’ bigger an’ now it’s rollin up the canyon wall like a wave rolls up a beach by the sea-side, an’ I see them red eyes getting’ bigger an’ bigger an’ it feels like my hands’r all thumbs an’ I can’t find the chamber anymore ‘n’ I can’t really hear Matty’s voice callin “Johnny! Johnny, reload! Johnny!” an’ I feel like I’m fallin down a long slope toward sleep…

…and from the eastern rim opposite us I hear a huge keerrrraaaaannnnnnggggg like’s if someone’s hit a giant iron gong with a sledgehammer an’ it rings inside my head like a church bell ringin in Hell to wake the dead, an’ my vision clears an’ I’m lookin down at the black greasy cloud that’s poured outten the Portal, fillin up and swirlin in the gorge like a storm-tossed sea. An’ I look up fum my crouch an’ see Matty’s on her feet, starin across to the eastern rim, an’ then the keerrrraaaaannnnnnggggg comes again an’ now it’s like there’s two gongs beatin an’ they set up a rhythm like it’s the drums I heerd when I uz in Cuba wi’ the guerrillas an’ then I hear Colonel’s voice, ringin in my head, or maybe it’s ringin out acrost the Gorge, an’ he’s singin words in his foreign language, but this time I kin unnerstan’ ‘em

O, Death

Won't you spare me over til another year?

An’ I see the cloud check an’ start back, like it might be a wave breakin at high tide like I seen on the beach at Californee, an’ then the keerrrraaaaannnnnnggggg comes agin an’ Colonel’s voice an’ a woman’s high voice an’ a guitar soundin, chiming like dark angels’ strings, an’ the bass boomin like the roarin surf an’ I kin hear other voices too, bass voices, singin like in the Holiness church I growed up in….

An’ now the whole gorge is ringin an’ vibratin like it might be the inside of a giant bass fiddle an’ Matty’s starin down inta the gorge an’ I see the cloud is swirlin faster an’ faster, an’ the red veins are pulsin throughout it, like it might be veins pumpin blood faster an’ faster, an’ I see the two red eyes, but even while I’m watchin I see ‘em blink, an’ then one flickers an’ goes out…

An’ the cloud is swirlin faster an’ faster, an’ now the keerrrraaaaannnnnnggggg is ringin out an’ it feels like I can see the stars twinklin in time with that rhythm from the eastern rim of the Gorge, an’ now there’s three voices singin an’ they soun’ like the Holiness church only now it’s like the saints’ voices at Pentecost an’ the cloud swirls faster…

An’ now I realize I kin see the foot of the gorge, through the cloud, an’ I see the eastern sky’s gettin lighter behind the Four on the rim opposite an’ the keerrrraaaaannnnnnggggg rings out like church bells on a cold frosty Christmas mornin, an’ down below I see the cloud swirlin an’ thinnin an’ there’s a golden light growin, seem like it’s comin up from under the red dirt of the valley floor an’ the water of the River, an’ it grows an’ glows an’ gets brighter an’ brighter an’ then, even as I look, an’ the music rings out ‘crost the gorge an’ ‘crost the mesa until it sounds like it’s ringin back against the face of Taos Mountain itself, I see the other red eye blink out, an’ the last wisps uv black smoke blow away like last bits of a bad dream, an’ the music quiets down ‘til it sounds like one last prayer at mass, as the first sliver of the mornin sun come up over the shoulder of the Mountain.

An’ there’s silence, except for the sound of the first morning birds an’, faintly from below, the sound of the river water flowin over stone.

Matty levered the action on the Winchester, loud in the quiet. The last silver cartridge flipped up in the air, almost in slow-motion, an’ glinted in the red of the sunrise, an’ she reached out her hand an’ ‘thout lookin she caughten it in mid-air. She was lookin down the canyon wall below us.

I heerd hooves drummin, an’ Colonel spurred up the trail. He cleared the rim, dismounted, an’ slipped Sam’s reins over his head. Matty stared at him, an’ he looked back, grinnin in his beard.

Matty said, “A little other than you expected, was it not?”

“Wasn’t exactly according to plan—but it came right in the end.”

She persisted: “You know if the One has found the Portal, that won’t be the last we see of them, right?”

Colonel, suddenly more sober, says “Yes. I do know that. There will be more of them to deal with.”

She added “And that means we have to know not only what might come here from Bassanda, but also what might go from here in the Gorge to the Rift Valley?”

“Yes, I know that, too. There will be more. And we have to warn our friends there. Anything can travel the Portal—not just brandy, or we ourselves.”

He turnt, an’ shaded his eyes, an’ squinted east against the risin sun’s rays. ‘Cross the Gorge, the Three uz still there, silhouetted agin the sunrise. Colonel jumped up on a rock at the lip of the rim, an’ reacht up an’ lifted up his beat-up old campaign hat, holdin it ‘bove his head in salute. Efter a minnit, the tall man in the stovepipe hat stirred, an’ reacht up, an’ held the guitar at arm’s length over his head, an’ the woman raised her open han’ like in a blessin. For a moment, neither moved, an’ then the tall man turnt away.

Colonel jumped down, an’ swung up on Sam’s back, an’ spoke t’ both of us.

“We’d better find the boys, and the pack-train. If they aren’t back at the Mill yet, they will be by the time we get there. And we’ve some messages to send and new plans to make.”

The mornin was growin as Matty an’ I mounted as well, an’ we three turnt our horses’, heading down the canyon trail southeast at a canter, ridin toward the sunrise.

[Just a small tip of the kepi to our brethren & sistren Dan & Carol of Bone Orchard, for their generosity in lettin' John borrer the band for the climax of his tale. Thankee!]

[caption: Cécile Lapin, aged approximately 19,
by Alfred Stieglitz]

From the Bibliotheque to Bassanda: Recruiting with the Colonel and the General, Paris 1906.

From an unpublished memoir by Cécile Lapin (1882-1974): explorer, code-breaker, translator, litteratrice, Bassanda political activist.

[original]

J'ai d'abord rencontré les Frères à Paris, aux alentours, je pense que 1906? au cours de mes études de langues d'Asie centrale et l'ethnographie à la Sorbonne… [I first met the Brethren in Paris, sometime around, I think, 1906? during my studies of Central Asian languages and ethnography at the Sorbonne….]

…Colonel Thompson I first saw at a café called La Closerie des Lilas at 171 Boulevard du Montparnasse, in the fall of that year—I remember that the leaves on the plane trees and chestnuts were just beginning to turn, which means it must have been late September. Arriving at Lilas late one forenoon for a pick-me-up after a rather dissipated evening in company with some painters and anarchists I knew in the Sixth Arrondissement, I noticed him at a sidewalk table, one in the corner of the terrace that commanded a good view of both the shop-front and the boulevard. Mostly I noticed him because he was so clearly not a Parisian of le Belle Epoque: massively bearded, in worn and dusty, but good, black clothing, with deeply tanned skin and long graying hair— to a canny observer, every element of the man telegraphed the New World. He sat tilted back in his chair, one boot crossed over the other knee, a stack of books on the table and another open on his lap. There was the remnant of a charcuterie on the table, a carafe of the house red, a slouch hat such as might be worn by a guide in the American West…and a good-sized hunting knife stuck point-down in the cheese board. At Lila’s it was not uncommon for people to sit over their aperitifs for quite some time, and of course there was no end of flamboyant dandies and general night-people—ticket-of-leave men, out-of-work journalists, “actresses” looking for new beaux, et cetera—but usually they were not quite so strikingly foreign or martial in their manner.

Curious about him, I eschewed my usual table at the inside rear corner, and motioned to Gaspard the waiter to bring me my croissants and café-crème at a table also on the terrace, diagonally across from this curious apparition. I scanned the morning’s copy of Le Matin: the latest liberalisms from the new Radical party, reports of the Algeciras conference on the future of Morocco, illustrated features on the aging Degas and the remarkable works of the Russian primitives being exhibited by Diaghilev at le Petit Palais—all the usual Parisian news and gossip, in other words. While I sipped my café-crème and leafed through the newspaper, I occasionally stole glances at the Westerner who sat diagonally across from me. As the café came to life around us—waiters on the terrace brushing off tables and laying cloths, shaking out brooms at the curbside, the din of food vendors and auto-taxis rising on the boulevard a few feet away, the café’s regulars entering with boisterous commotion—he sat nearly immobile, moving only to sip his vin rouge or turn a page in the volume on his lap.

I found myself more and more curious about the books that were so absorbing his attention, but at that distance, was unable to make out their titles. Eventually my curiosity, about the man and what his literary tastes might reveal, overcame my sense of discretion, and I determined that I would try to catch a closer glimpse. Beckoning to Gaspard the waiter, I ordered another café-crème and instructed him to mind my parcels while I went to wash my hands. Passing the Westerner on my way into the café, I avoided looking in his direction, but hoped that, upon my return, I might be able to see the book’s title or contents over his shoulder as I re-emerged.

However, such conduct, efficient and nearly de rigeur in social situations when one has forgotten an introduction or wishes to know more about an intriguing individual previously unintroduced, proved—as I was later to know very well—entirely impractical and unsupportable in the case of the American. Though he might appear to be absorbed in the mysterious and unknown text, he was a remarkably observant person; for as I exited the door of the café, to see Gaspard like a faithful pet guarding my parcels and parasol, I stooped slightly, hoping to catch a glimpse at the Westerner’s book without an awkward or obvious craning of attention.

This was, as I would discover, the silliest naïvete: I paused for only a moment as I passed, but in that moment, the Westerner’s right hand shot out, and grasped my left wrist. Though his palm was rough as sandpaper—obviously a man who had worked extensively with his hands—he held me very lightly and, without looking up, asked quietly, in strongly accented French which carried a tinge of the Caribbean, “Si vous êtes si curieux, pourquoi tu ne demandes pas moi?”[1]

I was momentarily flustered, and snatched-away my hand, but just as I turned to flounce back to my table—confusedly thinking to then gather up my parcels and leave embarrassed—he turned his head and smiled up at me.

“If you are interested in books, and interesting people are interested in books, then Paris is a wonderful place to be, n’est pas?”

I considered myself to be a modern woman and, at that hour, in a familiar café, I felt no compunction about speaking with a man to whom I had not been previously introduced. After all, what is the purpose of the gains made for women in the new century if we are not to engage our minds freely in open converse?

“Yes, monsieur. Paris is a wonderful place for interesting books and for interesting people as well.”

He replied “Since you are interested in books and people, why not ask our friend Gaspard to collect your parcels, while you join me in another café-crème and I will show you this volume, and the others?”

Which was done. It transpired that he was looking at old illustrated books, mostly culled from rare-book sellers and library sales on the Left Bank, recounting anthropology and history in travelers’ tales of the mysterious East. As it happened, I had begun exploring these themes in my own amateur painting, under the influence of my reading and translating, of Chinoiserie and the Orientalisms of the Russian Primitives, and he had a wealth of practical and experiential knowledge, evidently culled from extensive travel in those regions. I recall that we immediately discovered a shared taste for the young Russian mystic painter and archaeologist Nicholas Roerich, at that time still a half-dozen years away from his triumphs designing for Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes, and thus known only to cognoscenti. We sat over those books at Lilas for most of the day, talking of art, music, ethnography, and travel, and dined together for the first time that evening.

That was the beginning of our friendship, one not perhaps entirely common—how many Western “cowboys” shared literary tastes in Paris with young collegiate females? (although it being Paris in le Belle Epoque, anything is possible)—but, for me, most natural and comfortable. I presumed that he was fifteen to twenty years my elder, and, though May-December liaisons were not at all uncommon in Paris, even in the absence of a mercantile motive, our relationship was always most correct. I might perhaps have wished otherwise, but the Colonel, while remarkably frank and “man-to-man” in his conversational mode and topics, never gave any hint of seeking anything other than Platonic discourse—I had the sense that there were sorrows and obligations in that area, in his past or perhaps in his present life.

In the scant hours I was able to spare from my linguistics and ethnography courses at the Sorbonne, together we visited the art museums across the Seine, where he exhibited a tremendous eye for composition and quality, and a remarkable working familiarity with some of the most obscure examples of Central Asian folk art, although he expressly denied any expertise. Over the next several weeks, as we promenaded, visited galleries, took coffee or vin rouge together, I slowly pieced together a partial framework of his background: I learned that he had served in the Western wars, including that between the North and South in America—which meant that he must have been at least fifteen if not twenty years older than his appearance suggested—but also in various locales in Central America. He likewise had an acute understanding of Central Asian history, a topic to which I myself had dedicated time in my université studies with the adjunct lecturer Habjar-Lawrence.

The Colonel had come to Paris first as a trick-shooter with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West troupe in 1902. He had little use for that show, but admired Cody’s advocacy on behalf of Western nature preserves and fair treatment for the Red Indians, and shared some related past experiences with me. Mostly I found him to be engaging, studious, endlessly erudite about sometimes quite obscure topics, and altogether possessing an artistic and intellectual imagination not at all in keep with his rough Westerner’s appearance and mannerisms.

I was to see another side of the Colonel several weeks later, on an evening when we had been out particularly late, at a party in the Ninth Arondissement with a group of Irish expatriates, who were welcoming the playwright J. M. Synge on his return to Paris after the triumphant premiere of two plays in Dublin, and their resulting publication in French translation. The Colonel, who I discovered to my surprise shared with Synge an intimate knowledge of the primitive Gaelic lifestyle of the peasants in the Aran Islands, spent the evening deep in conversation with the playwright, both largely ignoring the guests who had clamored for tales of those Gaelic villagers. As we were leaving, the Colonel clasped Synge’s hand, looking into his eyes, and said quietly, “Write the damned thing. Write it the way it came to you. An fhírinne a insint ar an uaisle saol na tíre bocht.”[2] Synge nodded, and we left the gathering, along with the photographer Stieglitz, whose work the Colonel admired but who had not yet broken through with his iconic image The Steerage, from a year later.

I was living that month in a garret in Rue le Verrier, between Montparnasse and the Seine—not one of the better neighborhoods—and I was typically in the habit of taking one of the new Renault taxi-cabs—which, even though inexpensive, I could ill afford—if I should be returning to my flat at an indiscreet hour. But with two gentlemen accompanying me, and given the mildness of the autumn evening, it seemed within reason to eschew the cost of the taxi, especially because we welcomed the opportunity for further conversation—I remember that Stieglitz was explaining some of the new techniques that permitted very swift shutter exposures, while the Colonel described assisting Matthew Brady in his ground-breaking battlefield photography. We three walked arm-and-arm, though the Colonel insisted we walk contrary to the traffic, on the left curb of the road, and that he link his left arm with my right; at the time I thought it was merely a bit of unaccustomed gallantry, that he should follow the gentleman’s habit of keeping himself between the lady and the street itself. We bade bon soir to Stieglitz at his flat and continued on toward my address, still talking animatedly.

As I recall, we had turned from Rue Froidevaux onto the narrow Rue Emile Richard, which provided a shorter route toward my flat, taking us through the Cimetiere du Montparnasse. It is a narrow street, with common brick walls on either side, quite deserted at that late hour of the night (or morning), and not one I would ordinarily take at any time of day, if unaccompanied. However, as I was to rediscover in very different circumstances, much later and in a far distant land, the Colonel’s presence justified a great sense of personal security—one felt that one could not come to harm with him as companion.

This was naiveté however on my part: just as we turned the last curve of Rue Emile, which would open out to the brightly-lit boulevard life of Montparnasse, we caught sight of three figures standing motionless in the alley’s exit, blocking our way. Though, in the backwash of light from the Boulevard beyond, we could not make out details of faces or garb, there was no mistaking the intent or the threat implicit in those poised, motionless figures.

I gasped involuntarily—a fact about which I am still, in light of the Colonel’s presence of mind and calm, rather ashamed—but took heart as he eased to a stop. He glanced over his shoulder, I followed his glance, and gasped involuntarily again, for there were two more figures behind us, advancing stealthily along the darkened alley towards us. I heard the Colonel exhale slowly, and then say, under his breath almost absentmindedly:

“Well, now. How ‘bout that.”

He reached to my right hand, with which I was clutching his left elbow, and gently disengaged it, saying quietly, “All right, dear—now what I need you to do is take two steps to your left and one step back, and then stick near that wall. Don’t want you in the way.”

He turned half-round, looking over his shoulder at the two pursuers, and then toward Montparnasse again, where the three black figures stood ominous and motionless, blocking our escape, and then—still with his shoulders in line with the street itself, looking both ways at once—found a split second to look me straight in the eye as I shrank away across the alley with my back against the slimy brick. And he smiled.

“Not to worry, darlin’. This ain’t the Rev’s first trip to the dance.”

He looked past me to his left, reached his right hand around to the rear of his belt, under the tail of his frock coat, and appeared to speak directly to our footpads:

“Ven entonces, bastardos.”

The pursuing pair accelerated and, almost before he finished speaking, the first of the two lunged at him, while the second veered toward me, against the opposite wall. Though dreadfully frightened, I was mesmerized—like a rabbit confronted by a snake—by the scene unfolding in front of me, almost as if in dream-like slow motion. As the second thug came toward me, I even felt I had time, almost leisure, to observe that his hands were empty—obviously, my dreamlike thought process continued, he meant to take me captive, rather than harm me—and that the other thug, lunging toward the Colonel, held a revolver in his right hand and a wicked-looking curved knife in his left.

Afterward, upon reflection—and without the response of the Colonel, who categorically refused post-mortem of such encounters—I wondered why the first thug had not simply pistoled him. I can only surmise that the close proximity of Rue Emile to the entrance onto the main boulevard led to their circumspection about the noise of a gun-shot—a sound which would be noticeable and draw attention even in the riot of Montparnasse. So the complex events of the next few seconds occurred in what almost seemed to be silence, as well as slow motion.

The first thug lunged toward the Colonel, his left fist, gripping the hooked knife, foremost: his clear target, my protector’s vulnerable ribs and vital organs. I saw the Colonel twist, like a ballet dancer, back and to his left, and the assailant’s knife-lunge floated past his ribs into thin air. As the thug stumbled forward, the Colonel whipped his right arm back in clockwise motion and the long blade of his knife—that knife I had seen the first day we met, point-downward in the cheese board at Lilas—arced backward, like a whirling hoop, slashing across the thug’s throat. Continuing the motion, like a spring winding and unwinding, the Colonel leapt forward like a tiger across the alley, casting his left arm around my own assailant’s neck from behind, and spun back counter-clockwise; I saw the flash of reflected light on his blade as it arced upward from below. There was almost no sound, except the scuffling of feet on cobblestones, and then a harsh gasp as the knife went home. No more than twelve seconds—a few breaths—had elapsed since the first thug lunged.

The Colonel cast me back against the alley wall, almost like a player of rugby, and whirled toward the three assailants who had blocked our escape. But his readiness to carry the fight forward was unnecessary: as I turned and looked, one of the three dropped to the cobbles, like a marionette with cut strings, while the other two confronted a compact figure in black who had come upon them from beyond the alley’s mouth.

Even as we turned toward them, the figure made a short, efficient movement, and the second assailant staggered backwards, clutching himself like a worm curled on a fishing hook, while the third assailant jumped aside, and ran past us, obviously intending to flee the scene. The compact figure took a step forward, out of the Montparnasse glare and into the gloom of the alley, and turned sidewise, right hand foremost, aiming at arm’s length a handgun which even I, in my ignorance, recognized to be atypical: small, but with a long barrel, and a bulky appendage like a sausage on its end. The pistol coughed once—the discreet, barely audible cough of a Paris Opera patron in the midst of a performance—and the fifth and final assailant, sixty feet down the alley, leapt like a stag, before tumbling without a sound into the gutter.

The black figure turned again, looking over his shoulder out at Montparnasse, and I saw in the dim reflected light for the first time the set jaw and small goatee—features I was to come to know nearly as well as the Colonel’s. At the moment, however, all I knew was that, in the space of less than a minute, the Colonel and I had been set upon by five armed assailants, that at least four of those lay silent, probably dead, in the alley behind Montparnasse, and that I was safe, at least for the moment, due to the Colonel and this mysterious ally. I stumbled forward, half hysterical with belated reaction, and clutched at the Colonel. He put an arm around me, but spoke directly to the other:

“Jineral—who the hell was that, and why here?”

Without answering, the man he had called “General” crouched over the solo assailant still breathing—in fact, writhing on the filthy cobble, gasping for air and clutching his groin in a fashion that indicated precisely where the General had struck him, and how hard—and took him by the hair. I heard him say, in French, “Who sent you, svoloch?!?” but the assailant on the ground snarled and spat only. The General smacked the thug’s head back down against the cobble and shifted his grip to the throat, holding his pistol to the thug’s cheekbone.

The Colonel went down on one knee as well and grinned across to “The General,” saying “Reckon I’ve seen you use that punch against a ‘Pash before,” but the latter, without taking his eyes away from the surviving assailant, shook his head: “No, these ain’t Apache…Paris version nor Territories neither.”

Colonel Thompson grasped at a badge hung around the thug’s neck. Almost casually knocking aside the fist raised toward him, he yanked it outward, breaking the chain. Over his shoulder, by the light from the alley’s mouth, I saw upon the badge the stamp of the Tsarist police, the dreaded Okhrana.

The Colonel sat back easily on his heels. Continuing in English, which I spoke imperfectly but could comprehend:

“Huh. Why’n hell’d Stolypin care about us in Paris? We’re a thousand miles away from Ballyizget.”

Instead of answering, the General addressed the thug: “Dites à votre patron, il n'est pas à Moscou maintenant; c'est l'Occident. Et si jamais je te revois, je te tuerai de mes mains…Ponyat?”[3] Then he pressed the muzzle of his pistol to the fleshy part of the thug’s right thigh, and pulled the trigger.

The cough of its suppressor was nearly covered by the muffled shriek of the thug, instantly choked off by the Colonel’s added hand on his throat. At that same moment, a hansom cab, upon whose driver’s seat sat a tall woman, in a frock coat and chic top hat, the reins over her left wrist and a long rifle in her right hand, drew to a halt at the mouth of the alley, nearly blocking exit onto the Boulevard.

The General glanced up to see the cab, and then spoke to the thug, who was whimpering with pain: “Le prochain coup va dans ton oeil droit, comprende? Now, git!” [4] The thug struggled to his feet, and half-ran, limping badly, toward the hansom and around the corner of the alley that led to Montparnasse, while the woman driver covered him with her rifle.

The Colonel came easily to his feet, and spoke to the General, who was unscrewing the silencer from his pistol—both of which disappeared inside his clothing:

“Think we might need a nightcap, sir? I reckon Céline here might could use a bit of explanation.”

The General twisted away to light a cigar, puffed, closely examined its burning end to make sure it was drawing well, puffed again, and then removed the cigar long enough to say, with a small smile, “Reckon so. Seems like the Okhrana’s already figured out our new friend might be able to help us with one or two little matters.”

I looked from one to the other: the Colonel’s hirsute smile, and the glint of the General’s eyes under his kepi. Beyond them, the statuesque woman on the cab’s seat looked at me impassively, though I sensed she was not unfriendly. What could I say?

“Messieurs, Madame—after that excitement, I’d say that the very least you owe me is an explanation. And a drink, if you please!”

The General grinned past his cigar, and the Colonel offered me his arm:

“Well, then, darlin’, I’ve got a little Taos Lightning t’home—don’t think we want to be on the street any longer tonight. Come meet our friend Miss Algeria, an’ then let’s bivouac and git us a drink, so my friends and I kin commence to explain!”

And that is how my Bassanda adventure began.

[acknowledgements and humble respect to A. Doyle, D. Hammett, and G. M. Fraser]

[1] “If you’re so curious, why don’t you just ask me?”

[2] Irish: “Tell the truth of the poor folk’s lives.” Ed: An apparent reference to Synge’s masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World, then in rehearsal at the Abbey in Dublin and fated to receive a riotous, condemnatory reception at its premiere in January 1907.

[3] “[French] Tell your boss he's not in Moscow now; this is the West. And if I ever see you again, I'll kill you with my hands… [Russian] Understand?”

[4] “The next shot goes in your right eye, understand?”

Lapin, aged approximately 19,
by Alfred Stieglitz

Cécile Lapin (1882-1974)
linguist, cipher-expert, explorer, translator, travel writer, political activist.

Born in the provinces to a petit-bourgeois family of civil servants, though some ancestors may have been smugglers working the Channel Islands, and others are known to have been scholars and copyists at Mont Saint-Michel. Youngest of a family of five children, all others boys. Learned tracking, hunting, fishing on the Couesnon. Expert swimmer; occasionally modeled as “Modern Woman” archetype for magazines a lá “Gibson Girls.” Erotic sketches of a teenaged Lapin by Toulouse-Lautrec are alleged to be in the hands of private collectors, but none such have ever been published.

Another in a long line of independent and influential women mentored by Algeria Main-Smith (1862-1947), particularly in and around Paris, c1905-44. These women, including also Josephine Baker and Terésa-Marie Szabo as well as Lapin, came to be known within Bassandan circles as “Algerians,” a nickname they wore with defiant pride (Madame Szabo later said “the Algerians were the mothers of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters—they taught us how to be together, and be strong”).

Street dancer, plongeur, artist’s and photographer’s model—this was how she met the Alfred Stieglitz circle. Stieglitz (1864-1946), a legendary photographic innovator who was in and out of Europe in these years in his capacity as editor of American Amateur Photographer, is said to have seen her, aged 19, at an artist’s party, engaged her in conversation, quickly recognized her wit, self-confidence, and quicksilver intelligence, and brokered an introduction and scholarship assistance for her to attend university at the Sorbonne.

Between 1906, when she met the Brethren while pursuing graduate work in ethnography and Oriental languages, and 1914, when the frontiers were closed, she was extremely active as a courier and translator in Bassandan expat circles, both in Paris and across Europe. Known to have visited Bassanda several times; it is even possible that she accompanied Vaughan Williams and Bela Bartok on their fieldwork sojourn north of Ballyizget late in ’06. Certainly she made multiple journeys into Central Asia, accompanying her long-time mentor (and former professor) James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence (1856-1922) on his first explorations via the Trans-Caspian railway.[1] It has been alleged that at the same time, she was smuggling weapons plans, including possibly the mysterious drawings of the “Kroog-sheng electrical experiments” which were later referenced by Jackson Lawrence-Smyth in his 1970s deposition to the CIA Head of Station in Dolphu, Nepal. This may help to account for Bassandan partisans’ early and successful use of electrical and magnetic weapons in the fight to oust Tsarist and later Bolshevik occupying forces.

In the ’14-’18 War, served as a member of the Ambulance Corps on the Western Front; has been claimed as the inspiration for the character “Eudoxie” in Henri Barbusse’s (1873-1935) from-the-Trenches novel Under Fire (1916). It is also alleged that mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers based the story of the manservant “Mervyn Bunter” rescuing Lord Peter Wimsey from a “Boche shell-hole” on the Western Front upon one of Lapin’s exploits. It is known that, unlike many Red Cross members, she carried and was expert in the use of a standard British Army-issue Webley revolver and possibly of other weapons as well.

Some connection to the Breton 1950s BNRO member Benjamin Biraz Ouz (b1920); may have been the source for introduction of his mother Jacqueline Biraz Ouz into the circle around Algeria Main-Smith, Nadia Boulanger, and Yezget Nas1lsinez between the Wars.

In her 50s, definitely served as a conduit for Underground operations, both during the Dunkirk evacuation (May-June 1940), and in the lead-up to Operation Overlord (June 1944). Link-up with the chat houans (Breton partisans). It is a mark of her subtlety and cunning that the Gestapo never associated her with the Résistance. In fact, she was occasionally employed as an interpreter by German secret police during the Occupation, this activity allowing her to simultaneously conceal the identity of partisans from interrogators, and to pass-along—often in the obscure Nourmand dialect—escape plans to those being interrogated.

Fiercely opposed French colonial repression in Algeria and Morocco in the turbulent aftermath of WWII; she commented, in a 1962 interview: “Toujours la même. Toujours la même bêtise bottés. Et cela fonctionne jamais” (“Always the same. Always the same jackbooted stupidity. And it never ever works”). In her retirement, ran a rural shelter for geriatric animals in Normandy, while continuing to turn out fiery pamphlets and pirate radio broadcasts in support of French socialism.

Avatar of the May ’68 Rebellions. The anarchist slogan "Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible” (2) is attributed to her, though it may be related to an ancient Bassandan proverb:

“Biz imkansız oran artırmak için imkansız doğru umut olmadan çalışması gerekir” (“We must work without hope toward the impossible in order to better the odds of the improbable”).

[1] J.L. Habjar-Lawrence: father of Jefferson Washington, Miriam, Dianthe, and Anthea Habjar-Lawrence. Born Concord Massachusetts 1857; d Zurich 1922; Ph.D. Oriental Studies, Sorbonne, 1881.
[2) (a) French: "Be realistic, ask the impossible"; (b) Turkish, from the Bassandan original.

The General, c1922?
Photo by Cifani Dhoma

The General Explains

More from the unpublished memoir of Cécile Lapin

[October 1906]

The day after our hair-raising encounter in a Montparnasse back-alley with five assassins of the Tsarist Okhrana (secret service), the Colonel called for me at my garret in Rue le Verrier—not very early. Though I had received him with all propriety in my lodgings previously, on this particular bright autumn morning, with the sun slanting down through the skylight and catching the dust motes in its beams, I felt slightly éperdu—that is, slightly distracted or flustered. After all, though I had lunched, dined, visited museums, and talked for hours with this American primitif, I had not yet experienced the man of action which I sensed lay behind his weather-beaten exterior. Yet last night I had seen the Colonel, in company with his comrade the General, kill four assailants in the space of a few moments, and interrogate the lone survivor, before the General put a pistol slug through the man’s thigh as punishment and warning. It was not that I feared the Colonel—he was the same relaxed, smiling presence I had come to know—but instead I think that I more clearly recognized the volcanic capacities I had previously only intuited. Perhaps for the first time I realized the sheer number of years, even beyond the “normal” human span, and the scope of the battles, this man had survived.

We had talked through the night, following the Montparnasse battle, in the Colonel’s rooms, spacious and airy, though bare, on the top floor of 20 Rue de Vaugirard, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens and the Fontaine Medici, as the moon rose and fell and the sky lightened toward dawn. There I had heard a little more of the Brethren’s story, and of what had brought them to Paris. It was of course to do with Bassanda—of which fabled place I at the time knew little, not yet recognizing it to be the central node of the Colonel’s knowledge and research in the Paris libraries—and the very present and modern political challenges it faced.

Though I could not have known it prior to the fight in Montparnasse, they sought my help: the Colonel, the General, and the mysterious woman, Madame Main-Smith, with the unmarked black cab and the short rifle, who had whisked us away from the site and back to Rue de Vaugirard. We had arrived at the street door, where a small man in Eastern clothing stepped out from the darkened portico, caught the reins Madame tossed to him, and without a word, or the benefit of stirrups or saddle, vaulted lightly aboard the near-side horse. Madame looked up at him, and said “Tamam, devam et, Ismail.” Before the General closed the cab’s door, the man “Ismail” had kicked the team into motion, and they disappeared nearly silently up the street away from the Park—I now saw that the team’s hooves were muffled in leather overshoes and that the cab was equipped with indiarubber tyres. We had climbed the steep staircase to the top-floor flat without converse, and the Colonel had shown us to comfortable seats, poured drinks from an uncorked plain glass bottle, and pulled off his boots, before he spoke. Slouched deep in an overstuffed chair against the wall opposite the flat’s door, a small electric lamp behind him lighting one side of his face and beard, he had begun to talk: of travel, international politics and economics, of eastern ethnography and history, of his and his companions’ biographies, and of the cause of Bassanda…

The General I understood to be an old wartime comrade of the Colonel’s, though which campaigns they had shared was not entirely clear: I became lost in the exotic American place-names (“Fredericksburg”? “Chancellorsville”? “Appomattox”? “Las Guasimas”? These were very confusing), and I was in some mystification regarding for whom the Colonel had fought in the various conflicts. Madame Main-Smith, who spoke with a flat, nasal Atlantic Seaboard accent—rather like that I associated with the wax cylinder recordings by the American poet Whitman—I understood to be a long-time Friend of Bassanda; she spoke with authority and passion about its and other small nations’ right to self-determination and cultural individualism.

It was my impression that all three had visited the country, but not all together, and none of them recently, though both Madame Main-Smith and Colonel Thompson were prolix and rhapsodic in their praise of Bassandan historical, spiritual, and artistic traditions. When I inquired specifically about this, the General, who sat back, away from the light, in an easy chair watching through an open casement the pre-dawn street below, allowing the others to do most of the talking, removed his cigar long enough to say laconically, “Hain’t been able to get back. Leastwise not recently. Too dangerous for friends there. Cossacks’r too thick on the ground. There’s another route, out west a long ways, but” (looking across at the Colonel) “that’s got its own problems.”

The Colonel added, “See, darlin’, everybody wants a piece of Bassanda: the Russians, the Brits, the Austrians and Prussians who’re all building arms as fast as they can; only reason the USA don’t is ‘cause it’s so damned far on t’other side of the world. Bassanda is like the key to the door between eastern Europe an’ central Asia, and any country with designs on either place wants to hold that key.

“But all that the Bassandans want—all our friends want—is to be left alone. Ain’t got nothin’ anybody else desires, but ‘cept just that one crucial thing—geography. They’re the road empires have always taken, ever since Xerxes and Alexander, Frederick of Prussia, Napoleon, Ottoman emperors, the Austrians…hell, even the Brits tried to go that route, ‘til that got their noses bloodied in Afghanistan, back in the Forties. Now, since the Gandamack Treaty in ’79, Brits’ve got their buffer state, but that won’t stop the Austrians, Russians, the Turks, hell even the Emperor of China, from tryin’ their chance.

“An’ all the Bassandans care about is for them to be let alone. And ‘cause we’re friends of Bassanda, we care about that too. But they’re a tiny country—don’t have nor want no army, even if their partisans have chased some of the greatest hosts in history out of those hills. But now, in a new century, for Bassanda to defend themselves, to hold back the new empires, they’re too tiny; couldn’t field an army anyways. Instead, they need tools—tools as well as friends.”

He paused, and glanced sidelong at the General, who met his eye, impassively drawing upon his cigar, before the Colonel looked back at me.

“And that, darlin’, is where you and Professor Habjar-Lawrence come in.”

Seeing my start of surprise at this statement—what possible role could my fusty ethnography and Orientalia professor at the Sorbonne have in this escapade?—he paused again, and looked at Madame Main-Smith, who sat elegantly, legs crossed under her brocade skirt, in a wingback chair near the fireplace, her short black rifle with its sniper’s telescope leaning against the mantel. She spoke up:

“Mam’selle Lapin, the problem here is that, while we have tools—readily portable tools—which can aid the cause of Bassanda, none of us can cross the frontiers—we are known to the Okhrana as Friends, and the secret police are too skilful, on their home ground. Here, in Paris, a thousand miles from Bassanda, we have means and scope to defend ourselves—as you saw tonight. But there, on the railways which are saturated with uniformed and plainclothes Tsarists, any of we Three would be identified and searched—and the most optimistic likely outcome of that would be that we were expelled and our documents confiscated. Other outcomes would be more…permanent. And thus less helpful to our friends.

“But there is another way. With the completion of the Tsar’s new railroads, it is now possible to ride a passenger train all the way from Vienna to Vladivostok. We three Friends could not make this journey” she grimaced “as we are known to the Tsarist police, and for that matter to the Turks and the Austrians as well.

“But you and your Professor Habjar-Lawrence…you could.”

The Colonel held up a small book, bound in tan-colored oilpaper, taken from a shelf next to his chair. “Recognize this here volume?” Pulling on a pair of half-glasses, opening to the flyleaf, and tilting it toward the light, he read aloud, “Warriors, Mystics, Musicians, And Dancers Of High Bassanda.’ Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez, published 1874, Ballyizget and Budapest.”

Looking up, he added “You know the given name, right? That’s a cousin of your professor—Scottish cousin. Your professor wouldn’t rekkernize him ta shake hands, an’ it’s too late, now, anyway—we’ve put people in the East on his track, but Cousin Nas1lsinez’s dropped off the map years back. On the other hand, your professor, James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence, he’s got the Lawrence name, for a passport at the borders, and as a password in the high hills. Even more important, he’s got the professor knowledge—and a professor’s excuse to travel an’ do field research. He needs you, with your language skills and—sorry darlin’, but we’ve been doin’ some research on you yourself—what you learned from your brothers: tracking, hunting, how to survive. He’s a smart man, your professor—but he needs someone as travel companion, handling the details and communicating to us when he’s under scrutiny. That’s you.

“And if’n you’re worried about the fifth assassin, the one the General sent on his way with a slug in this thigh as a warning—if you’re worried that Fifth Business might’ve reported back to his Tsarist handlers—well, Madame Algeria thought of that too, an’ she sent Ismail to take care of it. And him.”

He looked across at Madame, who said nothing. After a moment, the Colonel continued.

“Let’s just say Fifth Business probably didn’t make it back to report. An’ that means that, s’far as the Okhrana know, their assassins were all unlucky and unsuccessful. And more to the point, s’far as they know, you don’t exist.”

I felt a chill down the spine and understood, possibly for the first time, the stakes that were played for here. Last night’s scuffle had the nature of a dream: the late hour, the anonymity of the five murderous assailants, the sense of invincibility conveyed by the Colonel’s and the General’s deadly competence. But to know, though it was unstated, that Madame had sent the small man “Ismail” after the surviving thug, with the necessity of stopping his mouth—that was somehow even more sobering.

It was also the final pith of our conversation: we lingered, and speculated regarding the specific impetus for the assault, or the specific motives of the Okhrana chieftains, or of the reasons why the assassins had sought to kill the Colonel but to capture me—Madame Main-Smith was particularly adamant about the “lack of intelligence data” regarding this last—but eventually concluded we had theorized as far as our (very limited) information would take us. Shortly after, we parted, Madame seeing me home in her armored cab, with the small man Ismail on the driver’s box.

[break]

I met the General again, at a reading room of the library, a few days afterwards. The Colonel had escorted me from my lodgings in Montparnasse, past the Sorbonne where my classes were held, across the Seine, past the Louvre and the Palais-Royale, to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Rue de Richelieu, where I was to meet his comrade. When I entered the long sunlit upstairs room, I saw that he sat at one end of an oversized table, piled high with manuscripts, and with a view of both entrance doors. Seeing me appear, he put down his pen, and looked over his half-glasses, down the length of the room.

I should emphasize that I found the General a rather intimidating presence. While the Colonel was formidable, of an outsized persona, appearance, and physical vitality, we had come to know one another over time, and there was a compactness about the General—of stature, speech, habits, intellect, even of discourse—which made one examine one’s own words and thoughts carefully, for unsophistication or illogic. He was an unusual combination of the worker and the scholar: equally adept with the manipulation of physical implements and of the pedant’s intellectual apparatus. I knew that he was a “man of his hands”, as Professor Habjar-Lawrence later said: capable with mechanics and books, horses and trains, equally at home in the wastes and in the city streets. But he was not as prolix, in his speech or action, as others, and so presented a somewhat more individuated and introspective mien.

As I learned over the course of the next several weeks, his public occupation in Paris, the activities that he had marked in his visa for admission, was work with the pioneering dancer and theatrical lighting designer Loie Fuller [ed: 1862-1928]: having previously corresponded with Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla, and been present with Edison at both the 1899 and 1900 Expositions Universelle, the General had a significant practical expertise in the world of electrical technology, and served as technical consultant for some of Fuller’s Paris experiments with dance, light, and color (though it is not widely known, the General in fact appears as one of a group of workers filmed in 1895 at the Lumière brothers' factory in Lyon).[1]

Seated there at the library table, a stack of unbound manuscripts next to him, draughtsman’s pencil in hand, looking over his half-glasses, I barely recognized the ferocious and efficient combatant of the prior evening, who had knifed one assailant, emasculated a second, and pistoled a third in a few brief seconds of street combat. The sense of disorientation was not alleviated by his relative lack of expression—when he was not speaking, I was to learn, the General was almost a Stoic in his quiet and stillness.

That sense of forbidding unapproachability was relaxed, however, when he suddenly smiled, beckoned to me, and pulled a chair around the corner of the table next to his own. He said “Come here and look at these documents. They’re your cargo. Yours and the Professor’s.”

He held out the first, single sheet from the unbound stack in front of him—I noticed he wore thin cotton gloves like those employed by archivists—and handed me a large magnifying glass, then stepped to the window behind him to draw open the curtains for better light.

“What do you make of that document, Mam’selle Cecile?”

As these documents will come again into the story, being the “cargo” the General implied we should be carrying to the East, I shall try to describe them as accurately as I can—though I must confess, even though I risked life, limb, and freedom for them, I still do not entirely understand the scope of their import. I pulled on another pair of the archivist’s gloves as I cast my eye over the document.

The item that lay before me, on parchment, had been backed with a kind of block-ruled manuscript paper which I recognized as Genkō yōshi (原稿用紙), which is employed by Japanese calligraphers as a guide for brushwork. On the backing manuscript paper, the item was stamped, in Arabic numerals “018,” which implied that there might be other “Documents” in a numerical series.

The parchment mounted on this square-ruled paper was of a mottled tan appearance, and quite thick: obviously made from the hide of a high-altitude animal, and seemingly quite old. It was covered with lines, curves, and what appeared to be letters in an unknown language and alphabet, drawn with a sure if spidery hand in black and red ink. Though the “018” stamped in the upper-right corner of the backing paper implied an orientation for viewing, it was difficult to know which way to regard the object: the unknown alphabet ran both vertically and horizontally, and there was little indication of the direction—right-to-left, like Japanese or Sanskrit, or left-to- right, like the Indo-European and Semitic languages—in which it was to be read.

Even more curious was the additional artwork—or illustrations—or perhaps diagrams—which the carefully drafted lines, curves, and angles comprised. It could equally have been an architectural floor plan, a series of complex algebraic equations in an unknown mathematical tradition, or an abstract art object intended precisely to befuddle the linear, incremental Western mind.

Most curious of all was the addition, in one quadrant of the document, of a strip of what appeared to be thin gold foil, of the sort employed for gilding small art objects. It was unclear to me what might be the purpose of this foil, though even I knew that gold has very high electrical conductivity, a factor of which I felt sure the General was also aware.

I looked across to the stack of parchments—there appeared to be dozens of similar sheets—and then at the General.

“What is the purpose of these documents? Why is it so important that they go to Bassanda?”

He took off his half-glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, and then looked directly at me.

“These are diagrams, which you probably realize. They’re ancient diagrams—at least six to seven hundred years. We don’t know their provenance, either location or even cultural background, but they’ve been known in Tibet, Nepal, and Bassanda for at least that long. The old annals talk about “machines of great power”—instruments that can block energy, bend light beams, melt weapons. We think they’re the “electrical” documents Robert Cruikshank was seeking when he went to Bassanda after the Battle of the Nile in 1793. We also think they came out of Bassanda with Cousin Nas1lsinez in the 1860s, but he’s not around for us to ask. All we know is that they were stashed here, forgotten in the stacks of the Bibliotheque, until Madame Main-Smith picked up the trail about three years ago.

“Since that time, we’ve been trying to track where they came from—that’s the Colonel’s job. We’ve been trying to figure out the best route to get them back to Bassanda to people who can decipher and build them—that’s Madame’s job. And we’ve been trying to cipher out what they do—and that’s been my job.”

He threaded his eyeglasses back over his ears.

“That one you’re looking at? That’ll tamp-down a black powder explosion: build that electrical device, carry it onto the battlefield, and you can silence an army’s big guns just like you’d snuff out a candle. It’s directional and distance doesn’t seem to affect it, as long as it’s line-of-sight—standin’ on the beach, you could shut down the cannon of a war-ship offshore. There’s another in here—Number 21—that we think will disable a steam engine or the motor-cars of Herren Benz and Daimler, or even one of those newfangled powered air-ships Monsieur Bleriot is working on.

“If the imperialists get their hands on these implements, they’ll be invincible. Even though the devices’re defensive—designed to shut down weapons—the imperialists will work to use them for conquest.

“But if we can get these designs to the Bassandan craftsmen and partisans, who remember the folks who remember how these were employed, centuries ago, there’s a chance they’ll be used as intended—for defense, to resist oppression, to lessen suffering.”

He tossed his pencil onto the table-top—well away from the documents—and sat back in his armchair.

“So that’s your cargo, Mam’selle, yours and your Professor’s, on the Railway. If he agrees, and you do. And I don’t mind saying, it matters, to a lot of people. To a whole nation, and a way of life.

“If you have any doubt about its significance? Think of those five golovorezy in the Rue Emile Richard last night. That’s how seriously our enemies believe the matter to be: five deaths on their side—or four on ours.”

What could I say? After the attack in the alley-way, and the night-long conversation with the Three, and now a survey of these mysterious and seemingly supernatural “implements” the General described—but most of all, after seeing the absolute conviction with which my friends made their case—I felt I could only agree to approach the Professor.

[1] See http://youtu.be/BO0EkMKfgJI; the General is the figure wearing a dark jacket and kepi who moves quickly from right to left, from the gate and exiting the frame, at approximately 0:09.5 in this clip.

James Lincoln (later Habjar-) Lawrence,
age about 26

Going to See the Professor

I went to see the professor in his cluttered study at the Sorbonne, bearing, as talisman or possibly diplomatic offering, the copy of the 1874 Mystics, Musicians, And Dancers Of High Bassanda from the Colonel’s shelves. As the General said “Don’t reckon it’ll tip the balance of his decision, either way. But it might pique his curiosity, just enough.” I also had with me, as further balm for the scholarly mind: a map; a calendar; a list of archaeological sites and a second map of ethnic language groups reasonably to be expected along the route; and a list of timetables for the newly-completed Trans-Caspian Railway.

I sat in the visitor’s chair—how well I knew that chair’s hard seat and knobby wicker back, from our thesis meetings!—across from his teak desk and explained the situation—quite convolutedly, I fear, as so much had happened so quickly. But I was surprised, and not a little piqued, to discover that the Professor already knew far more about Bassanda, and even about my friends the Brethren General L., Thompson, and Main-Smith, than I could ever have imagined or than he had ever previously mentioned.

“Yes, yes, yes, Colonel Thompson and General L. I have corresponded with, and Madame Main-Smith and I have family connections and have met in the past. I’m aware of the past history of the Russians in Bassanda, yes, as is any competent scholar of the East. Yes, yes, what of all that?!?”

I explained further, detailing the events of the alleyway attack, at which the Professor appeared rather taken aback, and to which he responded much more slowly.

“So…they believe that – the Russians know you are involved as a conspiratorial Friend of Bassanda?”

At the time, I felt only a certain vindication that he be forced to confront the threat of violence in the situation—here was one part of the story he hadn’t yet heard!—but looking back from the vantage point of years I now believe that he was most particularly concerned about the risk to my well-being. Though not a conventionally sentimental man, and—for an academic—quite matter of fact about both physical labor and physical risk in the wild parts of the world, there was a streak of the paternal and protective in the Professor. Though I never felt he sought to intrude upon my personal life, or otherwise to usurp the role of father figure in the wake of my own parent’s premature decease, I came to understand that, despite his perpetual correctness, he did harbor tender feelings for me. These feelings were to have unforeseen and potentially catastrophic effects in the months ahead, though such could not be anticipated at the time.

I expressed the Brethren’s own unclarity on his latter question: did the Okhrana know of my involvement, before I myself did? Or were they simply seeking to permanently silence the Colonel and General, given opportunity in the night streets of Paris—that is, was it simply an attempted assassination-of-opportunity, with myself as bystander? Had I then been altogether mistaken about the thugs’ intent to kidnap me?

There was no telling; as the General had said, in his characteristic laconic fashion, “Doesn’t matter what they intended; cain’t tell. Only way to find out, now, is to go.” We had, however, come to the conclusion that I would travel under a different name—if “Cecile Lapin” were a target, and if it was the Professor’s name and fame that was needed to open doors and frontiers rather than any of mine, then it were safer for me alias utens.

Finally, I took from my handbag a brown-paper parcel which contained the Colonel’s gift of Warriors, Mystics, Musicians, And Dancers Of High Bassanda and handed it across the Professor’s desk. “Sir, the Brethren believe that your cousin Habjar-Lawrence Nas1lsinez may have discovered the lost Documents—that he may have been the one who brought them out of Bassanda decades ago and, by many a wandering road, to Paris. The Colonel says this book may hold part of the key.”

He took the parcel from me slowly; I almost got the sense that he knew what the volume was before even unwrapping it. Having set aside the brown paper, he held the book in his hands, turning it over and over, before finally opening the cover and reading the title page.

“I’ve never seen this text—the first edition is so rare—but I have heard about it. The notorious Cousin Habjar. I never met him—few in the family even spoke of him. My grandfather’s elder brother’s son and something of a black sheep; he left school, and went East…and a lot of that side of the family’s fortune went with him. Sold off the Throbshire estates, repudiated the west, but…still…I don’t know that he was a black sheep, so much as an adventurer. And those adventures always seemed to lead East.”

He looked up and met my eyes.

“And so, it appears, does our present one.”

And so in the end he agreed to meet with my three Friends.

The Professor at the Sorbonnne, around 1906,
the year of the Trans-Caspian adventure

James Lincoln (later Habjar-) Lawrence (1859-1922)

Father of Jefferson Washington (b1888), Miriam (b1890), Dianthe (b1891), and Anthea (b1892). Born Concord Massachusetts; d Zurich. Ph.D. Oriental Studies, Sorbonne, 1881. Contemporary, colleague, and admirer of sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Married Countess Lucretia MacPherson (1863-95; of Mull in the Scottish Hebrides), who he met while she was an undergraduate exchange student at Harvard, in 1886.

Father Caleb Lawrence (1822-1879), descendent of Irish indentured workers and a former crewman on sugar schooners, had emigrated from Barbados to Marblehead Massachusetts in his late teens. The Lawrences became family friends of Bronson Alcott, though Caleb, a self-made merchant and trader who came ashore to develop a shipping company, found the Alcotts rather impractical and absolutist in their political views.

On the fringes of the circle that came to be called the New England Transcendentalists, a strong influence on both the Beats of the 1950s and before them the American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954). For the Transcendentalists, nature, intuition, observation, disinterested compassion were all priorities. Their spiritual center—not much recognized at the time—was the naturalist, surveyor, and author Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), who brought a strong whiff of the East to the Massachusetts woods. With Emerson, Thoreau edited the philosophical/literary journal The Dial from 1842; the first translated copy of the Bhagavad Gita was making the rounds in Concord by 1843, and by 1844, the year he left for his hermitage in the woods around Walden Pond, Thoreau was translating sections of the Lotus Sutra. He later linked both Transcendentalism, and the contemplative traditions of wild North America, to the Orient, saying “There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer…and the farthest west is but the farthest east,” an orientation similarly expressed by Whitman ins his late poem “Passage to India” (from the 1900 edition of Leaves of Grass), which alludes obliquely to the new railroads which had recently heightened western awareness of Central Asia.

Further Introduced to Hindu, Buddhist, and Creole thought via the (direct or indirect) Eastern connections of the Salem trading families; there are Caribbean as well as Oriental items and objects in the Peabody Museum at Salem which came indirectly to the museum from the Lawrences. The family’s Caribbean connections likewise probably account for Jefferson Washington Lawrence’s (b1888) permanent relocation to Trinidad-Tobago in his late teens. Shared trading interests may also have introduced the Lawrences of Marblehead and Concord to the family of Algeria Main-Smith of Salem.

James Lincoln was named, at Thoreau’s suggestion, after the young Congressman from Illinois who had so impressed in his debates with “the Little Giant,” Stephen A. Douglas, two years before. As a child he had the run of the extraordinary library which Ralph Waldo Emerson had inherited from his father. The Lawrences were always more activist than the rather quietest Transcendentalists and, while Bronson Alcott provided fiery anti-slavery oratory, they were prone to other blind spots. Most notably, the Lawrence Family had spoken out against the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which was merely the most visible and legalistic manifestation of a violent xenophobic impulse which found its most vicious expression in a series of attacks and mob violence directed at Chinese workers in the West, exploited as strike-breakers by mine owners. The 1885 murder of 28 Chinese migrant workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming, was only the most extensive and grotesque of these, and triggered a wave of similar assaults. It is a black chapter in the history of American labor: most notably, Terence Powderly, leader of the Knights of Labor, declined to condemn the outcome of the subsequent trials, at which all the accused were acquitted; in contrast, the New York Times published two scathing editorials (one possibly ghosted by the precocious James Lincoln himself) which suggested that “such ‘justice’ would be more appropriate in Sodom and Gomorrah.”[1]

The Lawrence family, true to Thoreau’s prescient comment about thought, reaching west, circling the globe and becoming eastern, was likewise split: James Lincoln’s offspring found cultural touchstones in widely disparate locations: Jefferson in music and the family’s Caribbean history, Miriam in women’s as well as Bassandan suffrage in western Europe, Dianthe in wild places and the North American Far West, and Anthea in mechanics and politics in eastern Europe. Their father, however, seems instinctively to have found a way to marry both the Brahmin and the Orientalist, the scholar and the adventurer. He matriculated at Harvard University in 1878 as a student of literature, Classics, and “natural philosophy” (what would become the field of anthropology), and later studied extensively at both Berlin and Paris. While an undergraduate, he worked summers on the family farm in West Concord, where he probably developed his considerable skills with mechanical implements and vegetable gardening—though of small stature, even into his 60s as a college professor he was a strong, vital individual: a photograph exists of James Lincoln, c1919, assisting with the barley harvest in north Bassanda at an altitude above 12,000 feet.

In his mid-50s, holder of an esteemed chair at the Sorbonne, a respected though eccentric figure in the international scholarly community on topics of languages, ethnography, and Orientalia. He had added the hyphenated “Habjar-“ to his surname sometime in the ‘90s, possibly after the Countess’s lamented early death in ‘95, and possibly also in homage to the Sufi mysticism which formed a rich and beautiful connecting thread through of his researches. He drove Gran Prix with his daughters “for relaxation,” and the unpredictability and notoriety of his children’s careers (political activists, partisan commandos, female mechanics, musicians, cavalry recruiters), and their rather unnerving sibling telepathy and extrasensory perception (inherited from the Hebrides mother), certainly did not consort with the typical Sorbonne faculty member’s prim bourgeois mores en famille.

This was the man who, in 1906-07, embarked on the epic train journey, in company with Cecile Lapin and intermittently Col. Thompson, Gen. L., Madame Main-Smith, and a selection of other Friends of Bassanda, via the Orient Express and the Trans-Caspian Railway, dodging Tsarist agents, common thieves, and other players in the Great Game, from Paris to Ballyizget, bearing the Documents of Peace.

[1] The New York Times, "The Rock Springs Massacre," September 26, 1885.

Beautiful See-in at the Human Be-In

--by Sunbear

[Original typescript of an article published in The San Francisco Oracle, reporting on the Human Be-in, in Golden Gate Park on January 14 1967, widely understood as inaugurating the San Francisco hippie revolution and the Summer of Love]

So I went down to the Golden Gate last Saturday to check out the scene on this free festival, the Human Be-In.

People, it was cool: weather was decent, nice sunny day, and there were just crowds of beautiful souls out in the Park: cowboys and Indians, fairy princesses and Vikings, mountain men and Hindu holy men, and the usual Golden Gate squares wandering through looking like they picked up the wrong guidebook. Minds were being blown in the most beautiful way, right and left. There were free balloons, a May-pole, beads and feathers, face-painting, beautiful giant soap bubbles, and flowers for everyone.

Things kicked off with a couple of the holy men, the poets Alan [sic] Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, who walked all the way around the park “to sanctify it” they said. Ginsberg looked like a sadhu in a long cotton Indian tunic and Snyder looked like he’d just left a run with the Hell’s Angels—who were also there in the Park on Saturday. It all got started when Gary blew a toot on a seashell and Ginsberg started to sing Indian mantras. And Jerry Garcia’s new band (he used to have the Warlocks) played this wonderful free form set—called themselves “the Grateful Dead”—music was beautiful, lots of beautiful dancing and beautiful people.

But the real hero of the day was Professor Timothy Leary—he’s the man who made the whole scene possible: the Harvard professor who talked the straights into letting him run experiments with LSD. Because he proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that psychedelics could totally short-circuit all that process of opening your mind. Like, meditation was the scenic route, but acid is like getting shot out of a cannon made of flowers. And Leary showed that to the squares.

So when he stood up to talk, wearing a white tunic, with a string of beads around his neck, he looked like a hip college professor, or a philosopher—like a cat who you could trust really knew where it all was at. So all the beautiful people in the Park heard what he had to say and it was all beautiful—all about “Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out” and psychedelics could be the pathway to a wider group consciousness if we could just get the square world to see that. Well, practically everybody in the Park was turning on, so that was like we’d already completed the first step on the journey.

I was circulating through the crowd, just kind of checking things out and digging the beautiful vibes that everyone was putting out, and the clothes and the costumes, and toking a toke off of any joint that came my way, and it was great—really a vision of the way the New World coming is going to be: everyone happy, everyone grooving, no more wars, no more suffering, no more boring work, everybody just peaceful and joyful.

[…end article; however, the fuller draft continues as follows]

But I will tell you about one especially cool thing that I’ll bet not everyone there in the Park could have been hip to.

As I was circling the crowd, around behind the stage (all draped with bunting and giant amps for the Warlocks’ set), I passed this one guy under a tree. He was a hip -looking Negro guy, sitting cross-legged on the ground, puffing on a pipe, with a violin case next to him. Friends, I didn’t know this dude, but he looked interesting, and I couldn’t help but notice how cool he was with the whole scene—just sitting with a half-smile on his face, and taking it all in. He wasn’t dressed nearly as up-to-date as the folks on the stage: just old jeans and a work-shirt, and work-boots, but he had this great look even so: tattoos up and down both arms, a big full white beard and his hair all ropey, kind of long braids—kind of looked like an Indian yogi or one of those old photos of Frederick Douglass we used to see in high school.

I kind of thought he might be with Emmett Grogan’s Diggers—he looked a little more like an anarchist than a peacenik—but they were down at the other end of the Park handing out free soup. When I stopped for a second to say hello, I caught a whiff of what was in his pipe—and I want to tell you it wasn’t any of that Mexican dirt-weed. Friends, I don’t know if I’ve ever smelt anything that smelled as potent as that bowl of whatever it was he had: it was like herbs and spices and a whole Caribbean market, just in the smoke. I caught just a whiff of it and I felt like I could already just float on away.

But the pipe itself is what really caught me: it was this wild thing, carved out of some kind of dark wood, that had a big bowl in the shape of an African woman sitting down. It sure didn’t look like the kind of tourist stuff they’re already hawking down on Haight Street.

“Nice pipe, man.”

The dude looked up at me and smiled. “Care to sit? More where that came from.”

He had an accent that sounded like a cross between Louisiana and something out of Casablanca or something like that. I sat down cross-legged next to him: “Hey, I’m Sunbear. I write for The Oracle.”

He puffed and smiled and passed me the pipe. “Pleased. Call me Etsy.” We sat and watched the crowd go by, and then I said

“You here to dig the Haight scene? Really something, isn’t it?”

He smiled, knocked out the pipe, and leaned back on his elbows. “Yes, it certainly is something.”

He told me that he was originally from Galveston but that he’d “been overseas for a good bit.” I just figured he might be one of those brothers who were starting to come back from Vietnam, some of them just totally turned-on and some of them ready to bring a little bit of Uncle Ho on home. But he shook his head:

“No, I’ve been in Europe, off-and-now, the last fifteen years. Mostly playing in orchestras. A lot in the East. A few of us came back with my boss, to visit Big Sur for a little while.”

I had to look twice at him for that; I’d figured him for the Now Generation’s age—I was 25, kind of an “old man” around the Oracle offices—but if he’d been playing in Europe for 15 years, he had to be at least five or six older than me. He didn’t look it, despite the white hair and beard—not a line on his face, and when he smiled he looked even younger. And “the East” sounded like a cool place to go.

“So like, where? Paris? Marrakesh? Tangier? Someplace cool like that?”

He shook his head again. “Naw—place called Bassanda. Further east.”

Well, I didn’t like to let on that I’d never even heard of Bassanda, so I asked him what kind of orchestras—that whole classical scene just seems like a total big drag; how can you make something beautiful and alive out of some music written a hundred years ago?—but he explained as how it was more like a cooperative orchestra; like a commune or something. Only classical music I knew was, like the stuff from Public TV that was on the tube when I was in junior high school, and some terrible film-strips they made us watch, but he said, packing another bowl of his potent dope into his carved pipe, “No, it’s cool—music from all over the world, and musicians too. Even if we have to wear suits.”

“Where is this orchestra at, again?”

He struck a kitchen match against his thumbnail, held it to the pipe’s bowl, puffed, smiled, and handed the pipe over to me.

“Place called Bassanda. Behind the Iron Curtain.”

“You mean in Russia?!?”

“Naw. One of the Satellites—you hip to satellites, like Poland? East Germany?—but closer to Asia. Ancient culture there, long before the Russians ever arrived.”

“How the hell did you get way out there?”

“Shipboard—Merchant Marine. That’s how come I didn’t get drafted. I grew up on the Louisiana coast—you know a place called Bay Tambour, in Plaquemines Parish? No?—Anyway, my daddy came from the Caribbean, and I been on boats since I was a little kid. Did a bunch of runs after the Big War in and out of Jamaica—that’s where I found out about Jah’s herb, here in the pipe—but then I wound up out I the Mediterranean. And friends of friends introduced me to the orchestra boss. Yezget-Bey.”

As if on cue, a long shadow fell across us, as I toked on the pipe. Startled, I looked up, and saw a tall figure silhouetted against the January sun. Etsy looked around and smiled: "Baba. Hello." He got to his feet.

"This is a new friend, name of Sunbear."

A Meeting at the Museum

I went with the Professor to the Musée d'Ethnographie in the old Trocadero Palace, west and across the Seine on the Right Bank. In the musty neglected halls dedicated to the folk arts of Oceania and Africa, amidst displays of primitive folklore and traditions—sculpture, clothing, artefacts—it was an environment whose colonialist unspecificity and indiscrimination I knew were anathema to him. In 1906, the Musée was not yet the haunt of Cubist and primitif artists like Picasso, who would shortly discover its collection of African masks, though the Fauvists like Matisse and Derain were beginning to evidence themselves. Nevertheless, we felt that this location was still less likely to elicit awkward chance-meetings with those who might know him, or us.

The “Trocadero,” as the Museum was often known, was a curious place—it was one of the only remaining of the structures which had been built cheaply, of lath and plaster, for the 1878 Exposition Universelle. It was a horrid building, without heating or proper plumbing, but it did hold a vast trove of ill-sorted artefacts from all over l’Empire. I recall particularly the room stuffed with plaster, bronze, and wooden statues of west African and—so the Professor later told me—Caribbean gods. Poor gods! They had traveled far, both in miles and prestige, from the sites where they had been made and imbued with power.

As we entered that chamber, across the space I spied the tall and striking figure of Madame Main-Smith, seemingly engrossed in her examination of a remarkable, almost caricatured full-size sculpture of the vodun God “Gou”, who held a club in one hand and a fierce-looking machete in the other. Rendered in what appeared to be sheets of riveted tin, he wore a long smock and a rakishly tilted hat decorated with its own small votive figures.

Silhouetted against the angular form of Gou, backlit in the dimness by the slanting sun from a dirty overhead skylight, dressed in quiet dark clothes, conservative in design, avoiding attention, there was nevertheless an air of command about this woman which drew, for one who had experienced her in person, one’s immediate attention.

Even as we entered the room, more than sixty feet away from Madame, to my right I heard the scuff of soft heels on marble, and before we had taken more than two steps forward a slender figure in dark plain clothes had slipped forward to contest our way.

I recognized again the young man of eastern appearance who had taken charge of Madame’s hansom cab on the night of the Montparnasse fight, and I remembered his name.

“Ca va, Ismail? You will recollect me, I hope, from the Colonel’s flat?”

He looked back for a moment before speaking. He was olive-skinned and fine of feature, with an aquiline face and fine black hair. Despite the plainness of his dress—dark clothing, a pullover and loose trousers and soft shoes, lacking ornament or costly fabric, there was no mistaking the coiled strength of his body or the fierce energy in his penetrating eye. Addressing himself to me but looking at my companion, he said,

“Oui, Mam’selle. I do remember you, but if the gentleman would be good enough to identify himself?”

This query I momentarily regretted: accustomed as I was to the rather imperious ways of many of the Sorbonnais professors—and to my own Professor’s stringent expectations for intellect and reserved conduct—I was prepared for him to take umbrage at being thus interrogated. But he somehow surprised me, with the gentility, candor, and approachability of his demeanor; though he spoke in a language I didn’t know, I understood that he was introducing himself:

“Bună ziua. Eu sunt profesorul James; numele meu este Habjar. Ești Ismail?”

Ismail smiled suddenly, and I saw the youthful energy and enthusiasm that lurked behind the forbidding exterior:

“Bună ziua, domnule profesor. Mi-am dorit să te cunosc. Sunt Ismail, iar eu sunt aici pentru a vă proteja și Madame. Și, desigur, Mam'selle Cecile.”

At this the Professor shifted his umbrella and stepped forward, and they clasped right hands. He spoke in French:

“I understand that you also are a chess aficionado—Is that correct? If so we must have a match.”

Surprisingly, the young man appeared to flush lightly with pleasure.

“Yes, m’sieu, I do play. I would welcome that opportunity, should such arise.”

Madame spoke in English from close behind us—she moved almost as silently and subtly as did Ismail himself. “Habjar—it is so good to see you again, after this long time.”

He took her extended fingertips and smiled into her eyes. “Yes, Algeria, it has been too long. And yet our reunion is perforce mandated by factors other than friendship or nostalgia, not so? Or so I understand from Cecile here.”

I heard the Colonel’s voice, before I saw him step forward, from a dim corner behind and to the left of the door through which we had entered: “Yes, sir, Professor, I’m afraid that’s exactly the situation. Wisht it could be simply friendship that brung us to ye in person for the first time, but you know that’s not how it seems t’work with Friends of Bassanda.”

The Professor, looking up at the looming presence of our frontiersman friend, clasped his left shoulder with one hand while they shook. “I know, Reverend Sir: it’s all right. Old friends, even if only by correspondence, can certainly make allowances for one another when they finally meet in person. I am happy to see you in Paris—though I understand other, less friendly hosts have already ‘welcomed’ you.”

A match sputtered in the shadows behind the dusty case of the vodun idol Gou to our right, and the General’s ever-present cigar flared up, lighting his face from below. He shook out the match, broke it in two, and dropped it into his pocket, before doffing his kepi and coming forward to offer his hand in turn. He didn’t speak, but the Professor did: “General Landes. I have admired your scholarship in the Journal for decades, sir. Though I recognize the ivied halls were not your primary metier, I have appreciated your erudition and the catholicity of your academic interests.”

The General smiled briefly—more with his eyes than lips—and nodded in appreciation. “Thankee, Doctor. As you’ve inferred, though, the task at hand is hardly academic. It’s a little more forbidding than a shoddy manuscript.”

Astonishingly—in this conversation whose brevity, understated language, and elliptical nature I could only partly follow, and in contrast to most of what I had experienced of the Professor’s mien with peers and contemporaries—he chuckled quietly. “No sir, I do understand that. What was it our friend Mr Clemens said? ‘The reason academic battles are so ferocious is because the stakes are so small’?”
The General nodded. “You’re right there, sir. In the present investigation, the stakes’re a little higher. And a lot more final.”

The Professor nodded thoughtfully, cocked a critical eye toward Madame, and then said: “Well then, sirs, madame, mademoiselle: if we are agreed on the merit of further discussion regarding this journey of discovery or delivery, and now that we have all met in person, perhaps we might consider more hospitable and private environments?”

A door slammed open at the other end of the room, echoing in the dim stillness of the hall, and a crowd of loud and animated young Left Bank aesthetes entered, talking excitedly; I recognized more than one among them who came from my own circle. The Colonel looked down the room, and then glanced quickly at the General, who nodded. “Time to adjourn, friends.”

So while the Colonel led the way, and the General lingered behind with one eye upon the newcomers, the Professor offered his arm to Madame. Ismail put his hand lightly for a moment upon my wrist. “Mam’selle, if you will permit—there is another and a more discreet egress—if you will come this way.”

We stepped through another, nearby door, which took us behind the lath-and-plaster walls of the hall, even mustier, dustier, dimmer and more stifling than the main rooms.

As we sidled lightly, in single file, through the dimness of the back corridor that would take us out into the warm sunlight and fashionable beau monde of the Right Bank, Ismail preceded me to show the way.

I was acutely conscious of the light, yet electric touch of his hand upon my forearm.

Dianthe Habjar-Lawrence (b1889),
aged about 13

The Lawrence Clan and the Ivy League

Fragment of a youthful reminiscence by Dianthe Habjar-Lawrence, daughter of James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence, folklorist, horsewoman, guerilla leader. Circumstantial evidence suggests it was probably authored at Taos, c1909

I was born in Concord in ’89, third of four children. Mama died when I was only five, but my siblings and my father were all close to one another, and my aunt Algeria—she wasn’t really my aunt but we called her that because she had known my father and mother for so long, and she was with my mother at the end—she was very good to us. She had a cottage in New Hampshire, though she didn’t use it much, but I went to visit her sometimes when she was there.

I don’t want to talk about Mama. We loved her so much, and she was so good to us, and it was so hard for us when she got sick. I was only five, but I remember her face so clearly: her smile, and the scent of her hair, and how gentle her hands were. Even though we’re older now, she still visits myself and my siblings in dreams—I’ve never really felt she went away. And Miss Colette, from Trinidad, she came to us after Mama died; she became part of the family too. She wasn’t really the housekeeper, though she helped us run the house: she was an old family friend and she was close to Papa also.

Growing up in Concord, sometimes before Mama’s death, family friends used to joke and call Papa “Bronson” after Mr Alcott, because everyone knew that Mr Alcott was more successful at producing daughters and newspapers than he was at earning a living. I never met him, or his daughter Louisa, though of course people later asked me all about her—they even called me “Jo”, but of course that was even more absurd: I was never that strong—honestly, though I quite respected the work it took to write a book, I thought Little Women was really rather old-fashioned; we weren’t raised anything like that. Papa was even more learned a man than Mr Alcott—that’s how he got his teaching post at Harvard, when he returned to work on his Master of Arts degree, when we moved to Arlington, and especially after Mama’s death, he made sure that we never went without. Of course after we lost her, people didn’t feel quite right about making fun of Papa.

But I think Mama’s death changed him, too: after she was gone, he spent much more time with us, and he even turned down other teaching posts, ones that paid more than his Harvard lectureship, because they came from places or at times when we children couldn’t be with him. Later on, I suppose we grew up a little wild, traveling in the exotic parts of the world with Papa, but I think those adventures actually began while we were conversing at the dinner table with all of his guests.

Jefferson was the only boy, and, at first, the one most interested in the far places, especially in music from those other places: he couldn’t wait to leave Concord, and he sometimes went off on his own by train in the summers. Miriam, perhaps because she was the eldest, was always looking out for others—not just Anthea & me, but other girls and boys we knew. She was the one who read Mr Thoreau’s writings most widely—not just the “Civil Disobedience” letters, and that lovely series about the cabin he had on Emerson’s woodlot, but lots of his letters and reading notes that were still in Mr Emerson’s library when we were small. I’m nearly sure that’s why she became involved with women’s rights, later: she used to quote Thoreau: “If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” Ant, my little sister—she was the boffin. I remember she always had the most wonderful tree-houses that she built herself, and I know she rebuilt a pony cart so its axles would rotate over bumps and furrows in the road.

At any rate, that’s how we picked up our languages: during term-time, at the dinner table in Arlington when Papa would have guests from the College or visitors from overseas, and then summers and at holidays when he would be invited to lecture and we would all travel with him. That’s how we first saw the West, from a rail trip we took via Chicago to Denver when I was only about four; and how I got to know Cambridge and Boston, on day trips with Papa to see where he worked. I remember Papa taking us into the New-York Historical Society when he was meeting with the archivists looking into the family history.

But I loved the Harvard term-time, too: with Mama gone, we all learned the things we could do around the house Papa had taken in Arlington. And there was Miss Colette: she would do the shopping and supervise the men who came to help with the garden and around the house. Papa got us started on German and Spanish and classical Chinese, so we could read the poets, but it was from Miss Colette that we got our French Creole, and smatterings of Gullah from the Sea Islands.

I remember when Aunt Algeria came to visit for the first time. I was six—it was the year after Mama died. Papa and we had talked about Mama; he told us it was all right to be sad and to miss her, and that we could talk about her any time we wanted. But he also encouraged us to make friends with other grown-ups: to make friends where we wanted to. And I was drawn to Madame Algeria straight away, from the time I heard her knock on the front door—she had a distinctive touch. She had dark hair and olive skin, and she was tall and beautiful, and when she saw Miss Colette they embraced each other, talking animatedly together in a language we didn’t recognize.

Madame Algeria was always chic and she always asked about the details of our own lives at Concord and Arlington, but I think I was drawn more to her manner, and the stories she told about traveling in the East, and the way that Papa obviously respected her and Miss Colette. At that first dinner, when they’d be talking about politics in the East, sometimes they’d lapse into that language Miss Colette had used with Madame Algeria. The second time they did that, Jeff learned over his plate, interrupting, and demanded to know from Papa about the language. Papa smiled, but he let Madame answer.

“Well, now, cherie, that is a very special language from a very special place. Of course, all places are very special to the people who know and love them, but Bassanda is a part of our lives, and your mama’s and—perhaps—of yours as well.”

She paused, and smiled, and I saw her wink at Miss Colette.

“For you, young sir, I should say you should learn this first:

Ya chuzhyy u tsʹomu chastynakh.”[1]

She may a joke of teaching it to all of us—I remember us chanting it over and over at that dinner table, and her laughing at our bad pronunciation—but I think my love of learning really dates from that experience: the way Madame Algeria could open worlds for us.

Over the next several years, she visited several times; each time, she would be dressed very differently, as if she was coming from very different parts of the world, and Papa and she and Miss Colette would sit up all night, sometimes with guests that Papa would invite out from Cambridge, talking in four languages. We looked forward to those visits, especially those times when she’d tell us stories of myths and heroes. I remember thinking that I’d like to grow up and be like Aunt Algeria…

The summer I was twelve Papa arranged for me to spend six weeks at her cottage. Jeff never liked doing much in the summers—mostly sleeping and eating and playing music—Miriam was attending summer tutorials at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, and Ant stayed home with Miss Colette, but I was interested in swimming, and riding, and there was a horse farm in Marlborough, and she arranged for me to work there, mucking out stalls and forking hay. Sometimes in the mornings I got to breeze the ponies. I wasn’t interested in dressage or fox-hunting or polo like some of the other girls, but it was a good way to get comfortable around horses. In the afternoons I’d read, or work on my languages with Madame, or swim.

But one afternoon Madame came into the sun-porch where I was reading. She was smiling—the smile that touched her eyes more than her other features; we thought of it as her “Bassanda smile”—as she said “Change your dress, dear. I have someone for you to meet.” We went out to her carriage—she was an expert whip, and owned and drove a beautiful two-seater Concord buggy, made in New Hampshire—and as we drove off up the lane under the dappled sunlight of the maples, she said “He’s a special man, a composer of music, a friend from New York.”

That is how I came to meet the pianist and composer Edward MacDowell. A New Yorker, he’d been brought up by a family who traveled widely in Europe, and so he knew the music and musicians of Paris and Frankfurt very well. After he married his student Marian, they came back to Boston in ’88 so that he could try to build his career as a composer: there were great things happening in the Nineties, with the first American schools of composition being founded.

We drove through the town and turned from Main Street toward High, Madame’s two horses Nipper and Shy tossing their heads and cantering easily on the macadamized road, with our light weight on the two-seater behind. We came uphill through the trees and, as we turned in at a small white sign reading “Hillcrest Farm,” Madame said “He’s a wonderful, kind man. We met in Germany. He teaches at Columbia, in New York, but Mrs MacDowell likes him to be here in the summer—he needs the rest, and his health isn’t very strong.”

It was a beautiful white-clapboarded house, wings stretching to either side of the front door that faced the road, giving it a welcoming feel—you felt as if the house was awaiting you with open arms. As we bowled up the drive to the front door, a tall slender dark-haired woman came down the steps to meet us. Though her face was thin and preoccupied, she was smiling.

A little while later, after I had seen the horses unhitched and turned loose in the paddock, I joined Madame and Mrs MacDowell on the sun porch of the white house, and we walked together up a planked path through the pine trees. Up the hill, from a log cabin glimpsed through the branches, we heard the liquid sounds of a phrase of music played on piano, over and over. We stepped up onto the plank porch and, peeking over the rough-hewn window sill, I saw Mr MacDowell within, hunched over, one ear pressed almost to the keys. His face was toward us, his expression curiously blank and peaceful, and his eyes were closed.

His wife stepped around to the wooden door, waited for a pause in the repeated phrase, then knocked softly and slipped inside. I heard her say gently, “Lovely, Edward—a lovely phrase. Are you ready for our visitors?” and a murmured reply. She swung the door wide, smiled at us, and gestured us inside. “Come in, come in. Mr MacDowell will be glad to see you.”

He was standing at the upright piano, one hand lying lightly on its case, with a gentle, rather tremulous smile. Dressed in a lightweight white summer suit, he was slight of build, hardly coming up to his wife’s height, pale-skinned and with a dramatic streak of white running through his dark, brushed-back hair. His manner was slightly ethereal, but he came forward to hold out his hand to Madame. As I clasped it in turn, I noticed that he had remarkably pale and bright china-blue eyes.

He turned back to Madame. “Miss Main-Smith, I am so happy to finally meet you in person. I have so grateful to you for the books and photographs you have been able to find me from the Indianist scholars.”

She smiled. “I have been only too happy to assist, Mr McDowell. And so you have heard from Colonel Thompson, at the Taos Pueblo?”

“Yes, he has sent me several packets of material. I can’t say how the melodies might be used in any works—they are so different in their manner than I had been led to believe of the red people’s tunes—but they have been invaluable in my thinking. And moreover, what he has been able to tell me of the music of the Irish peasantry: it is so rich—such a surprise to find that a military man could speak with such erudition on so many musics!”

I would come to know Mr and Mrs MacDowell a bit better over the course of that summer: he invited me to return for the occasional piano lesson. Both were charming people: she very solicitous, not only of guests but also of her husband. One always felt that she stood between Mr MacDowell and the world: providing hospitality for visitors, answering the telephone and correspondence, coordinating the cooking and ground staff. He spent most of his time in the studio cabin, and occasionally, when the wind was right, I could hear strains of his piano-playing wafting through the trees as I climbed up to meet him.

He was a gentle and patient teacher—despite his fame, one never felt condescended to or disregarded. He showed me sketches of the pieces for New England Idyl, and he was making the fair copy of what would be the Keltic Sonata (girl-like, I always secretly hoped that the sub-title he added to the middle movement, “With naïve tenderness,” might have been a reference to me).

But that summer the MacDowell’s were preparing to pack up Hillcrest Farm: after six years at Columbia, Mr MacDowell was terribly overworked and tired, and as I’ve said his health wasn’t very good. He had been granted a sabbatical, but had crammed it with a very full schedule of concert tours and guest lectureships, in the US and Canada, and Mrs was concerned that he rest before they began, and so the informal tutorials ceased. I remember, after our last lesson that summer, walking down the plank path from his cabin studio, and turning to see him, in his white suit, waving, and dim under the trees. I felt sad, and I didn’t know why.

As we drove away down the High Road, Nipper and Shy cantering to stay ahead of the free-rolling two-seater, I said to Madame “Mr MacDowell always seems so tired—and so lonely.” She was concentrating on driving—she was juggling the reins and the Concord’s friction brake, a three-handed job for most—and for a moment I thought she didn’t mean to answer. But as we came around the curve that led down into town again, out from under the shade trees and into the August sunlight, she did.

“Mr MacDowell is a good man, and a sensitive artist. But he is not really suited for the career this world asks of him. I think you are right, my dear Dianthe—even with the love of his wife, I think that Mr MacDowell is lonely. I hope the time away will help him.”

I never saw him again.[2]

But that summer was quite a watershed for all of us. In addition to my meeting Mr MacDowell, and the way that led me toward Southwestern Indian culture, and the Pueblo, and eventually to Madame’s friend Colonel Thompson; Mimi found she quite liked the circles of boys and girls at the Cambridge Latin School, and sometimes she had them back to the Arlington house for coffee and conversation and sometimes music and dancing. I think that might be where Jefferson heard Caribbean music for the first time—from some of the West Indian students at those parties. I remember listening while Mimi and her girlfriends talked about women’s rights—I remember some of the Cuban students talking about their universities having opened to girls the year before. And Ant, who was only about 10, loved the dancing—she was always a wonderful dancer.

All that back-and-forth between Cambridge and Arlington, and the Latin School and Harvard, where Papa was lecturing, we met a wide circle of people that summer, between my visits to the MacDowells. There were so many interesting friends, and students, and ideas from all around the world. I was actually very grateful that Papa knew these people—when they came to the big old house and Miss Colette rolled back the rugs so that she and the Cuban boys could dance those charangas, I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I only wished Mama could have been there.

Papa was a Harvard man, and he was very willing to help me go to the Latin School that Harvard ran, like Mimi. I remember one night at our house he had invited some fellow students and one of the senior people in the Modern Languages department: Professor Kittredge. They came in the front door—Papa had telephoned ahead to Miss Colette that he was bringing dinner guests—and they were almost staggering under two enormous stacks of books they had carried from the streetcar stop. He thumped them down on the dining room table, an enormous maple oval that was sometimes hard-pressed to accommodate all of Papa’s visitors, and called us to gather around.

“Look, youngsters. Look at the treasures the Professor has given us!”

It was the complete 5-volume set, and all the concordances and indices, of Professor Childs’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, left unfinished at his death, but which Kittredge had completed as a deathbed promise to his mentor. Papa was already very knowledgeable about those traditions—though it was only years later that I understood he’d got much of that knowledge from Mama, in the short time they were married: she was a Campbell from Mull—but he knew his own offspring, and what voracious readers we were. And I think he had it in the back of his mind that perhaps an introduction, via the Child Ballads, to Professor Kittredge, might sway Mimi toward Harvard. And certainly we liked him: he was tall and dark-haired, with a great beard, and a wonderful conversationalist—he spoke a dozen languages, he told wonderful folk tales himself, and was fascinated with Papa’s family ties to the Bassanda Shama bardic tradition. We always loved it when Professor Kittredge and some of Papa’s graduate student friends would come for dinner, and argue and tell stories and improvise poetry in archaic languages.

But even better we loved curling up with the Child volumes. They were great heavy leather-bound quartos, and they smelled of libraries (I think Professor Kittredge had “borrowed” a set left from the copies the publisher sent to the Widener), and even though Jeff and I were frustrated that they hadn’t got any tunes in them, we loved to curl up in a window-seat, or in the branches of a tree in the back yard, and get lost in the stories. Ant particularly liked the stories of heroic highwaymen and horse races, but I found myself drawn to the mysterious and supernatural tales. Sometimes I’d even dream them. Sometimes I’d even dream, or remember, them being sung in Mama’s Highlands-accented voice. I told this to Madame Algeria, once when she was visited, and she patted my hand, saying,

“Then that is your Mama singing to you, dear. I am happy for you that she comes back to visit you sometimes. I know what it is to lose one’s mother, and to miss her terribly.”[3]

And yet even the Child books and Professor Kittredge didn’t sway Mimi toward Harvard: she liked the students at the Latin School, she said, but she didn’t want to have to go to school at Radcliffe, and only have “guest” lectures from Harvard professors, “just because I’m a girl.” And she had already become enamored of Tufts, in Medford. At age 14, she already knew that she wanted to go to a progressive co-educational school, and Tufts had been a leader in that ever since the ‘90s.

So that autumn of ’02, after we had come back from Peterborough, Mimi started riding the streetcar from Arlington to Medford—it wasn’t far, really, just a walk to the trolley stop, and then a ride along Broadway, and then a short walk up Curtis Street. Starting in September, Mimi attended informal evening seminars hosted on Professors’ Row by a young graduate student, Olive Arnold Dame, who was taking a degree in English and Education; sometimes I would tag along. I think Mimi rather looked up to Miss Olive, as we called her: though she was rather tall and bookish, with pince-nez glasses and a shy manner, Miss Olive was absolutely fearless and very forceful in discussing both the value of folk song and traditions and of the “peasant culture” of the people it came from.

On the other hand, I think that Miss Olive was quite taken with our menage, too: between Papa’s erudition, and Miss Colette’s wonderful Creole folk stories and songs from Georgia and Trinidad, and the stories they could both tell about adventures in Bassanda, and our wild diversity as children: Jeff’s music and clownish sense of humor, Mimi’s passion, Ant’s wonderful open heart and her mechanical facility and—I suppose—my own interest in folklore and exotic places—I think Miss Olive found us exotic, but congenial. After all, for all her erudition, she had never been anywhere yet except Medford, where she was born. “But,” she used to say, her eyes twinkling behind her pince-nez, “I intend to change that!” I actually think that she might have been a bit enamored of Papa—even as a widowed graduate student twenty years her senior, he was a vital, charming man—but I don’t think anything ever came of that, on either side.

And so that is how we came to meet Olive Dame. She’s Mrs Campbell now—she married President Campbell of Piedmont College in Georgia, and we hear that they are both involved with education and folksong collecting among the mountain people. I remember one night, several years later, when Mimi was already at college at Tufts, Miss Dame came back to lecture, and we had her to dinner that night after the audience had gone home.

That was the one time that Miss Dame met Madame Algeria, who had just come back from the terrible Colorado Mine strikes at Victor—which must have been some time in ’04.[4] She looked tired, but unbeaten, and she had a marvelous, courageous ability to put aside sorrow and take joy in her friends. I remember sitting around that big oval table after dinner, with the lamps flaring, with Papa at one end with his cigar, and Madame Algeria throwing back her head to laugh, her beautiful chestnut hair glistening in the lamplight, clasping the hand of her old Bassandan Friend Miss Colette while the latter sang a ribald Gullah song, and Miss Olive looking on fascinated and happy. I admired those women so much, and I could tell Papa did too.

And I looked at the faces of my siblings: Mimi, already tall, dark, and beautiful at 16, able to hold her own in any debate or battle of limericks; Jeff, a gawky inarticulate 17-year-old, all knees and elbows (Miss Colette was always reprimanding him for “constan’ly outgrowin’ ere’ting, sah!”) but all the poetry of whose soul came out when he sang and played guitar or mandolin; my beautiful little Ant, golden-haired and apple-cheeked at 12, but who never met a tree she wouldn’t climb or a machine she couldn’t repair, and I felt grateful and fortunate. I loved my family.

It was sad growing up with our Mama gone, but Papa was so good to us—we were so much a part of his life, and of the lives of our New England friends at Concord and Cambridge and Medford, at Tufts and Harvard seminars, and the friends of Bassanda we came to know around our Arlington dinner table—that our world felt very rich, even so.

[1] Bassandan: “I am a stranger in these parts.”

[2] MacDowell was struck and knocked down by a hansom cab outside Columbia in 1904; whether from after-effects of the accident, or possibly sodium bromide poisoning from his amateur photography, his physical health and mental capacity deteriorated thereafter. See the Oxford Grove Dictionary of Music: “By the autumn of 1905 he was almost completely helpless, mentally and physically. For the remaining three years of his life he and his wife spent winters in New York and summers at their home in Peterborough, New Hampshire.” He died in 1908, which may account for DH-L’s use of the past tense, in this document, in speaking of him.

[3] Rebecca Dudley, wife of Jacob Smith and mother (1862) of Algeria Main-Smith, was the daughter of Ulster Presbyterian frontiersmen, and widely credited with the Second Sight. She died in 1869, when the child was seven.

[4] Algeria Main-Smith had worked actively with Western Miners Union founder Big Bill Haywood in the resistance against private militias and vigilantes mobilized to break the strike and, if necessary, exile or murder IWW leaders.

Mountain Rest Lodge, c1965. Photo by Everest
legend Chris Bonington

Matthias's Mountain Rest Lodge and Guest House

Matthias’s Mountain Rest is/was a rustic trekking lodge and guesthouse high in the northern Rift Valley, above the headwaters of the Ku’shan Darya, at approximately 3840 meters above sea level. Its precise location, both as indicated by historical cartographers and as recorded by modern GPS systems, appears to drift: that is, the best scientific methods of various eras have situated the Lodge in at least four different geographical locations: there is no consistent explanation which fits all known parameters for this geographical oddity. However, because all claimed locations are positioned just below the highest treeline, and because there are no navigable roads to the high south-sloping meadow within which it is situated, travel there is usually by foot or on mule-back, or occasionally by more esoteric methods—via either high-altitude hang glider, or the teleportative capacities of the Rift Portal itself.

The Mountain Rest stands on a site which originally housed a monastery, the Marianuskloster, founded by the Irish peregrini Marianus Scotus of Mainz around 1060CE; Scotus’s Chronicon, describing his wandering life as a missionary and teacher in late-Dark Age eastern Europe, mentions the cloister but does not specifically name it. The high altitude site reflects Scotus’s practice of situating houses in distant, mountainous, or otherwise inhospitable places: not from a desire to eschew the world, but rather from a theological conviction that communities of unquestioning succor and hospitality should be readily available to travelers, especially in hazardous and remote places. The monastery was secularized during the Tsarist period of the 16th century (Tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich was a notorious foe of the “green-yellow-blue” Catholicism—heavily influenced by Buddhism and Central Asian pantheism—which had evolved at the Marianuskloster) and razed nearly to the ground. Only its massive cut-stone walls remained: they later served as the foundations for the first construction work on Matthias’s lodge in the early 17th century. The Lodge’s hospitality is cited by travelers in diverse chronicles throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Because Matthias’s was situated at the saddle of a high pass in the Bassandan Alps, a location at which storm systems frequently collided with great force, electromagnetic phenomena were particularly prevalent and unpredictable; compasses and radios behaved very peculiarly and disparate groups of travelers often found themselves unexpectedly benighted. As one of the commenters in “The Book” (see ahead), who appears to have spent decades in the Lodge, put it: Sen bir dağ fırtına kanatlarında darbe olabilir kim biliyordu asla.[1]

It was briefly taken over in the winter of 1941 during the World War II German Occupation but, in a dark reminiscence of previous catastrophes befalling Tsarist Cossacks, upon arrival the Nazis’ Yugoslav Chetnik auxiliaries, despite previous Luftwaffe flight reconnaissance which had indicated the presence of Bassandan partisans, found the Lodge deserted and all food and fuel disappeared. The Chetniks held out two nights and a day, but on the second night, the temperature plummeted to -26C, with 40-50mph winds and snow-lightning striking all around the building and its grounds. When at 4am a particularly fierce bolt hit the largest of the Lodge’s stone chimneys, a massive affair which heated rooms on all four sides, and actually struck down the chimney to explode out of the hearth, over half the eighty-six Chetniks fled on skis in the pre-dawn darkness, lit by the lightning flashes. They disappeared into the storm and were never seen again. The next morning, after the storm had subsided, the survivors left the Lodge, attempting to escape on foot down to lower altitudes, but were caught in a “freak” avalanche: only three survived (years later, Yezget Bey, acknowledging the pain of the war, said of the Chetniks’ catastrophic experience: “With their crimes, they dishonored the mountains…and the mountains struck back”). Even after the German retreat from Bassanda in early 1944, Soviet troops likewise avoided the High Pass—as a folk proverb said “Ziyaretçiler nazik olmalıdır. Değilse, dağlar onlara görgü öğretecek.”[2]

After the War, the Lodge was renovated and eventually was ritually “cleansed” by a group of Berber musicians who had stumbled through a Rift Portal in northern Morocco, a tradition that Brother Matthias continued on decanal rotation, once every ten years, into the 1980s; see the bootleg recordings that appear in the Archive on From the Rif to the Rift, and the extraordinary short documentary on this ceremony, made by BPTV in 1991.

Historically, the proprietor(s) have often borne some combination of the names “Matthias | Xavier | Yordaniya””—presumably representing some real or mythic relation to the “Matthias Yordaniya” who had brought coffee a/k/a Tanrilarin Uyarici (“stimulant of the Gods”) from Vienna to Ballyizget c1597. That earlier Matthias had founded the capitol’s oldest coffee shop, Jerzy’s (a/k/a Suleiman’s, Bit'sya Uyezd Ostrov / “The Throbbing Island,” and Smythe’s—see “The Meeting of Binyamin and Melodiya”, elsewhere in the Correspondence). Whatever his own parentage and lineage, there is no question that the Brother Matthias(es) encountered in the Chronicles were a huge presence: patriarch of an extended family of spouse, siblings, offspring, and disciples, and a powerful figure in Bassandan folklore (he is said, for example, to have pioneered the art of skiing the high slopes on a single board attached to both his feet).

Though there is no documented genealogical connection between the 16th century ex-mercenary coffeneur and the pan-historical mountain publican, multiple citations of a “Matthias,” “Brother Matthias,” “Yerdan,” “Xavier,” “Jardan” appear in regional chronicles and travelers’ tales. As a folklorist, Winesap has posited that adoption of the name was a gesture of lineage-solidarity with the previous proprietors of the Mountain Lodge, in the fashion of the Malian jeliyat or Hindustani guarana, in which practitioners commonly assume the surnames and by implication the attributes of honored forebears. There is unshakeable conviction regarding the shamanic and cognitive power of names in Bassandan folklore: it is therefore possible that the more modern proprietors took on the “Matthias” name in order to invoke the founder’s legendary Ki-Nerūi-Ma'navī (essentially untranslatable except via colloquialism: e.g., roughly, “Bassandan mojo”), or even as a simple matter of promotional branding.

Yet another interpretation, perhaps more fanciful but reflecting a solid empirical argument, is that the well-documented electro-magnetic tendencies in the Rift Valley, and the Lodge’s location at or near one of its Portals, may have caused the building itself to slip back and forth in time and/or space. If that were so, if the structure itself constantly traversed the magnetic ley lines of the Rift—and certainly Hazzard-Igniti supported this interpretation—then those who spent extensive time under its roof (such as frequent guests, the regular staff, or Brother and his family) might themselves likewise experience the time-shifting and chronology-defying phenomena documented in the life-spans of Colonel Thompson and General Landes. Later work by graduate students of Hazzard-Igniti—those who escaped the Security Police’s 1941 arrest of the Doctor and his subsequent consignment to the Gulag—suggested for example that the journey through the Portal might effect permanent electromagnetic or even molecular transformations upon travelers, “unhooking” genetic aging mechanisms at the level of DNA. In such a construction, those who “traverse the Rift” can—rather like the poets and adventurers of ancient ballads like True Thomas and Cantiga de Santa Maria 36 “Muit' amar devemos”—step outside the boundaries of normative lifespan.

This would go far to explain for example the seemingly ageless nature of Thompson and Landes (who appear to have completed the Rift journey more times than anyone else), the apparently extended lifespans of a number of other Friends of Bassanda; the powerful group-teleportation capacities attributed to Azizlarim Jangchi; and—just possibly—the recurring and consistent appearance of “Matthias Yordaniya” across at least four centuries.[3]

The main building of the Lodge was constructed of stone and massive rough-hewn logs. Though the compound stood above the tree-line, it appears that at some previous point in prehistory prevailing winds had blown south-to-north, bringing warmer air up-valley and thus, in that earlier geological Era, making it possible for large trees to grow. By the time the Lodge was rebuilt on the stone foundations of the Marianuskloster, however, weather patterns had shifted and the treeline had crept down below the Lodge’s meadow. Ancient trunks, felled by mountain storms, still remained, preserved and nearly fossilized by the dry cold; these deadfalls were used to construct the Lodge’s massive timber walls. Its roofs were sod, planted with mountain grasses to hold them in place, and in summer they blossomed with flowers; daytime visitors remarked upon the wild beauty of the building’s brown bulk shouldering up from the thin soil, “crowned with blooms,” and the Lodge’s goat population lived on the roof in the warm season.

Inside the enormous main room, with its gigantic stone fireplace and the bar behind which Brother Matthias held court, had a ceiling vaulted to the rafters: mountain sparrows lived under the roof in winter, sheltering from the cold, and flying in and out the open double doors to the veranda during the Alpine summer. Despite the extensive collection of mismatched, heavy timbered benches, tables, and chairs; repurposed pews; and a gigantic refectory table, over thirty feet long—an antique rescued from the Marianuskloster—the room, which could hold over 100 people with ease, was still spacious and airy. The long curving bar-counter, which had come by unknown means over the mountains from the East, was inlaid with coins from around the world across a half-millennium—it was said that a departing guest could guarantee a warm welcome upon return by “leaving a single coin for the bar.”

The “big room’s” tall narrow windows looked outward and down-slope to catch the sun from the south, and could be closed and tightly shuttered against storms. Because of that same slope, the rear rooms on the ground floor were set back into the hill; though dim, they were warm in winter and cool in summer. On the other hand, there were no “cellars” per se—the dry-laid stone of the foundation rested upon the living rock of the mountainside—but a small staircase led down beneath the foundations to an underground spring: particularly useful in the depths of winter when the only other source of potable water was snowmelt. It was claimed that the Lodge’s beer possessed its unique “capacities”, in part, because of the peculiarly ionized properties of that underground spring’s water.

Kegs of newly-brewed beer and ale were stored in the unoccupied guest rooms; at peak trekking season, overflow visitors might find themselves sharing a room with sacks of potatoes, barley, and turnips, strings of goat jerky, and yeasty-smelling, bubbling carboys of fermenting beer—and sometimes lambs, calves, or kids.

Sunsets at the Lodge were moments for individuals to stop work, open the windows or step out onto the long veranda, and watch the Rift Valley below as it was painted in shades of ocher, rose, and gold. Even in the depths of winter, when the sun rose and set far to the south, and barely looked over the tops of the mountains, the evening light would etch bands of brilliant color across the glaciers and ice fields. In winter, night came down quickly and the temperature would drop even more quickly, but the astonishing brightness and ubiquity of the Bassandan constellations (particularly Sravana, Pūrva Phalgunī, and Chitra among others), reflected against the white snowpack, made it nearly as bright as day, with an icy, silvery luminescence.

Particularly by moonlight, but even during the day, the low angle of the winter sun, the clearness of the thin mountain air, and the brightness of the snow could “play tricks” on visitors’ vision: some hikers claimed to have seen “wolves that walked like men” and, even more implausibly, gigantic tawny-furred bipedal primates, in the cliffs above the Lodge. It has been suggested that altitude caused oxygen issues leading travelers to mistake what exactly they were witnessing. In such cases, particularly when new visitors complained of the various effects of altitude sickness (dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath, headache), or after sighting some such creature, the dreadlocked Brother Matthias would typically discount such tales, and prescribe the house barley-wine, brewed as it was by “Brother Robd” (see below) from a patch of “special summer wheat” Matthias tended in a meadow above the Lodge.

The kitchens served fare which, though rough and rather limited by the foodstuffs available at almost sixteen thousand feet (especially in winter), was recalled fondly by many visitors. Brother propounded a nutritional regime he called “mountain-Ital,” which emphasized raw and plant foods, especially soups, stews, root vegetables, and barley bread, as the primary source of calories, with dairy products—especially a range of goat cheeses—providing protein and fat (several recipes in the Bassandan Peoples’ Liberation Samizdat Cookbook originated at the Lodge, most notably “Brother’s Electric Brownies” and “Madame Sarah’s Barley Soup”). In addition to Alp-hounds, the ghost-white mastiffs who many regarded as the reincarnated spirits of past warrior-heroes, and the ubiquitous semi-feral Bassandan Barn Cats (the offspring of Norwegian Forest Cats brought to the East by venturing Norsemen in the Middle Ages), Brother also kept goats for milk and hair (and the occasional bodhran skin) and, for cheese and butter, a few head of the small, tough Buša cattle which had been imported into Bassanda from Nepal. Though no animals were raised for meat, the occasional superannuated and deceased cow or goat would be respectfully turned into “Brother’s Jerky,” a favorite among Bassandan, Tibetan, and Nepali porters for its preservability and “remarkable resuscitative powers.”

The large back room was a mysterious, dim space, lit by oil lamps or candles, most often deserted, seldom employed. It had been used, at various times, for teaching swordsmanship and Bassandan yoga, for dances and shamanic ceremonies, and the staff said that, if you stood in its vast dusty dimness on a quiet early morning and listened hard, you could hear echoes of all the voices from the past which had filled it. Brother himself told tales of the legendary yogini called Siddharajni, who he described as his “predecessor,” and of the classes she had taught in the “Old Days,” leading Vīrabhadrāsana on the south-facing veranda before dawn, Naṭarājāsana on the cliffs above, or Pranayama in the moonlit snowfields: it was said that her prajna (life energy) was so strong that sitting meditation with her in the snow was as comfortable as in a “hot yoga” studio. By the time that the BNRO historians encountered the Mountain Lodge, Siddharajni was only a memory, but a small tangka of her hung in the main room, above the huge oak double doors that led to the veranda.

There is inconsistency in the accounts regarding the balance of the spaces, especially for the less-used rooms. Just as the site’s location appears to have shifted periodically, no two accounts of the interior agree, and no reliable floor-plan exists The stone-enclosed snug to the rear of the bar was reserved for the musicians without a word ever being said; patrons claimed that the very occasional untutored visitor intruding upon the snug’s reservation for musicians would shortly find his beer flat and soured and his palms itching uncomfortably, and would seek different seating—though this may be an apocryphal tap-room tale, as almost never would such naifs find their way to the Mountain Rest in the first place.

On the other hand, the Lodge is legendary for its hospitality and no traveler, no matter how inexperienced or out of place, was ever turned away: there is a catch-phrase, common among patrons: Yakshcho vy znayshly mistse, to vy hidni buty tut (“If you found the Lodge, then you deserve to be here”). Brother Matthias hosts scheduled events—that is to say, as “regular” as any schedule could ever be in Bassanda or the Rift Valley—focused around various art forms. The most venerable of these is the Friday night music session Ceol agus крек, which was founded some time in the 1930s by the multi-instrumentalist Rogov Szczur Lądowy (b1916?), who in the 1960s was a stalwart of the Electric Trees (Eliektryčnyja Drevy); in fact, some have argued that the Trees originated in these sessions. Lądowy is also said to have been among the first to employ the Bassandan trichordo in performing the Irish music brought to the country by the wandering pipers Patrick O’Farrell, Tarlach Mac Suibhne, and Seamus Ennis.

However, Lądowy’s availability was so unpredictable, given his far-flung activities around the globe and across the millennia, that the job of session “anchor” was eventuall taken over by a succession of others—first, by Queen Daphne Ni Flainnagain, a so-called “Gypsy” (modern usage: Pavee) or Traveller matriarch and a fiddler of great renown; subsequently, by Jakov Redžinald (later of the BNRO), who was briefly employed as one of the legendarily leisurely baristas just after the end of the War, but who swiftly, by mutual consent, transitioned to leading the sessions. After Redžinald, the firebrand young mandolinist Niall Déantóir Bairille, a student of Lądowy, inherited the anchor’s chair, occasionally joined by his uncle, the legendary Bassandan mountaineer and flute-player Stiofan Déantóir Bairille. The co-anchor in most recent years has been Matthias’s son Wēland “Little John” Yordaniya, who claimed “never to remember” when he didn’t have a banjo in his hand, and laughingly said “If I grew up anywhere, I grew up here!” Colonel Thompson seldom appeared, usually being gone in the wide world, but Lądowy, a natural teacher, would hold court with his stable of hungry young bouzouki players. They were often joined by the iconoclastic bluesman Mississippi Stokes and the pagan falconer and avian rights activist Magister Ciarán O'Baoighill, who, on the basis of expertise and name etymology, may, like “Brother” Robd, and Brother Matthias himself, have been a time-shifting renegade from the original Marianuskloster foundation. The Ballyizget Ceili Band (Redžinald, Rezeg Vagyok, Thorvaldur Ragnarsson, Dzejms Rasel Srcetovredi, Antanas Kvainauškas), joined on occasion by Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory percussion professor Žaklin Paulu, ran summer workshops there, escaping the summer heat of the capitol, and providing generations of young aspirants a “jump-start” into musics of various traditions.

The legendary Mountain Lodge beer selection was managed by that patron of Bassandan craft brewers, Rodbertus de Vêtir (“Rob of the Garments”), also called “Brother” Rodb because he was a former member of Marianus’s order, now returned to the site of the original foundation. He had learned ancient brewing secrets as a monastic and, though the order had ceased to exist, said, of his beer and his family—wife Kaciaryna and, in later years, young son Guillaume—“This is my ministry now.” Of special note among his brews were мелница куќа подготовка Компај (Melnica Kuḱa Podgotovka KompaJ) or “Mill House Tornado,” a psychoactive barley wine; the “Ku’shan Darya BPA” (a Bassanda Pale Ale, a relic of the British Raj); “Heart of the Rift Dark Stout” (see label, below); and the “’Amsterdam Brown’ Coffee Porter.”

When the kegs were changed, and if they were present, the Uitmena Sisters shared shamanic dance to “bless the beer and the mountain brandy,” while Binyamin Biraz Ouz, saxophonist and vocalist with the BNRO, would discourse upon poetry and the taps. On other nights, Biraz and the writer Meyodija Zold Mezok (of “The Legend of Binyamin and Meyodija”) led the social dancing, in whose whirling sets one might find old friends, friendly strangers, and legendary scions of the past. Occasionally Madame Szabo, with baby Donal Og Szabo and Zigaboo Barwyn in tow, would stop through to consult with Brother Matthias on band or Bassanda business (Brother Matthias, a close friend and ally of Yezget Nas1lsinez, was an important part of the Band’s intra-Rift support network), though few others typically were brought into those conversations (a BNRO catchphrase was “Madame never explains”). On rare nights, Madame could be persuaded to dance in the Irish sean nos style with Samueli Jangali, sometimes with Baby Szabo on her hip.

Pianist and trumpeters Rahmani Boenavida, during summer-term residencies at Habjar-Lawrence from her retirement home in the California redwoods, would occasional visit to play guitar or sing a jazz ballad, and once or twice, it was even claimed, the writer and political activist Kristofer Askol’dov had appeared, shivering and exclaiming of the cold, far from his warm-weather retirement in the hills above Monaco, but welcomed by his oldest friends from the pre-BNRO “People’s Liberation Orchestra.”

A lexicographer in the Archives of the National Library, whose daughter eventually sang with the Bassanda State Radio Female Vocal Choir, when queried by the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project, said:

I loved the evenings when Matthias would host the Irish musicians, and their families. I didn’t know all the children but it didn’t matter—no child ever came to harm at the Lodge. The small ones running between the legs of the adults and holding onto their parents while the music played. It was all one thing: the music and the musicians; the sound and the light of the sunset outside; the old songs and the friendships that would endure beyond lifetimes.

On a lectern just inside the main doors, in a direct line for those departing after a stay, Brother Matthias maintains a guest-book, going back at least two centuries, which contains hundreds of student and wanderer’s songs, in multiple languages and many different hands. It is the tradition that visitors, whatever they are able to pay for their accommodations, should not depart without adding something to “The Book”: a song, limerick, anecdote, poem, or reminiscence. It is considered that the Book should be not simply a record of guests’ presence but a repository of their creativity: on a recent visit, a handwritten sign on the wall above the podium where The Book is chained read Prosa non imagines sui (“No prose selfies”).

Biraz Ouiz, a prolix and eloquent memoirist, said of his very many nights at the Lodge:

I always knew someone. It didn't matter if I was there just for a quick look-in, or just off the road with the Orchestra, or a night when there was music and Matthias had just changed out the taps. It was like electricity—maybe it was the magnetic fields, the Doc argued—I don’t know.

But it was certainly something that you could count on. No matter from where or when I was coming, as soon as I crossed the threshold I knew I was among family. There was such a sense of the possibilities that could unfold at Matthias’s place—you never knew who you’d meet, or see again, or what kind of music would ensue: players from everywhere and everywhen together making masterpieces. You could leave and return, moments or days or years or centuries apart, and it would feel as if the music hardly even stopped or faded.

Brother Matthias’s comes and goes—it’s not a constant, it’s a great Dharma lesson in how ephemeral our existence is. Yet I know, wherever I am in the wide world, if I meet up again with someone from those times, then we can still cross that threshold together, and we’ll be home at the Lodge again.

[caption: photograph of Matthias’s Mountain Rest Lodge, c1965, by Chris Bonington]

[1] Turkish: “You never knew who might blow in on the wings of a mountain storm.”
[2] Turkish: “Visitors should be polite. If they are not, the mountains will teach them manners.”
[3] Other individuals whose biographical chronologies would seem to indicate extensive Rift-exposure include Vagyok, Elzbieta Purves (although the latter’s longevity has been attributed to other, possibly genetic or “supernatural” causes), and a few others.

Queep, around 1975

My Dearest Professor:

Again, as I'm sad to say is becoming usual, I must offer I apologies and beg your indulgence with my tardiness. I have tried - with mixed success - to own up to my shortcomings but it seems as though I simply cannot turn in my assignments on time. I have, at the very least, spoken with my mother about this and admitted to all my failures, so I should certainly hope that you won't hear from her. My own faults have strained your patience quite enough, and you certainly don't need her complaints as well.

I must say that the State Library Of New Mexico is a fascinating place, despite the fact that the long-rumored field notes of Hazzard-Igniti were nowhere to be found. Obviously you don't need me to tell you what you already told me when you made my assignment, but I hounded the poor librarian - a long-suffering Mrs. Chavez - with all the details of Hazzard-Igniti's trip to northern New Mexico, apparently sponsored (at least in part) by Mabel Dodge-Lujan, and his investigations into the odd geomorphology of the Rio Grande Rift Valley. Mrs. Chavez promised she would continue looking for the field notes, as well as any of Mabel Dodge's unpublished memoirs that mentioned Hazzard-Igniti, but as I was turning my back I thought I saw her roll her eyes.

We may never find whether or not Hazzard-Igniti was even IN New Mexico, much less whether or not he made any progress in his geological investigations here.

Furthermore, I have little doubt that you will be hard-pressed to give me a passing grade this semester, and I am well aware that I may in fact have placed my entire academic career in jeopardy by this inexcusable lapse in my tenacity. I accept with humility and no defenses your judgment on my sophomoric behavior.

However: I would plead with you to accept these tidbits that I DID find while clamoring through the bedusted depths of the State Archives… first, this, a clipping from El Crepusculo de la Libertad (the predecessor of The Taos News, founded by Padre Antonio Jose Martinez around 1834-5, with the first printing press west of the Mississippi):

October 17, 1928

Residents of the Lama and Questa communities reported an inexplicable manifestation on the slopes of Flag Mountain last weekend.

A gigantic structure suddenly appeared where none had been before, remained for two days, and vanished once again, said Tomas Garcia, 64, of Questa.

"I was tracking an elk that I was going to shoot, and a hard rain followed by a strange fog came up from down in the gorge," said Garcia. "I bumped into this building in the fog. It was a huge place with stone foundations bigger than I have ever seen, and huge vigas. I knew it wasn't there the day before 'cause I was tracking that bull elk that day, too, and I was right there. I went home really fast. I was scared."

Garcia's daughter Danielle, 33, said "My father says he's going hunting, but he goes up there on Flag Mountain and drinks mescal with his buddies. They're loco. There's no building up there at all."

Hernando Lopez offered a second account.

"I was out there on my mule, and when the fog came up she started braying and didn't want to move," said Lopez. "Then, she got over it and walked right through the mist to this big building. There was a hitching post and she walked right up to it and wouldn't move again, so I tied her up and knocked on the door. This man with hair like long ropes let me in. I've never seen vigas that big. I've never been anywhere like it before. There was a lot of people in there, but I didn't recognize any of them. There was nobody from around here. But they were real friendly-like. They gave me some brown bread and a really good beer. I had more than one beer, actually. There was weird music coming from the back, and when I looked back there I thought I saw that old man they say who fought in the Civil War. He was playing the music, but it wasn't no guitar. I don't know what it was. It had a lot of strings and a long neck on it. It was getting dark. I left then. There was a woman with a white dog outside feeding my mule. I didn't think she'd want to leave but I saddled up and she rode right out. As I was going back to my house I saw this huge golden animal. I thought at first it was a elk, but I couldn't tell. I got out of there quick. It was bellowing and I didn't want it to attack me. Somebody told me later that the Civil War Colonel had a big yellow dog but I ain't ever see no dog get that big before."

Lopez' wife Ignacia said when reached for comment, "Hernando is stupid. Don't listen to him, he makes up stories about everything. But he did stink of beer when he got home, of course."

Then, professor, Mrs. Chavez directed me to an old-fashioned card-catalogue since she said that anything like Hazzard-Igniti's note wouldn't necessarily be in the electronic database. I sighed with horror at the prospect of slogging though the entire catalogue, and a quick perusal confirmed my worst fears that the cards were just thrown in in no order at all. I would have to go through the entire thing card-by-card. But I was in only the second drawer (of many) when I found this:

Nasilsinez, Habjar-Lawrence (1845? - 1920?) "Warriors, Mystics, Musicians, And Dancers Of High Bassanda" Copyright 1874, Podolov Brothers, Irkutsk

Professor! There may be a copy of Habjar-Lawrence Nasilsinez's book in the Sate Library Of New Mexico! I rushed to Mrs. Chavez with the card, and she blinked at me as if she couldn't believe I was asking for something that might actually be available. "I think I remember this," she said, pondering. While I was there, she couldn't find the book, but she swore she would contact me if and when she did come across it, and furthermore promised that in her slow moments she would actually look for it, not just wait to come across it.

So, with ongoing apologies for my sadly un-academic behavior, I do offer these small, tantalizing fragments to you, Sir, and until we speak again in regards to my enrollment status,

I remain

Your humble servant and student

Seymour M. Queep

Bassandan Iconography, sample #1:M
“Crayon image from the ‘Grimoire’ of Matthias’s Mountain Rest”

From the Matthiaskloster Grimoire

Brief analysis of the only known historical representation of Matthias’s Mountain Rest Lodge (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), though it also contains a good deal of additional information revealed to those versed in Bassandan iconography.

Rendered in crayon on cheap Soviet-era drawing paper, the provenance of the image is unknown, but based on watermarks and technical data, it is almost certainly a c1940s copy of a much older image, possibly from a manuscript. That MSS was conceivably the legendary Matthiaskloster Grimoire, the 300-year-old guest book, inscribed in hundreds of different hands, containing songs, tunes, dedications, remembrances, minor spells, and the like. If the source is correct, it suggests that Hazzard-Igniti, like other Bassanda figures scattered throughout the Correspondence, had actual first-hand knowledge of the lodge through having visited in person. The only other contents of the manila folder in which this crayon drawing was found in the Archive are a small slip of paper, notated—possibly in Hazzard-Igniti’s hand—reading "Астрахань 1947 - MSS c1642 Matthiaskloster" (The “Astrachan” referenced was a notorious camp on the north coast of the Black Sea). It is thought that perhaps the Doctor himself drew the fragment—possibly even from memory—based upon a much older manuscript (possibly the “c1642” reference) which he had rediscovered but which was lost or confiscated when Hazzard-Igniti was interned in the Gulag some time after 1941.

However, it is also entirely possible that the image is of a completely different provenance, though iconographic analysis is still revealing, regardless of the original source.

The image is consistent with what is known of Matthias’s, particularly its location seemingly well above the tree-line in the northern Alps, and certain aspects of the building’s physical construction: the stone foundations and timbered upper structures reflect its history of having been built upon the rough stone of the much older Matthiaskloster (monastery); likewise, the gigantic double doors at the entrance and the front windows which faced west and south toward the warmer lowlands, and the enormous chimney was is recounted to have been fed with deadfallen timber killed by dropping temperatures as the treeline crept down to lower altitudes.

The peaks in the center/left background are not positively identified, but it may be that they represent “The Three Brothers” of Bassandan mountaineering legend, based upon the folk-tale “Fi Talat Ixwan”, with the “eldest” and tallest being “Annolungma” (approx. 7900 metres above sea level). The legend of Orla Serdtse Sestry (The Eagle’s Heart Sisters) was said to originate from a mountain village on the slopes of Annolungma, and certainly there are cliffs of the sort described in the transcriptions of that legend found elsewhere in the Archive.

This interpretation is somewhat bolstered by the presence, in the upper-left quadrant of a crudely-drawn long-winged bird, presumably a raptor: a White-Rumped Vulture, Black Kite, or indeed possibly Asian Golden Eagle. The presence of the bird does not guarantee that the peaks depicted are The Three Brothers or the site of Orla Serdtse Sestry, because in Bassandan iconography it was not at all uncommon to add the depiction of an Eagle to any image which sought to evoke the courage, loyalty, and archetypal feminine power of the Legend, which of course formed the basis for Bronislava Nijinsky’s earth-shattering choreography on Xlbt. Op 16, the so-called “Bassandan Rite of Spring.” So it is ultimately unknowable whether the presence of the Eagle literally connotes that these birds were found in the neighborhood of the Mountain Rest, or whether the artist of the unknown original was simply referencing that folkloric metaphor.

Even less certain is the precise meaning of the Arabic numerals “14” contained within an outlined heart at the top center of the image. While the crude crayon frame of the mountain scene vaguely suggests the two leaves of a large open book (this thus supporting the idea that Hazzard-Igniti—if it was in fact he—was referencing the Matthiaskloster Grimoire), the “14” floats above the book, seemingly separate from and free of its connection. We know that Arabic numerals had come to the country by the 13th century CE, as the Liber Abaci of Leonard Fibonacci was well known and a cornerstone of medieval Bassandan mathematics, but the significance of this particular number, and its situation within an outlined heart, is unknown. Certainly numerology was a significant knowledge system within Bassandan scholarship, because of the centrality of mathematical ratios in understanding both the acoustics of sound and the behavior of magnetism, a very important and central phenomenon in Bassandan geography, geomancy, and electrical technology.

Yet, though the “14” within the heart is unexplained, one theory—a particularly poignant one—has been advanced.

We know that certain iconic images in Bassandan lore have been understood to be both psycho- and/or spatially-active: we have Winesap’s own 1997 account of the very peculiar capacities of original prints by Cifani Dhoma of the “Classic ’52 Band,” and the stories that were subsequently told (though not by him) about how through this image Winesap had come to participate in the “Great Train Ride for Bassanda” 90 years before.

It has been posited that perhaps Hazzard-Igniti, some time in the late 1940s, while trapped in the Gelug at the Astrachan camp, might have attempted, using crude materials and only the force of his remarkable memory, to construct a psychoactive image of the Mountain Rest Lodge. Under this theory, the Doctor, working in secret and in conditions of great physical and mental difficulty, would have sought to draw an image of the Mountain Rest, whose accuracy, iconography, and physical technique might render that image capable of human teleportation, as Winesap believed of the ’52 Photo. In this interpretation—which is, as we have said, quite poignant—Hazzard-Igniti numbered his attempts at this drawing, possibly as a means of distinguishing between them or, even more starkly, because he was losing the mental capacity to so distinguish, while he desperately tried to finish a drawing that might, through its telekinetic and telemagnetic powers, permit him to transport himself out of the horror of the camps so aptly described by Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

It is not recorded or explained how—if indeed the above hypothesis is true—Hazzard-Igniti’s last attempts at rendering the Mountain Rest found their way out of the Gulag and into the compendious collections of the Archive, but the above iconographic interpretation is consistent with other Bassandan art-historical and folkloric scholarship. Sadly, there is no record of the Doctor ever succeeding, as there is in fact no record of where or how he might have died or been buried.

If, on the other hand, as some more fanciful accounts have claimed, there was a successful attempt, e.g.

15

then this image “14” may represent, not Hazzard-Igniti’s last flickerings of hope for liberation, but in fact, a harbinger of escape and victory. As a slogan emblematic of the hope and courage of the 1970s Bassandan liberation movement commemorated him:

“Shifokor hech qachon noumid”(“The Doctor never despaired”).

Bauherr and Käsityöläinen on Annolungma.
Photo by Cifani Dhoma, Feb 1960

On the Mountains’ Peak

They came out of the pine and mountain alder into the granite and shale above the treeline on an early spring dawn of cold bright weather and sharp blue skies. There was little wind, but the high wispy clouds pinwheeled at different altitudes, suggesting unreliable weather. They walked single file, two women and a man, and two dogs—picking their way uphill through the loose scree, wary of a slip or fall. The dogs, remarkably silent for canines, wore leather boots to protect their paws from the sharp rock. The humans were dressed for alpine conditions: booted, gloved, and goggled against the cold and the sun’s glare. Other than the faint whistling winds, and the occasional call of a Black Kite, there was no sound, and the thin mountain air unnaturally amplified the sounds of the climbers: the pant of the dogs, the scrape of boots on gravel, the tunk and rattle as a climbing staff drove downward into the scree for a firm grip. From above, little could be seen of their faces, hidden by googles and earmuffs or the tight-drawn hoods of their parkas.

Moving laterally along the line of the last trees, they reached a bare spot where the scree leveled before tilting upward again, and stopped to draw breath. The dogs, grateful for the pause, capered around the blue-jacketed leader, whining with anticipation. She shrugged off her pack and pulled out a folding waxed-canvas water bowl, as the purple-jacketed woman in the middle of the string pushed back her hood, pulled off her dark glasses, and shook her short dark hair. She spoke in Ukrainian to the dogs “Stiyte spokiyno , vy durni zviri!” (“Be still, you foolish beasts!”). The man bringing up the rear, who carried a bulky pack from which a radio aerial protruded, pushed his goggles up on his forehead, as a grin split his sandy beard. “You got anything in there for me to drink?”

The leader pulled off a knit cap, showing short-cropped blonde hair, and likewise pulled down her goggles, revealing bright green eyes set in a tanned, weathered face.

She considered the blond man for a moment without expression, and then suddenly smiled. “Have to wait. I’m not hauling beer above the treeline. You can deal with bottled water or wait for the snowmelt.”

The sandy-haired man chuckled. To the dogs, she said “Down. Down, now.” And they sat obediently, while she poured water into the bowl, before jumping up at the command and lapping noisily. While they drank, the blonde woman turned to look at the uphill horizon, shading her eyes. With the other hand, she absently patted the white dog’s head.

Then she pointed upward and to the north. “We’ve got another 300 meters, I’d say, to the snowline. And when the sun hits that glacier, it’s going to start warming up. I want to be across the traverse before noon.” The Ukrainian said “OK, boss. So we go soon?” as she traded off to take the heavier pack of water and food and adjusted its straps, hefting it easily and expertly onto her broad shoulders.

“Yes. Once we’re across the traverse, we’ll find a spot out of the wind, and make camp. You two can mind the dogs and do your business while I go for the summit.”

After stopping to bow and offer flowers at a path-side shrine to Siddharajni which included a stone carving of the legendary yogini, nude except for a loincloth, ramrod-straight in Padmāsana as she faced north toward Annolungma, they resumed the single file and started laterally and uphill across the scree-field.

It took almost ninety minutes to gain the 300 meters in altitude—not because the climbing was technically difficult, but because of the slippery and unreliable gravel underfoot. The leader watched the sun’s ascent over the eastern ridges, as its fingers of light reached down the slope, toward the climbers and toward the snowpack they had been warned about. They came around to the foot of the southwest ridge; it reared upward, the snow fell away and the bare rock was revealed. As the slope steepened, and they had on occasion to lean forward for handholds, or to balance as they manipulated the dogs’ leads, they could feel the granite warming beneath their palms. The younger of the dogs whined softly, and the leader spoke to the dark-haired woman, who had taken the middle position of their stick of climbers.

“Nolla’, get yourself a good stance, all right? I’m going to put Mani on my pack, and if she slips I don’t want her to crash into you.” The other nodded, dug her boot-soles into the rock, banged in a piton, and looped a short safety line through its ring. Behind her, the blond-bearded man, who led the white dog, called jestingly, “Hey, what about Joost and Güzel? What if Mani crashes into us?” The leader looked down at him thoughtfully and said “Take care of Güzel first. Then maybe the beer. Then yourself.” Joost laughed and nodded.

The photographer crouched down on one knee and clucked her tongue to the young dog. Mani scrambled onto her mistress’s pack, clambering up with hind feet clawing at various straps, and draped her front paws one on each of her human’s shoulders. The latter took a deep breath, grunted, and rose to her feet, not noticeably discommoded by the additional weight. She reached up one hand to pat the young dog’s snout and said “Try not to drool in my ear, OK?” They resumed their slow-but-steady progress up the steep granite slope.

By the time they had rounded the ridge on the faint trekker’s path and come to the final base camp, the sun had lit most of the snowfield below them and they could hear the shush and trickle of wet snow and running water behind them. They were glad to be on the hard granite of the west face.

Joost hurried to erect the tent, anxious to get to his field recording, but Nolla’ insisted that he adjust its orientation and double-stake its guy-lines, sending him for extra cans of water from a rivulet of snowmelt just on the other side of the ridge. Nolla’ herself checked the dogs’ feet for injuries, fed them, and then looked at her friend, handing her the much-lightened haversack.

“OK now. This is just water, a little food, and the best of the sleeping bags, in case you get delayed. You get up that hill, see what you can see. We are OK here.”

The photographer took the haversack, turned and looked northeast toward the summit. In the thin clear mountain air of midday, it seemed much closer than she knew it to be. She looked back at her friend.

“Okay, Nolla’. Thanks.” And she commenced the final stage…

Attaining the summit, she sat on her haunches, and stared out beyond the snowfields, to where the noon-day sun touched reddish gold off the distant peaks. And she thought of Hazzard-Igniti, in a lecture years before in the battered environs of Anschluss-era Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, with the Soviet artillery pounding away on Ballyizget’s outskirts. None present had known that just a few weeks later, as an unforeseen, tragic repercussion of this public talk and its military implications, the Sovet Bezpeky (secret police) would kidnap the Doctor and disappear him into the Gulag.

She herself had already deserted her post as a Soviet combat photographer, appalled by the human rights abuses she had seen on both sides, and slipped into the city, hoping to offer her assistance to the partisans as photographer, driver, bodyguard, or guide. She knew no one, but the old walls of the Conservatory, the images of musicians and composers from the past, and the familiar sounds and smells of pianos and chalk, all comforted her. She was at the lecture by chance.

The Doctor had stood behind the battered lectern, in a room full of mismatched and broken chairs, quiet except for the shuffling of his papers, the scratching of pencils, and, in the distance, the rumble of big-caliber guns. To the dozen young people present—science, mythology, and folklore students grimly hanging on to university routine even as the worlds of Nazi occupiers and Soviet “liberators” collided—he had discoursed upon magnetism and folklore and their intersecting histories in Bassanda, covering the old-fashioned chalkboard which was the classroom’s only teaching equipment with figures, diagrams, and esoteric words from half a dozen languages. The photographer had not followed all the theoretical formulae and technical terminology, but had found herself powerfully engaged by Hazzard-Igniti’s passionate commitment to both the logic and the significance of the arguments he was making—whatever they were. Around her, the students scribbled furious notes, occasionally whispering fiercely back-and-forth to one another as they tried to keep up.

At the door, two additional persons listened intently but wrote nothing. They stood still, and appeared to be paying equal attention to the content of the Doctor’s talk and to the sounds from the outside environment. One was a hulking very young man—hardly more than a teenager—dressed in rough peasant’s clothing and a peaked cap. He had a Soviet PPS submachine gun slung over one shoulder and a fiddle case over the other. The second was a short-statured, small-boned woman, deeply tanned, also dressed in rough clothes, with short, straw-blonde hair sticking out from under a cylindrical newsboy’s cap. She carried no firearm, but had a light haversack over one shoulder. A sheathed Sykes-Fairborn fighting knife was threaded onto her belt at the small of her back.

Outside, there was a longer and louder roll of artillery thunder, and the Doctor grimaced.

“Well, colleagues—I have heard that sound before and I know what it means. We will have to cut our concluding seminar a little shorter, but before we finish, it is essential that you all see this last piece of data. Step closer to the lectern—this item is too precious for me to pass it around.”

Curious, the mismatched dozen of students left their notebooks and textbooks open on their desks and crowded around the small raised dais. The Doctor placed his worn brass-cornered briefcase on the lectern and carefully opened its lid. Without touching the contents, he swiveled the case so that the ring of open-eyed youngsters could see inside.

“Yes, colleagues: these are They. These are just a few of the Documents—the only ones I have been able to track in the municipal archives—which came back to Ballyizget in the ‘Oughts. If you don’t know the story of the Great Train Ride for Bassanda, and of Colonel Thompson, General Landes, Mam’selle Cecile Lapin, and Ismail Durang—then you should. It is a tale that bears retelling, and it changed the course of Tsarist history in our country. It is only a shame that, once again, the knowledge of how to use these Documents for peace, what was once known in the high monasteries, was again lost.”

His voice grew and strengthened. “But if we are to have peace in our country, peace in the wider world, then we need all the tools we can find—tools of the heart and mind, of science and of poetry, of history and of myth—if we are going to beat the imperialists’ swords once and for all into plowshares. Perhaps this is the next chapter.”

He reached out and gently closed the case. “I don’t know what is the next meeting we will have, colleagues. Life is uncertain, in these present days more than most. Please be careful, carry this knowledge with you, and work for a better future.”

He snapped the latches on the briefcase and hefted it in his left hand, turning toward the mismatched sentries at the door. “All right, friends. I think our seminar is dismissed. Let us go and find Yezget-Bey.”

As the trio—the two armed civilians and the thin-shouldered academic—left the room, the students burst into a buzz of conversation, crowding around the professor, shaking his hand, expressing thanks. The photographer ignored them, and slipped along the room’s wall. She waited outside the classroom door, to follow the Doctor and his companions down the corridor and out the building’s stone steps, battered by shrapnel and years of Nazi graffiti. They were heading for an enormous car, parked at the curb, which looked like a small dacha built onto the back of a truck chassis.

Sensing movement behind them—though the photographer had moved silently— the small newsboy-capped woman turned like a dancer and slid to one side, drawing the eye and any potential weapons fire away from the Doctor. Her hand waved behind her back and came forward with the knife, but even as the big-boned young man, her companion, whirled and pointed his own weapon, the woman raised her free hand, and came up out of her fighting crouch.

“No, Yako’. I think this is no threat. I think this might be a future Friend of Bassanda.”

She smiled up the staircase to the photographer.

“Is that true, young woman? Are you a friend of the Friends?”…

The memory faded. On the mountain, the photographer came back to the present. She crossed her legs, put her hands on her knees, straightened her back, and breathed in slowly through her nose. Looking out over the expanse of the Bassandan Alps, peak beyond peak like a Hokusai landscape, the world fell away and time slowed down. The sky rang around her ears and she could feel the mountains humming beneath her. The sun, close overhead, wheeled an arc just above her head.

She thought back to the previous night’s conversation. Brother Mathias had leaned forward, massive forearms folded on the bar of his Mountain Guest House, his eyes veiled and thoughtful as they spoke of the Peaks. They had talked of the Three Brothers--Fi Talat Ixwan from the old legend—and of the “eldest,” the tallest: Annolungma, the Magic Peak. As the Chandra the Moon rose full and seemingly close beyond the slats of the shuttered windows facing east, they talked of the routes upward, and the weather patterns. He warned her “It doesn’t matter what season it is—the Mountains’ forces are always at play.”[1] And she asked after the giant wolves and the Parvatamā mānisaharū, the huge bipeds who were said to roam the snowfields above the lodge. He had smiled and replied “The Mānisaharū won’t give you trouble; they know me, and I’ve told them of you, and they’ll leave you alone. But don’t be foolish about the peaks themselves—the Mountain Gods are nowhere near as hospitable. The monks who founded the Matthiaskloster said the mountains could open—themselves, or the mind, or even the doors between worlds. You’ll need to be careful.”

She had asked about routes. He said “Kangshung, the East Face—maybe. If the weather is clear, the snowpack will start to melt and shift after about midday; take that way only if the clouds are thick and the snow is firm. The Southwest Face, and then turning to the north, is better on a bright day. You’ll have to make the traverse, but then you’ll be out of the sun and the icepack will hold.” He unfolded a battered large-scale topographic map of the range on the bar, spreading it across the counter, pocked with embedded coins from all over the world. His broad finger traced the routes.

“Here: stay near the tree line after Siddharajni’s shrine, as you head west above the Lodge: it’ll keep you out of the wind, and the going will be faster: the snow’s not as deep. By the time the sun comes up over the eastern ridge, you’ll want to be out on the slope so you can get over the ice-field before it warms up too much. And then you can make camp on the northwest ridge, and strike for the summit.”

He folded the map and handed it over the bar. As she tucked it away and stood up from the barstool, the two dogs curled around its pillar got to their feet. Mathias, a benevolent rope-haired giant, raised his eyebrows as he leaned back against the bar’s rear wall of rare, expensive, and exotic cordials. He re-crossed his arms.

“Just what is it you’re looking for on top of the Big Brother?”

She paused. Then she leaned down to pat the white dog’s head. Then she looked up again, and smiled, a quirk at the corner of her mouth. She met Matthias’s eye.

“Clarity.”

Matthias grinned. “Well, that’s one thing he’s usually good at. Things get real clear at the Peak. Śubhakāmanā mērō, mitra.”[2]

The recollection faded. Her heart rate slowed. Her breathing deepened.

The mountain hummed beneath her. Time slowed.

Quiet…

Much later—an hour? two hours?—she broke the cycle of her breathing and relaxed her concentration. Arching her back, she dipped one shoulder and then the other, stretching her spine. Leaning forward, she shaded her eyes and used a small brass telescope to peer down southward across the snowfields to their base camp. She could see Nolla, long-lensed camera slung on a photographer’s harness pushed around to her back, playing with the two dogs as they pranced and rolled through the thin powder snow. Beyond, Joost prowled the sound-field, his Neumann microphone visible at the end of a long wand, which he slowly waved as he pivoted to capture the sounds of wind and of running water beneath the snow.

Shifting her posture, she rolled up to her feet, and looked west, to the bare peaks of Madhya bhā'i Parvatamā and Sānā Bhā'i—the second and third of the Three Brothers. Her hand went to her belt, and she pulled out a compass, flipping it open with a practiced gesture. Slowly pivoting and side-stepping, and keeping her eye on the compass even as the contrary winds on Annolungma’s peak whipped at her jacket, she slowly calibrated her position until the visible summits of the Middle Brother Mountain and the Little Brother were directly in line with her own place on the peak of Annolungma.

As she did so, the compass needle suddenly spun wildly and it was as if the sun was whirling over her head. She paused. Despite the deep rasp of her trained mountaineer’s breathing, she was conscious of the lack of oxygen at this high altitude, and the resultant dizziness was disorientating. She could likewise feel the electrical power emanating up from inside the earth’s bones. The air danced around her and she heard voices calling as if through a distant rift. The wind suddenly howled in her ears, dark clouds rolled across the sky, and the mountain heaved under her feet. Voices whispered in her head said, louder and louder and growing to a howl “It’s you it’s you it’s you your fault YOUR fault YOUR FAULT you saw it saw it saw it DID IT SAW IT and now DIDN’T STOP IT” and visions of shot-torn streets and children screaming, and rows of bloodstained hospital beds and buildings exploding “and you’re going to PAY AND GO AWAY AND PAY AND PAY AND IT’S AT YOUR DOOR AND DOOM FOR YOU AND AT THE DOOR FOR ALL OF YOU AND YOU ARE THE ONE IT WAS YOU AND YOU DID NOTHING…..!”

She gasped at the vision, and shook her head violently to dispel it. “NO!” she screamed internally. “This is not the past! I am not the past! This is just me and the mountain!” She fell to her knees and pounded her mittened hand into the rock of the summit.

“NO!”

And suddenly it was quiet on the mountaintop, except for the loud hiss of her erratic breathing. The wind dropped, and after a few moments, the rolling clouds cleared and the sun again shone quietly over the rocks and a light dusting of new snow. Far down past the top-most snowfield, she could see the minute specks that were her friends.

And she thought back—to the Doctor, gone now, so they thought, into the darkness of the Gulag; to the formidable Madame Szabo and her tribal brood; the General and the Colonel, such unlikely larger-than-life characters she thought she might have met only in dreams; the youngsters and oldsters in the Band; her friends down below, two-legged and four-legged; of the new world coming, to which they had all at least implicitly committed themselves; of the long trail of friends and enemies and victories and defeats and works and choices and sorrows that had led from those moments to this one; and she thought of the tall gaunt smiling figure of Yezget-Bey himself, who sometimes came to her in dreams and held her, to stave off the nightmares—and she realized that she had been right all along: that the story was not at an end. That it might never end. And that this perhaps was the point.

She paused. Closed the compass. And breathed in, as if to fill all her lungs and all the lungs below with the thin crystalline icy-pure air of the peaks, and breathed out, as if blowing breath into the lungs of the world.

She took one last sighting of the peaks of the Three Brothers—herself on Annolungma, and the straight-as-a-dye line that traced through the summits of Madhya bhā'i Parvatamā and Sānā Bhā'I, fixing the location of this highest-altitude Portal for others, as she had been instructed—and sent a small prayer of thanks, and of hope for the future, to Dr Hazzard-Igniti, wherever or if-ever he still was.

And then she shouldered her pack, and began the journey down to the land of the living.

They sat together, the three humans and two canines—three two-leggeds and two four-leggeds—and watched Sūrya, the Sun, as she pirouetted down through the western sky and kissed the mountain ranges with red and gold. They ate parboiled rice and chocolate, and drank Joost Bauherr’s hoarded Tripl beer, around a tiny fire of dried yak dung, and slept that night under canvas, listening to the voices of the Three Brothers.

They dreamed of home.

[1] A possible reference to the complex electrical storms caused by the collision, in the high Alps, of various magnetic ley lines.
[2] Nepali: “Good luck, my friend.”

Lafcadio Hearn meets the Colonel

[Editor’s note: This unpublished fragment was found in the papers of the Greek-Irish journalist Koizumi Yakumo (1850-1904), formerly Lafcadio Hearn, left behind in his desk at Waseda University in Japan upon his death in 1904. Though Yakumo/Hearn had the professional journalist’s knack of turning almost any piece of prose into a salable publication, it appears that this fragment may not have been for public consumption—perhaps for friends or a limited readership, only. Hearn’s language is as a result slightly rougher, more direct, and more descriptive than most of his published work.]

Matsue can be definitely divided into three architectural quarters: the district of the merchants and shop-keepers, forming the heart of the settlement, where all the houses are two stories high; the district of the temples, including nearly the whole south-eastern part of the town; and the district or districts of the shizoku (formerly called samurai), comprising a vast number of large, roomy, garden-girt, one-story dwellings.

If the new arrival wishes to become acquainted with the most charming and engaging inhabitants of Matsue, it is wise to seek such acquaintance through the community of oyatoi gaikokujin—those Westerners who have come to this place as advisors, educators, and scientists in the employ of the Meiji Emperor. These are without exception amusing and erudite companions, fonts of information and gossip about goings-on within the Diet and the Palace, and they are capable of introducing the intrepid visitor to some remarkable and unique cultural expressions. Through my acquaintances of Japan “Old Hands,” I was exposed to Shinto and Buddhist ceremonies, to the grounds of the Black Castle itself, to the tea ceremony and that of viewing the mulberry blossoms by moonlight, and the more delicate pleasures of the onsen geisha and the Willow Quarter.

It became my habit to refresh myself, at the hottest part of the day, from the exertions of the morning’s writing (itself sometimes delayed if I had been late to bed after an expedition into the night-time city), in a siesta after luncheon—a habit I had developed in my previous assignment in the French Indies at Martinique. My cleaning woman, the estimable Hausukīpā-San, had strict instructions that I was not to be disturbed in this period.

However, one warm afternoon in May 1890, when I was not yet quite ready to emerge from sleep, Hausu-San coughed on the other side of the shoji screen.

Watashi wa, ishi kyō mōshiwakearimasen. Kita yūjin ga arimasu. [“I am sorry Doctor Sir. There is a friend who has come.”]

“All right,” I grunted. “A moment, please.”

After splashing my face with water from the ewer at the edge of the tatami, I pulled on a plain black kimono, having slept in the loose nagajuban. On the verandah I was met by the bent figure of Hausu-San, her brown face creased with a diffident smile, bowing repeatedly. The bespectacled young man with her was Futabatei Shimei, a highly regarded man of letters to whom I had been introduced at a literary luncheon a few weeks previously. A thoughtful, well-read individual of considerable personal charisma, he was regarded as an author of great promise, his realist novel Ukigumo (“Floating Clouds”) having ushered in a new era in Japanese letters.

It was to the shizoku district that my friend Shimei conducted me, saying en route: “I know that you have interest in the ancient arts of Nippon. Though I understand you to be a peaceable person, some of our most fascinating tradition-bearers combine the insights of the monastic and the martial. I propose that we should attend a meeting at the Kurumazaka dojo of the Sensei Sakakibara, chief teacher in the Jikishinkage school of sword-play.”

My friend gave me to understand that this teacher had experienced personal difficulties when, after the fall of the Shogunate, his traditional means of patronage had become available. Now a wanderer, a kind of modern day ronin, he seldom appeared at large gatherings, but still taught the art of kenjustu or sword practice. I eagerly assented to Futabatei-San’s suggestion…

I knelt, the woven bamboo matting under my knees comfortably mitigating the pressure of the polished, closely-fitted floor boards. To my left, past the wood-and-paper sliding doors that stood open, I could see the mulberry bushes were just coming into blossom. I was aware of the lines and rows of towns-people who knelt around me. The occasional cough or rustle of clothing emphasized the otherwise quiet decorum of the crowd. Across the dojo from us, the members of the Gakkō (school) sat cross-legged and motionless. I was given to understand that this immobility was a gesture of respect to the solemnity of the occasion.

The purpose of the ceremony, as had been explained to me, was the dedication of a new gallery of Jikishinkage teachers. The guest of honor was not yet present and so I had opportunity to look around and make mental notes upon the scene. As was common in many formal spaces I had already encountered in Matsue, the emphasis was upon clear, open spaces and the clean beauty of natural materials: cedar, oak, bamboo, and red tile. With the shoji screens slid aside to welcome the breezes on this hot day, there was a splendid contrast between the quiet muted colors and clean lines of the interior and the profusion of foliage and blooms just without.

Among the guests, most were in conventional western garb, but a few—especially young women accompanying powerful shoshi (gentlemen)—in classical court clothing; several were persons who I knew by reputation or prior acquaintance. Among the disciples of the school seated across from the guests, I recognized the Baron von Siebold, to whom I had been introduced in an anteroom of the Emperor’s levee a few days before. Wearing the golden-hued bamboo armor and white tunic of the school, with long dark skirts tucked around his crossed knees, his dark-blond, slicked-back hair and rakish Kaiser moustache contrasted sharply with the clean-shaven olive-skinned faces all around him. Another European unknown to me, a bulky older man with a long dark beard and his hair cut en brosse, also dressed in the school’s uniform, sat near. He happened to make eye-contact with me and gave an abrupt Teutonic nod.

Most of the other students were appreciably younger and unmistakably Japanese—though there were several who I had previously met on the Bourse in western clothes and conversing readily in English of constitutional reforms and the threat of Chinese aggression in Korea. Here, though, all was solemnity and traditional ceremonial. The birds sang in the trees outside, and the breeze from the open shoji eddied the smoke of the incense at the Shinto altar, covered with photographs of past masters, which stood to one side of the dais to my right.

With the clash of a brass gong, the shoji at the top of the hall snicked back, and we guests and the junior students turned and respectfully came to our feet, to bow with a collective rustle of starched clothing. I saw the man I took to be Sakakibara-Sensei. The visiting teacher was a rather squat, powerfully-built man apparently in his fifties, armed with the traditional two swords of the samurai—a prohibited armament in these days of the modernist Meiji Restoration. Despite his weather-beaten appearance and rather ragged clothes, he was treated with great deference by those around him, who knelt as he stepped across the threshold of the room and mounted the low dais to the seat of honor. He was followed by the party of teachers—most of them small aged men of immense gravity—and senior students—several of whom I had seen in very impressive sparring sessions, but who here were deferential and modest in their bearing.

One among them, however, stood out most decidedly: a tall man, unmistakably a Gaijin, a Caucasian, though his clothing and bearing were impeccably appropriate. Dressed like the other senior students in dark gi and bamboo armor, he nevertheless towered over them, standing six feet or more in height. He was dark-skinned and weather-beaten and wore a short full beard; his dark hair, gray-streaked, was clubbed back in a pigtail that hung to the middle of his back. Though he positioned himself respectfully toward the rear of the group of senior students, and despite the fact that he moved, stood, and sat like a Japanese, his sheer physical presence drew the eye by its sheer incongruity. As the ceremony began, and a series of offerings were made to the tama (ancestors of the school and the lineage), I found myself wondering at his presence. Not at the simple presence of a Gaijin—as I have said, there were others present, and still others who—like myself—had been drawn by the cultural and mercantile opportunities offered by the modernistic and internationalist polices of the Meiji Restoration.

But this man, even before I met him, was self-evidently not of the usual run of oyatoi gaikokujin—more common to be found among them were plump bankers, pale clerks, and stoop-shouldered scholars. No, this man was something different; indeed, in his body stance, features, movements, he reminded me strongly of other Americans I had met, particularly on the wharves of Cincinnati and le Vieux Carré—boatmen, longshoremen, back-country hunters. He was as incongruously out of place amongst the deferential and slight-statured Nipponese as an Arctic wolf.

Yet in the brief formal kata—demonstrations—which were offered by the senior students, he showed himself to be as skilled as any; in fact, he was one of the few to whom the Sensei offered a direct and individual word of approbation. At the end of the ceremony, after a round of bows and final offerings, the townspeople began to file out of the dojo, pausing to admire the immaculate grounds and trees. A few of the junior students made a queue for a personal word with Sakakibara-Sensei, though the seniors sought to restrict this and usher the Sensei out of the dojo to the teacher’s rooms.

In the midst of this commotion, the crewcut, bearded European rushed up to me, and said, in thickly-accented English, “You are the Irishman, the journalist, of whom the Baron has told me? I am Bälz, physician and amateur swordsman. I welcome you to Matsue—will you be joining our small colony of expatriates here?” Before I could answer, Baron von Siebold joined us, and then Herr Doktor Bälz hurried on.

“Come, come, come—you must meet our esteemed friend the Colonel!”

Upon introductions, I clasped his hand—with callouses rough as sharkskin and discolored by what looked like old gunpowder burns—and looked up into the craggy face. He smiled, and spoke in the soft, slurred accents of the American South.

“Writer, are ye? So I hear, anyway. Agus sílim roinnimid Éire i bpáirt?[1]

I said, “Yes, in fact, sir. Waterford—and yourself?”

“Oh, here and there. I’d admit to a passin’ familiarity with Aran, for sure—mebbe Galway an’ West Clare too. What brings you to Nippon?”

Talking thus on casual topics, we allowed the bustling Dr Bälz to hurry us out of the building to the street just outside the temple, and into the nearest noodle shop. The Colonel declined the ramen but displayed a close knowledge of the local shōchū. He seemed content to let Bälz and the Baron and Futabatei make the majority of the conversation, but I did learn that he had a semi-official role in Nippon, ostensibly as an advisor to the Emperor on modern military strategy and tactics. In practice, it appeared, his time in the royal presence was primarily taken up with answering myriad questions about the American West and his adventures there.

Over the next several months I came to spend as much time with Dr Bälz and his circle of Gaijin as I did with my local Japanese informants. I never resented the Doctor’s presence—he was a fount of good talk and useful introductions, and generous to a fault—but I will confess that I sometimes wished for more opportunity to meet locals, develop my own contacts, and simply wander the streets on my own, seeking what I might find. I happened to mention this to the Colonel early on one warm sleepy June evening, as we waited in a small public garden for Bälz and Futabatei Shimei to join us for supper.

“Herr Doktor Bälz—he is an excellent major-domo for introductions to, it seems, the entire city—but do you not find his presence a bit, shall we say, overwhelming?”

Sitting hunched on the garden’s stone bench next to me in the rusty black suit and string tie he typically wore as street clothes, one knee crossed over the other and his arms folded, watching the butterflies in the hedge across the path from us under the brim of his Westerner’s Stetson hat, the Colonel did not reply for a few moments, and I worried momentarily that perhaps he had taken offense on behalf of our mutual friend. But then he spoke, thoughtfully.

“Oh, I reckon so. But—sometimes an overwhelmingly rational presence like the Herr Dokter’s kin keep back some other kin’s a problems. Don’t mind him too much; you’d be s’prised, some moments, how glad ye’d be of him.”

Joined in that moment by our friends, I did not have opportunity to inquire of the Colonel precisely what sorts of “moments” he referred to. But his words stayed with me, and at times I would find myself wondering when or in what circumstances an “overwhelmingly rational” presence like the Doctor’s might be necessary.

That evening, we four—the Doctor, the Colonel, Futabatei the Author, and myself—joined a large party for dinner at the eating house founded by Hanaya Yohei, a revolutionary chef, now deceased. By this point, I considered myself to be a Matsue “old hand,” and so was not completely shocked to discover that the principle specialty of the house was the raw-fish-and-rice cake called sushi (it was not, I comforted myself, so very different from the raw fish ceviche and assiette du cocotier I had known in the West Indies). Though Bälz and Futabatei ate the house specialty with gusto, I noticed that the Colonel also avoided the raw fish, contenting himself with fresh fruit and plain rice.

We were joined at this dinner—offered in the most modernist fashion at a conventional western table with proper armchairs—by other members of Matsue’s progressive political and literary communities, including the young novelist Kyōka Izumi, only nineteen years of age, and the Old Lion of Japanese dramaturgy, the legendary kabuki playwright Kawatake Mokuami: now retired at age seventy-four, but still a vital and strong-minded interlocutor and conversationalist. Others in the party included actors, dancers, writers, and musicians, not all of whose names I was able to record.

One of the group, however, both Futabatei and myself remarked: a young female introduced to us by Kawatake-San, again via the translation of the ubiquitous Doktor Bälz, as “one of the great shamisen players of Nippon; if I were still writing, she would be the only musician for my kabuki.” Her name was Okada Chou: a slender woman, pale, clad mostly in simple white, tall for a Japanese but with a modest and rather remote manner. She did not blush or respond to Kawatake’s hyperbole, or to Bälz’s heavy German enthusiasm, but she did reach across the table to clasp our hands in a forthright manner.

Bälz continued, “Oh, she is a wonder, this Okada-San: a fine musician, but also a singer and composer of songs, and with a fund of folk tales and other stories as well. Quite a Renaissance woman, as we might say!”

I pricked up my ears at this, interested—as I always was—in meeting those who knew the folkloric tales of a place’s people and events. Before the evening, which stretched well on into the early morning hours, and many rounds of toasts, was over, we three gaikokujin had arranged to meet Okada Chou again, this time for tea at her home near the canal…

Following the meal and its clearing away by her silent house-maid, Okada-San poured tea and we drank the ritual three sips.

After a few moments, she said in a soft voice, “Bälz -San had said that you distinguished gentlemen are interested in traditional ways of Nippon, and in literary materials in particular.”

The Colonel, sitting erect in the lotus position, smiled and inclined his head silently towards myself. Not expecting to speak for all of us, and struck by the young woman’s reserved manner, I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts so that I might speak with clarity.

“Yes, Okada-San—thank you. I myself am a journalist, but I am also a student of folklore and literature. I would welcome the opportunity to hear more of the supernatural tales of Matsue and its history, and other tales that a Westerner might comprehend.”

Okada Chou began to speak, and I found myself leaning closer, drawn in by her soft, uninflected voice. She spoke, with a most attractive slight lisp, and we listened, and she poured tea, and the old woman brought mochi and sata andagi and more tea. Futabatei asked the occasional question, and I myself scribbled furious notes in my newspaperman’s shorthand and asked the occasional question as well. Though Okada-San’s manner was so reserved, her stories—of demons and samurai, ghosts and tragic heroines, epic heroism and base treachery—were hypnotic. As the paper-framed andan oil lamps burned low, and then one by one guttered out, I—and, I assume, Futabei as well—found ourselves drawn further and further into the tales: so much so that the surroundings, the clean-lined paper walls, the soft thick tatami under our knees, even the pungent flavors and aromas of mochi and tea, seemed to fade…until only the features of the stories, their dramatic moments of violence or eros, their poignant endings or mysterious beginnings, seemed real.

It was with a start that I realized the last of the lanterns had gone out and that the room had fallen silent. A dim pinkish light to the east was brightening the shoji, but the north end of the room, where Okada-San sat, remained lost in the shadows. I realized that she was no longer speaking, and that I did not know how long ago the silence had fallen. Futabei was asleep beside me.

I heard a low hiss, barely audible, from the tatami where the young woman sat. I saw the whites of Colonel Thompson’s eyes flicker in the dimness, though he made no move or sound. Outside in the garden, a first bird called tentatively, and then another.

The hiss came again, and I heard a soft slithering sound from the dark end of the room. But at that moment—and for the first time in hours—the Colonel shifted, and came easily to his feet. I saw his hand flicker at his waist, and a momentary flash of the pink morning light reflected on glass or metal.

Futabei-San snorted next to me and twitched convulsively. He mumbled for a moment and I shook his shoulder to awaken him fully. The Colonel spoke, in his strongly accented yet idiomatic Japanese:

“Watashitachi wa anata no hanashi, wakai josei o arigatōgozaimashita.[2] But, with the dawn, it is time that we were departed. Domo arigato.”

For several long moments, the young woman did not respond. The Colonel spoke again, his voice firmer.

“Domo arigato, Okada-San. We will depart. Now.”

Finally I heard the sighing, soft voice of the young woman, and her white-clad shape appeared, as she stood up, drifting like a wraith from the shadows into the pinkish light of dawn.

“Very well, Korunel-San. You and Hurrin-San will always be welcome to return and hear more of my tales.” She did not offer a handclasp or make eye contact this time, but ducked her head, and we took our leave.

As we walked the pre-dawn streets back to my house, Futabei enthused to us about Okada Chou, her delicate form, the impeccability of her complexion, and the soft susurrus of her voice. Finally, as we entered the gate of my rented house, I said to him teasingly, “I am struck, Shimei-Cho, by the allure you have found in this young woman—my recollection is that you slept half the night.”

Futabei flushed, but then smiled. I heard the deep rumble of the Colonel’s answering chuckle.

We were laughing as I shouted to Hausukīpā-San for breakfast.

//

Over the course of that summer, I found myself engaging with a wider range of Matsue society. I was introduced to a variety of individuals, young and old, conservative and western-thinking, and was made to feel welcome in a number of different social circles. This was of course invaluable for my work, and provided many opportunities to encounter the folk tales, tales of place names, curiosities and ephemera which made for rich and colorful journalistic pieces. I continued to see the Herr Doktor and Futabei, and the Colonel occasionally—though the latter’s intermittent appearances, and a few words dropped in passing by the Baron, suggested to me that the American was often away on unspecified business.

Futabei-San, on the other hand, I saw more frequently: he was extremely interested in new progressive trends in western literature and asked endless questions about styles and authors. More and more, over that summer, when I saw Futabei I also saw Okada Chou—though they were discreet and quite proper in public settings, I sense that there was a growing, possibly romantic relationship between them. And certainly they shared many interests, particularly in their common activity of writing and making music for the kabuki. On occasion, we would attend performances at which Okada-San led the musicians from the shamisen, and there was no question that she was the virtuosa that Kawatake Mokuami had described. Among the gossip of the musicians after performances, the talk was all of her skill and expressive genius. One night, another shamisen player, who I suspected might be speaking from envy at her greater virtuosity, muttered in my hearing, “It’s all in that jade bachi she uses. If I had a wealthy patron who could bestow jade plectra upon me, I could be that strong a player.”

I though nothing more of this, but as a grizzled veteran of Amour’s wars (or so I thought myself at that time), I wished the playwright and the female virtuosa a kind of avuncular blessing, and thought little more about it.

I did meet the Colonel one night very late—or rather, one very early morning—in a drinking-house in Matsue’s small Willow Quarter. Futabei and Doktor Bälz were, as I understood, at the kabuki with Okada-San, and were then to adjourn to her home for tea and conversation. I had declined the theater, in favor of spending the evening talking to the oiran who was most senior in the tayū-house. As I have found courtesans all around the world, she was a fascinating and remarkably well-informed interlocutor, with acute observations about many aspects of Japanese culture, politics, values, and secret history, and with a marvelous sense of humor coinciding what may be the most unsentimental view of the world I have ever encountered. Given that she was a model of discretion, I took it as a signal endorsement and not a small personal compliment that she would share such unfettered wisdom with me, though she was always careful to avoid any use of names in her hilarious and ribald tales.

I had mentioned to this oiran my previous meetings with Okada Chou, and had been surprised to see her mobile, cynical face suddenly become very still.

“This young woman—you know her well?”

I replied that I did not, though I—and, even more, my young friend Futabei—found her to be fascinating company.

The madam was silent for a moment, and then spoke seemingly at a tangent.

“And the Kurrunel Tump-sin San: he is with you on these visits?”

“Actually, my lady, he is mostly unable to join us. His duties at the palace, and overseas, take him away from our presence, which we regret.”

She was silent again, and when she spoke I felt that she was choosing her words with great care, for reasons I could not divine.

“He will be here this evening—he has brought me some gifts back at a commission. May I respectfully suggest that you await him, and that he accompany you and Futabei on other visits?”

I was curious and in fact rather unsettled by her visible and very atypical circumspection—I was accustomed to thinking of Oiran-san as a strong, unsentimental, and very confident interlocutor—but I respected her comments and assured her that, in future visits to Okada Chou’s home, the Colonel-San would accompany us.

She nodded. “Domo arigato, Hurrun-San. I think that would be wisdom.”

She smoothed her kimono and visibly sought to change the subject, willing her face into a conspiratorial smile. “Now: will I tell you of the most recent doings of the geisha, the sake-dealer, and the university president, while we await his return?”…

Later that evening, well after midnight, I came out of Oiran-San’s parlor to find the front room of the tayū-house nearly deserted and the street beyond quiet. In the front corner to the right of the door—his preferred spot in any room—I found the Colonel, behind a small table on which stood two cups and a ceramic jar of his preferred shōchū. He gave a crooked grin as our eyes met.

“Oiran-San tells a good tale, don’t she?”

I assented, and, after leaving the tayū-house, we fell into step together on the walk back toward my house on the canal. As we paced through the dark quiet streets, with only an occasional lantern glowing from behind the shoji of the houses to either side, I returned to the oiran’s elliptical caution:

“She does tell tales, mostly amusing and revealing. But one was not so—rather allusive and indirect: she counsels against visiting Okada-San’s house unless in your presence. What does the Oiran anticipate might occur, otherwise—do you know?”

The Colonel was silent for several moments as we walked, and I had time to wonder if he would simply decline to respond. But then he spoke, thoughtfully and slowly.

“No, don’t ‘zactly know. I’ve seen a few things, here an’ there in the wide world, an’ I know that sometimes things aren’t quite ez they seem. Even more, I know what I don’t know. Reckon that might be what Madame was referrin’ to.”

He was silent for a few more paces, then spoke again.

“An’ you’re sayin’ Madame specifically cautioned about visitin’ Miss Okada’s house? Thet particular place?”

I nodded, recalling the marked change in Madame’s manner when she had issued this warning, and added “Though I think that Futabei might spend even more time at her home than do I—they have become quite close.”

As I did so, I saw the Colonel’s expression change—as if, behind his eyes, a previously-missing puzzle piece was falling into place.

“Alone? He visits her house along, jist the two of them?”

“Well—so I understand…As a friend, I hardly thought it my place to inquire indiscreetly—but yes. I would think it is likely that their relationship has progressed to that point.”

He spoke more quickly, and I felt a growing sense of urgency.

“And tonight? What ‘bout tonight? Wasn’t it Futabei an’ the Doktor both togither was to visit her?”

“Well, yes—so I thought. But why would that matter? What is the risk to Futabei if the Doctor were not to be present?”

The Colonel did not reply, but his pace quickened. I struggled to keep up with his longer stride.

“Colonel? Why is that we should feel concern?”

He still did not reply, and now I was trotting to keep up.

“Colonel?”

I was nearly running now, as we approached the last corner leading to the dark, mostly unlit road on which Okada’s house backed up to the castle’s moat. Rounding the corner, we nearly collided with Herr Doktor Bälz.

He was standing open-mouthed in the middle of the road, staring up into the night sky. We jerked to a halt, but he did not look around at us. The Colonel spoke urgently.

“Herr Doktor—where are Futabei and Okada?”

The Doktor’s gaze slowly came down, and he turned his face in our general direction. His eyes were unfocused and glazed. He did not respond.

“Herr Doktor Bälz-wo sind Futabei und Okada? Es eilt!”

The Doktor’s shoulders twitched for a moment, and the tremor ran through his whole body. Then he gulped, coughed, and cleared his throat. His eyes met the Colonel’s.

“Herr Doktor—Futabei! Quickly!”

Almost in slow motion, the Doktor nodded once, and raised his hand to point down the alley, past Okada Chou’s house, toward the castle. I heard a distant prolonged splashing, as of some large object falling into—or perhaps, emerging from?—the waters of the moat. The Colonel pushed past the Doktor, who spun and sat down heavily in the street, and we ran for the alley, myself gasping at the American’s heels.

In the dimness of the castle wall’s shadows, we saw something—a whitish, man-sized blur—stooping over a body lying on the damp cobblestones of the alley. The Colonel shouted, and the blur shuddered, expanding like a hot-air balloon and taking on a gold-tinged glow from within. As we approached at the run, the blur resolved itself into a gigantic whitish globe, looming over the body. I realized it was Futabei, limp and with soaking clothing.

The Colonel skidded to a halt a few yards from the giant glowing thing. I realized with a shudder that it had a single, red-rimmed eye, and a mouth gaping with teeth; a reddish tongue lolled from the mouth. It hissed menacingly, and in horror I recognized the serpentine susurrus from that night at Okada’s.

I heard a whisk of serge and leather beside me, and suddenly there was a dagger in the Colonel’s hand—a “Green River” knife of the sort I had seen wielded with brutal efficiency in the Cincinnati waterfront dives. Its saber-shaped blade caught the light from the glowing globe and reflected shards of gold onto the black waters of the moat. Rivulets of more water ran from Futabei’s clothing down into the runnels between the cobbles. My heart pounding, I held back the horror, crouching defensively over my unconscious friend.

The Colonel spoke.

“Konkai wa setsuzoku shimasen, Obaka-san. Kono ichi wa anata no tamede wa arimasen.”[3]

The creature—if that is indeed what it was—undulated slowly, like an undersea plant, floating in the air. It made no reply, but the hissing grew louder and its tongue lolled out longer.

The Colonel stepped one pace closer, and raised the knife, deftly reflecting light back at the Creature’s “eyes.” He spoke again, more loudly:

“Not this time, O-san. This one is not for you.”

The creature hissed louder, and now there were jagged teeth around the lolling tongue. It grew, like a balloon filling with hotter air, or a puffer fish expanding to fire its poison. It loomed over the Colonel, and I saw his granite features and grizzled beard lit by the globe’s unearthly golden light.

“Last chance, O-San. It’s time to go.”

The globular creature grew, and hissed louder, and its gigantic crescent-shaped mouth suddenly gaped wide as it swooped toward the Colonel to attack. Beneath me, Futabei twitched, made a choking sound, and suddenly vomited water from his mouth and nose.

At that sound, for a split second the monster flinched, like an undersea fish swimming in the air, and then lunged downward toward the Colonel.

But the Colonel side-stepped the attack like a dancer or toreador, and the foot-long dagger looped upward and across like a scythe—it met the monster in mid-air, slashing in a curving arc up under its chin and across its face. The monster shrieked and retreated and I felt its hot breath brush across my face. Futabei groaned and muttered “O-san?” and I suddenly found myself falling forward across his body. In the pinwheel of my vision, the black waters of the moat rushed up at me.

A hand like a vice clamped down on my wrist and my shoulder was almost jerked from its socket as the Colonel snatched me back from the brink. He dropped me unceremoniously on top of my friend Futabei, and whirled to look upward, knife foremost, ready to meet the monster’s next charge.

Only to find that there would be none. The globular creature was spinning like a top in the air above us, the hissing louder and more continuous now and sliding up the scale to a high shriek almost beyond the bounds of hearing. As it spun, I realized that it was splitting open, like a paper balloon grown too hot inside, the mouth with its jagged teeth growing wider and wider like a pumpkin.

And suddenly there was a soft explosion—like a hot-air balloon blown too full and bursting—and the rags of the globular creature spun like an out-of-control gunpowder rocket up into the sky. Following its trail, I saw it burst into a cloud of golden sparks high overhead.

There was a silence. The Colonel stood stock still for a few seconds, watching the last of the sparks shower downward and fade into nothingness. And then he shook himself, as of one who shakes after a deep plunge into water, and sheathed his knife at the small of his back. Turning toward us, he helped me draw Futabei to a sitting position and slapped his back hard to help eradicate the last of the water.

I said “What was that, Colonel? Futabei-San, what happened to you?”

The Colonel did not reply. The playwright said, “We were walking, and I was fascinated with her talk. And she suggested that we walk to view the moon’s reflection in the moat. And then I was suddenly in the water, falling downward.” He coughed. “But it was a most peaceful feeling—like going to sleep. That is all I remember.”

Wildly I looked at the American. “Colonel, what was that Thing?”

The Colonel did not reply for a moment, but heaved Futabei to his feet, slapping the water out of his clothes. Then he spoke.

“Waal, I tell ye. The folklorists’d say thet was jist a paper lantern, got too warm, burst open, an’ took off like a firework. They call ‘em Chōchin-obake—ghost lanterns—‘cause when they wear and split open, they kin look a little like a face.”

He slapped Futabei’s shoulder. “Mebbe our young friend here just had a little too much sake, an’ fell in the canal, an’ dreamt the rest. You reckon?”

I shook my head. I was unaccustomed to contradicting the Colonel, given his charisma and personal force, but I was quite confident that this prosaicism was not the explanation for what we had just witnessed. He nodded, and said “No, I rackoned you might not believe thet.”

He stooped and picked up a triangular object from the cobblestones where Futabei had lain. He held it up in the light from the castle’s high walls.

“An’ then there’s this.”

It was a jade shamisen bachi.

[1] “And I think we share Ireland in common?”
[2] We thank you for your stories, young lady.
[3] “Not this time, Obaka-San. This one is not for you.”

The 1965 Newport Folk Festival Band

By 1965, the Band had been on the road touring widely for over two decades, first as the People’s Liberation Orchestra (c1941-47) and then as the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra (from 1947), both behind and beyond the Iron Curtain. Members were more and more acutely aware of the very significant socio-cultural changes occurring in the West, with the rise of the American Civil Rights movement, the push toward nuclear disarmament, and even the (very earliest glimmerings of) the anti-Vietnam War movement. They were likewise conscious that their situation as an ensemble sponsored by a Soviet satellite was highly paradoxical—their state salaries, retirement funds, and health plans were deeply attractive, but the concomitant state-sanctioned control of content they found very frustrating. More than one of the band members had grumbled to Nas1lsinez, over the preceding several years, about the greater “freedom and opportunities” available beyond the Curtain, and at least intimated a desire to jump ship for a free-lance career in Western Europe or even the fabled USA. These grumblings were not decreased by the enthusiastic endorsements of the West’s potential which came from BNRO collaborators and friends, including Jérome Courvalle, Pappy Lilt, Rezeg Vagyok, Edward Abbey, and Andy Irvine (the latter of whom had encountered expat Bassandan musicians in London in 1963-64 before his fabled 1968 busking trips to Eastern Europe).

Yezget-Bey walked a very careful line, for the band members knew that he too was powerfully drawn to the openness of the West. However, the Leader was also acutely conscious that a complex network of musicians, families, partnered artists, institutions, and home-grown collaborators depended upon the Band, and upon the Band’s capacity to extend a protective network of support and advocacy, at home in Bassanda. The more mature band members (especially those more senior who had worked with him for a decade or more) intuited his support for their larger desires, but also recognized the significant pressure—and close scrutiny—to which he was subjected by the Commissars. Nas1lsinez engaged this balancing act literally for decades, juggling the very real and immediate goals and frustrations of his players versus the massive investment by the State in dictating the band’s personnel and public relations profile.

The BNRO leadership and members were not alone in their frustration at the failed reforms of Kruschev and his replacement with the gray bureaucrats Brezhnev and Kosygin. In the late ‘50s, there had been, throughout the Satellites and the state ensembles, a palpable sense of optimism—a sense that, after the long nightmare of Stalinism, Kruschev represented the possibility of relaxed social and cultural restrictions. When, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962) and Kremlin infighting, Kruschev was supplanted by Brezhnev in late 1964, that window of hope was perceived as slamming shut—and Nas1lsinez had even more difficulty persuading his players to stick together and keep the BNRO afloat. He was assisted in this by the more senior members still on the Band (O’Laoghaire, Biraz Ouiz, Szabo, Vagyok, Redžinald, the Srcetovredi Brothers), who remembered the wartime People’s Liberation Orchestra experience and the apocalyptic wreckage of the post-War period through which Yezget-Bey had safely navigated them. Nevertheless, by the early ‘60s, and especially in light of the heightened degree of Western visibility accorded the “Beatnik Band” of 1962 (a March 1962 Life magazine cover had featured Cifani Dhoma’s band portrait, with the legend “New Currents Behind the Iron Curtain”), younger members were restless and dissatisfied. Even the return to the fold of the veterans Krzysztof Arczewski (bass) and Rahmani Boenavida (trumpet, guitar, keyboards, vocals) and the arrival of promising newcomers could not wholly counterbalance the lamented departures of valued members Federica Rozhkov (violin, dance) and Yannoula Periplanó̱menos (flute)—and the youngest, those who did not even remember the stark War years, continued to cast longing eyes at the Western folk music “revival.”

There is a great deal of evidence in the Archives regarding these tensions—the Band members, while loyal to “Baba” and the mission “Fierce dedication to the traditions—and to each other”—were notoriously outspoken, and there are very passionate letters, telegrams, and journal entries in the Correspondence. Some ephemera and other primary sources likewise reinforce the immediacy of these tensions; the BNRO’s 23 July 1965 concert, for example, which should have been regarded as a kind of triumphant homecoming for a group which had held together so long, providing an artistic home and a public community identity to so many in and beyond Ballyizget, and which (by ’65) had “conquered” the fabled West, in fact drew highly negative headlines and concert reviews.[1] It is possible in fact that Madame Szabo’s and Zigaboo Barwn’s absence from the Newport dates was precisely a result of her remaining in Ballyizget to deal with the backlash from that concert, seeking to deflect the worst of the commissars’ ire.

So the ‘65 Band was an ensemble in the throes of internal as well as external transformation. As the cultural revolutions of the Sixties ramped up, perhaps no one in the band orbit except Yezget-Bey, and possibly Madame Szabo, fully understood how fundamentally music, politics, and international relations would be transformed over the course of that decade. YN had followed with great interest the American folk music revival, recalling its echoes in earlier “revivals” of which he had been part (most notably, the revival of the Bassandan hurdy-gurdy and bagpipe duet tradition in the first flush of 1920s Leninist progressive nationalism, swiftly supplanted by the horror of the Stalinist purge of folk musicians, and later the Popular Front of the 1930s, the source of much of the rhetoric of the early USA and UK 1960s revivals), and he saw in the Western folk “revolution” a manifestation of young people’s thirst for different, more participatory, more democratic means of expression and entertainment. While he recognized the classism and romanticism which complicated the exchange of folkloric musics from elderly rural tradition-bearers to younger college-educated urbanites, he nevertheless supported the experiments with traditional genres and personal songwriting of the American folk revival, and he kept close watch for historical and political moments within the Bassandan semiotic landscape when similar experiments might clear expressive and political space locally.

In addition to Irvine, the American nature writer Edward Abbey, the medieval music specialist Thomas Binkley, and the multi-instrumentalist David Lindley, particular friends of Bassanda in the West in this period include:

Eric von Schmidt (born Connecticut, 1931-2007): painter, Fulbright Scholar, army veteran, boat-builder, sailor, blues guitarist; a very significant influence upon and source of songs for the young Bob Dylan;

Richard Farina (born Brooklyn, 1937-66): novelist, guitarist, songwriter; a Bronx-born hustler and world-traveler, but whose Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, released posthumously just after his death in a motorcycle accident, has been described as “essentially Bassandan in outlook and prose style.”[2]

Geno Foreman (1939-66): another member of the Boston/Cambridge folk scene in the early 1960s, and another very strong influence on Bob Dylan. A noted acoustic blues guitarist, he also served as a bodyguard and personal assistant on several of Dylan’s early overseas tours and he moved into and through the BNRO orbit on more than one occasion. He had met Zigaboo Barwn in Morocco around 1962;

The remarkable deepwater sailor, scholar, and shanty-man Stan Hugill (1906-92), a direct tradition-bearer of the sailors’ work-song from the age of windjammers (Nas1lsinez is said to have commented, “I always liked to send my singers out for a season on Stan’s ships—they came back with harder hands and bigger lungs”).

All four of the above individuals were present at Newport ’65 and at the legendary party on board the schooner Bruxa do Mar on 24 July, the night before Dylan’s watershed performance, when, backed by members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Ban, he played electric guitar onstage for the first time. There is a great deal of hagiographic and mythographic apocrypha regarding this tumultuous performance, and possibly only Dylan himself shows to much advantage: Albert Grossman, Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Peter Yarrow all behaved problematically. A half-century later, eyewitnesses remember highly contrasting crowd responses, but it is inarguable that Dylan felt himself to be caught in the eye of a hurricane.

The tumult was somewhat prefigured by the divided crowd response to the Butterfield Blues Band at an afternoon workshop on 23 July, the day before Dylan’s revolutionary evening set, when the integrated 5-piece had presented a powerful set of Southside Chicago blues. Fronted by Butterfield’s powerful Little Walter-styled amplified harmonica, and featuring the frenetic solos of prototypical “guitar hero” Mike Bloomfield, the BBB brought a jolt of electricity to a festival which (unlike Newport Jazz) still presumed that its blues and folk were essentially rural and acoustic musics. Few audience members, and very few of the Festival’s Board members, were prepared for the electric revolution that was coming.

It was never explained how the ’65 Band could have appeared in the controversial Ballyizget concert on 23 July 1965 (cited above), jammed with Bob Dylan and the Butterfield Blues Band in Newport Rhode Island on the night of the 24th, and yet been back in Ballyizget to answer the Soviet commissars’ critiques on the 25th. It has sometimes been argued that the Band performing in Ballyizget must have been another ensemble “covering” the gig for the actual members, using the BNRO name; it has even been suggested that everyone at Newport who reported upon specific Bassandans’ presence was somehow mistaken or even lying. None of these appear to be credible explanation

One other possible explanation has been promulgated but it strains credibility—though, in fairness, much detail about Bassanda strains credibility. It has been alleged that there was in fact a Bassanda Rift Portal—an electromagnetic crack in the space-time continuum of the sort referenced elsewhere in the Correspondence— located somewhere among the islands south of the Massachusetts archipelago of Cape Cod: possibly off southwest Nantucket Island, or perhaps Naushon, near Falmouth Massachusetts on the mainland. There is no direct corroboration for the presence of this Rift at or near these locations, but analogous Portals have been identified elsewhere in the Archives: most notably in the northern Rio Grande Valley, the western Isles of Scotland, the northern Mississippi Hill Country, the Bassandan Alps near Brother Matthias’s Mountain Rest Lodge, and in the hills above San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, southern Mexico (see various accounts cited elsewhere in the Correspondence which confirm the very significant strategic, narrative, or physiological transformations sometimes effected by these Rifts). There are no other reports of such a rift on the northeast Atlantic coast, but a few small circumstantial details, from the 1965 story and from the region’s folklore, offer faint corroboration:

First, their means of transport: in contrast to almost all the other Folk Festival artists, who arrived by private cars and were domiciled in various of the legendary “summer cottages” (really mansions) that had made Newport a playground for the rich in the Gilded Age, and at the town’s Hotel Victor, the BNRO arrived by boat—in a converted fishing schooner called A Bruxa do Mar, conned by the Breton ex-smuggler Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, who had learned his seamanship in the Guernsey run, with von Schmidt himself—a competent coasting sailor—piloting them in through the Newport shoals. The Bruxa, a gaff topsail two-masted schooner of the sort sometimes employed by 19th century Bassanda smugglers precisely for its speed and ability to avoid detection, appears occasionally elsewhere in the canon, most commonly associated with the family of Davoud Gora, uncle to Ismail Durang, and a legendary seaman and navigator in the history of the Bassandanista partisans (Gora, who is not mentioned in the 1965 Newport accounts, is for example a significant figure in the epic story of the 1906 Great Train Ride for Bassanda). That the Bruxa might still have been in service 60 years after she is last documented—and over 2000 miles west of Bassanda—is not beyond the bounds of possibility, though the idea that she might have appeared off Newport, far from her Black Sea home, is decidedly more fanciful.

In fact, the presence of the Bruxa implied that the BNRO had traveled to Newport by schooner, not just from Nantucket or Naushon, but actually from Bassanda itself: it is known that Rifts sometimes involved water as well as electromagnetism (see the headwaters of the Rio Grande, and the shoreline of Hebrides), and certainly there is a long and rich (and often disreputable) tradition of Bassandan seamanship. Later quizzed about his role in the BNRO’s one-night-only appearance at Newport—the folk bandleader Jim Kweskin asked him, half-jokingly, “So are you touring with those crazy Bassandans now?” (definitely a pot-kettle-black query)—von Schmidt evaded a direct answer, replying instead: “Nah, they’ve got a guitar player. But I figured, if we wanted a really legendary party, we needed to have Baba and his Band come along to jam. So I got into The John Hurt [a cat-ketch built by von Schmidt himself] and went and got ‘em.”[3] This anecdote, if it is to be believed, not only reinforces the Portals’ frequent coincidence with water and the allegation that von Schmidt may have known one such, but also suggests that a single traveler, knowing a Rift-route, might be able to lead others—or even other vessels. This in turn would explain how new users became competent with Rift-travel—as “passengers” first, and leaders only later (see “Riding the Rift”, elsewhere in the Correspondence).

A second small factor likewise corroborating the possibility of a Rift somewhere in the vicinity of Cape Cod is the family connection of the Louisiana/Haitian fiddler Extaberri le Gwo and the harpooner Queequeg in Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Though that latter is conventionally considered a fictional character, it is possible that Melville had in mind a real-world model: the northwest Atlantic whaling fleet was a highly polyglot maritime community and it contained members from all over the Pacific Rim—and from more far-flung origins. So the presence of a real-life Bassandan model for Melville’s fictional harpooner, and of Bassandans among the Nantucket whaling fleet, is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Regardless of the route, the factual reality is that the BNRO members did arrive at Newport on board the schooner Bruxo do Mar—even if their point of departure is the subject of argument—and that it was they, not imposters or substitutes, who both played the controversial Ballyizget concert on 22 July and somehow were present in Newport to jam with Dylan et al the next day. In fact, there was a legendary party on Friday 23rd on the deck of the Bruxo, at which almost all the Boston / Cambridge musicians were in attendance. Von Schmidt’s daughters Caitlinn and Megan, toddlers at the time, report upon a remarkably diverse cast that night, including artists from the Newport roster as previously named, but many other more colorful or unpredictable attendees as well. These included the semi-legendary Massachusetts fiddler Tobias Tripp, known as a notoriously unreliable though hypnotically listenable dance player, addicted to rum, and prone to peculiarly antiquated and incomprehensible slang. He claimed to have served “with Glover, in the Congress’s Navy”, and he spent the evening playing duets with the Irish fiddler Gorman and trading shanties with the Englishmen Hugill, who later commented, “Waal. He had a few tunes I hadn’t heard. Value meetin’ him.” Other locals, not formally part of the Newport roster but definitely adding to the flavor of the all-night party on the Bruxa, were the singer, tin-whistler, and guitarist Caoimhinn Lowicki, like Irvine an early exponent of the busker’s life in Eastern Europe, and the double-bassist YūshaʿHaydar-Eburstein, a friend of Madame Algeria Main-Smith who had been Serge Koussevitzky’s first-chair bassist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s. Lowicki, a notoriously light-footed wanderer, would later occasionally visit Bassanda, particularly in the greenest parts of the year in late May and early June. Haydar-Eburstein, on the other hand, could barely be persuaded to stir from his secluded home in the hills west of Boston to venture as far as Lenox for the Tanglewood summer series, and so his attendance at the legendary “Newport Party on the Bruxa” was especially meaningful to Madame Algeria.

On the other hand, not all attendees wound up being welcome on board the Bruxa that night, particularly the musician Mel Lyman, who had made a name for himself playing harmonica with the Kweskin Jug Band but was an unpredictable and rather oppressive presence. He insisted on engaging Yezget-Bey in conversation, haranguing the Leader about the invalidity of what he denigrated as “your Stalinist crap” so persistently that eventually the dancer Морган Ŭitmena tapped him on the shoulder, caught him under the armpit, and threw him overboard into Newport Harbor; he was fished out by his “disciple” Jim Kweskin, after which both went ashore. Морган shrugged in the aftermath: “Oh, he’s just another God-drunk messianic asshole. Overboard is the best place for him. Maybe he’ll wake up when he dries out.”[4]

The bluesmen, who also included the saintly Mississippi John Hurt and the young Minneapolis firebrand “Spider” John Koerner, were notably unfazed by the “bizarre” accents and conduct of the Bassandans—there seemed to be remarkable parity of outlook and festival behavior—and various BNRO members—most notably the bluesman Mississippi Stokes, the Creole fiddler Etxaberri Le Gwo, the Irish-American drummer Jamey O’Laoghaire, and New Orleans pianist/trumpeter Rahmani Boenavida—were in their glory; Son House said “’at git-tar player—think I seen him befo’. Long time ago. With Robert.” O’Laoghaire played snare and high-hat behind the Chambers Brothers’ at a jam session, Koerner jammed with the venerable Bassandan banjoist Pappy Lilt, and Boenavida is said to have sat up all night with Rev Davis, drinking whiskey, smoking cigars and trading gospel verses; Davis, who was vision-impaired, is later alleged to have said “Ain’t no way that little sister was a white girl!” Jakov Redzinald, who played the night away with Gorman and Tripp, had that afternoon revealed a previously-unremarked terpsichorean capacity, and had danced a duet during the blues workshop with Maria D’Amato that set tongues wagging all across the festival grounds.

Stokes was carrying with him a black Fender Stratocaster guitar, allegedly formerly belonging to Buddy Holly (Holly is most often depicted with his trademark dark sunburst, but there are photos of him, especially from very early in his career, with what appears to be a black Strat), which had been “hot-rodded” with the addition of a set of hand-wound Bassandan Habjar-Lawrence bouzouki pickups whose pole pieces had been moved to accommodate the Strat’s contrasting string spacing. Dylan heard Stokes playing this “Franken-Strat” at the Bruxa party/jam session on “Baby Let Me Follow You Down,” with von Schmidt and Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins, and immediately inquired about “that sound!” Stokes, whose generosity was legendary in the loan and sourcing of gear on behalf of others, promptly offered to let Dylan borrow the Franken-Strat for next evening’s main-stage performance.

It was a legendary party. Decades later, those who were absent would claim to have attended, and those who were present would remember the night as “a kind of a magical place. It felt like we were floating, out there on the Bruxa. Like nothing could reach us, or harm us, or drive wedges between us. Like the future had possibilities, for joy and peace. We didn’t want that life to end.”[5]

Very late, at around 4:30am just as the eastern sky over the Atlantic was just beginning to lighten, and most of the party-goers had either tumbled down the gangplank to the Newport dock to go back to their lodgings, or were asleep on flemished ropes or along the ship’s rails, Lowicki, Haydar-Eburstein, and Tripp played a gentle, introspective version of “Gypsy Davy,” accompanying Madame Main-Smith’s understated solo vocal. Dylan, impassive behind his black sunglasses, sat cross-legged on the Bruxa’s deck as she sang. At the closing line of the last refrain “…Singin’ in the green, green trees,” there was a silence.

Kaciaryna Ŭitmena, one of the few still conscious at that hour of the night (or morning), later commented: “It was quiet. You could hear the waves over the side and the first few gulls calling. Madame, who’d been singing with her clothes closed, opened them and smiled. I looked over at Dylan, and just for a moment that protective shell he always carried around him—it cracked. He pulled off his sunglasses for a minute, and in the golden light coming up from the sunrise behind me, I saw tears in his eyes.

“Then Madam leaned toward him. She spoke very softly, but it was so quiet except for the waves and the gulls that I could hear every word. She said ‘This is it, Robert. This is Bassanda, right here. Right now. You don’t have to search any further. Find the Bassanda inside you. “Tonight: find it for them, inside them, too.’

“And then the sun came up. And it was a new day.”

[1] See, in the Archives, the newspaper clipping dated “23.VIII.65” and headlined “Gosudarstvennyy ansambl' Vyzovy Predely muzykal'noy prilichiya” / “State Ensemble Challenges Limits of Musical Propriety.” ESO cat # 1982.10632.b
[2] Mehmet Ozul Ortegon, professor of western literature at Ballyizget University.
[3] This in turn suggests that von Schmidt himself may have known and been capable of navigating at least the northwest Atlantic Rift Portal, if such existed.
[4] Lyman later became the leader of a cult-like intentional family in the Fort Hill section of Boston; he died under mysterious circumstances in 1978.
[5] Aislinn mac Aluinn, c1998, archive of the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project.

From the Bassandevalayana
The Creation Myth of Bassanda

In the beginning there was the Great Silence.

There was white light but it was without Form.

There was motion but it was without Pattern.

There was mind but it was without Intent or Consciousness.

And the Universe in a moment became aware of Itself and gathered the Breath between the Stars and the Dust that floated upon the stars’ breath and with a great rush of motion and a burst of energy that echoed across the Cosmos there was Sound.

And the Universe began and it began with Sound and that sound was:

CHORRRNNGGGGGGGGG

And that Sound was a Drone spun from the cosmos’ Vibration, and that vibration gave birth to Consciousness and consciousness to Thought and that thought to Intention and that intention to Motion and that motion to Pattern and the Sound swirled upon itself and its Drone’s vibrations were heard across the Cosmos and the Vibrations brought the Dust between the stars swirling together into Planets and the planets swirled over Aeons into orbits around the stars and the pattern of their movement become the Song that gave the cosmic consciousness Intention and the cosmic intention brought forth the Singer.

The Singer of Light and dark and joy and sorrow and the space between the voices of the stars and two beats of the heart and the singer was the first Aşik who sings the tales of the world’s creation, dissolution, and renewal.

And as the singer sang, the sound became audible to the singer’s own ears and its vibrations echoed across the Solar system to a small Planet far from the Center and it fell down upon the moving Waters and echoed across the Waters and the waves of the waters moved in Patterns and the patterns gave rise to Proteins and the proteins to Organisms and the organisms to Species and the Song became sentient Beings and they moved upon the Water and dove to the waters’ Depths and brought forth the Lands from beneath the Waters and the Song continued and the World began.

And the singer wandered between the Stars, across the Cosmos, between the Planets and from World to world, and where the Singer touched, there Music began and from the music came the Voices to sing the Song and from the voices the Bodies to carry the song’s knowing and from that knowing came forth the community of Breath and the breath breathed outward into the mountains, rivers, sky, cloud, stone, wind, trees, birds, beasts, and humans.

And the import of the song was of the intention and community and the network of love that holds back the Darkness.

And the song declared that the Universe should begin to Dance.

Bassandan mid-winter hospitality and the cycle of the seasons

Bassanda’s geography, topography, and highly diversified microclimates, which include high alpine pine forest and high-altitude shortgrass steppes in the north, and both temperate rain forest and rolling hills in the south, in addition to the craggy beaches of the coast, combine to yield marked meteorological and seasonal contrasts. Due to its high latitude, the contrast between summer (very long and dry sunny days, short nights), rainy season (shortening days, excessive precipitation) and winter (very short days, cold temperatures, exceptionally arid conditions, and long nights) is quite pronounced. In the summer, especially in the days leading up to harvest, when it is important to get the crops in before the rains come and put the yield at risk, it is common for the reapers and threshers to rise well before the very early dawn, around 4am, so as to be in the fields by the time it is light enough to work, and to stay in the fields until it is too dark to see (working, as Pappy Lilt put it, “from kin ‘til cain’t”). Likewise, on the south coasts, fishermen regularly rise even earlier, so as to be on the fishing banks by sunrise, before which it is illegal to take any catch (after the comprehensive environmental disaster that was the Tsarist and Soviet regimes, during which pesticides, herbicides, and early and incompetent attempts at GMO manufacture nearly destroyed the central valleys’ ecosystems, Bassanda was an early adopter of especially stringent restrictions upon mechanized or chemical agriculture and aquaculture; the happy result was that “stewardship”—not exploitation—became farmers’ and fishers’ primary ethical priority).

In the winter, in contrast, when the high altitudes and high latitudes lead to short days and very long nights of very cold temperatures, it is common for individuals, especially in the countryside, to stay much closer to hearth and home. A competent farmer will have won-home the harvest, gathered fodder for beasts, gathered turf or firewood, stored extensive supplies of preserved and dried foods, and will thus have most of the winter’s calories for heat and nutrition already assured—this in turn enabling the wintertime emphasis upon socializing, music-making, and family life. Sailors will have their boats into dry-dock, turning their hands to manufacture and repair of gear, perhaps to winter employment on the coast’s wharves or in the craft-distilling industry (casks of Bassandan oak are highly prized amongst artisanal distillers), and likewise focusing upon home and family.

The result is that, in Bassandan folklore, family-centered wintertime hospitality is especially prized. Of course, as is common worldwide in pastoral and agricultural societies, throughout the year hospitality is considered a sacred and moral obligation—those who live close to the earth and the cycle of the seasons, those of little material but very great cultural wealth, understand the importance of human community and support networks. But in winter, when both weather and activities tend to turn the mind toward home, hearth, and family, hospitality within the domestic sphere is especially prized as a human value—and isolation, alienation, and loneliness felt especially keenly.

Bassandans prize hospitality as the physical manifestation of connection, community, and generosity. It is almost impossible to decline Bassandan hospitality when offered: it is so comprehensive and so extensive that it can even be difficult to politely decline a meal, a drink, a gift, or a bed. Over the centuries, since long before Soviet, Nazi, or Tsarist incursion, even before the advent of Christianity itself around the 9th century, Bassandans have ritualized mid-winter hospitality. To quote a Persian proverb also known in Bassanda, “Alhaddiat hi niemat lil manih” (“The gift is a blessing to the giver”); paraphrased, it connotes the idea that the giving of hospitality is a blessing, not only or even primarily to the recipient, but on behalf of and in service of enhancing compassionate humanity on the part of the giver.[1] Traditionally, then, on the coldest and longest nights of mid-winter, or on the occasion of unexpected bad weather at other times in the year, families and neighbors would meet at country crossroads, precisely in order to ascertain whether any travelers on the road might need assistance and hospitality. They would light fires and prepare food. It was considered a great blessing, bringing good luck for the coming year, if such a benighted traveler was discovered and provided-for. In the modern era, variants of this tradition continued, when modern corporations, schools, or manufacturies open their facilities as spaces for families to offer hospitality to the homeless, indigent, ill—to orphans, widows, single parents, guest workers, and refugees.

The last is especially important: though Bassanda has never been a primary target of imperial conquest, it was (and is) most definitely an imperial highway—a portion of the world’s geography which empires have sought to employ as access to zones of military activity. It was a central target of Tsarist and Soviet expansion, and of the Nazi blitzkrieg in World War II, for precisely this reason. Moreover, many Bassandans have, over the centuries, served abroad in foreign wars. The result is that Bassandans are especially sensitive to the human coast of imperial conflict and conquest, and especially sensitive to their moral obligation to comfort empires’ victims.

Such hospitality is perceived to be, indeed, “a blessing to the giver,” and the greatest and most profound religious miracle of all: the discovery that for humans to give to one another, for those with resources to provide succor to those in need, miraculously transmutes suffering, sorrow, isolation, and loss, via love, into connection, community, healing, and joy. Both the Iliot shamanic and related Shama bardic-poetry tradition are full of fables explicating the rewards that hospitality showers upon the giver, as well as the recipient. Both sacred and secular traditions teach that generosity is the highest and most concrete manifestation of compassion and connection; the Shama story of Aşık Pir Sultan Abdal, which recounts his single-handed rescue of a refugee family from bandits, paraphrases the Christian Bible: “biqadar mma kuntum qad faealt dhlk hatta wahidatan min 'aqall min hadhih 'iikhwati , kuntum qad faealt dhlk li” (“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”).[2]

To Bassandans, the idea of failing to offer hospitality, of being found wanting in willingness to succor the needy, of rejecting the opportunity to forge that loving connection of human generosity which hospitality translates to warmth, food, care, and acceptance, is morally and spiritually repugnant. To withhold hospitality is to withhold compassion—it is to be less-than-human.

In contrast, to provide hospitality, to experience the privilege of embodying generosity, when it is most needed, with a kindness and openness that overcomes hatred, fear, sorrow, and loss, is—according to Bassandan moral and spiritual teachings—the greatest religious miracle of all.

[1] الهدية هي نعمة من المانح

[2] Matthew 25:40.

Asiatic Golden Eagle, attributed to Kano Tan'yu c1650.

The Eagle’s Heart Daughters

Орел Сердце дочери (“Orel Serdtse docheri”) - Dance company

It is unlikely that there was a direct genetic relationship between this group (c1962 and after) and the earlier generation’s troupe, called the Eagle’s Heart Sisters, which was originally assembled circa 1952 for the final completion and premiere of Xlbt op. 16, first sketched by Nijinska and Celeste Roullet around 1909. Despite some confusing cross-references in the Archive, it has been confirmed that the Orel Serdtse Docheri were a separate women’s modern/folkloric dance company recruited by Madame Bronislava Nijinska some years after the much-delayed premiere of Xlbt Op. 16 by the original Sisters in Ballyizget in ‘52. Despite the absence of any literal genetic or particular personal connections, the Daughters were nevertheless demonstrably linked to the earlier-generation and to Nijinska herself. They coalesced around Madame at a particular historical moment in which such bonds of female confraternity and mentorship were especially important to her—after the premiere of Xlbt (which has been called “the Bassandan Rite of Spring”), and in a period of particular change and transformation in her life.

There is some thought that the Daughters may have been drawn from the first cadre of dance students at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, just after Madame had been invited to found the dance program there. Madame already had a strong reputation: with the commissars, largely due to her sibling relation to the exceptionally troubled prima danseur Vaclav Nijinsky (who had been institutionalized from 1919 onward). But to dance cognoscenti, and in the composition / choreography partnership with Yezget Nas1lsinez, she was a powerful artistic presence entirely on her own unique merits. The original members of the Sisters—Madame Szabo, Ferikarohasu, Kristina Olenev, Lisle Goncharov, and Azizlarim Jangchi—came from widely divergent backgrounds, though Madame Szabo at times had hinted or implied that they were in some sense true relations or “Sisters.”

In contrast, the Daughters encountered Nijinska, the BNRO, and the Bassanda Project partnership later in chronological time (after 1953) yet earlier in their own individual artistic developments; in that sense, they were “daughters” of the earlier group in terms of artistic bloodlines, even if not genetic ones.

Because at Habjar-Lawrence Nijinska was given a relatively free hand in terms of curriculum, admissions policy, and artistic expectations—and because she was a ferociously articulate and outspoken defender of academic freedom and student well-being—the dance program she designed was relatively untouched by the highly constrictive Socialist Realist aesthetics otherwise imposed by the Bassandan Central Soviet. While recognizing the valued inheritance of classical Bolshoi/Kirov ballet, Nijinska, even more than her brother, adamantly supported the development of more inclusive, diverse, and participatory forms of dance expression and community. She was emphatic in her insistence that “joyful inhabitation of one’s own body is a human right”; consistent with this precept, she worked extensively with non-traditional or unconventional dance populations—the aged, children, those with disabilities, musicians, and so on.

She was equally adamant about the invocation of creative spaces that allowed young artists maximal freedom to step outside of artistic and personal expectations, to share openly and create together. She believed, as she said, in “the spark of holy fire, from one comrade to another, in the moment of creating together,” and that such catalytic moments required curation and protection. Her long-time dancer Sasha later said: “She was a lion. I always felt safe, no matter the room, no matter the audience, when Madame was there.”

That Company, which as has been stated was initially drawn from the first recruits to the new dance program at Habjar-Lawrence, consisted of:

Sasha Gruschevsky, born Bassanda 1941 of Iliot shamanic stock, whose artistic relationship with Nijinska was by the Sixties quite lengthy, she having observed the (unrecorded) premiere of Madame’s The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus in 1949 (Sofia Kráľa of the Kráľa Family Band was a child soloist in this production, as well). Sasha was absent from Bassanda during the initial formation of the Sisters, having come to the West to work with Ballet Rambert in London. By 1963, however, she had returned to Bassanda, drawn by Madame’s permanent relocation there and the opportunity to build a new Company;
Cifani Walter: born near Schleswig in north Germany in 1945, she came to Habjar-Lawrence as a scholarship student;
Laurica Temino: born Monterrey Mexico 1941 as the descendent of Hidalgo conquistadores, her family was related to that of Rahmani Boenavida, pianist and trumpeter in the BNRO, who was a likely source of Laurica’s Bassandan connections;
Ana de Quareton, whose family descended in part from Irish and English “Red Legs” who shipped out to Barbados from London in the 1630s; prior to that time, the family name is associated with Norman settlers in North England (Yorkshire). Her Bassanda connection may have come through the ex-smuggler Etxaberri le Gwo’s Barbados relations; he had played with the BNRO since 1950 and, like other senior band members, was always on the lookout for new talent for the Bassanda Project;
Ambrosía de Cantù, born in Spain in 1941 but whose family roots in North Italy (Lombardy and Belluno) reached eastward as well. She later described family stories which appear to reveal a Bassanda connection, and, once again, the influence of “Etsy” le Gwo was instrumental in her acceptance of a scholarship offer from Habjar-Lawrence.

The new company coalesced during a legendary series of workshops in the dusty, largely deserted rooms of Habjar-Lawrence in the late spring of 1963, before the 1963-64 academic year had gotten into full swing. Nijinska, aware that the newness and largely-hypothetical nature of her proposed dance curriculum made it difficult to predict time commitments or long-term support, insisted that those who wished to participate “in Madame’s new Company” must commit themselves to early and additional attendance at these workshops. In these intensive weeks, the foundations were laid for the next round of collaborations between the BNRO and the EHD: improvisations, conversation, contact partnering, writing prompts, and non-verbal musical exercises were combined to generate new material that originated from the participants themselves. Madame consciously sought a “letting-go” of choreographic control, saying “I didn’t want to be the puppeteer manipulating their marionettes’ strings—I wanted them to be thinking with their bodies, and on their own.”

Other participants in this series of foundational workshops including various members of the BNRO, including the singing and dancing Ŭitmena Sisters Морган and Kaciaryna, the guitarist Mississippi Stokes, flutist Fionnuala Nic Aindriú, and fiddler Jakov Redžinald; in previous iterations, drummer Žaklin Paulu, trumpeter Thorvaldur Ragnarsson, and tubist Yūhannā Casco Encabezado had likewise participated. There exists a series of Super-8 film fragments, shot by Cifani Dhoma, which though without audio capture something of the intimacy and intensity of these H-LC workshops: the rooms are bare, worn, and dusty (Habjar-Lawrence’s first teaching spaces were repurposed schoolrooms), the windows cracked and cloudy, the floors and plaster walls stained and discolored.

But a palpable kinetic energy emerges from these archival Dhoma clips. Though it was not clear at the time—Madame’s avowed method was to “do the practice first, and only then decide what it might mean”—these workshops were also seen (with hindsight) to lead, quite rapidly and directly, to the revised 1964 choreography Casting Out Snakes. This work had originally been conceived as a collaboration of choreographer (Nijinsky) and composer (Nas1lsinez), but what ultimately emerged from the revision process was in fact an art film, assembled by Dhoma, not only as a document of the process and of the final choreography, but as the actual final realization of the work. The groundwork for such innovative movement-sound-film work had been laid several years before, when Dhoma’s abstract pieces had been an integral part of the live 1961 Ballyizget production of The Tempest, set in the Gulag, in which Goncharov and Jangchi had joined as, respectively, Ariel and Prospero. However, by late 1962 several key members of the Sisters had departed, including both Ferikarohasu and Śamū’ēla Jaṅgalī, and Nijinska herself was in a stage of artistic reinvention. So the Autumn ’63 workshops at Habjar-Lawrence laid the groundwork not only for the new dance program’s curriculum, but also for the next-generation BNRO/EHD collaboration.

That is one origin story.

There is another, one much more mythographic in its connotations and language, but perhaps even more metaphorically revealing:

The watershed choreography Xlbt Op. 16, the so-called “Bassandan Rite of Spring,” which had been conceived by Nijinska and Celeste Roullet on an eastern-Mediterranean pleasure cruise as early as 1909, was only completed as a collaboration between Nijinska, Nas1lsinez, the BNRO, and the original Eagles’ Heart Sisters in 1952. That work, whose basic premise was appropriated, uncredited, by Stravinsky and Diaghilev for their much more famous (or infamous) Le Sacre du printemps, had itself been based on a Bassandan folktale, which had likewise been filched and flipped by the Ballets Russe in 1913. Though Stravinsky and Diaghilev described Le Sacre as based in “scenes from pagan Russia,” its scenario was in fact an invention, informed by their Russian nationalist agenda and—in no small part—by the “primitive” costuming of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, which both had seen in Paris in 1905. Its central motif—the virgin who must be sacrificed in order to save the village or the crop—is a venerable if not hackneyed, patriarchal, and foolish cliché, compared to the much more powerful and empowering Bassandan origin myth of five heroic Sisters.

But where to place the Daughters, in this construction?

A rather elliptical part-answer to this question was proffered by Magister Ciarán O'Baoighill, the ex-monk, pagan falconer, avian rights activist, and bouzouki player, when queried about the Daughters by the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project in the 1980s. Near the end of his interview, having addressed a host of questions which had ranged widely, touching upon his work at the Center for Human-Animal Intra-Constitutional Wildlife Ethics, upon his own music, his monastic and military experiences, and upon his unique anecdotes regarding the General, the Colonel, Madame Algeria Main-Smith, and a host of other semi-legendary Bassandan figures, the interviewers asked, off-handedly, “And what do you think of the various fanciful stories about the ‘Eagles’ Daughters’? Where do you think they really came from?” O'Baoighill, a reserved man whose scientific bent governed his speech no less than his field research, paused before answering. He glanced up at the commissar who, even in this period of perestroika, was required by the Central Committee to be present to vet such interviews:

“Ubiraysya, byurokrat” (“Get out, bureaucrat”).

The official scowled, and made as if to answer, but O’Baoighill—a former commando and military policeman—met his eye again, and repeated “Вон!” (“Out!”). The commissar departed, slamming the door, and O’Baoighill looked again at the interviewers. They describe an unnervingly searching glance, as if he were assessing not just the possible content of his answer, but the psychological and even spiritual acuity of its recipients. His initial response, however, seemed a non-sequitur.

“Would any of you know a golden eagle if you saw one? Aquila chrysaetos daphanea?”

None spoke.

“Well, that figures. But they’re all over the north of our country. They nest and fledge in the foothills of the Alps.”

The interviewers nodded impatiently—all were familiar with the canonic “Legend of the Five” origin myth—but he shook his head.

“No, you don’t understand, actually. And I’m not the one who’ll explain it to you. But I’ll tell you this—that Legend? That’s biologically accurate: Daphanea do nest and fledge in the Alps, and they do mate for life, and their clutches do tend to include five eggs, even if there’s significant variation in coloration between the chicks. So when we say ‘Daughters,’ what are we actually talking about?”

There was a silence in the room. Then O’Baoighill spoke.

“You remember the Legend of the original Five? That at the end of the dance, they were turned into Eagles? It says the Sisters were never seen again, but that the Eagles remain, there on the slopes below Annolungma, of the Three Brothers.

“You say you know where each of the Daughters came from—her name, or ancestors, or place of birth. Maybe you do.

“But do you know where their hearts came from? Their dreams? Their collective spirit? Do you know when they were born as the Five?

“There can be more than one kind of ancestry. Origins can come from more than one explanation. They were born that week at Habjar-Lawrence, whatever else came before.

“I’ll tell you this: the Myth that was born that week at Habjar-Lawrence in ’53—that myth is a strong one. And I’ll tell you something else: myths can tell their own kind of truths.

“You can be re-born more than once.”

The Mysterious 1885 Victorian "Steampunk" Band, with Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur & Yezget Nas1lsinez. Anonymous ambrotype, hand-colored by Cifani Dhoma

The Mysterious 1885 Victorian “Steampunk” Band

The premise of the “steampunk movement,” a 20th century craft-costume-creation subculture which imagines an alternate history in which computers (“Difference Engines”) are invented in the Victorian era, but in which steam energy also continues to hold sway, may in part have been inspired by early Bassandan experiments seeking to power technology via the earth’s magnetic ley lines. We know that magnetism is a fundamental part of the “Rift” phenomenon which appears to have permitted 4th-dimensional travel between and among various “Rift Portals” found widely throughout Bassanda and also at various locations around the globe: the northern Rio Grande Valley; Annolunmga, the tallest of the “Three Brothers” peaks in the Bassandan Alps; the northern Rift Valley, at the foot of those same Alps; the north Mississippi Hill Country; off Nantucket Island in Massachusetts Bay; somewhere off the coast of Trinidad; in the Outer Hebrides; the South Downs of England.

This Rift travel also appears to account for peculiarities in various Bassandan notables’ biographical chronologies: the “Hazzard-Igniti Principle” postulates that “the extension of human longevity is in selective but direct proportion to the preponderance of Rift travel”: suggesting that, all other health and longevity considerations being equal, the more frequently an individual traveled via Rift portal, the longer s/he might be expected to live.[1] And certainly there were both very notable and also lesser individuals in the Bassanda orbit for whom the ordinary rules of human longevity and indeed of aging itself appear to have been very significantly suspended.[2] The Doctor was unable to comprehensively test this hypothesis prior to his apparent disappearance into the Gulag in 1941—which may have occurred in part because the Soviets wished to sequester Rift travel as a potential means for anticipating or even re-writing and accelerating the history of the Marxist revolution—but his senior students continued to investigate in secret.[3] Likewise, various of the Bassandan wisdom traditions, most notably that of the Iliot shamans, provided both a cosmological and a surprisingly precise psycho-electrical framework for understanding the cognitive impact of Rift travel, and it is thus no surprise that several of Hazzard-Igniti’s senior students were also initiates and even adepts in those traditions.

A second significant factor is that, because, in both the Tsarist and Soviet periods, conventional internal combustion technology was very closely guarded as a weapon of imperial domination, and because—with hindsight, very fortunately, in light of environmental impact—there were absolutely zero petroleum deposits to be found anywhere within Bassanda, the internal combustion engine took hold very late, and only as a technological import. As late as the 1930s, therefore, Bassandan freedom fighters and rebel technologists were building highly efficient steam-powered land- and sea-vehicles, reports upon which may have inspired the early forerunners of steampunk aesthetics, as for example in the Disney corporation’s 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, based upon Verne’s 1870 speculative-fiction classic. But, in the same period, also in secret to prevent co-optation by the Soviets, Bassandan artisans were developing highly sophisticated samizdat vehicles that exploited the earth’s magnetic fields to drive electrical motors.

The archetype of this “alternate fuel source” technology was of course Sleipnir, the semi-legendary locomotive known in Bassandan folklore as “The Beast,” developed around 1910 by craftspeople who closely guarded the secrets of its design (the schematics were hidden within monastic archives, while subsequent analysis by electrical experts concluded “the Thing shouldn’t work, according to the laws of physics—but it does”), which served as the flagship of the Grand Bassanda Top of the World Railroad and Travel Corporation and was an essential part of the epic 1906 tale of “The Great Train Ride for Bassanda.”

The Beast was capable of traveling over land or water, suspended via magnetic repulsion from the earth’s ley lines, and was one of the few vehicles (along with the iconic smugglers’ sloop called Bruxa do Mar) which could transport individuals and cargo via Rift Portals. In fact, it is now thought that, by the 1960s, The Beast had traversed such Portals so many times that its cars became, in effect, a Portal of their own, within which one might find as passengers Friends of Bassanda from every epoch of real and alternative history.[4]

This may possibly explain how the Mysterious 1885 Steampunk (or more accurately but perhaps less euphoniously “Magneto-Punk”) version of the Band might have been ambrotyped in Paris or, equally implausibly, in the American Southwest. Though the Beast was only laid down around 1910, and though indeed the Band was only founded c1947 by Yezget-Bey, on the foundation of the earlier ad hoc People’s Liberation Orchestra, it is possible that some version of the Band, whose personnel were coincident with or postdated the documented 1965 Newport Folk Festival Band, may have found itself on the road via Beast, and (intentionally or inadvertently) to have traversed an unexpected or temporary Rift, thereafter hopping backwards in time and finding themselves in an earlier era of the American Southwest. If so, on the evidence of the ambrotype, it would appear that the Band spent enough time “in” 1885 to assimilate, as all are garbed—unusually opulently, for the BNRO/ESO—in well-fitted period clothing. Perhaps they found themselves inadvertently, via Rift, in the period, and took the time to successfully adopt/adapt/integrate.[5]

However, the interplay between electricity, magnetism, and Rift Travel may also account for the presence of the visual artist Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur, who like most of the Band was a product of the early-/mid-20th century, but who was also an “electrical sensitive”: a locution coined by the Hazzard-Igniti School to describe those in the Bassandan orbit—often musicians, artists, poets, dancers, or Iliot shamans—who could invoke, channel, manipulate, and target magnetic/electrical energy. There is a remarkable story of Gigi as an adolescent, traveling the Caribbean via ship with her mother and the folklorist/film-maker Maya Deren, being struck by—or perhaps having called down—lightning during a tropical storm. Given, then, her documented “electrical sensitivity”, it may have been unnecessary for her to travel with the Band via The Beast, as indeed she may have been able to locate or even forge her own Rift routes.

Two small pieces of iconographic data seem to support the latter impression: that Gigi may have had some sort of active role in the Band’s journey to 1885—or even possibly in their eventual escape and return to the late 20th century. On the back of a fragment of a second ambrotype depicting Yezget-Bey and Gigi in closeup—apparently a number of single portrait images were taken even if only the single band portrait was preserved undamaged—there is an inscription in Nas1lsinez’s distinctive jagged hand “Merci à notre cher et courageux soeur Gigi, qui est venu de plus tard et a sauvé la bande” (“Thank you to our dear and courageous sister Gigi, who came from Later and saved the Band”).

The second piece of data is also found in the portrait fragment, in the image itself. Though both Yezget-Bey and Gigi are dressed in the height of early Edwardian couture, there is one jarring anomaly: on her left bicep, just below the shoulder, the sleeve of her gown is torn and what appears to be a bloodstained bandage is visible beneath it (because of the black-and-white medium, the color of the stain is unknowable, but its distribution and seeping in the linen bandage is consistent with bloodstains). It is known that Gigi, like Nas1lsinez, possessed great physical courage and stamina, but the lack of documentary texts provides no explanation for what appears to have been a potentially serious physical injury in 1885.

But one anecdote, possibly unrelated, has come down to us in another part of the extensive Correspondence only partly cataloged by the Miskatonic University Archive, which regrettably has long lacked for sufficient personnel to even identify, much less complete accession of, much of its holdings.[6] Indeed, Professor Homer Saint-John sometimes, at moments of frustration with long-suffering graduate assistants, would threaten “If you don’t do better at this job I shall never show the Locked-Room Holdings!” and then, when calmed, might typically deny such a Locked-Room even existed. (The Archive, housed in a formerly-abandoned Victorian triple-decker on the Miskatonic grounds, also enjoyed extensive cellars which connected to the tunnels of the early 20th century campus hot-water-heat system. Over time, various of these subterranean chambers were taken over as archival storage space. No one knew them all, or what was stored within them). Nevertheless, the occasional fragment does emerge, allegedly from this fabled Locked-Room—it is thought that occasionally, unscrupulous and anti-Bassandan graduate students, desperate for dissertation topics not previously plowed-over, may have sometimes abused their Archive privileges.

One such fragment appeared in the bookstalls at Southbank on the Thames around 1974: a single page of paper covered with cursive handwriting, stained with water and what may have been whiskey or blood, tucked inside a schoolboy’s edition of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, itself inscribed “To Perkins Major, Sixth form Classics 1936” and below, in a different hand, “To Claude, in memory of Samuel, killed over Kiel, 1941.” This fragment appears to be unrelated to both the Dumas and the sad inscription referencing “Perkins Major,” “killed over Kiel.”

It appears instead to be one leaf from an extended letter; extraordinarily, a letter written by Julāhē Kaur herself. The date is unknown, but internal evidence and specific references suggest that Gigi may have authored the account at nearly or even exactly the same time (late summer 1885) as the purported date of the Band ambrotype. It appears to have been addressed to her mother—in itself another chronological paradox, for Madame Tisserand would be born in the Faubourg Marigny around 1915, an event which thus post-dates by 30 years the letter which her daughter appears to have intended for her.[7]

The fragment begins:

Dear Mama--

I hope that you are well and I send you greetings from the far west of the new world. I have traveled on a long dark journey, far from you in Bassanda, seeking after friends who have become lost. We both know what it is to lose loved ones, but this time I am strong in the electrical energy of the Earth Mother and I bear sacred weapons in this quest.

My friends, musicians and dancers, have become lost: they and their steed fell into a chasm between the stars, a chasm opened by dark forces from Outside. Their world--my world--is under attack and I must go to them. There are fierce and deadly beings, full of hate, who threaten us all, but I bear the bangle and comb and I am armed with the blade of truth against the darkness of anger and loss.

Please do not fear for me, and know that I will return to you. Neither Rift nor the Old Ones nor this dark time will divert me: love is stronger than fear and stronger than death itself and it will bring my friends and me home to you again... [the letter breaks off][8]

It would appear, then, that Julāhē Kaur wrote this letter immediately after her undocumented journey, assumedly via Rift, from Bassanda in the 1970s to the American Southwest in the 1880s.

It is a matter of substantiated record that in this period maleficent forces, the so-called “Dark Ones,” were understood to be attacking the 3-dimensional world of Gaia from an unspecified, seemingly non-tangible “Outer Realm.” In the testimony of former mountain man, mail rider, and scout John David Albert, taken in Denver in 1898, is the detailed account of the 1883 Rift Portal ride of Colonel Thompson, his common-law wife “Matty Teegan” (sic: actually Maritjie Tiedtgen), and their brandy-smuggling companions, when, under pursuit from Bassanda, they inadvertently led supernatural beings through the northern Rio Grande Portal and into the phenomenal world. Given the Colonel’s recorded words, in that account, “I hate to lead them from here…It will make for more trouble in the future,” it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that, less than 18 months later, additional Dark Ones might have followed the trail the Colonel and his riders had inadvertently blazed. Hazzard-Igniti suggested that the period saw some unexplained but exceptionally severe disruption of the earth’s magnetic ley lines—a theoretically possible though catastrophically disruptive scenario. The resulting expansion and debasement of the Rift Portal may even account for the apparent accident through which the Beast, carrying the Band as they departed on a late 1960s tour, “fell” through—or perhaps unintentionally cracked open—another Rift path to the northern Rio Grande. In essence, then, the Band may have found itself dropped unexpectedly and unpreparedly into the middle of a supernatural frontier “shooting war.”

It is not known, then, how Gigi came by the arm wound that appears bandaged in the 1885 ambrotype. But it seems clear that she herself knew that she was following her lost friends, through a Rift leading across the world and back in time, into both supernatural and tangible danger. And she did come from a long line of fighting soldiers (her ancestor Captain Donald McDonald served with distinction under Wolfe at the First Battle of Quebec, her father Lakhbir Julāhē Singh in one of the last cavalry charges by the Sikh Khalsa, in 1915 on the Western Front), and she did at times in her life keep the Pañj Kakār, the “Five Ks” required of Sikhs, including the carrying of the fighting knife called Kirpan.

However, the edged weapon she carries in the ambrotype appears to be on the design of the ancient sickle-shaped design which Fernando Fulgosio in 1872 dubbed falcata, a wickedly effective fighting knife capable of delivering powerful blows in close quarters. How she came to be carrying a Celtic/Iberian edged weapon from the Roman era, and where she might have acquired her training—perhaps even in another historical era entirely—is likewise unknown…at least until such time as additional lost materials from the Miskatonic Locked-Room Holdings appear.

Winesap, however, on the matter of the Holdings, remains noncommittal.

[caption: The Mysterious 1885 Victorian "Steampunk" Band, with Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur & Yezget Nas1lsinez. Anonymous ambrotype, hand-colored by Cifani Dhoma.]

[1] From an unpublished draft intended for publication in a 1934 number of the Journal of Speculative Geographical Metaphysics, but which was embargoed before printing by the BSSP.

[2] Most notably, the Colonel, whose verified life events antedate 1830, when he was found to have traveled the Oregon Trail with his parents, and post-date 1944, when he liaised with Ranger battalions at the Breakout from Normandy; and the General, whose similarly verifiable dates include his service in the Wakarusa War (1855) and 1952, when he played sessions at Sun Studios in Memphis TN (later sightings of the General in 1957, at the premiere of Partch’s The Bewitched, and 1962, at the “Bagpipes not Bombs” protests in Ballyizget, are as yet unconfirmed).

[3] These would include cellist Elzbieta Purves, flutist & electrical savant Yannoula Periplanó̱menos, tubist/designer “sensitive” Yūhannā Casco Encabezado, and several others.

[4] See Winesap’s account, in the “Boarding the Train” episode in the epic Great Train Ride for Bassanda.

[5] It is hoped that further investigation of the monastic archives of this Taos mission house (in Talpa, the oldest settlement outside the Pueblo), may possibly reveal additional records of the Band’s 1885 activities, but to date it has been impossible to secure funds to complete this important archival task.

[6] Indeed, Professor Homer Saint-John sometimes, at moments of frustration with long-suffering graduate assistants, would threaten “if you don’t do better at this job I shall never show the Locked-Room Holdings,” and then, when calmed, deny such a Locked-Room collection even existed. The Archive, housed in a formerly-abandoned Victorian triple-decker on the Miskatonic grounds, also enjoyed extensive cellars which connected to the tunnels of the early 20th century campus hot-water-heat system. Over time, various of these subterranean chambers were taken over as archival storage space. No one knew them all, or what was stored within them.

[7] It has been alleged, by Soviet kommissars and anti-Bassanda skeptics, that the letter is a simple forgery, planted in the Southbank bookstalls for precisely the intention of mythologizing the Band and thereby obscuring its “bourgeois” origins. Citing paleography, internal references, handwriting analysis, manuscript paper studies, and various other dating methods, Professor Saint-John has demolished any such quasi-scholarly attempts to disprove the letter’s authenticity, and Winesap himself, normally an exceptionally diffident junior scholar always ready to discount his own conclusions, has provided an affidavit that he purchased the Dumas edition on the Southbank during his first trip to the UK, in 1974. The matter is complicated by the loss of the book itself: only the single sheet of foolscap is preserved. However, the handwriting in the letter is consistent with the 1960s and ‘70s letters of Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur.

[8] “Chère maman--J'espère que vous êtes bien et je vous envoie les salutations de l'extrême ouest du nouveau monde. J'ai voyagé un long voyage sombre, loin de vous en Bassanda, à la recherche après que des amis qui sont devenus perdus. Nous savons tous les deux ce qu'il est de perdre des êtres chers, mais cette fois je suis forte dans l'énergie électrique de la Terre Mère et je porter des armes sacrées dans cette quête. Mes amis, musiciens et danseurs, sont perdus: ils et leur destrier est tombé dans un gouffre entre les étoiles, un gouffre ouvert par les forces obscures de l'extérieur. Leur monde - mon monde - est attaqué et je dois aller à eux. Il y a des êtres féroces et mortels, pleins de haine, qui nous menacent tous, mais je portent le bracelet et un peigne et je suis armé avec la lame de la vérité contre l'obscurité de la colère et de la perte. S'il vous plaît ne crains pas pour moi, et je sais que je reviendrai à vous. Ni Rift ni les Anciens, ni cette fois sombre me détourner: l'amour est plus fort que la peur et plus fort que la mort elle-même et il va amener mes amis et moi à la maison à vous encore ... [Julāhē Kaur to Tisserand, American SW to Bassanda, August 1885?]

The Charlatans at the Red Dog Saloon, c1965

The Charlatans and the BNRO

The Mysterious 1885 Victorian “Steampunk” Band may have played another, time-folding role in the early roots of the Sixties’ cultural revolutions: in June 1965, when the San Francisco band called “The Charlatans” began a six-week residency at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, NV, during which the Victorian/West environs, their burgeoning interest in visual spectacle, and—very importantly—access to powerful (and legal) LSD birthed the first essays in “psychedelic” music, poster art, and concert venues. Photos of the band from that summer, dressed in a mixture of Victorian, Edwardian, and Wild West costume, were a major influence upon later Haight-Asbury bands’ styles through the 1967 Summer of Love. Several of those images became particularly iconic, even as, over that same several years, the Charlatans ran the gamut of sartorial identities, from gunslinger to jolly tar to cricketer. But one particular image, an out-take from the 1965 photo sessions, contains an intriguing anomaly, which has only been deciphered in the modern era by Dhoma using sophisticated Bassandan electromagnetic photo-imaging techniques. The 1965 image depicts the band—Winchester repeaters, Colt revolvers, and Stetson hats well to the fore—seated at a table in one corner of the Red Dog. Dimly visible on the rear wall, some distance behind bassist Mike Ferguson, there inexplicably (and unnervingly) appears an alternate version of the 1885 BNRO daguerreotype, framed under cloudy hand-blown glass.

No scholarship has satisfactorily explained the presence of a second image from the 1885 session in a Nevada saloon in 1965, but Dhoma’s photographic analysis is persuasive, and the presence of this authenticated image in the background of the 1965 photo does go toward confirming the BNRO’s time-shifting capacities.

The Thirteen, Ford at Bedford, Summer 1957. Photo by Cifani Dhoma

The Thirteen Wise Companions – a Bassandan Sufi fable
There is a tale told in the lodges of the Iliot shamans—Bassandan adherents to Sufism, the mystical and experiential teachings of Islam, whose spiritual progenitors are the poets Rumi and Hafiz—of “The Thirteen Wise Companions”: wandering artists, a fellowship of dancers, musicians, and teachers, drawn from diverse and often lonely stories, who join together, by happenstance or design, on a quest for enlightenment. A particularly rich and beautiful variant of this archetypal folkloric tale appears in the 12th century Persian poet Attar’s Maqāmāt-uṭ-Ṭuyūr, an extended metaphorical treatise describing an epic journey by a “Conference of Birds,” who cross seven valleys (of “the Quest,” “Love,” “Knowledge,” “Detachment,” “Unity,” “Wonderment,” and “Poverty & Annihilation”), to visit their sovereign, who lives on the top of a mountain. These birds, each a metaphorical representation of a certain type of seeker’s personality, are led by the cunning and indefatigable Hoopoe, who “addresses their many hesitations, complaints, fears, vanities, and questions” as he coaxes them to complete their journey. Attar’s poem is an early (and masterful) example of the masnavi lyric, employed within a frame tale in a style that recalls the Decameron or Canterbury Tales. In the end, when the survivors of the journey arrive at the mountaintop, they realize that there is no sovereign outside the Self, that they themselves are the Simorgh; that “the majesty of that Beloved is like the sun that can be seen when one looks into one’s own face in a mirror.”

In the mid-20th century, the tale of Maqāmāt-uṭ-Ṭuyūr was invoked again to describe the adventures of a collection of dancer-artists, mostly refugees from occupied Bassanda, convened in England in in the summer of 1957 by Cifani Dhoma, Madame Nijinska, Ana de Quareton, and Nas1lsinez himself. The majority of the information on this artistic residency is contained in a small unlined book in the Archives, of quarto size, custom bound with a fragment of music manuscript, and containing jotted notes, sketches, and descriptions in Yezget-Bey’s distinctively spiky copperplate handwriting.

Of course, dance had been an essential part of Bassandan folk and “high-art” culture for centuries, and would be integral to the ad hoc performances of the Peoples’ Liberation Orchestra in the 1940s and of its successors, the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra and (following glasnost), the Elegant Savages Orchestra. Nas1lsinez inherited the traditions of Iliot shamanic dance through his mother, and his own artistic, compositional, and choreographic consciousness had been further shaped both during his (brief and wary) return to the extraordinary creative ferment of Leninist Russia, and his more lasting influences in post-World War I Paris, particularly as a member of Nadia Boulanger’s composition studio.

Another influential factor may have been Rudolf von Laban’s interest in Sufism; it is thought that Yezget-Bey was instrumental in persuading the older man to leave Nazi Germany in the wake of the ban imposed by Goebbels on 1936’s Of the Spring Wind and the New Joy, which some interpreted as a repudiation of Aryanism. The two had previously met in Paris in the wake of World War I, after the young Nas1lsinez fled the Bolshevik Revolution; he held no brief for the preceding Tsarist regimes but even as a youth mistrusted the revolutionary fervor of the new soviets. Laban, and Nas1lsinez himself, in turn were powerful advocates on behalf of the choreographer and movement theorist Anna Sokolow (1910-2000), who, after training with Martha Graham and Louis Horst, set up her experimental Dance Unit in NYC, also in 1936—and whose pupils and mentors enter into the Bassanda cycle in other places (see Correspondence).

But in the early 1940s Yezget had less opportunity to work with dancers as he had done formerly and would later, for several reasons: because of his very extensive (but still clandestine and embargoed) work with the Bassandan anti-Nazi and then anti-Soviet Underground Resistance; because the financially-constrained ad hoc nature of PLO performances and (especially) venues too often precluded the more extended conceptualization, creation, and rehearsal of large-scale dance works; and most importantly because he had not yet formed his creative partnership with Nijinska. Their more extensive music-movement collaborations had to wait until she arrived in Ballyizget in the very late 1940s, and paradoxically flowered in the topsy-turvy conditions that obtained between the death of Stalin (1953) and election of Kruschev as Party Chairman (1958).

In the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, which had implicated members of the Bassanda circle (see elsewhere in the Correspondence) and had been crushed when the Soviets sent in the tanks at Budapest, many including Nijinska herself fled Ballyizget, rightly anticipating increased repression across all the satellites in the wake of the Uprising. Nas1lsinez, who was sought as a “person of interest” by the Agentstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the BSSP’s feared secret police, resisted exile, insisting upon continuing his organizing and concertizing, but managing always to be “elsewhere” when AGB agents came calling.

However, by September of ’57 and precisely as a result of the Kremlin power struggle, the pressure from the secret police was increasing upon dissidenty of all stripes, and so Yezget-Bey considered himself fortunate to be hired as adjunct lecturer at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he would meet and exchange ideas with medieval music avatar Thomas Binkley. Prior to the beginning of that Fall ’57 term, therefore, he was at a bit of a loose end, and, being conscious of the AGB’s willingness to engage in “wet work” (political assassination) beyond Bassanda’s borders, he went to ground off the beaten path in the UK at the Bedford College of Physical Education, a historically female institution where Madame Nijinska had cultivated partnerships since her return from the Caribbean in the late 1940s. As was the case with many women’s colleges in the U.K.’s post-War recession, modernization and adequate state funding at Bedford had particularly lagged behind. So when Nas1lsinez, Nijinska, and the coterie of young artists who gathered around them, the spiritual descendants of the Eagles’ Heart Sisters c1947-49 and Daughters c1953-54 (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), came to the University in that summer of 1957, and were joined by the ex-combat photographer Cifani Dhoma and Nijinska’s protégé Ana de Quareton, they brought a splash of multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-colored energy that was a welcome contrast to the gray drabness of Britain in the 1950s.

Yet there were also preliminary clues, visible to those who could see, which suggested that the Bedford location and experience might prove fertile and fruitful. It was a river city, and there was that aspect of the Companions’ mutual magic which was energized by running water, their periods of greatest creativity often seeming to coincide with residencies proximate to rivers and streams. This was more markedly true in the later 1970s years of the partnership, in their legendary annual summer residencies at Nijinska’s Libertas Domum no-kill animal shelter in the Bassandan foothills, below the falls of Ab Almyah (the “Father of Waters”, the great river of the central highlands) which flowed from its source in the high alps of the Annolungma Range. In Iliot theology, Bab’ Almyah brought them all the baraka (spiritual energy) associated with the archetypal Rift Portal situated on the highest peak of the Three Brothers range, which energy was greatly intensified as the River carried its sacred waters downstream from the high snowfields. Though some western critics wrote that “centeredness” within the 1970s troupe proceeded from a new “maturity” in artistic conceptions and execution, Nijinska herself insisted that it was the Rift Valley waters and falls that fueled their peak performances: as she put it, “the Companions had the hot fires of creation, but they needed the cool running water to anneal that creativity and keep them strong.” Even earlier however, at Bedford, the River Great Ouse, which had brought human communities to Bedanfordscir in the prehistoric era, ran, a literal waterway, through the center of that sacred summer of 1957.

At the same time, like many “red-brick” (urban, or working-class) universities across Britain outside the Oxford-Cambridge orbit, Bedford as a woman’s college was a haven for the socialist and progressive impulses that had been part of English creativity ever since the 1930s. Unlike the situation in the USA, communists and socialists in Britain were less often scapegoated, were more often able to hold onto their jobs in education and the arts, and thus enabled to carry the thread of Popular Front progressivism into the post-War period, even after the defeat of Labour in 1951. This was particularly true, again, in the women’s colleges, as it had been ever since Cecil Sharpe’s experiments with adding folk-dance to female secondary-school education.[1] The very fact that Bedford was a women’s technical college, in close geographic proximity to, yet at a great social distance from, the Oxbridge axis, paradoxically enhanced its fierce defense of the “sacred circle” of women’s space.

Then there was the fact that, by ’57, Nijinska and Nas1lsinez had several successful collaborations behind them. Though they saw one another seldom, their white-hot early 1950s creative partnership had yielded imaginative, even ground-breaking works of collaborative movement and sound.[2] No doubt also significant was the fact that, in the initial planning for the intensive/immersive summer workshop at Bedford, Nijinska and Nas1lsinez had arrived at what dance historians later described as an extraordinarily powerful topic for an extended work of Devised dance and music: a meditation upon the lives, careers, and (from Limbo) regrets of the Western dance duos Ruth St Denis & Ted Shawn, and Vernon & Irene Castle. Particularly at this post-War moment when all manner of Western colonialism, appropriation, and privilege were being called into question around the world, both coolly, in academic debating societies, and very hotly, in the spate of independence wars that arose out of the ashes of the colonial era, the topic itself drove the collaborative process and its results, and integrated all of the Companions, with the members of the leadership team, in a hothouse atmosphere of enormous—if emotionally exhausting—creativity. Particularly with the addition of the documentary and experimental visual artistry of Dhoma, both independent from and (often) integrated within the concert performances, and latterly with the integration of Ana de Quareton as co-choreographer with Madame, and as always with Nas1lsinez’s quiet, watchful presence, the stage was set, at Bedford, for a moment of extraordinary collaborative ferment in 20th century Bassandan arts. But what of the dancers themselves?

To all appearances, that the total of the Companions’ number should equal thirteen was coincidence—it was simply the number of refugees, orphans, iconoclasts, lone wolves, and novices who came by chance and happenstance, by hook and by crook, and by every possible prior biographical and geographical path, to be convened by Nijinska and de Quareton at Bedford. What linked them, perhaps, in those initial meetings, was simply the fact that, one way or another, they were all survivors—some more bruised than others. And, when questioned in later years by the fieldworkers of the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project, each of the Thirteen independently insisted that the specifics of their number held no special significance.

Yet it cannot be denied that the number 13, even aside from the obvious and immediate numerical association with Christ’s disciples (though Christianity was not a central part of Bassandan cultural history, its geographical location at the crossroads of Europe and Asia made for a very rich and nuanced Bassandan awareness of and scholarship upon multiple theological doctrines, including the Judeo-Christian), has carried metaphorical power in diverse wisdom traditions. For example, in the lore of the Torah, “thirteen is the number that bonds multiplicity into oneness,” while in Welsh folklore, Arthur’s counselor Merlin is said to have been buried with the “13 Treasures of Britain,” which included legendary weapons, tools, jewels, and garments, each bearing its own unique and magical story capacities.[3] While, in a more prosaic example from the English-language tradition, the “baker’s dozen” ensures that baker and buyer could agree on a full and fair exchange.[4]

Conversely, the experience of the Wise Companions at Bedford in the summer after the Hungarian Uprising appears—not least in their semblance to the birds of Attar’s Maqāmāt-uṭ-Ṭuyūr—to have been a direct numerological inspiration for the French avant-garde composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-92). One of the great composers of the 20th century, Messiaen’s very wide range of influences included, along with Hindu polyrhythms, medieval Church modes, the integral serialism of Anton Webern, and the French organ tradition, his avid and expert collecting of birdsong. His 1958 collection of thirteen works for the piano, composed in Paris after a summer in England, is entitled Catalogue d’oiseaux—the “Catalog of Birds.” It may be no coincidence, therefore, that the Companions each bore, as a secret known only to her fellows, the name of one of Attar’s or Messiaen’s birds.

The Treasure and exchange that the Companions and their mentors together gathered, that hot summer of 1957 in the English Midlands, were shaped both by the creative team of Nijinska, Nas1lsinez, Dhoma, and de Quareton, and by the Thirteen themselves, as well as by the Bedfordshire environment and geo-magnetic richness of its topography. Though no Rift Portals have been identified in central England—it is possible that over 400 years of Empire had closed some previously available, a phenomenon termed “imperial erasure” by Rift theorists—there were clearly spiritual, meteorological, and psychological energies flowing throughout the experience. Members of the Companions spoke, both at the time and decades later, of the transformative nature of that collaboration; one said: “before, we were Teen, and alone. After, we were One, and together, even when we are apart.”

In addition to all the specific circumstances cited above, which appear to have shaped the To Wipe All Tears from Our Eyes collaboration, it is also certainly true that specific opportunities and resources, and the Companions’ response to those opportunities, further enriched their collaboration. Due to a coincidence in touring schedules, the Companions had opportunity to meet up with the dancers of Kóneio Morris, exponents of the Northwestern tradition of Raqs Marisco, a stick-dancing style associated with the iron-miners who made essential contributions to the body of Bassandan electro-magnetic knowledge. Their spiritual leader Uzunboylu Mischa (Bassandan: “Big Mike”), recorded in a samizdat audio tape made in his home region of Qrystynʼa at some point in the early 1960s, acknowledged of the 1957 meeting [rough translation] “Them girls was fierce. Didn’t partikly know our ways, but they were quick as lightnin’ in learnin’ an they wasn’t afeerd a NUTHIN.”[5]

Similarly, the Thirteen were surprisingly effective as Bassandan ambassadors to the English: though the War years had encouraged Britons to become more cognizant of and—perhaps—sympathetic to the peoples of the Soviet satellites, it was as ever the direct contact, person-to-person, especially through the medium of the participatory arts, that forged more lasting connections. The Thirteen, possibly as a result of their individual prior experience of self-reliance within uncertain socio-political contexts (post-War Bassanda), and as well of their shared experience of creative collaboration with the Bassanda Project, met and charmed elderly members of the Bedford social dance community, some of whose memories, in 1957, reached all the way back to Sharp’s first experiments in the early ‘Teens. The women of the Wise Companions spoke movingly of their sense of connection and empathy with these aging dancers.

The nature of the sound/movement/image collaboration that emerged from that Bedford summer, To Wipe All Tears from Our Eyes, has been discussed elsewhere, both within and beyond the corpus of the Correspondence: it was both castigated, and hotly defended, by dance advocates throughout the Eastern satellites.[6] Far more significant than the critical response, of course, was the intense conviction with which the Bedford participants carried forward its lessons in the works and years to come. Most central to the Thirteen’s triumph, in the summer of 1957, is that, once again and as so often in the artistic and philosophical circles in which the PLO / BNRO / ESO operated, they together discovered—or recovered—a respect for organic processes, a release from prior attachments and preconceived outcomes, and a demonstrable, palpable, and enduring love for one another.

Finally, it is perhaps worthwhile noting one more numerological resonance recurring in this Tale of the Wise Companions—one which appears to have occurred to Yezget-Bey himself, for, on the last page of his handwritten notes in the small bound book presented to him by the Companions at Bedford, he concludes:

In the esoteric teachings of the Tarot, the 13th card of the Major Arcana, “Death” connotes not the mundane cessation of life, but rather—and very significantly--

“The end of one life or belief system and the beginning of something new.”

In the wake of that hot, transformative English summer of 1957, Yezget-Bey further comments,

The Thirteen Wise Companions might well agree.

--YN

[1] See http://www.cdss.org/programs/cdss-news-publications/cds-online/cecil-sharp

[2] See Xlbt Op. 16, A Landscape Triptych, Slangpolska efter Byss-Calle, and the Nonet, elsewhere in the Correspondence

[3] See The Legend of Culhwch and Olwen (c11th century CE).

[4] http://www.betemunah.org/thirteen.html

[5] “Ta dekleta so bila huda. Niso posebej vedeli za naše načine, vendar so bili hitro kot strela pri učenju In se ničesar ne bojijo.”

[6] See Zhenevyeva Durham Kráľa, “Circle and Flow: Understanding Devised Processes in 1957’s To Wipe All Tears from Our Eyes,” Tantseval'naya Istoriya 36 (1978), 72-97.

The Great Southwestern Desert post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’ Band

The evidence supporting the existence of the “post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’ Band” is largely confined to a body of materials, now held in the embargoed Confidential Materials (the so-called “Locked-Room Archive”) amongst the Bassanda Papers at Miskatonic, which appear to date from shortly—perhaps even only a few months—before the daguerreotype of the “Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band.” They include a calfskin-bound manuscript book, handwritten on vellum and measuring approximately 5 by 7 inches, which appears to be one volume of the tour diary of violinist Marushka Dugarte Orjuela. It is a treasure trove of sketches of landscapes and exotic steam-powered technology, of map coordinates and electromagnetic schematics, informal pencil portraits (mostly of various members associated with the 1967/1885 band), and the occasional fragment of third-person narrative prose, in both Spanish and English. The most extended and closely-linked several of these fragments appear to describe a series of adventures experienced by the 1967 Band just after the Rift Accident that cast them, and the locomotive called The Beast, back in time to the American Southwest, but just before they surfaced (in London or Paris, though the locale is unconfirmed) in time to have taken the 1885 daguerreotype found by Colonel Thompson in a Taos mission (see elsewhere in the Correspondence).

It is known that this version of the Band had been cast back in time from Bassanda c1967 to the American Southwest c1885, in a “Rift Accident” involving previously-unrecognized time-traveling capacities of the electromagnetic locomotive Sleipner a/k/a “The Beast” (see “The Grand Celestial Top-of-the-World Railroad and Travel Corporation”). Elsewhere in the Correspondence, it is confirmed that “The Beast” had gradually acquired an unremarked capacity for time-travel, and that the erstwhile ’67 Band, departing for their spring tour of the eastern Soviet Socialist satellites, had instead by accident been deposited somewhere in the northern Rio Grande valley, at a time when the Taos Mission itself was known to very few Anglos. Accounts of the adventures of Yezget Nas1lsinez and Giyanlakshmi Julahi Kaur likewise confirm—and, on the surface, resolve—the apparent paradox of the presence of members of the ’65 and ’67 bands in the 1885 daguerreotype. What is not explained by that previously-embargoed-but-recently-surveyed archival material [the circumstances of that illicit review are themselves redacted at the present time] is what appears to be an entirely independent storyline, concurrent with the 1967-1885 reverse continuum, but parallel to and containing separate events from those previously documented in the 1885 daguerreotype.

Of course, Hazzard-Igniti’s comprehensive “Unified Field Theory of Electromagnetic Chronological Transport” allows for Rift Accidents which entail time-travel. Not previously encountered in the Archival material, but also—theoretically—possible within the Hazzard-Igniti Theorem are the controversial additional claims of “Rift Drift”: the idea that Rift travel across distances (from the various portals known to be scattered around the globe, including the northern Rio Grande Valley, the Bassandan Alps, the Outer Hebrides, the Rif Mountains of Morocco, and elsewhere) and across time periods (as evidenced in numerous examples of chronological contradiction—what Hazzard-Igniti’ites call “chron cons”, a phenomenon not dissimilar to the kensho-like Huìyǎn or “spontaneous insight” described by the Iliot shamans) might actually be matched by intentional or inadvertent travel across what some argued were slightly variant parallel realities. Thus, travel via Rift might deposit the unwary or intentional adventurer in a different, unexpected location, time period, or even parallel universe--a concept derived from quantum mechanics, but explored most evocatively and poetically by the speculative fiction author Roger Zelazny (a Santa Fe inhabitant), in his Amber series, for whose secondary character “Benedict of Amber” the Bassandan bassist Džonatan Výrobca may have served as a model (“Red Dorakeen” from the novella Roadmarks may be derived from Natanas Hus, similarly).

Rift Drift has thus been tendered as one possible explanation for the appearance of the so-called “post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’ Band” in the northern Rio Grande Valley a year or two before the 1885 daguerreotype—but in a parallel and separate historical continuum in which a mysterious “electromagnetic burn” had somehow radically redirected the region’s magnetic ley lines, drastically reordering the Continent’s weather patterns and wreaking havoc upon the young United States territories’ social and mechanical infrastructure.

In this parallel where-when, the great Southwestern Desert (so-called by the first European explorers, before its extensive industrial-age settlement), in the wake of electromagnetic “Great Burn," reverts to isolated tribal bands, occupying the crumbling infrastructure of the (now discontiguous) southwestern metropoli: Yuma Crossing, Rio Santa Cruz, Ysleta, and Forks of Gila. The area was swiftly reclaimed by those indigenous peoples (chiefly Navajo, Ute, and Apache; as well as those denizens of Old Mexico whose nationality had been summarily altered by shifting national boundaries) who were most accustomed to surviving in its stark conditions, and gradually a parallel, non-electrical economy began to re-emerge. In addition to the radical acceleration of geomagnetic secular variation which succeeded the Great Burn, that event appears also to have created very significant regional variations in the capacity of the atmosphere to transmit electrical arcs—in other words, to have rendered electrostatic sparks nearly impossible through much of the desert Southwest, with the exception of the very fierce lightning storms which the geomagnetic variations had made even more frequent.

This cessation of electrical conductivity or muerte de la chispa (“spark-arc-death”) very significantly eroded the capacity of crucial 1880s-era technology (the telegraph and the electric light, principally) to function, and rendered conventional internal combustion engines—knowledge of which the Band brought with them in the Rift Accident—essentially inert. Electro-magnetic savants in the 1960s Band (principally Erzbieta “Ḍrēgana” Ateşleyici, the alumnus pianist/vocalist Rahmani Boenavida, and the “electrical sensitive” Kulamani Llandaff Callan) did bring that knowledge, and with the “hands-on engineer” Mississippi Stokes appear to have swiftly developed alternatives to both the electrical motor and the internal combustion engine—including also the use of wood-burning steam boilers to power large vehicles, which were very powerful, but which were likewise—dependent as they were upon combustible sources like wood or coal—largely impractical in the vast treeless expanses of the Great Southwestern Dessert. In this circumstance, communicative contact was maintained by "sand sailors,” who traveled the very great distances of the Southwest’s barren, arid wastes on “sand yachts” and “racers”—sail-driven wheeled carts which exploited the extreme weather’s shifting, unpredictable, but potentially very powerful wind patterns. These journeys also brought the Band’s “boffins” in contact with the remarkable electro-magnetic savant (in Bassandan mythology, the “Lightning Wizard”) Athanais Salamone of the northern Rio Grande valley, who materially advanced their transport and documentation technology.

Meteorological expertise, in this parallel “post-Apocalyptic” wasteland, was thus, as it had been for ancient indigenous peoples long before the coming of European culture, absolutely essential to the survival of the new “tribes”. “Weather prophets” were persons of respect within the tribe and their knowledge, particularly the internally-visualized and -memorized sung maps called “songlines,” a term borrowed from indigenous Australian culture, was regarded as a precious tribal inheritance.

On the other hand—and in contrast to other, more violent, dystopic post-apocalyptic environments elsewhere and elsewhen—the post-Burn Great Southwestern Desert was a relatively peaceful place, if for no other reason than that its population was so small. In the wake of the Burn, birth-rates dropped drastically (though the connection to the region’s electromagnetic disruption is unproven) and very large percentages of the Southwest population emigrated: to the desert cities of Southern California / New Old Mexico, or to the Caribbean basin. Those who remained in the Desert tended to be those populations who had been most comfortable with or adaptable to such stark conditions long before the Burn accelerated the depopulation. As the noted ecologist and speculative-fiction author Frank Herbert said, of his own imagined desert world, “God created Arrakis to train the faithful.”

Of course, for some of the longest-tenured members of the Band, such stark climatic and socio-economic circumstances were not unknown: some had been raised on the arid fringes of the Great Eastern Steppe, while others had been Displaced persons who came together in impromptu performances under Yezget-Bey’s direction in makeshift spaces as early as 1939 in the rubble-strewn outskirts of Ballyizget, pulverized during the Soviet “liberation” of late 1942, and still largely in ruins in late 1946 after the last pockets of stay-behind Nazi resistance had been obliterated. These veterans (including Морган and Kaciaryna, the Ŭitmena Sisters; Raksha Boenavida; and Nas1lsinez himself ) were accustomed to the complex dynamics of post-apocalyptic societies and to the adaptability and psychological stamina which survival in such circumstances demanded. Thus it comes as no enormous surprise that the Band—in the non-Canonic “Locked-Room Holdings” apocrypha which have not yet been confirmed by the Eagles’ Heart Sisters Oral History Project, and which are thus embargoed and not part of the Correspondence’s general circulation—functioned with their wind- and steam-powered vehicles especially as couriers, caravan guards, and diplomatic emissaries. Eventually, their extensive experience of the new trade routes made it possible for them to set up tours and residencies, and they became favored and welcome itinerant performers and educators in those same multilingual, polyglot Southwestern cities.

This “Rift Drift” scenario may also provide context for the first-person account of Caitriona & Ani lost in the Rio Grande Canyon, after the Rift Accident, but before they linked up with the Band. While that fragment has always been presumed to immediately precede the reunion captured by the 1885 daguerreotype in the “Where-When” of the conventional timeline, it may be more accurate to link their separation from the band, and the linkup that was presumed to immediately follow the Cait/Ani account, to the “parallel” Rift Drift scenario. In that case, perhaps they reconnected, not with the “Victorian Band,” but with the Where-When “Sand Pirates” variant of the Band described in the embargoed literature.

That “Sand Pirates” version of the Band consisted of band members who are presumed to have retained their paralleled memories of both the 1967 and 1880s contexts, and of the paradoxical parallel existences of their own consciousnesses. It is said, in fact, that the most extensively-traveled figures in the Bassandan pantheon—the General, the Colonel, Madame Main-Smith, Žaklin Paulu, and Nas1lsinez—possessed the capacity to experience all of these parallel “Where-When” consciousnesses simultaneously, and that this accounts for their predictive, telepathic, and teleportational abilities; while other, younger figures, especially those born into Iliot shamanic lineages, and/or other psycho-active micro-populations, were able to manifest similar “Where-When” consciousnesses in a more intuitive, less self-conscious fashion.

In this model—never formally endorsed by Hazzard-Igniti prior to his disappearance into the Gulag in the early ‘40s, but subsequently and passionately argued by his disciples Ambrosius de Colatta and “Ḍrēgana” Ateşleyici, during Bassandan’s “Revolution of Consciousness” in the early ’60s—true spiritual insight was precisely that which could sustain multiple, parallel first-person consciousnesses, across parallel Where-When’s, and operate with compassion and right-action from within them. The Hazzard-Üretici (Eng: “Igniti’ites”) linked such trans-cognitive capacity (“multi-consciousness” in Rift psychological theory) to the Japanese Zen concept of kensho, to Keats’s “negative capability” (the ability to treat as realities simultaneous conflicting imperatives), to Frank Herbert’s concept of the Kwisatz Haderach (the “one who can be many places at once,” in the Dune series); and to Whitman’s iconic line “do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes”—which they insist represents the very antithesis of the egocentricity of which it has sometimes been accused.

Such “multi-consciousness,” whether acquired via repetitive Rift experience (as with the Brethren, Madame, and Nas1lsinez), or from genetic predisposition (as with the Ŭitmenas, Raakeli Ursa Eldarnen, and Sian Isobel Seaforth MacKenzie), or from the transformative shock of “Rift Drift” accidents like that described in the Locked-Archive materials, would enable such persons to operate with right action and right intention with such clarity that all their parallel manifestations in parallel universes would likewise act rightly. “Rift Echoes” could thus account for the capacity of multi-consciousness to yield integrative rather than dissociative experience, provided those undergoing such Echoes possessed the psychological training, strength of character, and tribal awareness to weather the attendant challenges. It might thus explain the capacity of these individuals to emerge from a “zone” of multiple parallel-universe experiences and -consciousness, into a “nexus” in which various storylines suddenly merged again into a single, integrative timeline—which appears to have been the case sometime around, or just before, the 1885 daguerreotype was taken.

This is a rather fanciful and—for the literally-minded—head-achingly paradoxical theoretical construct, but Hazzard-Igniti’s theorems, the Igniti’ites philosophical extension of those theorems, Iliot shamanic multi-cognitive ritual, and the available facts regarding the “Sand Pirates” versus the “Victorian ‘Steampunk’” versions of the Band, can all thus be rendered consistent.

So it is possible that the “Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band,” captured with Nas1lsinez and Giyanlakshmi Julahi Kaur in either Paris or London, in the daguerreotype found in the Taos mission, in fact represents a reintegration of individuals and experience, from a range of parallel universes which the personnel entered just after the Rift Accident that cast them back pre-1885, just after the Rio Grande Valley adventure of Katriona and Ani (see Ani’s Personnel profile): and immediately preceded by a “pocket in the universe(s)” in which the “Sand Pirates” band’s adventures occurred.

In any event, in the years after 1884, over time, it is agreed in all standard chronicles, the “Steampunk” Band established themselves in the southwest, and eventually into Spanish California and the San Francisco Bay. They experienced a degree of recovery and, indeed, notable success, in the boom-towns of Santa Fe, Tucson, and San Francisco. They appear to have enjoyed the convenience of a series of mysteriously efficacious train schedules and unusual link-ups not fully accounted-for by the rail maps of the day.

So did the adventures of the “Sand Pirates Band” actually occur, in this space-time—in what seems to be the actual space-time—of the experience that has led me to the authorship, and you to the reading, of this fanciful account? Did they, on board the Beast, fall backward after the “Rift Accident,” from 1967 to pre-1883, only to find themselves transferred not only in time but also in universe-reality? Did they encounter an entirely additional series of adventures in this parallel, post-Apocalyptic universe? Did they then, either by intent or accident, experience a “Rift nexus” which brought all of these parallel universes, these parallel “Sand Pirates” Bands, together again in our Where-When? According to the Hazzard-Igniti Theorem, definitive assessment of the “reality,” “unreality,” parallel multiverses, and “Rift Echoes” in such a quantum theory is only attainable by those who possess both the technical and the spiritual knowledge, coupled with actual Rift Echo experience, which is granted to very few—mostly, to the Iliot shamans, certain of the Hazzard-Igniti’ites, and—conceivably—to members of the “Sand Pirates”/“Victorian Steampunk” Band(s) themselves.

And they mostly aren’t saying.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: New scholarly society and inaugural conference meetings

Announcing the First Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Bassanda Studies (a/k/a ISBS), December 2018

(ISBS: formerly “The Bassanda Corresponding Society,” “The Drones,” “The Young Gentlemen’s Oriental Society of Talpa,” “Il Carbonari,” “Filiki Etaireia,” “Ethnographische Aufklärungsgesellschaften,” etc., etc.[1])

Mission: The Mission of the ISBS is to foster research, communication, collaboration, advocacy, restoration, and new knowledge in the realm of the history, folklore, mythography, music, political schema, written and oral knowledge traditions of Bassanda, and of other topics and places as they intersect with Bassandan history and culture. The remit of the Society is explicitly inclusive, and the ISBS particularly welcomes transdisciplinary research. The ISBS explicitly repudiates essentialism, nationalism, and/or authoritarianism, and the Society is explicitly precluded from accepting sponsorship from any government body.

History: The Young Gentlemen’s Oriental Society of Talpa (YGOST or, familiarly, “WY-gost”) reflected in its membership the social and intellectual classes from which much late-Victorian anthropological and folkloric scholarship was built, and was not devoid of the classist and chauvinist perspectives endemic to other such societies. …The Society underwent a very significant watershed transformation in the early 1970s, when a small group of junior members, mostly Bassandan-born, staged a kind of revolt against the Society’s domination by a senior cadre of Soviet-trained scholars whose primary commitment was to top-down Socialist Realist versions of “sanctioned folklore.” This group of young scholars set about applying, to the conservatory and the university (in Bassandan: “The Golden Tower” = academic cloisters), the principles of inclusivity, demonstration-imitation-critique learning, respect for vernacular pedagogies, and organic synthesis of scholarship, expression, and community action.

CFP:

The Society invites scholars, lineage-holders, shamans, authors, poets, dancers, and composers who identify as Friends of Bassanda to propose individual papers, themed panels, “informances”, and arts-practice research pieces on any theme relating to the history, politics, ethnography, folklore, cultural geography, and so on. While all topics will be considered, the following themes and methodologies have been suggested by the programming committee for consideration.

Bassandan martial arts, especially the complex balletic forms of gatka knife-fighting
Bassanda Carnival and the Mjekësia Trego or Bassandan “medicine show”
Rabbits, foxes, and squirrels: Bassandan trickster god Korsák (корса́к)
Comparative mythography and historical performance practice, especially reconstructing the shamanic music of pre-Soviet Bassanda
Cartography, with special emphasis upon techniques for rendering four-dimensional maps of the Rift Portals
Prehistoric trade with the Pacific Rim and the possibility that Buddhism appeared in Bassanda as a seagoing import
Cave paintings and their connection to Iliot shamanic culture; allegations of psychoactivity
Early travelers' tales in Romance languages: the apocryphal “lost accounts” of Marco Polo and the early Jesuits in Bassanda
Bassandan maritime culture
Carpets, tapestries, quilts, embroidery, and other material/tactile cultural expressions
LGBTQ culture in Bassandan folk history: gender as construct and creative reimagination in the Bassandayana
The Bassandan pipe organ tradition
The historiography of ethnomusicology, folklore, and “popular antiquities” in Bassanda, and their ties to underground resistance movements
Foodways and indigenous cuisine; mythography and semiotics of food; Bassandan gastro-tourism
Itinerant & gypsy peoples of Bassanda
“Not so innocents abroad”: Yezget Nas1lsinez in Appalachia with Cecil Sharpe & Maud Karpeles
Bassandan smuggling and the contra-dance tradition
The 1970s and ‘80s underground Xalq Uyg'onish (“folk revival”) movement known as “the Grey Sleeves”, its later blossoming as Bassanda folk-rock, and modern PX (“pop-Xalq”) permutations
Bassanda in Parisian cafe culture: Pound, Nas1lsinez, and Algeria Main-Smith

Nota bene: Special Interest Groups are welcome but remain upon an ad-hoc basis at this time

Keynote, plenary addresses, gallery showings, lecture-demonstrations, workshops:

Giyanlakshmi Julāhē Kaur: “Earth and Sky: Nature-based mythographies of the body in oil and charcoal” [gallery showing]
Cifani Dhoma: “The visual Dharma: 120 years of Bassanda on film” [gallery showing]
Zhenevyeva Durham Kráľa: “Making use of that 25th hour: Administration, Artistry, and Child Advocacy in Bassandan Public Life” [Skype presentation: “Academia” ad hoc Special Interest Group]
Vilyum Balandjeor: “Is there life after Administration?” [Skype presentation: “Academia” ad hoc Special Interest Group]
Maritjie Tiedtgen: “Equus Bassandus: equine psychology and trauma recovery” [workshop]
Algeria Main-Smith: “Contemplating the Early Mind: Bassandan historical repertoires” [workshop]
Kristina Olenev: “Sticks in hand: Raqs Marisco in early childhood movement education” [workshop]
Pappy Lilt: “Bassandevalayana: The Creation Myth of Bassanda” [guided meditation]
Džonatan Výrobca: “Electromagnetics, Acoustics, and Neurosis: Unique Bassandan challenges” [lecture-demo]
Jakov Redžinald: “The Grand Bassanda Purveyance and Goods Catalog Company: Mail-Order Culture Under the Patronage of His Imperial Majesty, the Tsar of All the Russias, and Eastern Expansion” [archival tour]
Colonel Thompson: “Filling the Gaps on the Map: ‘The Documents’ and their role in the 1943 Schloss Itter assault” [plenary: “History and Combat” ad hoc Special Interest Group]
The General: “Cry havoc!: battlefield tactics in Bassanda’s ‘little wars’ of liberation” [plenary: “History and Combat” ad hoc Special Interest Group]
Nollag Käsityöläinen: “Prahmatychna bahatomovnistʹ v bassandsʹkykh doslidzhennyakh [Pragmatic multilinguality in Bassandan studies]”
Winesap (and St John, in absentia): “A few thoughts” [archival talk]
Ана Ljubak de Quareton: morning movement mediation 6-7:30am daily

Please submit an abstract (maximum 250 words) which clearly outlines topic, data, methodology, literature review, potential impact on the field of Bassanda studies, and anticipated conclusions. Limited access to data-projection and audio playback will be available on a first-come, first-served ad hoc basis. Deadline for proposals: 30 February 2018; notifications by June 31.

[1] http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/european-networks/secret-societies

The Beast & the Band at the Rendezvous, c1883

The Return from the Rift, Part 1

The image is of a small remnant of the "Great Southwestern Desert post-Apocalyptic 'Sand Pirates'" band awaiting the return of their colleagues from the parallel where-when (Qa'erd bolsa) of the "post 'Great Electromagnetic Burn'" in the American Southwest, in which a sudden and cataclysmic reversal of the region's geomagnetic ley-lines had destroyed all electrical and internal combustion power sources. The "Sand Pirates" band had been cast backward in time, from Bassanda in 1967, when the gigantic electromagnetic locomotive known colloquially as "The Beast" had spontaneously and unanticipatedly been transformed into its own "Rift Portal," bearing the Band backward in time, and across parallel Qa'erda bolas, to c1881 northern Rio Grande Valley. They endured many adventures and survived many dangers (see elsewhere in the Bassanda Correspondence) but would eventually be reunited--so they thought--both with one another, and with the Beast itself, sent from Ballyizget on a trans-chronological rescue mission. Here, a small nucleus of the band (see individual bios elsewhere in the Correspondence) have gathered at the rendezvous, but it would appear, from this hand-colored collotype image (possibly by Cifani Dhoma herself) that the rendezvous had somehow been interrupted or aborted.

Preliminary additional research in the Archives at Miskatonic University suggests that, though the Founder Yezget-Bey Nas1lsinez was successfully in guiding The Beast across time and space, to this rendezvous, the peculiar conditions of the post-Burn Qaerda bol’sa somehow interfered with the machine's own electromagnetic functions: while the presence of extensive steam is consistent with the Beast's backup system of supplementary steam-power retrofitted engineering (probably due to the unreliability of this where-when's magnetic ley lines), the presence of smoke, in addition to steam, is unexplained. Indeed, it is even posited that the black cloud from the engine's "smoke"-stack in fact reveals the electric magento's overheating or otherwise malfunctioning. It is even possible that this hypothesized malfunction which sent the (mostly) reunited "Sand Pirates" Band even further back in time, to c1842, in the western foothills of the Rocky Mountains, to the "Green River Rendezvous" of mountain men and others.

Further archival research obviously remains to be done.

The Band & the Beast, part 2

The Return from the Rift, Part 2

Another image of a small portion of the members of the 1967/c1881 “Great Southwestern Desert post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’ Band” at the rendezvous with the electromagnetic locomotive called “The Beast”, in the Qaerda-bol’sa (parallel wherewhen) of the “post-Burn” American Southwest, in which an unanticipated and still-unexplained shift of the Earth’s geomagnetic ley-lines had knocked out all electrical and internal-combustion engines and motors. They had been cast backward in time, space, and dimensions as a result of a “Rift Accident,” in which--apparently--the Beast itself had become a Rift Portal, such that the ‘67 Band, believing they were boarding in Ballyizget for the summer tour of the Eastern Bloc satellites, had instead been accidentally relocated to the post-Burn American Southwest Qaerda-bol’sa. They endured many hardships and adventures (see also, elsewhere in the Correspondence held in the Bassanda Archives at Miskatonic University, the “Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band”), appearing in daguerreotypes, found in a Taos mission, but apparently taken in either Paris or San Francisco (the evidence is inconclusive). They also appear in collotypes, taken apparently immediately after the Accident by Tsarist Cossacks arriving from a different Qaerda-bol’sa via the Rift in pursuit--those collotype images survive, though the Cossack pursuers apparently did not.

In this image, a portion of the Band appear to have been reunited with the Beast, which in turn appears to have been repaired and sent to find them (there is some thought that the Founder, Yezget-Bey Nas1lsinez, himself had mounted the space-time rescue expedition). The extensive steam suggests that the reverse-engineered and jury-rigged steam boiler, used to fire the electrical magnetos of the Beast’s motors, is here in use, and the arc-light brightness of the engine’s headlamp suggests that the Rift engineers among the Band had repaired the mainframe electrics; these would account for the visible relief and joy in some faces.

On the other hand: many members of the Band, documented in the earlier Cossack collotypes, are absent from this image. Their absence suggests that the image was taken at a moment when there were still more dangers to come; indeed, it is thought that the fact that comrades were missing at the rendezvous was itself the precipitating factor that sent those present here on a further, dangerous series of adventures, as they sought, via the Beast, across time and space to find the others. This may account for an apparent, further detour, which saw them cast still further back in time, to the Mountain Man Green River Rendezvous in c1841 Wyoming.

Further investigation in the Archives is clearly essential.

Image recovered from the Archives, restored, and hand-colored by Cifani Dhoma

Cultural Diplomacy and The “State Folklore” Ensemble

There are parallels and paradoxes intertwined within the histories of the People’s Liberation Orchestra / Bassandan National Radio Orchestra / Elegant Savages Orchestra. It is a fact that, throughout the period of Soviet dominance of the various satellite nations (“People’s Republics” or “Soviet Socialist Republics”) roughly 1945-1989/90, it was standard policy to create and subsidize “national ensembles,” both choral and instrumental, whose public relations task was very directly to promote a particularly sanitized vision of that nation’s folklore. “Appropriate” genres and ethnicities were centralized and iconicized, often framed with picturesque “folkloric” garb, performing sanitized, often standardized large-ensemble versions of traditional pieces. Genres and ethnicities considered undesirable by the Soviet-appointed cultural commissars could be ignored or reimagined, effectively if clumsily “erased” from that nation’s cultural fabric, rather in the way that disgraced or defeated Soviet officials could be “erased”—in those pre-Photoshop eras—from official photographs of May Day and Lenin’s Tomb.

At the height of the Cold War, and indeed into the 1960s, these “ethnic folkloric” ensembles were a central part of international cultural diplomacy—“arts propaganda” by any other name—in acting-out a sanitized vision of the multi-ethnic socialist workers’ paradise. Their surface pantomime of inclusive heterogeneity could, indeed, be contrasted by the commissars to the real public conflicts of the American Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam movements, and thus to undercut US government critique of Soviet authoritarianism. Conductors and arrangers for these folkloric ensembles, not a few of whom were both skillful musicians and knowledgeable ethnographers, were forced to walk the thin line between advocacy and appropriative parody, but only a few were particularly successful as was Yezget Nas1lsinez.

On the other hand, the musicians, singers, and dancers were accorded comparatively high social status—certainly treated with more respect than that garnered by freelance and underemployed “folk” musicians in the West—and were treated as valued cultural representatives, receiving solid salaries, health benefits, and retirement pensions. Of course the USA and the other members of the NATO alliance were not free of similar forms of “cultural diplomacy,” most visibly in the form of the powerful shortwave broadcasts of Voice of America, which carried a significant ratio of American popular music, and in the Jazz Ambassador tours undertaken, most notably, by Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington: both of whom understood well that their music was being mapped, in propaganda terms, as emblematic of the “superiority” of Western democratic ideals (Dizzy, in particular, was not shy himself about pointing-out the racist, ethnic, and classist injustices to which jazz musicians, and African Americans more widely, were subjected in 1960s North America).

The irony, then, is that though perestroika, then glasnost, and finally the fall of the Soviets were all regarded, both in the West and in the satellites, as individual watershed moments of inspiring liberalization, they were also, paradoxically, markers of the disintegration of the financial and touring networks which had provided employment for a very considerable number of musicians, singers, conductors, and composers associated with the state folkloric ensembles, only a very small number of whom survived: perhaps the best-known example is the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir, who had enjoyed a fluke “hit record” with the compilation Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (Vol. 1 1975, Vol. 2 1989), essentially—and coincidentally—just in time to develop a substantial Western audience, such that, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, they were able to transition to touring as a commercial ensemble. Most other Soviet-era state folklore ensembles were not so lucky: as we know, the BNRO, rechristened as “The Elegant Savages Orchestra,” was forced to develop a scrappy, collective self-sufficiency, which originated in the War years, carried over from the Soviet era, continued with the Band’s mass defection to Helsinki in 1985, and continued again after the death of the Founder on the “Endless Tour,” into the next millennium. Their experience, like that of the Bulgarian Women’s Choir, was atypical, but not unknown—remarkable historical tale though it be.[1]

[1] There is an element as well, in the BNRO, of the mixed-instrumentation ensembles which came into existence in many colonial states: from the Police-sponsored brass bands of Ghana and Nigeria to the kwadri and menway string bands of the Antilles to Arabo-Andalusian ensembles of rebabs, violins, oud, and percussion found at the Royal Court of Fez: in each case, collections of vernacular musicians seeking new sounds, new syntheses, and new opportunities through the melding of indigenous and imported/appropriated instruments and sounds.

Frontiers of imperial conquest and exchange:
the case of Bassanda

Part of the mythos of Bassanda is the ethno-historical analysis of what happens culturally in a small geographically-specific enclave, united mostly by shared or contiguous linguistic (and thus spiritual and cosmological) traditions rather than formal political identities, without much in the way of indigenous natural resources, whether extractive (coal, timber, minerals, precious metals, etc) or territorial (e.g., arable land ripe for confiscation and colonization), but vulnerable to and a target for invasion precisely because it is the gateway between/among wealthier and/or more desirable locations.

Most of Central Asia, for example—the home of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Uighurs, Turkmens, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, and the like—was not a desired target for either extraction or colonization, yet it was nevertheless the site of constant imperial interplay, because its location between Europe and Pacific Asia made it an essential highway—e.g., a “Silk Route”—for trade and invasion. Likewise, invaders from Alexander through Catherine the Great, all the way to Bush 43, were forced to conclude that Afghanistan, though a singularly undesirable site for extraction or colonization—though arid, mountainous, and stark, populated with intensely localized tribal identities who ferociously resisted invasion—because of its location as the center of the three empires of Persia, Russia, and India, represented a kind of territorial imperative for imperial trade and conquest. Likewise, the northern imperial reaches of the Mande kingdoms comprised arid sub-Saharan territory which was singularly undesirable for occupation, but nevertheless controlled lucrative trade in slaves and other goods between the Arabic Mediterranean and the mineral and human wealth of West-central Africa. Poland, in central Europe, was constantly subjected to invasion, annexation, and political destabilization—but primarily because the contending Prussian and Russian empires recognized its significance as a frontier for either fomenting or contesting imperial conquest.

So Bassanda, which (as CIA and NSA reports confirm) lacked much in the way of either extractive or territorial resources, was nevertheless the constant subject of invasion, annexation, and/or political manipulation. As “highways of empire,” such places often share, despite their limited natural resources and fiercely individuated indigenous populations, long histories of complex multi-cultural exchange, synthesis, and creativity. They are often invaded.

The invaders, from Macedonian hoplites to Tsarist Cossacks to British regulars to Soviet tankers, often realize—belatedly—that they’ve made a mistake.

The Buddhist History of the Bassandayana

As a crossroads of imperial trade and conquest, Bassanda has, for at least 6000 years, experienced an enormous, cosmopolitan range of cultural and theological influences, which—as so often—have interacted with homegrown beliefs in complex and unique ways. Buddhism itself has typically been a peripatetic and adaptable set of beliefs, which since its origins in India has both traveled and evolved to fit shifting historical, geographical, and cultural contexts: its adaptation was no less rich and unique in Bassanda.

Theological influences which preceded Buddhism—which arrived in the country, seemingly, c400 CE—include particularly Zoroastrianism, a quasi-deistic teaching tradition that comes from Persia in the first millennium BCE; its emphasis upon the warrior attributes of spiritual aspiration, group consciousness, and courageous sacrifice echo in some of the epic poetry of gods and heroes associated with the northern steppes.

The very old Iliot shamanistic traditions, which precede Zoroastrianism in the country, appear to have emerged indigenously; the earliest preserved documents mentioning these practices date from 600-800 CE, though internal references suggest that the traditions reach well back into the second millennium BCE. That shamanic tradition was a sky religion, paying particular tribute to steppes/horses, sea/winds, and individual transportative experience.

Long before the “Religions of the Book” (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) found their way there via trade and conquest, Bassanda had developed a deep, abiding, instinctive and remarkably resilient love of nature, which tied directly into the very ancient tradition of oral poetry. Music, poetry, and dance played an extremely significant role in Bassanda spirituality: in the sky (steppes) and wind (sea) sects of the old religion, life-cycle transformation ceremonies were often focused around participation in music, song, and dance rituals. However, there was a high degree of both theological diversity and also syncretic exchange in religious beliefs, as all of these wisdom traditions intermingled with the indigenous beliefs and with one another. Overwhelmingly, the Bassandan versions of all these traditions were most strongly shaped by the ancient indigenous influence of and love for the natural world. Cultural attitudes from the pre-literate era likewise tended toward high acceptance of spiritual diversity, this a product of the region’s very long history of cosmopolitan/traveler experience. In the pre-literate era, shaman/healers/seers occupied very central social roles, as with many other aural/oral cultures from the Arctic Circle to the Central Asian steppes to the kingdoms of sub-Saharan Africa.

When Buddhism finally arrives in the 7th century, it intermingles with the shamanistic traditions, rather as the influence of Tibetan Bon added elements of pantheism, animism, and magical/invocatory practices to the Buddhism that took root there. Certain aspects of the Indian teachings echo elements of the later Bassandayana sutra—it is thus inferred that a relatively small cohort of Indian Buddhist monks might have trekked over the northwestern Hindu Kush, perhaps wandering on the old routes that Alexander’s mercenaries had pioneered seven hundred years before. Christianity arrives by the 9th century; Islam in the 10th.

As would be the case with Jesuit monks during the eras of exploration and colonization by European powers c1500-1800, some of the most reliable early written documentation of indigenous pantheism was assembled by wandering Buddhist monks, scholars, and teachers, who took pains to document the Iliot traditions they encountered when they first arrived from India in the eighth century. These annals confirm the inclusivity of the syncretic Iliot-influenced Buddhism captured in the scrolls of the Bassandayana (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), which inclusivity is reminiscent of that practiced by St Patrick when he first entered pagan Ireland in the late fifth century CE; like Patrick, these early pilgrims sought points of commonality and spiritual echo between Iliot and Buddhist teachings. This no doubt accounts for the particular sensitivity to landscape, sky, running water, and the spiritual identities of plants and animals found throughout the Bassandan Sutras. Bassanda seems to have been the site of a relatively early (and prescient) rejection of the falsely-dichotomous Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”) and Hinayana (“Lesser Vehicle”) schools which emphasized philosophical engagement as opposed to “good works” in the world. An additional element which appears to have originated with the Iliot teachings and strongly impacted the Bassandayana is echoed in the Mahayana belief that, at any given instant, "there exist other Buddhas who are simultaneously preaching in countless other world-systems"; this is intriguingly reminiscent of the Hazzard-Igniti Theorem’s equation of the Iliot Qaerda-bol’sa (theory of parallel “where-when”) to the possibility of parallel quantum universes; if so, this would not be the first or only historical occasion when an ancient wisdom tradition had intuited scientific truths which were only confirmed centuries, or even millennia, later.[1]

Certainly the first manuscript appearance, around 800 CE, in Iliot scrolls of the mystical phenomenon generally described as “The Eagle’s Vision” (see elsewhere in the Correspondence) would seem to parallel the Buddhist concept of prajñā (Sanskrit: “insight”) or kenshō (Japanese: “spontaneous enlightenment”): the moment of multi-perspectival clear-vision in which the veil of phenomenal existence is set aside, and the aspirant achieves (temporary) insight in to the systems of deep meaning which underly communal consciousness.

[1] Bassandan (lit: "wherewhen") referring to the phenomenon of parallel and simultaneous quantum realities.

Ntónalnt Kozyr a/k/a Ḍōnālḍa Müllkippe

b1946- (imprisoned for life without parole, 1992)

Possibly the most hated of all post-Soviet Bassandan oligarchs; figurehead leader of a brief coup in the wake of the fall of the Central Committee in 1985, having usurped the title of First Counselor from Polli Kilotona, the political activist who had been the first democratically-elected leader. A descendent of Russian and East German gangsters, he claimed during his brief political regime to have “served with distinction” in clandestine operations in 1976-77 in the run up to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Jackson Lawrence-Smyth, an ally and combat advisor to the Khampa resistance against China’s annexation of Tibet after 1959, insisted that Kozyr/Müllkippe never served and that his “distinguished” military record had been falsified during his short regime.[1]

His grandfather Müllkippe had been a White Russian infiltrator and agent provocateur of various revolutionary movements in St Petersburg c1905—it is thought that he was the traitor who identified a number of leaders for assassination by the Okhrana. After 1917, the grandfather was shunted aside by the Leninist faction, but scratched out a living via his connections with paramilitaries and the Moscow underworld. The father was likewise a gangster, a member of the сука (“bitch”) class who was briefly imprisoned in the Gulag, but survived by corruption, pimping, bootlegging, and human trafficking, earning first release and then continuing immunity through his betrayal of other gangsters: in the 1950s, the father managed to set himself up as a real estate fixer, importer/exporter (especially of petroleum products), and “seller of influence” for western businessmen interested in economic ties with Stalin’s oligarchs. Ḍōnyā himself, like many Dauphin-style characters throughout imperial history, was prone to boasting, narcissistic self-inflation, and a seeming inability to discern his self-promoting personal myth and the reality that others experienced.

Recounted elsewhere has been the story of the dissolution of the Soviet state apparatus in 1985—the so-called “Fall of the Apparatchiks”—and the remarkable scene which ensued when a motley group of Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory students and adjunct faculty led a protesting crowd in massed revolutionary song outside the final meeting of the Central Committee. That night Polli Kilotona was confirmed as new First Counselor to the nation, the first democratically-elected leader; her appointment was swiftly ratified by a special pan-national referendum in November 1985. She promptly set about the task of forming a coalition government and explicitly sought the widest representation from across all of Bassanda’s diverse ethnic, regional, and social constituencies. Though the task of nation-building in the wake of colonial collapse is never an easy one, conventional histories of the period are relatively accurate in portraying 1986-1990 as a period of consolidation, development of social and economic infrastructure, and a very significant relaxation and redress of historical repression and injustice.

Explicitly in order to avoid any cult of personality, Kilotona chose not to stand for a second term in the election season of Fall 1990, instead opting to endorse the fiddle-player, ex-BNRO member, and social activist Jakov Redžinald to campaign for her seat: members of the Kamuna Liasami Eĺfaŭ / “Wood-Elves’ Commune”, her familial and arts collective in the foothills of the Northern Alps, who had become adept social activists and political operators in the perestroika years of 1970s, serving as her campaign staff.

However, unbeknownst to activists, scholars, and bureaucrats across the spectrum who had been working diligently in the period 1988-90 to both develop effective parliamentary systems and to educate the new electorate about the duties and opportunities attendant upon the franchise, a separate cabal of gangsters, oligarchs, fundamentalist soldiers, corrupt public servants, and entrenched political operatives had been building, in secret, plans for a totalitarian overthrow of the young democracy. Though the power and money behind this plan came from mostly outside the country—particularly from disaffected and greedy billionaire businessmen in the USA, UK, and former Soviet Union—the individual chosen in the fall of 1990 as the figurehead for this new Наши люди всегда всегда (“Our People First Always”) or #NLVV movement was none other than Kozyr / Müllkippe. Though best known as a notorious playboy, popular celebrity, and failed businessman (and though the subject of journalistic and judicial observation since the 1980s, as a money launderer, human trafficker, and serial abuser of women), Kozyr possessed a raw animal magnetism which proved to be shockingly attractive to that one-quarter of the Bassandan voting population who, perversely enough, longed naively for the “good old days” of the Soviet Socialist Republic. Even more shockingly, Kozyr was—seemingly—elected with a slight majority of parliamentary votes in the November 1990 elections, garnering far more support than any polling had suggested possible. Despite this extraordinary and shocking upset, the democratic process held, and he assumed office in January of ’91.

It would take over two years from that date for a remarkable coalition of journalists, opposition politicians, social activists, and—especially ironically—former intelligence and secret police professionals to trace the degree, scope, and catastrophic impact of Russian oligarchs’ meddling with the Bassandan electoral process, which meddling including voter disenfranchisement, the weaponizing of false reporting (what the #Resistance called, accurately, falʹshyvi novyny—“fake news”), intimidation, and blackmail.[2] (Indeed, it appears that much of the groundwork for this investigation had been laid in the decade or more prior to the 1990 elections).

The period January 1991 through November 1992 was one of escalating shock and horror, as the Kozyr regime imposed and enacted a vast and intentional chaos-making campaign intended to distract from and delegitimize the process of justice. Hundreds were detained without trial, journalists and opposition politicians were threatened and silenced, ethnic minorities were targeted for vicious scapegoating which recalled the cynical propaganda excesses of the fascist 1930s, the dictator maintained a schedule of massive rallies which together coalesced in a horrific symphony of hate, and external agitators (mostly Russian criminal elements) sought to turn Bassandans against one another.

The grotesque rhetorical and behavioral excesses of Kozyr himself, and of his immediate circle, were part of this massive distraction and delegitimization strategy. In one particularly notorious incident, the hated twin sons of the oligarch, Uday and Qusay, were surprised poaching big game—elephants and tigers—on the frontier, having (probably intentionally) strayed into wildlife preserves, and were summarily tried, convicted, and narrowly escaped the punishment for animal-murder which was traditional among the indigenous Maa hunter-gatherers who formed the nucleus of the park-ranger corps: namely, castration.

Within a week of their dictator father having demanded their release, however, the special investigators charged with uncovering this elaborate, pan-national, multi-decade political conspiracy, which implicated hundreds of wealthy businessmen, politicians, and journalists, both within and beyond the national borders, issued a wave of indictments, which reached nearly as far as the First Counselor’s office itself.

In response, Kozyr/ Müllkippe declared martial law and called out the #NLVV paramilitaries. Super-8mm film footage exists of the would-be demagogue standing on a tank in Ballyizget’s Parliament Square, orating in his trademark style through a bullhorn, surrounded by the crimson caps of his supporters and the olive-drab uniforms of rogue soldiers, and in turn by an enormous crowd of chanting #Resistance protesters. At one particular moment, which eyewitnesses describe as following a spontaneous massed-choral a cappella version of the anthemic Plima Istorije (“The Tide of History”), the corrupt counselors around the dictator appear to suffer a collective hallucination, gesticulating to one another and pointing with horror at an unseen apparition on the roof of the Parliament building. Though the film footage is without sound, those same eyewitnesses describe an unearthly howling, beginning in the subsonic and progressing gradually upward in pitch and volume to an earsplitting screech; of this occurrence; the bassist and sound technologist Džonatan Výrobca, in later years recalling the abortive coup, provided the cryptic comment, “Sometimes the right Documents at the right Wherewhen [Qaerda-bol’sa] come in handy.” In any event, it appears—from the slightly inconclusive evidence of the many-times-duplicated, extremely low-resolution videotape—that immediately after this unidentified event Müllkippe literally loses control of his bodily functions, before being pulled from the tank by the crowd.[3]

Within a week, Kilotona—with assistance from internal and external allies, most notably the General Council of the United Nations and the International Court—had rallied loyal military and executive personnel and led the ratification of the results of the 1990 free democratic election, in which Redžinald was voted to Parliament and declared, via parliamentary acclamation, the new First Counselor. Kozyr, meantime, went into hiding, and eventually sought, with his wife and female offspring, to leave the country by clandestine means, evidently hoping to obtain permanent residence in a non-extraditable location—Russia or the Third World, or perhaps, in secret, amongst the other exiled dictators in south Florida. However, he was captured by elements of the ASIS in Australian waters, and returned to Bassanda under indictment, as were several other members of his immediate family (most notably, his third wife, widely thought to be a Russian plant, and his daughter, of whose relationship with her father the darkest imputations were inferred).

He was tried at the World Court (Den Haag), and in 1994—over three years after taking office in a stolen election—was convicted of human trafficking, rape, money-laundering, high treason, and obstruction of justice. Though there were wrathful voices in the new democratic Bassanda, and indeed in the international community, who called for a judgement of capital punishment against both Kozyr and the worst of his enablers, Polli Kilotona—who herself had lost friends and family to the “disappearances” inflicted by the Dictator’s red-capped private security forces—led the faction, eventually successful, who argued instead for life imprisonment, and the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the model of post-Apartheid South Africa. During this Commission’s hearings, hundreds of victims and family members testified to the corruption and elective cruelty of the short, brutal Regime, and indeed dozens more indictments emerged as a result of the proceedings: of the neo-Nazis, extortionists, propagandists, money launderers, murderers, war criminals, and gangsters the Dictator had brought into government in his betrayal of the democratic process—many of these were exiled, incarcerated, or extradited to face international charges abroad.

Kozyr himself was eventually sentenced to life, without possibility of parole, at a remote medium-security prison in the far Northern Alps; as Kilotona said “not vengeance—just quarantine, silence, and oblivion.” He was free to move within the confines of the facility, to take exercise and to employ its library (both of which resources he resolutely and viciously rejected), but was denied all voice to the outside world: only his court-appointed advocates were allowed either to interact with him or to transmit any of his “requests” (really, impotent demands).

In that prison, like the Nazi engineer Albert Speer, under blue skies and with a modicum of the human dignity he and his foul ilk had gleefully denied others, he lived out his days—finally and securely deprived of the tools of anger, hatred, and fear he had stoked to his own selfish ends.

As the General said, “Best that we forget the monster, and remember the lessons.”

Photo caption: Artist's rendering of Kozyr the Dictator in the dock for sentencing at International Criminal Court, Den Haag, August 1994. AF-P.

[1] Subsequent research has confirmed that Kozyr was absolved of military duty because of unspecified “bone spurs” and, more credibly, congenital and recurring syphilis.

[2] The veteran investigative journalists Carl Bernstein and David Corn described this comprehensive strategy of misinformation and manipulation “as the most broad-based and egregious example of political sabotage we’ve seen in the history of modern electoral politics.” Bernstein said, “It’s rat-fucking of the lowest order.”

[3] The General put it more succinctly, in his redacted notes on the archival film: “Right here—right after the Device peaks out—is where he shits himself.”

Entertaining partisans after German surrender, June 1945.

Socialist Realism and the People’s Liberation Orchestra c1943-47

The term “socialist realism” only came into common usage after 1934, when the notorious Andre Zhdanov dictated, in a speech to the Congress of Soviet Writers, that henceforth art should strive for clarity, naturalness, narrative, patriotic unity, technological optimism, and the idealization of peasant values, but these ideas about art as a tool of central power of course reached back through the Tsars and nobility all the way to Louis XIV, if not before. In the Soviet era, these strictures were more readily assessed, and employed, in more literally pictorial arts like painting and literature; artists—especially musicians—working in less linear or narrative forms could sometimes unintentionally violate SR aesthetics, as assessed, essentially, on the basis of Stalin’s own simplistic artistic tastes, failure to anticipate which could elicit censure, as Shostakovich and Prokofiev among others discovered to their chagrin. It became an accepted credo of Stalinist arts policy, in both the Soviet Union and in the satellites, that painters, composers, and musicians, no less than bureaucrats and factory-workers, owed fundamental allegiance to the socialist collective: that their efforts should be as strongly and uniformly directed toward national unity and the glorious workers’ revolution to come. Tikhon Khrennikov was appointed by Stalin as First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, and at their First Congress in 1948, he laid down the laws that would shape the next 40 years of Soviet music—himself a creative mediocrity, Khrennikov never relented from his view that both Stalin, and socialist realism, had been brilliant responses to historical/artistic imperatives.[1]

Fortunately, Nas1lsinez and the members of the seminal People’s Liberation Orchestra (fl c1943-47) were able to anticipate the directions in which post-War arts politics were likely to proceed:

47.03.22
Nas1lsinez to Szabo
[ciphered letter]
We must look ahead. Though the Central Committee has been focusing upon Russian composers, rather than the satellites, I’m not optimistic that they’ll stop there. If we want to continue to engage with artists and musicians from beyond the USSR, we’re going to need some kind of cover for those activities. We have to keep that engagement with thea folkloric materials. The commissars are not bright, but they have almost limitless resources within the Georgian’s prejudices. They may have approved of our collecting and partisan activity during the War, but they’re closing off resources now, right and left. We need the folklore material, as cover for the activity with the Westerners. That might mean we have to de-emphasize the experimental works, at least when we think a commissar might be present. And the rest of them: Śamū’ēla, Jamey, Jakov—we must keep them silent. Benjy, Etsy, Syntiya: they can keep their mouths shut and use soft words. But we must watch the youngsters also.

47.03.28
Szabo to Nas1lsinez
[en clar letter]
Understood, Baba. It will be a privilege to continue to explore the richness of the folkloric musics which all Bassandans inherit. And of course I and my comrades Vyrobnyk, and the dedicated Socialists who come to us from the west—Biraz Ouiz and Le Gwo—welcome the opportunity to train the younger musicians in the aesthetics of Socialist Realism.

47.04.01
Szabo-Nas1lsinez
[conversation while en route via Jordan House Car from Prague to Ballyizget.

YN at the wheel, TMS nursing an infant as they jolt over the rough roads through the Carpathians]

YN: I have not yet seen any kind of formal communication from Khrennikov’s committee, but I can feel it coming.

TMS: [to infant] Shh, shh baby… [to YN] So what do you want to do with the autumn recordings? It’s expected that we’ll record the repertoire from the summer tour. Are you going to make changes?

YN: I think we have to start with the texted pieces…

The diktat had originated with the Chairman of the Bassandan League of Composers and Folkloric Musicians, a government-sponsored organized which was charged with assessing funding proposals, setting budgets, and—most impactfully—assessing and if necessary censoring the content of compositions. Its biases were revealed by the degree to which its leadership skewed toward academic composers of a certain economic class, and tended to neglect folkloric musicians, improvisers, and cross-genre collaborations—though the mission statement emphasized “inclusion of all concert and folkloric musics of merit, in order to demonstrate the diversity and egalitarian spirit of the socialist aesthetic,” the reality was that the same hegemonic class hierarchies were carried over from the Tsarist era: sometimes by the very same individuals.

48.01.30
[lost]
Concert program: “Inclusivity for Victory”: the People’s Liberation Orchestra, in Their First Theatrical Appearance

48.02.014
Official communique from the League of Bassandan Composers
The composers failed to draw upon the riches of folk melody, the songs and dance tunes that are to be found in such abundance among the peoples of the USSR in general, and in particular among the peoples of Bassanda. The national orchestral music should be distinguished by its richness of content, the variety of its melodies, the breadth of its range, its national character and its graceful, beautiful and lucid musical form. The Central Committee believes that the failure of this programming results from the rejection of socialist realist principles that Comrade Nas1lsinez appears to have chosen – a path that could spell ruin for the artistic life of this country.

48.02.17
Nas1lsinez
[from YN’s encrypted secret journal]
Yes, we are going ahead. If the commissars are beginning to cast their sights upon the PLO, it is past time to change the name and profile. I will have to make gestures of appeasement, as regards repertoire and presentation. I will do all in my power to protect the membership, both the ones with documentation and those without. We will all have to remain vigilant about one another’s identities and affiliations, but the best way I can do that is to keep the members safe and together.

48.03.01
Nas1lsinez to the League of Bassandan Composers
We of the People’s Liberation Orchestra, like all among the ranks of loyal Bassandan Soviet musicians, are very glad to accept just criticism from the custodians of our country’s artistic future. We recognize the impact of their guidance and strive to act from their example. In light of our recent errors, we respectfully petition the Central Committee to consider our application to formalize and rededicate our efforts, especially in the aftermath of the glorious People’s Victory in the recent defeat of the fascists. If it should be deemed acceptable, we propose to accept the dictate that we should provide broadcasting services over state radio and in suitable concert venues. We therefore respectfully accept the renaming of the ensemble as the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra and humbly acknowledge the charge that has been laid upon us. We will make every effort to live up to the highest ideals of our glorious national character.

48.03.02
Nas1lsinez to Szabo
[ciphered letter]
We continue as we have begun. The name change is irrelevant: as the Iliot shamans tell us, names, words, mean little or nothing. More important is that we protect the membership, their families and friends, and that we continue in the mission to preserve and strengthen our communities through our music.

Let the commissars dictate temporary policy, for we will outlast them in the end.

[1] Tikhon Khrennikov: "Stalin znal muziku luchshe nas ..." ("Stalin knew music better than we ..."), Zavtra 39 (671), 27th September 2006.

Brauḍasakī’s Bukasa: A Rare and Treasured Volumes Emporium

In Bassanda’s university quarter, the “Old City” adjacent to the Inner Harbor ,whose crooked cobblestoned thoroughfares reached back to the early Middle Ages, on a side street lined by elms and esoteric shops, around the corner from the oldest of the city’s municipal libraries (est. 1792, with a grant from the British East India Company), beneath the old wheat market, lay Brauḍasakī’s Bukasa (A Rare and Treasured Volumes Emporium), with its lending-library annex. It was said that you could, eventually—if you showed patience and generosity, calm and purpose—find, somewhere in Brauḍasakī’s stacks, every book that had ever been important to you. And not only that: it was claimed that, with calm, purpose, patience, and generosity, and holding the intention to remain open to new experience, you the customer could even find the books you didn’t yet know that you needed--even if you didn’t know what they were. There were maps, engravings, ephemera, first editions, obscure university presses and remainders, ancient students’ textbooks and even lecture notes, incunabula, curios, and much more.

The Avenue of the Scholars was itself a busy street, but a turn into Corn Alley was almost like stepping through a sound-lock, or a time-portal, to a quieter time before the factories or the internal combustion engine. A few rolling carts marked “free” signaled the presence of books to be had below, and, while the contents of these carts were mostly comprised of volumes probably best suited to a landfill or potbellied stove, the more cunning or mercurial senior staff would, with the owner’s encouragement, occasionally squirrel a treasure, “for the sake of happenstance or happy accident,” amongst the forgettable novels and self-help books. A display case at street level, which from the sunken interior of the subterranean bookshop looked like a high clerestory window, contained a collection of obscure, wonderful, and mundane objects, behind windows which were somewhat obscured by the aging and arabesque gilt lettering on their surface, and well-festooned with cats. It was a matter of curiosity that, although no patron ever seemed to see in these cases the same combination of objects as any other, all, even as they seemed to interchange, were covered with the same thick layer of undisturbed dust.

Descending the worn, steep stone staircase at the side of the old stone corn-exchange building was itself even more evocative: like stepping backward through time and downward into an earlier quiet. The stone wall of that outdoor staircase, which was roofed over but otherwise open to the elements, was a patchwork quilt of ancient and yellowed posters, flyers, postcards, and calls-to-arms; their very archaeological layering revealing the shop’s decades-long status as a center for activism both artistic and political (and for their nexus). Among such activists and organizers, there was a superstition that to remove others’ notices, no matter how antiquated, was a matter for careful philosophical and spiritual consideration: indeed, among connoisseurs, it was felt that the very act of seeking-out thumbtack- or flour-and-water glue space could itself reveal new “cut-ups,” connections, and unanticipated conflations of groups and interests.

Through the battered old steel door, then, one crossed the splintered, many-times-repainted wooden jamb into a low ceiling’d space, with narrow crooked aisles, built from stacks of improvised book shelves and cases, leading off in all directions. Directly to one side, perched on a stool behind a high counter, itself surrounded and nearly engulfed by stacks of recent acquisitions still awaiting cataloging, the customer found, at different and unpredictable intervals, the widest and most unexpected diversity of bookshop staff: rebel librarians, serial diarists, impassioned political philosophers, retired mercenaries, and others even more improbable, even including—occasionally—veterans of the BNRO. The owner—the eponymous “Karolyi Brauḍasakī”—was never seen, preferring to engage inventory and assess new and rare acquisitions only between the hours of 2:00 and 5:00am. There were certain customers, especially those who had patronized the shop since the early days of the pre-Anschluss 1930s, who lamented the absence of Karolyi’s seemingly limitless ability to both instantly locate, and knowledgeably discourse upon, any volume in the shop, no matter how esoteric. In fact individual patrons tended to prefer certain visiting days based upon who could be expected to be behind the counter: though such expectations were as likely to be dashed as delighted (one occasional patron said, “Oh, my husband Yitzhak loves Brauḍasakī’s, but if his favorite staffer isn’t behind the counter, he pouts and sulks”). It boasted an antique cash register from which change could be made in seemingly limitless diversities of currency—though the pricing system was seemingly subject more to the caprice (or, to be more generous, personal assessments) of staff’s response to patrons’ conduct and demeanor. The register itself functioned only as a cash-box, its mechanical innards long-since frozen into silence, but no self-respecting Brauḍasakī staff member would ever have deigned to employ a numerical/arithmetical tool, priding themselves as they did on their lightning-fast mental calculations (though there was more than one staffer who would, in the event of an especially complex buyback-and-sale-and-layaway-and-bulk discount transaction, employ an abacus).

The aromas were of dust, old paper, mildew, dry rot, pipe smoke, cat, coffee, the sharp tang of oils and petroleum products from the antique audio machines, and other more exotic spices and scents—some of the more mysterious wafting in the door along with the day’s customers. Only a few of these came with the expectation of a simple search or sale, most instead viewing the shop as a combined salon, letter drop, revolutionary site, wine bar, and breakfast nook. The shop brewed its own espresso from a special roast supplied by their comrades at Jerzy’s coffeeshop, founded by the ex-landsknecht Matthias Yordaniya in the 16th century (see elsewhere in the Correspondence), though the fineness and duration of its grind was a closely-guarded secret—and more than one patron, lost in a distant or less-trafficked section of the stacks, found his or her way back to the entrance following the venerable espresso machine’s hiss and aroma.

Across from the sales counter was a battered and elongated leather sofa, upon which both indigent poets and overindulging engineers might occasionally overnight. In the small open space in between—a peril, in the winter time, to those lacking spatial awareness—was a woodstove surrounded by an ever-rotating collection of creaky & dubious rocking chairs (which would occasionally and mysteriously migrate to distant corners of the shop), and of equally creaky & dubious patrons, the most eccentric of whom tended also to be the most regular visitors—manifesting unpredictable but extensive visit-schedules and rant-topics.

Originally, the shop’s cataloging system had existed in only in Karolyi’s capacious, if capricious, memory, but as time had gone on, it had become apparent that even that resource might eventually be overburdened. Hence there was a gradual migration to a vast, floor-to-ceiling card catalog, located safely behind the high acquisitions counter and jealously guarded both by humans (most notably, Vassily, the notoriously well-read yet -skeptical head buyer) and by Cyclops, an elderly three-legged Jack Russell terrier who served as gatekeeper and arbiter of admissibility for both books and customers alike (long-time book-exchangers would say “if Cyclops didn’t like you, you’d be better off taking your sales elsewhere”). The relatively infrequent rare and valuable volumes (incunabula, first editions, obscure treatises and off-print essays) were likewise stored in cases behind the acquisitions desk, the glass-topped counter of which itself contained a few especially characteristic volumes; most notably, one donated in the late 1940s by Nas1lsinez himself: found in the Thames Embankment bookstalls, and brought back to Ballyizget, a 1930s edition of The Three Musketeers, with a bookplate from one of the English public schools, and the inscription: "To E Lambe: first place, 6th Form English, 1936," and a following inscription, "To Claude, in memory of Eustace, killed over Kiel, 1943."

From the front rooms, the shop opened outward to successive, telescoping wings and annexes of rooms, the full extent of which were not at all apparent when you first walked through the door. Brauḍasakī’s fastnesses trailed through multiple levels, corners, nooks & crannies, ever expanding and extending, seemingly varying from visit to visit: frequent customers, upon returning, reported discovering obscure staircases, hidden doors, and new annexes amongst the stacks of bookshelves. Likewise, within its subterranean architecture were multiple levels and lower floors, access to which, in reverse order, via ramps, mysterious and asymmetrical steps, wrought-iron staircases, and even stepladders, some argued might be taken as an indicator of arcane insight. The more adventurous patron might find himself nearly tripping over hillocks and unexpected pits in the cobbled stone floor—it was even rumored that, in the further and deepest recesses of the shop, where the newest acquisitions or most esoteric subjects might be found, the floors were mere packed earth. And certain of these adventurous patrons swore that they heard the footsteps of long-deceased browsers on the creaking floor boards of the long-vacant corn market under which the bookshop lay.

Scattered throughout was the occasional comfortable, if musty-smelling, deep wing-backed chair—typically jealously guarded by a “regular” whose right-of-first-refusal was seldom challenged—but also the occasional rickety footstool or repurposed kitchen chair. In seasons of peak traffic—for example, just before and during the Fall university season, when students returned full of optimism to the capitol, or during the darkest of the winter months, when the pace of life in the University Quarter slowed considerably, and “old-timers” sought the shop’s friendly warmth, in addition to chairs—unexpected stools and stepladders were likewise pressed into service as browsing stations.

The shop had a not-insignificant non-human population, including the requisite innumerable cats, and occasional more unexpected denizens, from mice to ferrets to badgers to crows in the courtyard, and the occasional solemn owl. The best-known of the non-human mammalian mascots of the shop was the legendary Jasper, an ink-black feline relative distantly related, via the genus of Bassandan Barn Cats, to Professor St John’s Anubis at Miskatonic University (it was said that Anubis—introduced elsewhere in the Correspondence—had actually first come to Misky’s North American campus as an unnoticed stowaway on a smuggling trip by La Bruxa do Mar). Jasper’s (and Anubis’s) own trans-Rift experience was alleged to “account for” their astonishingly long life-span—in the former’s case, over 22 years—though his precise age is unconfirmed, as he had first “manifested” (Karolyi’s own term) in the shop some time in the 1960s, and was still very much in evidence in the post-Soviet 1980s. Jasper and Cyclops maintained an armed détente, with the feline primarily patrolling the front of the shop, and the canine—very much in keeping with his digging and burrowing genetics—roaming the rear-most hinterlands of the space. They would, however, unite fearsomely in the event of invasive or unpleasant conduct from unwelcome visitors (either during or after hours).

There were unexpected stained-glass skylights, typically located at the dim, uppermost recesses of occasional eaves and rafters, nearly obscured by the stock, as were the occasional window-ledges high in the walls, piled with stacks of books, some so high as to shut out the light. Brauḍasakī’s was always notoriously overstocked: despite Karolyi’s regular and impassioned directives to the daytime staff, mostly via smudged mimeographs, that they must contain acquisitions, almost no staff member except the notorious Vassily was capable of declining an “interesting” purchase. In contrast to most bookshops, if you were to root around amongst and above the rickety top-most shelves, you’d find anything but redundant overstock: rather, there might be stashed the occasional treasure among the teetering piles. A joke popular among the staff—those who were known—claimed that more than one worker, impatient of solutions, might have tumbled one of the stacks, cutting off escape: this theory of disappearances was at least as plausible as some of the documented explanations for the departures and returns among the staff. Karolyi’s staff had a preternatural ability to recall precisely how many patrons had entered the shop, versus the number who had departed, and to intuit precisely where any missing patrons might have been isolated—it was in fact a matter of pride, amongst long-time patrons, to manage to find themselves locked-in overnight, thereby obtaining more extended and more exclusive access to the more distant corners of the stacks.

Curious and more adventurous long-term patrons would occasionally find their way, by little-notices staircases and dumbwaiters, to the vacant space of the Corn Market above, whose mezzanine was surrounded on three sides by wrought-iron balconies where the buyers had looked down upon the samples and auctions. It was a mysterious space, shot through with slanted sunbeams that came in through the high windows and the motes of chaff that still floated in its hot still air—and those few adventurous patrons who managed, over the decades to get themselves trapped in the deserted Market overnight could tell some strange tales of midnight conversations with unseen interlocutors.

Below, in the shop proper, the dust lay thick in certain sections, but remarkable finds were everywhere available—or at least rumored to lie—under that undisturbed dust. Of course, the collections likewise include very substantial collections of obscure and not-so-obscure Bassandan authors—including a significant component of samizdat or otherwise prohibited material, reflecting Karolyi’s own authorial roots in 1930s progressive literature, which for some reason Brauḍasakī’s had managed to carry even during the harshest days of the gray Soviet 1950s. Although shop acquisition policies tended to avoid extensive sound collections—preferring to donate valued recordings to the Sound Archive at Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, which developed, after independence, an inter-library loan program with the Archive Material Objects Collection at Miskatonic—there was a selection of antiquated and rare recordings of folkloric music (much of it at one time or another banned) in a diversity of odd and obscure recording media. Karolyi made it a point of pride to maintain working sound-playback machines capable of accommodating these formats. Scattered throughout the rooms were small oases of the shop’s small but choice selection of esoteric prints and old daguerreotypes and ambrotypes; in fact, several of the historical images which the ex-combat photographer and naturalist Chifani Dhoma subsequently restored first mysteriously appeared in the shop’s collection through Brauḍasakī’s clandestine network of donors and purveyors, only being recognized, rescued, and restored after identification by yet other regular patrons.

The dancer, storyteller, fortune-teller, impresaria, administrator, matriarch, and (eventually) chancellor of Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory, Zhenev'yeva Durham Kráľa, one of the most fearsome, mentally-tough scions of the Bassanda circle, provided, for the Eagles Heart Sisters Oral History Project, perhaps the most apt and most heartfelt testimonial to the impact of Brauḍasakī’s in the lives of the generations who moved through its orbit:

She said, “When I entered Karolyi’s shop, I took hope from the past. And for the future.”

*Some readers will no doubt recognize echoes of Brauḍasakī’s in four remarkable bookshops from the phenomenal world: Charlie Byrnes’s in Galway’s Old Corn Store, the best bookshop in Ireland; Raven Books, in Northampton Massachusetts, whose geo-social location ensures that its collection of history, political science, and poetry titles is second to none; the tiny but nonpareil Brodsky Books of Taos New Mexico, and the much-missed but still-beloved Book Cellar, of Bloomington Indiana: all four independents, all staffed and patronized by those who love and believe in books, and all of them places in which the imagination can take fire.

[Particular thanks to all the bookshop-aficionados who contributed insights and treasured details to this reconstruction from the Correspondence, especially Mary Katherine Aldin, Paul Wells, Il Shea, Austin Jones, Roger Landes, Kay Millerick, Angela Mariani, Anna Springer, Jordan Smith, Roger Landes, Anthony Cahill, Lyn Ellen Burkett, Jason H Mitchell, Kris Olson, Jane Ellarby, Rachel Mitchell, Samantha Wilde, and all the rest of them.]

The Beast

The 1967 Rift Portal Accident

The gigantic locomotive called, in Bassandan folklore, “The Beast”—an American-built prototype of the Alco Pacific Class ‘4-6-2' steam locomotive, which had been constructed in the ferrous iron country of Pennsylvania, and then shipped west from San Francisco to Asia—is central to the accidental discoveries, in the late 1960s, of the time-and-space-shifting capacities which had been theorized by Ibrahim Hazzard-Igniti. The Professor, who was disappeared by Stalinist agents into the Gulag in the late 1930s, probably in order to restrict dissemination of his insights, had formulated a series of theorems which laid out the electromagnetic and quantum characteristics which hypothetically “explained” the phenomenon of the “Rift Portals”—particular locations in the geographic landscape in which, as had been known in Iliot cosmology for centuries, it was possible to jump across distances, from one Portal to another. The locomotive’s capacity to “float” (on a field of electromagnetic repulsion following the Earth’s magnetic ley lines) was discovered to likewise entail the capacity to “pass through” these Portals and thus shift geographical locations.

The intention behind the liberalization of travel beyond the satellites had been that, in the opener environment of Khrushchev’s 1960s warming of international relations, the BNRO and other progressive Bassandan musicians would have opportunity to collaborate, both between and among their own projects (especially those involving the arts expression of ethnic minorities more rigidly repressed under Stalin) and also with interested Westerners. The Bassandan Central Soviet and the Directorate of Arts was not insensible to the cultural revolutions that were occurring in the West, and, as totalitarian regimes often do, opted for a slight slackening of the most visible forms of repression, as a kind of “pressure valve” to draw away the most desperate underclass resistance efforts; as ever, such token gestures were not particularly successful.

However, no one in the BNRO orbit could have anticipated the Rift Accident in which, for the first time and according to Vortex principles not fully understood prior to the later 1970s, the entire locomotive called familiarly “The Beast”, which ran on power drawn from the earth’s magnetic ley lines, itself became an electromagnetically-charged field, and its own mobile Rift Portal. While awareness of geomagnetic Rift portals’ distance-folding capacities had been known, in the teachings of the Iliot Buddhist shamans, for millennia (often tendered as the “explanation” for various lamas supernatural and/or superhuman powers), and the geographical location of various Rift Portals, both within and beyond the nation’s borders, had been a matter of both legend and local knowledge, the realization that such fourth-dimensional travel might fold time as well as distance came only in the aftermath of this 1967 accident.[1] Departing for a spring tour, the Band and a number of Friends of Bassanda, traveling with them, found themselves cast backwards in time, “The Beast” unintentionally and unpredictably cracking upon another Rift path to the northern Rio Grande Valley c1885. This accident was the supposed origin of the “Mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band,” immortalized in a daguerreotype found in a Taos mission archive, but appearing to depict the 1967 Band’s personnel in Victorian costume, in a location (possibly Paris or London) quite distant from northern New Mexico. Indirect corroboration of the image’s provenance appears in a famous 1965 photograph of the very early San Francisco “hippie” band The Charlatans at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City NV; the 1885 ambrotype appears on a wall in the background of that photo. That Band’s adventures in the 1880s American Southwest and on the coast of California became a matter of legend as well (see elsewhere in the Correspondence).

Not understood until the 1980s scholarship of members of the Hazzard-Igniti’ite school, whose training included both quantum physics and also koan-style meditation, was the capacity of Rift travel to lead to both else-wheres (distant geographical locations) and else-whens (distant chronological locations), but also—and much more controversially, else-worlds: that is locations in parallel spheres of existence—alternate histories in which entirely different mundane or profound chains of events might occur. Thus the events, timelines, and universe-lines that lead to the Great Southwestern Desert post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’ Band.

The BNRO literally disappeared for the balance of 1967 and into the early spring of 1968. When they did reappear in the capitol city, it was apparent that their mysterious sojourn had significantly altered not only their perspectives (most were quieter, but more emphatic, in manner): most also appeared to have aged several years, or more, during the missing months. Had they been “lost” in 1881? 1885? 1912? Or in other, as-yet-uncharted or un-documented where-whens?

The Correspondence is, as yet, inconclusive.

[1] The time-travel capacities of Rift Portals had been theoretically accounted for in Hazzard-Igniti’s “Unified Field Theory of Electromagnetic Chronological Transport”, but no tests or known examples had occurred under controlled conditions at the time of the 1967 “Rift Accident”.

The 1912 New Orleans Creole / 'Vodun' Band. Archival identification and paranormal restoration by Cifani Dhoma.

The 1912 New Orleans Creole “Voodoo” Band
a/k/a “The Ghost Band”

The line of descent from the earlier “Steampunk” (1881) and “Sand Pirates” (1885) Bands to the 1912 New Orleans Band, whose images and documentation represent one of the more recently-unearthed bodies of uncatalogued period material in the Miskatonic Archives, is not known. Thus it is unclear whether the experience of the “Creole/Voodoo” Band again involved time/space Rift travel, skipping from the c1885 American Southwest—or possibly from the c1881 qaerda bol’sa (parallel quantum “where-when”) of the post-Apocalyptic Great Southwestern Desert—or whether perhaps the Band, or only some members thereof, may have passed a contiguous though as yet undocumented three decades in early 20th Century North America. Certainly, there are reports of various persons in the Bassanda orbit being present in the American West between the mid-1880s and the pre-WWI period, and there was a presence of Friends of Bassanda in North America, particularly in the southern and western States, in the decades just before and after 1900, but how directly this impacted the survivors of the 1881 and 1885 Bands is unknown at this time.[1]

The most suggestive, if indirect, continuities are: first, the presence of the cousin, Habjar-Lawrence Nas1lsinez, documented in photographs of Carnivale at NOLA and in Trinidad in the period around 1906-07, and, second, the 1908 expedition by Dianthe Habjar-Lawrence to recruit Buffalo Soldiers in the West to serve as military advisers resisting Tsarist incursions on the Bassandan frontiers. However, neither of these experiences of the Lawrence clan directly connect to the Band or its known members, and as has been stated, there are few documented appearances in the physical archives—though there are tantalizing references to impromptu performances at melodeons (music halls) in San Francisco and at gold and lumber camps and other frontier locations further north in California and the Pacific Northwest.[2]

Again: was this because the Band itself had disintegrated: had members scattered, across space and time? Had they again inadvertently Rift-shifted en masse, to yet another (as yet undocumented) qaerda bol’sa? Alternatively, and more mundanely, had they maintained time/space continuity, but simply gone underground? Or—more hypothetically (although, in the Bassanda Orbit, it is a mistake to too-readily ascribe either hypothetical or fictional status to seemingly incongruous narratives)—had they received messages that, perhaps due to pan-Rift risk, they should scatter, remove themselves from historical visibility, and reconvene on the lowermost Mississippi? Certainly NOLA itself was a location of magnetic and fluid-dynamic power. As a result, of anywhere in North America, surely Orleans would therefore seem a likely candidate for the presence of a natural and primordial Rift: the City’s history since first foundation by French Canadian couriers de bois—and indeed by Natchez Indians prior to the Age of Colonization—had been one of human cultural exchange, geological and meteorological transformation, amid a profusion of Caribbean flora and fauna. And by the Age of Imperialism, the layers of cultural, spiritual, psychological, and—as a result—cosmological collision would, according to the Hazzard-Igniti Theorem, have been sufficient to bring about a “Rifting Event”: a shift in the region’s electromagnetic fields, analogous to a shift and/or collision in tectonic plates, sufficient to open up new Rifts and thus new channels for cross-space and -time travel. The risks of such Rifting Events—the very unpredictability of their occurrence and impact, in the pre-Hazzard-Igniti era—made them dangerous zones and events. At the same time, for over 1000 years, the diverse peoples who flowed through the geological, chronological, and psychological zone of Misi-ziibi, the Great River, found there all manner of hopes, dreams, challenges, and transformations.

The 1912 Band was no different.

[1] Here also may be cited various undated vignettes and anecdotes found scattered throughout the Correspondence: See for example the 1883 account by Tom Tobin of an encounter pitting Colonel Thompson and his common-law wife Maritjie Tiedtgen against Dark Ones arriving from the Outer Realm via the northern Rio Grande Rift Portal; the 1884 encounter between Algeria Main-Smith and Colonel Thompson at Taos, which led to the Foundation of the Young Men’s Oriental Society of Talpa; the presence of various luminaries from Bassanda’s “Gilt Age” (the late Tsarist period) at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions at Chicago; and visits by various Habjar-Lawrence offspring to North American contacts in the period: Dianthe meeting Olive Dame Campbell at Harvard in 1902, Jefferson Washington to Trinidad in 1908, and so on.

[2] See Jonathan Verbeten, PhD dissertation, 2019.

Scattered in c1900 North America

Before the complex theoretical structures which modeled Rift-accidents (across space) and Rift-Drifts (across quantum time/space) were finally and consistently hypothesized by Hazzard-Igniti in the early 1930s, no one really understood what was happening during such phenomena; quite logically, then, there was resultant hesitation about engaging with the not-yet-understood powers of the gigantic electromagnetic locomotive called The Beast. Though the space-folding capacities of naturally-occurring Rift Portals had been known and employed by Iliot adepts in Bassanda for centuries if not millennia, the accidents recently experienced aboard the Rift-enabled Beast by the 1885 “Steampunk” Band, who had been cast backward in time from 1967, and by the 1882 “Sand Pirates” band who—when the Beast became activated as its own portable Portal—had been cast “sideways” across quantum-parallel where-whens (Bassandan: qaerda-bol’sa)—understandably evoked mystification; there was a reluctance to engage with the Beast when its newly-discovered capacities were so little understood. The graduate student Winesap has suggested, in the teeth of Professor St John’s skepticism, that possibly the 1880s Band’s members, hesitant or unable to attempt to travel time-space intentionally and reliably on board the Beast, finding themselves separated and adrift in late 19th-century North America, might simply have gone “underground,” in order to avoid visibility or targeting by Tsarist or even more mysterious malevolent forces.[1] If Winesap is correct, it is therefore distinctly possible that there are many such anecdotes of individual or small-group adventures, as yet uncatalogued, across the diverse locales and populations of c1900-10 America, as the Band members scattered, reconnected, and sought to protect both themselves and one another. It has been suggested that the meeting in NOLA of the “Creole/Voodoo Band” was simply the product of a lengthy and clandestine chain correspondence, traveling by letter, telegram, and word-of-mouth—and by even more esoteric means—that led only, and finally, to the reunion at Orleans in 1912.

More fancifully and eerily—although, again, an unseemly fixation upon “the Plausible,” in the case of Bassanda, tends to lead to interpretative or correlative dead-ends—it has been suggested that the entire 1912 episode, and the “Creole/’Voodoo’ Band” itself, might in fact represent a paranormal phenomenon. Perhaps none of the Band members survived the years of exile between c1885 and 1912; perhaps—at least in the parallel qaerda-bol’sa of the “post-Apocalyptic ‘Desert Pirates’ Band”--none of them managed to return across quantum universes.

This puts a rather different interpretative spin upon the seeming presence of photos of the 1912 Band’s members in an apparently-decrepit moving-picture theater. Internal forensic evidence suggests that the site may be the Trianon, opened in 1912; a contemporary review of the new theater’s opening says, “The lobby is well-illuminated by many lights. The mural decorations are symbolic of various scenes in Louisiana. A five-piece orchestra furnishes the musical accompaniment to the three reels of first-run pictures, for which a price of ten cents is charged.”[2] Similarly, a contemporary advertisement includes the rather fanciful claim that “Like a frothy summer confection, our ventilation keeps our theater cool,” and a period squib in the to-the-trade journal The Electrical Review describes the elaborate cove lighting which was installed to “show up the interior architecture and decorations to advantage.”[3]
Thus the photos of the Creole/’Voodoo’ Band seem to contain an internal contradiction: while the architectural interiors are more-or-less confirmed to be those of the Trianon, if the Band was indeed photographed in 1912, why on earth does the then-new theater appear to be dilapidated if not derelict? Surely, if indeed the images were taken in 1912, the year of its opening, the Trianon’s lighting and appointments would be in seen to be in spick-and-span burnished condition?

Professor St John has insisted upon another possible explanation, which—as with so many historical/chronological contradictions and paradoxes in the Band’s history—may in fact represent the most “plausible” within a range of even-more-fanciful alternatives. While the interiors are definitely those of the Trianon, the photographer and archivist Dhoma’s technical analysis suggests that the images themselves may have been taken later, using photographic technology associated with the 1930s or even 1940s. Yet the personnel depicted are definitely confirmed, by separate empirical evidence, to date from the 1912 Band (indeed, by 1930 some of those contained in the portraits had literally disappeared from the Bassanda orbit, though others subsequently returned in much later iterations). So: the interiors are of the Trianon, built in 1912. The personnel are likewise those of the 1912 Band. But the state of the building—its forlorn, abandoned air—suggest that the date of the photographs appears to be as much as 40 years later.

It is known that, over and over in the history of the Bassanda orbit, and most definitely including the various permutations of the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra, time-and-space were/are flexible and mutable constructs. In the case of the Trianon photos, one wonders if, perhaps, the images might represent some kind of “quantum double exposure”: an image taken in the 1940s, depicting the interiors of the now-derelict Trianon, but somehow capturing, via electro-magnetic or even supernatural means, visual “echoes” of the figures of the 1912 Band. Faint corroborating evidence for this seemingly supernatural explanation is seen, in some of the 1940s images, in the apparent electromagnetic interference seemingly emanating from the jury-rigged movie projection screen. Or…perhaps the screen itself, in the deserted theater, is actually reflecting ectoplasmic activity occurring in front of it?

Indeed, perhaps the explanation is as simple as this: that it is the collection of idiosyncratics, rebels, freebooters, smugglers, stowaways, runaways, and rebels who made up the 1912 New Orleans Creole/’Voodoo’ Band, who reappear in faint paranormal echo in the 1940s photographs, and who themselves may still actually “haunt” the old buildings and back streets of the Afro-Caribbean Vieux Carré.

This may, thus, in turn explain the alternate locution for the 1912 Orchestra, as “The Ghost Band.”

[1] Anecdotal evidence supporting this hypothesis can be found in the account of Ani and Cait, separated from the Band and lost in the Northern Rio Grande Valley, and their brush with Old Ones, only vanquished by Ani’s singing, and there are a host of other analogous vignettes scattered throughout the Correspondence.

[2] See http://old-new-orleans.com/NO_Movies.html; accessed 9.1.2018.

[3] The Electrical Review (McGraw-Hill) 64/21 (1914), 1044.

Why write the Bassanda universe?

Beyond the aspect of personal and creative amusement, what purpose is served by the creation of this material?

Because:

The extensive prose and its related material are an experiment, seeking a mode of writing historical narrative which is more playful and open than the scholarly monograph, but more rigorous than the observational/experiential POV of the novel. Though history need not be conceived as narrative—there are many models for historical understanding, only some of which depend upon linear chronology or an individual’s perceptual voice—individuals often experience it as narrative.

Because every professional historian engages multiple modes and registers of writing, adapting to changing circumstances, media, and audiences.

Because it is an exercise in imagination and recollection: a way of more deeply understanding and/or experiencing “what ‘actually’ happened” as a contingent narrative, whose circumstances, contexts, and precipitating events could have combined in ways that yielded very different story arcs.

It is thus an experiment in “what if” visualization: “what if events had been different?” If the mark of true communicative fluency in a language (or a musical style) is the ability to improvise—to “spontaneously compose material”—in a fashion that is internally consistent and rhetorically persuasive within the genre’s own aesthetic expectations and voice, then a mark of true communicative fluency in the imagining of historical contingency might be the ability to “spontaneously compose material” whose details, tone, and plausibility are equivalently consistent and persuasive within the context and aesthetics of the known historical record.[1]

It is an experiment in engaging with other/another audience(s). The analogy I might use would be that of the world of historical re-enactors: US Civil or Revolutionary War, 19th century mountain men/buckskinners, English Civil War, and so forth. The “hardcore” re-enactor engages with meticulous attention to the actual physical details (clothing, implements, armaments, landscapes, and so forth) of historical situations, due to a conviction that embodied experiential knowledge—not just book-learning—can provide its own sorts of insight.[2] Very gradually, over the past 25 or so years, academic historians have begun to open the portals of their conversations to re-enactors—who are now actually/occasionally also academic historians—and the ensuing dialogs can/should enliven both groups’ discourse. Employing some of the tools of fiction—that is, the invention of characters, contexts, or participating events—while situating them within the rigorous and reflective frame of the actual historical record can provide analogous, and in fact mutual, enlightenment about the human experience(s) of history.

Because such prose has the potential to be another kind of scholarly outreach. Constructing fiction that is both narratively engaging and historically rigorous requires recognizing that “fiction”, like “poetry”, is capable of not only expressive truths, but also cultural/critical ones. To engage historical/contextual understanding via more than one mode—not just that of the narrative monolog, but also of story arc, dialog, dramatic interplay, etc—helps to connect our “historiography” to other, more diverse, and more ancient oral traditions, including storytelling, drama, poetry, song, and religious ritual.

The exercise of world-building is an exercise of imagination, but one that is directly tied—especially in so-called “historical fiction”—to the knowable and experiential phenomenal world. Thus, the greater the author’s command of historical and cultural contexts, the more effectively those contexts are evoked and conveyed, and the richer the opportunity to situate for the reader the ‘fictional’ material within rich, complex, yet historically precise narrative environments. Conversely, the ret-conning—the reverse-engineering necessary to fit the fictional narrative into the complex and rich historical record—in turn illuminates, problematizes, and thus enriches our understanding of historical contexts, events, and experiences.

There are many ways to tell the rich human narratives of history.

The Bassanda material, like the historical fiction of Faulkner and Dickens, Thomas Mann and John Dos Passos, Robert Graves and Mary Renault, seeks to find one more.

[1] See for example Mantle Hood, “The Challenge of ‘Bi-Musicality’,” Ethnomusicology 04/2 (May, 1960), 55-59.

[2] See for example Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Vintage, 1999).

The 1962 "Beatnik" Band

Bassanda as historical role-playing game – and as education

TEACHING WITH ROLE-PLAYING GAMES

The use of role-playing games, whether paper-based or digital, is by now accepted as a means of teaching history, philosophy, ethics, and social skills, for multiple clienteles and at multiple grade levels.[1] For almost five years, as part of my Second-Year “Music as Cultural History: the Modern Period” course at Texas Tech University, I have employed team-based game-building as an optional alternative to the traditional multi-stage undergraduate research paper. Employing an evolving combination of live action role-playing and freeware-based interactive fiction tools, we have created a historical game-set we call Musicologist’s Creed. That title riffs on the popular computer game Assassin’s Creed, whose various editions’ appeal in no small part arises from their attention to the tactile details of the rich historical contexts through which players move as they run, fight, and shoot.[2]

In the annual iteration of #MCreed (to employ the hashtag used on Twitter, which is a major conduit for our player/developers to share ideas and generate conversation), we borrow Reacting to the Past’s (and many corporate and military war-games’) organizational structure, focusing upon specific historical watersheds when a large number of “actors”—central historical figures—actually found themselves at a moment of enhanced or accelerated contact and catalysis: the Constitutional Convention of 1787, India on the Eve of Independence in 1945, suffragettes and labor activists in Greenwich Village in 1913, and so on.

In #MCreed, over the course of the semester, three such watershed moments are explored: in Unit I, the premiere of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus (1876); in Unit II, the premiere of Satie’s Parade in 1917 Paris; in Unit III, the premiere of Charles Ives’s Second Symphony by Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic on radio in 1951. Each Unit develops and then advances and expands students’ skill-sets, both in the traditional academic pursuits of bibliography, critical reading, research, hypothesis, and critical thinking, but also in the technical and imaginative demands of developing alternative “what if it had been different?” contingent scenarios.[3]

The responses have been positive, and over that five-year period, as would be expected with any new teaching or assessment paradigm, our integration of analog and digital tools; of prompts and formats; of goals, outcomes, and assessments; have all evolved and sharpened. A major shift came when we realized that—contrary to the approach of a number of the games-based curricula (see for example Reacting to the Past)—we found more potential in requiring students to invent historical characters, rather than merely assuming the persona of an existing historical person. We did so because we realized, belatedly, that simply learning the surface details of Wagner’s, Satie’s, or Ives’s and associates’ lives and thought, and parroting those in the live-action and computer game dialogs, was essentially a replication of the “gather facts and write a report” format of the conventional research paper. In refining the traditional paper format, we had already moved away from the “bucket of facts” model by requiring that students frame, submit, defend, and complete revisions of a formal thesis statement: this concrete and explicit interpretative thesis forces students to take positions regarding why events, individuals, and situations play out the way they did in history.

The goal of the #MCreed game model, then, was to move students to the next level of analysis and interpretation: to have them engage not only with the questions of “what happened in history?” and “why did it happen?” but also with more open-ended, less predictable questions of contingent alternatives: that is “under what circumstances and in what complex ways might events have turned out differently?” We discovered that students were much more completely challenged and thus engaged by imagining the impact of combinations of contingent circumstances upon fictional individuals, rather than upon historical actors whose life stories and artistic experiences they perceived as fixed, if not inevitable. Requiring students to imagine a character, and then build a biography, context, experiences, and perspectives consistent with and persuasive of that character’s reality, was far more immersive, challenging, and thus generative of original thinking.

BASSANDA AS ROLE-PLAYING GAME

The Bassanda Universe is a similar sort of cultural/historical role-playing, writ large: encompassing an entire (fictional) nation’s history, culture, demography, geography, socio-political perceptions, and all the ways that such a nation, and its diverse peoples, might interact with the global 20th century. Centered around the Cold War-and-after adventures of the “Bassandan National Radio Orchestra,” and its offshoots, it provides a platform within and through which to explore a wealth of cultural/historical factors that shaped transnational experience in that era.

The Universe is not so much an exercise in “world-building” a la Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Pratchett’s Discworld, or Howard’s Hyborian Age—rather, it “reverse-engineers” Bassanda’s cultural and political history into the larger arcs of 19th-20th Eastern and Western bloc dynamics. Though this former Soviet Socialist Republic’s geographical location is intentionally unspecific (Eastern Europe? Central Asia?), its characters’ historical, cultural, demographic, philosophical, and transnational experiences are in every case rendered consistent with wider histories. In terms specifically of role-playing, the Bassanda Biographies intentionally and consciously reflect not only the individual character’s wished-for personality traits, goals, and dreams, but also all other historical/etc factors (both “real” and imaginary) impinging upon it in the Bassanda Universe.

What this project of reverse-engineered historical fiction makes possible is the engagement of the student, through the personalized immediacy of an alter ego interacting with other alter egos, in the contingent “what if” worlds of “fictional” Bassanda and of the “historical” 20th century. It provides space for both research and “Imagineering,” both personal myth-building and historical rigor. As scholars, pedagogues, and tellers of history, we imagine historical contexts as products of discoverable, if very complex, combinations of factors and phenomena; we seek the “keys” that unlock patterns of meaning in historical events, and we endeavor to convey those patterns, those meanings, to students and audiences. Historical role-playing allows students to bring into these processes imagination, agency, and collaboration.

[1] See for example Reacting to the Past (http://reacting.barnard.edu), Jeremiah McCall’s Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History, and others. This method of delivering historical/etc content via contingent game-playing is a qualitatively different approach than that which delivers traditional content but tests and assesses via game-like points systems. For the latter, see for example Lee Sheldon, The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (Cengage Learning: Boston, 2012).

[2] That attraction is confirmed, in 2018, with the release of Assassin’s Creed Origins, which eschews the run-and-shoot action of the parent game in favor of enriched environments whose exploration is players’ primary reward.

[3] See Christopher J. Smith, “’What If It Had Been Different?’: Role-Playing Games as Practice-Based Teaching and Research,” originally presented at the History, Analysis, Pedagogy conference, University of Nottingham, England (July 2016).

Costume, persona, and paint

There is another layer to what we do in the Elegant Savages Orchestra, especially as regards costume, persona, and face-paint. It arises through the incantatory and invocatory powers of theatrical ritual. Even more than for the audience, we costume and paint for us. The face-painting is of a piece with the rituals that theatrical actors develop in order to gird themselves for the physical, emotional, and psychological marathon of stage performance. We need those moments backstage, paying attention to one another, seeing in one another the archetypes that we are to seek to manifest from the stage itself. There is a kind of transformation, a kind of inner invocation or incantation, which a great stage actor must undergo, in order to generate the larger-than-life, more ancient than days, stage persona which makes live theatre possible; an archetypal example of this, when you can actually see the transformation in real time, Fiona Shaw “armoring up” as the lead character in Mother Courage and Her Children at the National Theatre.

All great stage actors (and some musicians) have pre-show rituals; in some cases, they are conscious, intentional, and strategic. For us in the Elegant Savages Orchestra, the face-painting that is the center of the pre-show ritual is the Raising of Aspect: the invocation of all the archetypal Attributes we seek individually and collectively to discover and embody, for purposes of expressive power, in our onstage performances. Performance occurs in a ritual space; its power and capacity to effectuate lasting changes (emotional, archetypal, imaginative, and/or intentional) amongst participants arises precisely as a result of the intensity and conviction with which performance is collectively created. For 40 years I have worked on the warp-and-weft of that space, seeking to discover all the available tools that let us weave the web, and—even more importantly—to continue to discover, and uncover, the very nature of the web we seek to weave. As we costume and paint, we acknowledge and celebrate that what is about to occur, what we are about to make happen, has the potential to reverberate across time and space.

At an ESO show, when you encounter a player, singer, or dancer with paint on her or his face, you are receiving a signal: a signal that who you are dealing with is actually a bigger, more charismatic, more archetypal, more impactful version of the person behind the paint in the mundane world. The power of the face-painted ritual Aspect becomes another resource in our expressive palette as we seek to draw the audience into a magical, shared experience.

We realize that the warp and weft of ritual performance is itself the Net of Indra: that complex web of connections across the universe whose infinite knots and joints and ligatures each, at every point of intersection, manifest the precious unique jewel that is the individual human consciousness. Every point connects to every other, every jewel reflects all the others, and, as a result, the sharing of connection yields a group consciousness in which all experience—the theatricalized experience, the ritual experience of our moment-by-moment universal understanding—links in that moment to every other experience.

“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. The artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the center of every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. Each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite. This relationship is said to be one of simultaneous mutual identity and mutual intercausality.”
~ Francis H. Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra

A fragment of the Sand Pirates Band, at the Rendezvous with the Beast [pc: Tif Holmes Photography]

The Bassanda Universe as immersive theater - and as education

The Bassanda universe is a kind of immersive theater, but one built with words rather than props, in an arena of shared imagination rather than that of a building. Moreover, in contrast to marvelous theater companies like Double Edge or Punchdrunk—whose actors and directors seek to provide invited audience members the opportunity to become experiencers within the piece—the BU’s primary actors are simultaneously its primary audience.

A better analogy, then, is to Punchdrunk Enrichment’s immersive installations (for example, Against Captain’s Orders, Under the Eiderdown or, especially, The Lost Lending Library), which enlist an audience of schoolchildren as actors within their own epic-mythic imaginative universe. Our particular target audience is secondary- and tertiary-level students, most especially students for whom artistic creativity and professional skills-development are central motivators (whether or not they are actually studying visual or performing arts in school). Our goal is to empower these young artists to experience their lives as simultaneously pragmatic and also mythic: to equip them to engage with the tactile details of artistic experience but to simultaneously perceive that engagement as part of larger practical and metaphorical arcs of motivation, aspiration, community, and the spirit.

This overlapping simultaneity of actor <=> audience is what thus makes the Bassanda universe education.
The skill-set of a functional artist includes, in part, the capacity to see larger patterns, to recognize their resonance and universality in human experience, and then to concretize artistic expressions which make these patterns visible to and experiential for wider audiences. So BU students are not “acting” or “pretending”—they are inhabiting personae which reflect who they aspire to be. Internal consistency—between fictional characters, institutions, and events, for example—within the Bassanda universe matters, but so does, simultaneously, external consistency with the outer world of history, culture, and global experience.

We endeavor to provide environments—physical, cognitive, communal, participatory, temporal—which permit young artists to experience their lives and work as, in fact, both epic and mythic, and thus profoundly impactful, and then to “build out” and fully inhabit their individualized personal and artistic myths, and in turn employ them in service of their communities and the wider world.

The Bassanda universe is not “escapism”. It is rather “engage-ism”: a profoundly committed and inhabited application of the individual and communal artist’s personal myth to the challenges of samsara and the complex phenomenal world.

[pc: Tif Holmes Photography – Wallace Theatre, Levelland TX]

19th-century European "15-Puzzle"

The Taklif of Fifteen (Taklif 'ana al-raqasat): Bedfordshire, 1959

We came whirling out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust…
The stars made a circle, and in the middle, we dance.
–Rumi

The Taklif of Fifteen (Taklif 'ana al-raqasat), a collection of spiritual verses which echo certain Koranic teachings, is found in a 14th century manuscript [BS MS 29987.314159] preserved in the Ballyizget Archives but probably copied from earlier works by Sufi teachers who were part of medieval Bassanda’s polyglot southern coastal cultures. The Fifteen is a variant iteration—a kind of literary echo—of the same Eagle’s Heart Sisters folk tale which had been an inspiration for the Thirteen Wise Companions who joined Nijinska, Nas1lsinez, de Quareton, and Doma on England’s Great River Ouse, in the hot summer of 1957, to create To Wipe All Tears from Our Eyes. Internal evidence suggests that the original Bassandan manuscript version of the myth was set down some time in the last part of Bassanda’s Imperial Age, when the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire were expanding, and late-period Persian philosophers had begun to formulate an “end-times theorem.” This indigenous philosophical school, influenced by the Classical tradition of the Stoics and of Marcus Aurelius, sought to articulate a mythical/mystical frame to cope with the 14th century Mediterranean world’s pervasive sense of disintegration, degradation, and collapse.

Taklif (Arabic: “adulthood” or “responsibility”) is identified, in Muslim philosophy, as the onset of the “age of reason,” the moment in life when adulthood, and awareness of adulthood’s moral, social, and creative obligations, begins. Its roots probably lie in Hanbali Sunni theology, though in Bassanda the interplay with older indigenous and pantheist beliefs loosened the gendered specifics of orthodoxy. Bassandan traditions, in fact, had consistently taught that the assumption of spiritual adulthood was an obligation not only upon the newly-matured young person, but upon the community as a whole. As the Iliot proverb had it: Yumkin lilmar' 'an yusbih 'insanyana kamlaan bimusaeadat al'asdiqa' (“One can only become fully human with the help of Friends”), and this was born out in the ritual experiences which were marked and sacralized by the Taklif year, which included prayer, good works, creative effort, time in solitude, but also communal collaboration. The goal was to develop a sense of self in mature relation to others, of generosity and community, and of mutual individuality and artistic sensibility—even in “end-times.”

In the case of the Taklif 'ana al-raqasat, a 1959 episode at Bedfordshire in England in the history of the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska’s work as an avatar of Bassandan revolutionary movement creativity, the story echoes with the same mythic elements: a tale of effort and attention, of conflict and resolution, of anger and forgiveness, and of attention to the “world as it is—but also as it could be.” It represents another cycle in the story of Nijinska and her influence, upon the worlds of dance and of community growth. And, given certain aspects of quantum time-and-place shift which began to be recognized in the Bassanda orbit in the same period, it is possible that they were indeed not only inspired by, but—in a chronological paradox—and inspiration for those 14th century mystical writings.

The elder dancers who returned to Ballyizget’s Habjar-Lawrence Conservatory from the 1957 Bedfordshire workshops had been changed by that overseas experience, as their later interviews with the Eagle’s Heart Sisters Oral History Project make this clear (see elsewhere in the Correspondence). In 1959 the group of young artists was again joined by Nijinska’s protégé and collaborator, the shapeshifter dancer, piper, and choreographer Ана (“Ana”) Ljubak de Quareton, and this time also by veterans of the Thirteen Wise Companions, the group who had been convened in 1957 by the two choreographers and the composer Yezget Nas1lsinez. The appellation is a reference, seemingly authored by him, to the Sufi poet Attar’s Maqāmāt-uṭ-Ṭuyūr or “Conference of Birds”: Yezget-Bey described the group of as “refugees, orphans, iconoclasts, lone wolves, and novices.” But he also adds, in that earlier account, that at Bedford in ’57 this disparate group had discovered, together, “the courage to lead from strength and experience, and the wisdom that comes from both.”

But the return was different: as one of veterans, the Mohawk film-maker known as “La Cygne,” put it: “In ’57, we had got a little glimpse of where we could go, together. But the time was so short…there wasn’t time to bring things to fruition—we were so immersed that we couldn’t see where we were.” It is not entirely obvious that the power of such Nijinska-sparked collaborations became clear—as Chaikira said “Mostly, we were just trying to get to the studio each morning and ride the lightning”—but the return in 1959 brought some new challenges of energy and creativity. Danuta Ewelina Jankowski said: “Already some of us were moving on, in our minds, if not yet in our bodies. We tried to recapture what it had been, until we realized that was gone—we had to find someplace new.”

Though the accession of Khruschev as Party Chairman in 1958 had provided a new spark of optimism throughout the Satellites—the first flickerings of a hope that the Stalinist repressions might be loosened, (and a harbinger of the yet-unimagined cultural revolutions of the 1960s; see “The 1962 ‘Beatnik’ Band,” elsewhere in the Correspondence)—there was also push-back: the entrenched forces of conformist repression would not let go so easily. And the catastrophic invasion of Tibet by China and the wave of brutal reprisals and ethnic cleansing that followed likewise confirmed that Bassanda was still vulnerable to external totalitarianism from multiple directions. Nas1lsinez, a target of the Soviets precisely because of his clandestine activism with the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II and the anti-Communist resistance during the post-War occupation, had thus opted to work outside the country’s borders. 1957 had been, for Nas1lsinez and others in the Bassanda orbit, a first cultural beachhead in the UK.

Thus, for the Fifteen, both past and future—of the place itself, and of the Bassandan experience in that place—echoed, in the summer of 1959, on the banks of the Great River Ouse. It would also appear that the unrecoverable nature of the prior experience was more than merely a product of happenstance or personalities, but of quantum “echoes” as well: that is, momentary, apparent resonances or parallels between one quantum reality and a closely-related one—in the nature of a photographic double-exposure or the echoing latency of delayed audio-tape. It was only later in the 1960s, specifically following the Rift Accident which cast the 1967 Band backward in time to a parallel, post-apocalyptic 1890s American Southwest, that the possibility of new, recurring, or “drifting” trans-quantum Rift Portals was first suspected. These were only theorized after the return of the ’67 band from an almost forty-year exile across time and distance, and the Rift Theorems of the Igniti’ite School were not formalized or published until the ’70s (though they had been intuited by Hazzard-Igniti himself in the 1930s).

So in 1959, even the returning veterans, although they could anticipate the intensity of the Bedford experience, could not yet know of the quantum reverberations which might slightly mutate their circumstances. They could not know that, though they arrived at the red-brick campus of the University of Bedford in June of 1959, the particular circumstances of the building, or the terrain, or the people they met, might vary in inexplicable ways from those they “remembered” from 1957—that they might find themselves, in 1959, both elsewhere and elsewhen than they expected. Nevertheless, not all were disoriented by this: as the Tanzanian acrobat and dancer Nalea Juma said, matter-of-factly, “We went somewhere else. And then we came back.”

The Bedfordshire environment and geo-magnetic richness of its topography were already an unfamiliar and exotic space for many of the new recruits. As Nas1lsinez’s notes from two decades later describe it, “Though no Rift Portals have been identified in central England—it is possible that over 400 years of Empire had closed some previously available, a phenomenon termed “imperial erasure” by Rift theorists—there were clearly spiritual, meteorological, and psychological energies flowing throughout the experience”: energies which some participants found difficult to handle. For others, the sheer physical intensity of 8-hour rehearsals, paired with the emotional intensity of their sequestered day-to-day experience, was likewise challenging.

For many, it was the first exposure to folkloric musics and dance, especially the expat Irish traditional music which had come to Bedfordshire in the rebuilding after the Second World War, but also the indigenous traditions of Cotswolds morris, the burgeoning “neotraditional” revival of Border morris (a dance style associated with the Welsh borders counties of Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Shropshire), and—from farther afield—the first glimmerings of awareness of the richness of French folk-dance music, brought to Bedford by de Quareton via various Continental adventures.[1] All of these elements, and the participants’ individual and complex past personal histories, met—or, perhaps, collided—in the 1959 group’s restoration and reconception of Xlbt Op. 16.

In the intuitive creative process that in the 1960s came to be called “Devising”—a process less familiar perhaps in the worlds of concert music and classical theater, but more familiar in the worlds of dance and vernacular theater like commedia dell’arte and folkloric music—the hierarchical authority of the Lone Creator (composer, choreographer, impresario) is deemphasized in favor of a lateral collaborative process in which participants themselves find their roles and places within shared performative art works.[2] The experiences of the anarchist directors Julian Beck and Judith Molina in the Living Theater (NYC), founded in 1947, and in the creative approach which came to be known as Devised Theatre (and later Dance), were significant here, and may reflect Yezget-Bey’s own synthesis of avant-garde, anarchist, and folkloric sources and inspirations—he was in and out of New York in the late 1940s. Nijinska, after a seminal and transformative 1949-50 Caribbean journey via tramp steamer with film-maker Maya Deren, and her intensive/immersive experiences of the Haitian loas (pantheist gods, worshipped through music and dance), would also have contributed. Certainly it is after Nijinska’s expatriation to Bassanda, in 1952, that the fruits of this first meeting of composer and choreographer emerged, in the string of white-hot collaborations that began with the workshop premiere of their Xlbt Op. 16, the so-called “Bassandan Rite of Spring,” which Nijinska had first conceived forty years earlier, but whose conception had been appropriated by the masculine creative team of Serge Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and her brother Vaclav Nijinsky.

An interesting choreographic parallel to the not-yet-named devising practices which Nijinska, de Quareton, and Nas1lsinez helped to pioneer is to be found in the fluid patterning of the Lo-Shu or “Nine Halls Diagram” of Chinese mathematics and divination—an influence which perhaps reflects the interplay of Taoist, Buddhist, and Sufi influences which shaped the version of the Taklif found in Bassanda. In this grid-based divination method, which de Quareton cited in her later analysis of the dynamics of the 1959 experience, figures representing the nine digits of traditional decimal counting are arranged in such a fashion that, read in any direction (left-to-right, right-to-left, vertically, horizontally, diagonally, and so on), they total fifteen:

The Lo-Shu was used as a tool in Feng Shui—the art and spiritual training concerned “with the placement of objects in relation to the flow of natural energy (qi 氣)”—and in the I Ching—the use of coins, stalks, or cards as a tool of divination and self-revelation. Its earliest roots as a symbolic method appear to be very old:

A legend concerning the pre-historic Emperor Yu (夏禹; c. 2123 – 2025 BC), who is credited with introducing techniques of flood control to ancient China, tells of the divinatory power of the Lo Shu: after a huge deluge: the people offered sacrifices to the god of one of the flooding rivers, the Luo river (洛河), to try to calm his anger. A magical turtle emerged from the water with the Lo Shu pattern on its shell: circular dots representing the integers 1 through 9 are arranged in a three-by-three grid [the image of a turtle with the Lo Shu on its back is used as a metaphor for the cosmos by writers as diverse as Yu and Terry Pratchett].

During the Bassandan Renaissance of the 16th century, in the window between the retreat of the Ottoman empire and the growing encroachment of Tsarist expansionism, the Lo-Shu was adapted and expanded as a brain-teaser toy, in which a set of 15 small numbered sliding tiles (of wood, bone, or ceramic) were arranged in a 16-space frame, and in which the puzzle was to rearrange those tiles in various numerical order. It is thus an apt metaphor for a collection of fifteen thinking bodies, moving through and rearranging space, observing new openings and angles, identifying points of freedom or constraint: a task ordinarily left to the choreographer, but in the non-hierarchical 1959 world of the Fifteen, providing a space of infinite if unstable possibilities…

Nijinska sat crosslegged on the floor of the deserted rehearsal studio. Through the open door, June’s moist heat blew inward, and there came the sound of mowers. She was bent over something in her lap, seemingly oblivious to the undergraduates and secondary school students who clattered by in the corridor. De Quareton (“The Wolf”) spoke.

“What do you have there, Madame?”

For several moments, Nijinska did not reply, continued in her absorbed manipulation of the object in her lap; there was a quiet clacking sound as of dominoes being moved on a board. De Quareton entered softly, and sat down beside her, gently leaning to one side to look over her shoulder. Her teacher was holding a small puzzle made of worn dark wood and faded, chipped enamel, its pieces consisting of small square tiles, loosely contained within a mahogany frame, itself measuring four tiles to a side. The pieces, numbered “1” to “15” which thus left a sixteenth tile-space empty, could be slid laterally or vertically, taking advantage of that one vacant space to take up various different configurations.

Finally Nijinska spoke, distractedly, and still absorbed in moving and refiguring the fifteen tiles. “I know there is a pattern to these. I know we can find a way for them all to fit together. I just haven’t found it, yet…”

The bright sunlight from the opened door was broken by the tall gaunt figure of Yezget-Bey in silhouette, as he stepped into the room from the grassy courtyard. He did not approach the two dancers cross-legged on the studio’s floor but leaned against the doorjamb and watched quietly. Nijinska continued to manipulate the puzzle. The tiles whispered and clacked. De Quareton continued to look over her shoulder. A breeze blew up outside, bringing the heavy smell of cut grass further into the dim, bare, high-ceilinged room. Yezget-Bey stood silently by the door.

After another few minutes, Nijinska sighed in exasperation, and dropped the wood-and-enamel puzzle on the studio floor, to rub her eyes with both palms. Shifting her hands to massage her temples, she said, “I know the pattern is there. But I just can’t see it. Too many of the pieces are stuck—they won’t move and I can’t force them.”

De Quareton came up onto her knees and slid sideways, massaging her teacher’s neck and shoulders with a dancer’s easy physical intimacy. She worked silently for a few moments, and then said gently, “Madame—give it time. The pieces don’t always fall into alignment right away.” Nijinska dropped her hands, to rest them in her lap, and her face and shoulders relaxed. She sighed, more deeply, but conveying a greater sense of relief and release. Nas1sinez stepped softly closer, sitting down upon the piano bench a few feet away, from which he was accustomed to take notes and play cues for the work as it evolved. From outside, the clacking sound of the grass mowers receded.

And then, unexpectedly, there was a flash of bright sunlight through the outer door, and—paradoxically—what sounded like a distant roll of thunder. Its vibrations shook the room and the blinds over the tall half-open windows rattled in a sudden gust of wind. There was another, more prolonged thunderclap, though this time the windows darkened, and it felt, for a moment, as if the room momentarily tilted: De Quareton put out one hand to the floor to recover her balance. Yezget-Bey looked straight upward, as if staring through the corrugated iron of the studio’s roof to the sky beyond.

He dropped his gaze, only to discover that—seemingly without sound or intention—the two dancers were now, in similar posture with Nijinska cross-legged and De Quareton kneeling behind her, all the way across the studio from him, as if they had suddenly shifted without moving, like the shift from one photographic negative in a series to the next. Another thunderclap, and again a wave of darkness through the room, and now they were in yet another corner of the studio. The light shifted, from the bright yellow glare of noon, to a green-tinged overcast like that preceding a storm. Yet another roll of thunder, and the room tilted again—now Nijinska and De Quareton were outside, kneeling in the tall grass, though he could still see them through the open door. From the corridor behind him came the incongruous sound of rushing water.

Nas1lsinez moved quickly, scooping up the enamel-and-tile puzzle where it lay on the studio floor near him, and taking long strides toward the courtyard door. He emerged into what was again the hard bright sunlight of mid-day, and went down on one knee beside the two dancers. De Quareton’s arm was still around Nijinska’s neck. Madame looked up at Yezget-Bey, squinting; his face was obscured against the bright sun, but he seemed to be smiling down at the puzzle in his hand. After a moment, and without speaking, he passed it to her. She looked down at it. All the tiles were in numerical order.

Nijinska looked up at Nas1sinez, who met her eyes, and pointed to the long June grass beside them.

A small, bright-green turtle stood on short bowed legs and smiled up at them.

The 15th card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot (a card-based Western divination system) is “The Devil”—which represents, not a literal malevolent deity, but the ego being seduced; living in fear, domination and bondage; envy and jealousy; and/or being caged by overabundance. But, reversed, The Devil represents: freedom from restraints, breaking from addictions, acceptance, liberation, and departure from destructive relationships.

The story of the Fifteen was one such story of challenges and reversals: moments of crisis, complex conflicts moving through space, and the discovery of new combinations which open the door to new and previously-unforeseen possibilities.

In the incomplete notes left behind in his papers at his death in 1985, and from which, along with testimony of the survivors, this account has been reconstructed, Nas1lsinez concludes by quoting the Sufi poet Rumi, in an aphorism which may be regarded as both commentary upon, and predictions for, the fifteen dancers of 1959’s Taklif 'ana al-raqasat:

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” Rumi

[1] See Barbara Lowe (1957), "Early Records of the Morris in England.” Journal of the English Folk and Dance Society 8 (2): 61–82; and Zhenevyeva Durham Kráľa, “Circle and Flow: Understanding Devised Processes in 1957’s To Wipe All Tears from Our Eyes,” Tantseval'naya Istoriya 36 (1977/78), 72-97; and Ана Ljubak de Quareton, “Pas de frontières, pas de limites, mais la liberté,” Tantseval'naya Istoriya 22 (1955/56), 19-21.

[2] See for example Kráľa, “Circle and Flow,” 92-93.

The 1928 Carnivale Incognito Band (pc: Melissa Arnold)

bout the 1928 “Carnivale Incognito” Band

Not much is known of the rag-tag 1928 American Southwest collective called, in the Bassanda corpus, the “Carnivale Incognito” Band. Drawn from an especially wide but very poorly-documented range of prior experiences, its members were, in their threadbare costumes and vehicles, perhaps less impressive than better-known or -paid contemporaneous circus organizations. But occasionally, beneath the dust and burlap and canvas, the deferential mannerisms and body language, a glint of something more powerful would shine forth. James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence, writing about the wandering Bassandan folk-theatrical troupes called Mjekë sia Trego (Eng: “medicine show”) which were one influence upon the Incognito Band, has this to say:

The Mjekësia Trego, in its brightly-painted pony-drawn caravans and featuring small traveling casts of multi-talented singers, players, dancers, acrobats, magicians, and comic actors, was a beloved feature of rural life which provided multiple generations their first performance training. Small hints of its vibrancy are captured in the first Tableau of Stravinsky’s Petrushka (set in “primitive Russia,” but containing key elements, and not a few tunes, “borrowed” from Bassandan tradition) and in the folkloric elements of his L’histoire du soldat and in Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. In turn, its improvised musical/theatrical elements, decades later, informed the BNRO’s collaboration on a 1961 Ballyizget production of The Tempest, set in the Gulag, in which many Band luminaries appeared. But there are other, possibly more fanciful tales told about the 1928 Band, and about their rather more far-flung sources, inspiration, and recruiting…

In the magic-realist Bassandan literature of the 1930s, often published in samizdat (semi-secret) form by underground authors, and reflecting the influence of sardonic and ironic anti-totalitarian works like Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita (known in fragments as early as 1930, though not published in full until 1966), the Depression-era Trego is also symbolic of a certain response to the gray mundanity and conformity of either bourgeois or proletariat life. It seeks to inject into these urbanized and “modernized” contexts something of the light, color, and vitality of the folkloric traditions which, in precisely the same period, were being coopted and standardized as stiff theatrical representations of the “workers’ paradise.” Just as its improvised folk-puppetry and theatricals had mocked Tsarist-era class and pretense, in the fashion of the commedia dell’arte, so in the underground literature of the Stalinist period the Trego symbolized an anarchic, comedic spirit. Thus, despite outward appearances, the 1928 “Carnivale Incognito” Band did in fact carry its own cargo of hidden disruptive power. Its visual aesthetic and performative ethos established the “Big Top” as a place within which things were not always what they seemed; in which individuals might reimagine or reinvent themselves; behind the scenes of which curious, inexplicable, and powerful transformations of power might be occurring; a place of infinite, exotic attraction—and enticement to wanderlust. Finally, the Carnivale Incognito Big Top was a place in which—so it was inferred—the cast of characters themselves were “incognito,” but might in fact be figures of considerably greater power than outward appearances first suggested.

[From an unpublished interview conducted for the March 17, 1928 edition of the Lubbock Avalanche]:

Where do you come from? Where are you going?

Everywhere. Nowhen. Allwhere. Here. Now.

Why don’t you all just tell people who and what you are?

What if we knew that people wouldn’t believe what they're told?
Sometimes humans have to be tricked into accepting assistance.
And besides, when things get bad,
Sometimes you need a steadfast friend, more than you need a superhero.

Can’t somebody be both?

They’d reject a “god.”

Besides, a little humility isn't the worst attribute for a deity.
Most gods are too self-engrossed, anyway.

The Electromagnetic Trio (Dallas, c1926)

Dr Hazzard-Igniti commented, before he was disappeared into the Soviet Gulag around 1942:

The experience of traveling—voluntarily or involuntarily—via quantum “Rift Echoes” could thus account for the capacity of multi-consciousness to yield integrative rather than dissociative awareness, provided those individuals undergoing such Echoes possessed the psychological training, strength of character, and tribal awareness to weather the attendant perceptually challenges. Rift Echoes might thus explain the capacity of certain individuals to emerge from a “zone” of multiple parallel-universe experiences and -consciousness, into a “nexus” at which various storylines suddenly merged again into a single, integrative timeline, and to act strategically and effectively, even if “intuitively,” within those integrative narrative moments…

They had come from their dormitories at the College of Industrial Arts in Denton to make a Dallas day of it, Yisekāh and Alysoun: two small-town girls, from El Paso and Amarillo respectively, exploring the bustling streets and elaborate interiors of a booming oil town. They had wandered the Neiman Marcus store on Commerce Street, ogling dresses and furnishings in its elaborate windows, had lunched with discrete frugality at Isca’s cousin’s restaurant El Fenix on McKinney, visiting the Dallas Camera Club at Yisekāh’s insistence at 1504 Young, where she longingly handled a borrowed Leica-1 and caused a sensation by insisting that women had a unique aptitude for “kodakery,” and finally visiting a moving-picture show at the magnificent new Majestic Theater on Elm, with its painted ceiling “sky” of floating clouds and mechanically controlled twinkling stars.

At the end of the afternoon matinee, they were passing under the arch that led out of the Majestic’s brass- and glass-lined lobby.

“So, chica, are you ready to move on for dinner? Anything else you wanted to see?”

There was no response. Surprised, Alli stopped and realized that her friend was no longer beside her.

“Chica?”

Alli looked back along their path. Forty feet away, in the interior they had already left, she saw Yisekāh in profile. She was staring at something on the wall, invisible through the doorway.

“Iscah?”

Alli retraced her steps, squeezing past the exiting crowd. She looked over Yisekāh’s shoulder at the poster on the wall. Its focus was a hand-colored photograph of a young man:

METRO – GOLDWYN – MAYER
Presents
King Vidor’s Production
The BIG PARADE

But the poster was unlike any others displayed prominently throughout the lobby, for screen idol Rudolph Valentino in The Eagle or the comedian Harold Lloyd in The Freshman. It was even unlike any others she had seen for this very film.

Alli looked at her friend. “What is it, girl?”

Yisekāh did not answer—indeed, it seemed as if she had not even heard her friend’s voice. Alli looked more closely at the poster, which appeared to be, not the portrait of leads John Gilbert and Renée Adorée she had seen elsewhere, but instead—possibly—a still from the film. Depicting a young man in quasi-military uniform, it had evidently been taken in action: bareheaded and dark haired, in olive-drab military uniform, with a rifle in one hand and a whistle in the other, he was running uphill to the right of the frame, but looking back over his shoulder, as if calling upon others to follow. There appeared to be shell-bursts behind him. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the image, except possibly the immediacy and candid nature of the topic and rendering, and the fact that—at that distant date—such depictions of wartime actions were unusual.

Alli looked at the brass plaque on the photograph’s frame. It read, simply, “Unknown Serviceman, Somme, 1918” and—ironically and paradoxically, in light of the subject’s “unknown” status—”May their names be never forgotten.” She found herself unexpectedly moved by the image and its caption, and her eyes filled momentarily with tears, at the mournful recollection of this anonymous hero. Then she thought to look at her friend.

Yisekāh was transfixed, her gaze locked on the portrait, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings, the passing crowd, or the general noise of the hotel. She was staring at the Unknown Serviceman’s face, leaning closer and closer to the glass of the frame. As Alli looked, her friend slowly lifted one hand to her own face, lightly touching her cheek, as if to reassure herself of its corporeality. Then she lifted the other hand, reaching out similarly with her fingertips toward the face in the image. She moved more and more slowly, leaning further and further, almost as if she would fall forward into the frame.

Alli quietly stepped closer, and said softly, “Chica, are you all right? I’m here too.” But she did not appear to be listening.

“Iscah?”

Alli turned her gaze from her friend’s face, and back toward the photograph which appeared to hold Yisekāh’s entire attention. She looked more closely at the face of the unknown young man. The sounds of the crowd around them faded, and she heard her friend’s deep and irregular breathing. She looked again at the young man. There seemed to be a faint echo, ringing in her ears, of distant shouts. Explosions. Rifle shots. The sound of aircraft. The crowd-noise was almost gone. The background of the photograph blurred, and it seemed as if the young man’s limbs were moving. His outstretched hand, gripping the rifle, whirled over his head. He raised the whistle in his other hand to his lips, blew fiercely, and the shrilling of the whistle, echoing as if at the end of a long tunnel, cut through all other sounds. She heard Yisekāh moan, and turned to see her friend, on the verge of falling forward. Her eyes were wide open, but had rolled back in her head—only the whites showed.

Alli tentatively reached out one hand, and touched her friend’s shoulder. Yisekāh twitched convulsively, as if at an electric shock, swallowed, and then coughed aloud. She coughed again, and shook her head, swaying as if she would fall: her eyes were open but unfocused and glazed. Alli caught her around the shoulders and said, “here, let’s get out of this crush.” She pulled Yisekāh toward the door, peremptorily pushing aside those who obstructed their progress. Her friend leaned heavily upon her shoulder, her head down, stumbling a bit, allowing herself to be guided through the crowd.

They were buffeted to and fro. Figures seemed to loom over them, like dark shadows of great monsters. The crowd noise was back and louder than before, though Alli’s ears were still ringing from the sounds of that echoing whistle. Her vision was blurred, but she held Yisekāh tightly across the shoulders, as they fought their way forward.

They struggled through the tall, brass-framed double doors that led out from the lobby to the shaded portico, and burst through them with a sense of being expelled, like a cork from an overheated bottle, into the evening twilight. For a moment, the press of the crowd lessened, and Alli was able to take her friend by the shoulders, stand her upright, and look her in the face.

“All right? Are you all right?

Yisekāh shook her head, and her eyes cleared. She met Ally’s gaze and nodded.

“It’s all right. I’m back.”

It was as if they stood alone on the sidewalk, almost unhearing the surrounding bustle.

“What did you see in that photograph? Am I crazy—did it move?”

Yisekāh said, “You’re not crazy.”

“You heard the whistle too, right?”

“Yes, I…heard it too. It…He—he did move. He…”

Her voice trailed off, obscured by the noise of the passing crowds and traffic.

Alli pressed her. “Iscah, who was he?”

Yisekāh did not reply. She was staring past her friend’s shoulder, at something beyond and across the street. Alli turned to look.

A diagonal half-block away, at the intersection of Elm and its cross street, rising above the passing vehicles, a lean figure teetered on the curb. For a moment, the dark-haired young man paused, poised on his toes, looking back and down Harwood. Alli saw that beyond him on Elm, there were three large figures—big blocky men in dark suits, hats pulled down over their eyes—striding purposefully, in long quick steps, up the sidewalk after him. As she watched, the leader reached his right hand inside the breast of his coat.

Then the young man darted forward, narrowly dodging an oncoming city bus, into the snorting, chugging Elm Street traffic of automobiles, trucks, and wagons, moving like a broken-field runner in a football match. Automobile horns blew. Angry drivers shouted. More distantly, a policeman’s whistle shrilled—an echo of the combat whistle both girls had heard in the photographic vision.

Yisekāh shrugged Alli’s arm from her shoulders, seized her hand, and tugged her forward.

“Come on! Now!”

They ran a few yards down the sidewalk, dodging oncoming pedestrians, arriving breathless at the corner of Elm and St Paul, when the young man came up onto the raised curb as if he were breasting the breaking waves on a storm-pounded seashore. Even as he emerged from the traffic, he turned to look back toward his pursuers—and almost collided with Alli and Yisekāh, a collision only avoided when Yisekāh threw up her hands, palms outward. At her touch, he whirled, ready for a new threat. But he froze when he saw the two girls, as they did likewise, seeing his face.

It was the young man from the photograph. There was a black patch over one of his eyes, and a dramatic streak of white, running back through his dark hair, almost glowed in the twilight.

Yisekāh spoke quickly, taking his arm and linking hers through his; she motioned Alli to her other side, and turned them all three to face northeast on Elm.

“Don’t ask questions! Walk with me, now!”

They had traveled a few yards, quickly crossing Harwood, and for a few seconds Alli thought that they might have succeeded in their escape. But there came a shout behind them, and then the crack of a pistol shot, audible even over the traffic noise. Distantly, a woman screamed. Yisekāh dropped her companions’ linked arms, and turned back toward the three pursuers. Alli saw the leader level his pistol, disregarding the passing crowds, while the traffic light shifted at Harwood, and the approaching traffic accelerated through the busy intersection, led by a large city trolley car, its overhead-cable electrical connection sparking in the gathering twilight.

But then Yisekāh snarled in her throat like a cat, audible even in the hubbub, and threw up one hand toward the three big blocky men. Her eyes rolled back, to again show only the whites, and she growled again, even more loudly. There was a sudden crack of thunder, shocking on this cloudless summer evening, and there came a silent flash of molten red light, almost too quick to see, from her outstretched palm.

All the traffic lights at Elm and Harwood suddenly flipped to red. A parked police car’s siren erupted in banshee wails. There was a volley of automobile horns and the screech of slammed brakes. Men shouted. There came a bursting, crackling explosion, and a shower of sparks from the cable above the trolley, a screech from its undercarriage, and the car itself slid off its tracks. Pedestrians shrank away—miraculously, all dodging safely —as the trolley, swaying but miraculously upright, like an ocean liner in stormy seas, jumped the curb, almost in slow motion, and skidded sideways across the Elm Street sidewalk. The leader of the pursuit fired his pistol, and though Alli never knew where the shot went, she saw the other two pursuers turn and look up with disbelief at the huge streetcar that loomed over them, as they froze, seemingly fixed in place, and the trolley slid like an iceberg across the curb, driving them back and crushing them against the wall of the J.P. Haven department store, coming to a grinding, shuddering halt.

There was a sudden wave of near-silence. A single woman’s shriek of shock, dying away almost instantly. The hum and crackle of electricity gradually dissipating, and a hubbub of confused talk and shouts rising. All attention was riveted on the trolley car, jammed up against the wall of the department store. Its conductor climbed down shakily from his cab, peering at the iron wheels, which glowed red, visibly melting and distorting, and then started back at the black liquid—blacker than blood—that pooled from between the carriage and the store’s brick wall.

Alli looked at her friend. Yisekāh’s pupils had returned to visibility, but her olive skin was flushed and she gasped as if just completing a road race: a faint nimbus of sparks seemed to wreath her dark hair. The tall blond man grasped her arm, and shook it for attention.

“Alli, take her and come this way—there’s not much time. We have to get to the Power and Light Building!”

They turned, Yisekāh between them, and began to run, south on Harwood, away from the wrecked trolley and the mangled remnants of the pursuers, toward the tall Deco shape of the DP&L building, blocks away but visible over the surrounding smaller structures. Alli’s mind buzzed with questions, but, with her friend stumbling between them, she could barely spare the breath to puff out, “Who…who are you?”

Without looking at her, still scanning the streets and sidewalks ahead of them, dodging past the crowds of pedestrians on this balmy springtime evening, and hustling them forward, he rapped out “I’m Stòr. I’m a friend, sent to help Yisekāh. From a distant when. And you.

“But none of that will matter if we can’t make our rendezvous at the P&L. Come on, hurry!”

The c1934 Intergalactic Pandemic Popular Front Band

On tour by locomotive in the 1930s (during the Great Depression & Dust Bowl), it is alleged that the ESO members were blown sideways in space and time, via collision with a huge haboob-style dust storm, into c2046, to a wherewhen in which a pan-solar-system and cross-species “Galactic Pandemic” was raging. They found themselves marooned on a spaceship which only occasionally made landfall on isolated planets, having to physically distance from one another even on-board, because the disease had a lengthy asymptomatic incubation period such that they were forced to speak/work from their own individual compartments or work-pods, constantly sterilize surfaces and scrub the air-handlers, and beware of remote-planet locations. The “crew” (Band) themselves recognized the risks both physical and psychological, and struggled to stay alert and wary regarding one another’s developing physical symptoms or psychotic behaviors. Would they survive? How would individuals deal with isolation and lockdown? What perils would they face?

The Beast, which ran on electromagnetic repulsion following the earth’s ley lines, had been blown across space and time because of the haboob’s magnetic distortion. It took time for the onboard boffins to understand what had occurred, as all compasses and electrical circuits were likewise rendered non-functional. The remnants of the locomotive had been fused and sealed inside an exoskeleton which maintained air pressure, but the interiors still reflected its origins as a coal- or wood-fired locomotive, in fragments of gear, mementos, etc which were still functional and had been rebuilt into the new jury-rigged craft. They were constantly beset with existential questions which shook the very bases of their collective sense of self: would any ecosystems or societies they encountered have a natural immunity? By chance, by science, or because of (undocumented) prior exposure?

In isolation, they found themselves grappling with physical fear: of disease, disorienting and hazardous encounters, and equipment breakdown, and also with psycho-emotional costs: anxiety, depression, neurodiversity, bipolarity, hallucination. Some experienced themselves as human, some as cyborg, some cryptozoological, some evolving into new life forms or from old.

But even in isolation, even in the midst of uncertainty and fear, they retained the tough sense of community identity they had developed as part of the Popular Front in the Hungry 1930s, a “can-do” Dieselpunk vibe within which they knew they could count on one another, even when the world was on fire.

The 1936 International Brigade Libertarias Band

On tour by locomotive in the 1930s (during the Great Depression & Dust Bowl), the ESO members are blown sideways in space and time, via collision with a huge haboob-style dust storm, into c2046, when a pan-solar-system and cross-species “Galactic Pandemic” is raging. They find themselves marooned on a spaceship on only occasionally makes landfall on isolated planets, having to physically distance from one another even on-board, because the disease has a lengthy asymptomatic incubation period such that they must speak/work from their own individual compartments or work-pods, constantly sterilize surfaces and scrub the air-handlers, and beware of remote-planet locations. The “crew” (Band) themselves recognize the risks both physical and psychological, and they have to stay alert and wary regarding one another’s developing physical symptoms or psychotic behaviors.

In the wake of the Intergalactic Pandemic, and now having developed, in the Beast’s own labs, an effective series of vaccines which will protect them and others from the virus’s spread, they limp back across the galaxy, warily approaching the Earth from which they have been blown across space and time. Where/when will they land? What will they find, when they do?

At last, they find themselves dropping down out of a swirling snowstorm into a little train station in the high peaks of the wintertime Pyrenees, the mountain passes that lie between France and Spain, at a moment when the rise of militarism threatens both the world, and the “little peoples”.

It’s the Autumn of 1935.

The Colonel and Sam
archival photograph & accompanying accession information

A photograph, date unknown, purported to show “The Colonel” aka The Right-Reverend-Colonel R.E.C. Thompson, just as he mounts a horse. The location of this photograph is entirely unknown; the vast plains behind the Colonel could almost literally be anywhere in the west, but could obviously perhaps be at or near the place where the Colonel’s “tourist” pack trips into the Rio Grande Rift were staged.

The Colonel’s regalia is strange; he wears Spanish-American style “calzonera” trousers, a mismatched military jacket, and yet again a mismatched small hat. His sword appears to be the 1796 British Cavalry Saber picked up by his father after the Battle of New Orleans, never used in a fight by the Colonel, not to mention radically out-of-era based on the Colonel’s dress. The saddle seems to be an 1830’s - 1850’s - era “Hope” saddle, commonly seen on the great plains and southwestern frontier in that time but, like the saber, superseded by the time photography was practiced in such far-flung locations. It has been speculated that if this photograph was taken just before a pack trip, perhaps the Colonel’s clients asked him to “dress up” as he might have “in the old days” and the Colonel just threw on whatever old clothing and gear he had at hand.

The horse could be “Sam,” the most famous equine associated with the Colonel, but Sam’s exact confirmation is not known (the horse in this photo appears to be a bay; Sam - or a horse that may be Sam - appears in at least one other photograph as a palomino or grey… but then stranger things have been reported about Sam than just his color).

This photo could have been taken by the mysterious Isaac Uchida Garlic, the half-Japanese practitioner of that art who roamed the American west in the same era as the great Edward Curtis, and indeed may have learned his craft from Curtis. It is firmly established that Garlic was a friend of the Colonel’s, and even attempted to instruct the Colonel in the art of the Japanese sword, which the Colonel once described with a chuckle as “unlearnable by man.”[1] Garlic was reputed to have been a superb sketcher as well.

[1] Although: see elsewhere in the Correspondence, “Lafcadio Hearn meets the Colonel,” –Winesap.

The Colonel, c1855-1955

Vignette: The Colonel and the Beast, Taos, c1955
opening the Rift portal

It’s an old hacienda far out on the mesa, on a winter day so dry that there are “heat” mirages on the horizon: though the thermometer is below 10 degrees, the sun dances off the light dusting of snow that whitens the distance and reflects that whiteness back into the sky. It is so dry that the cloudless blue overhead almost crackles, as if one is breathing in the frost itself. On the distant horizon, a faint black smudge indicates a branch line of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. The air is so still that one can sense the sound—or perhaps it’s just the vibration—of the big steel driving wheels. And it’s so clear that the horizon shimmers, almost as if the black smudge of the train’s plume is floating on water or ice. A sextant would be overwhelmed by the bright sun, so bright it’s as if its corona is ringing down to the horizon: even without the navigator’s necessary calculation of angles, one has the sense of both knowing exactly where one is, and of being everywhere at once—as if all points of the compass are looking both outward and inward at the same time.

Drop your gaze from the horizon, and find the mesa, and the red, iron-rich clay, and the mesquite and saltbush. The shimmering, brittle-dry air plays tricks upon the eye: there is so little moisture to distort vision that a given creosote bush might seem tiny and close, or distant and large. Very faintly, like the echo of a remembered sound breathing down the tiny breeze, comes the distant chuff of the train.

Pull back the focus a bit more, swing your view in an arc from the west-northwest to the east, and find behind us a low, rambling adobe built in a U-shape around a placita, open to the southeast, sheltered on three sides; from our vantage, we can see into one corner of the courtyard. The interior walls are lined with an overhanging portal, and drying strings of chiles hang from the vigas, drying in the winter sun. Just west of the courtyard, between us and the hacienda, is a small, two-storied outbuilding in stick construction, which looks more like a railway’s branch-line station than a domicile: tin-roofed, sheathed in worn cedar shingles showing the last vestiges of dull green paint, overlaid with faded tin signs and peeling newsprint advertisements—both posters and painted—for long-gone regional companies and products.

The Colonel is squatted in the sun at the west side of the small outbuilding, drawing seemingly random patterns in the dirt; occasionally, he looks up and to the west, cocking his head as if listening for the sound of the train, before bending back to his work. Only after a moment and upon closer examination does one realize that he is holding, not a stick, but a finely-haired paintbrush, which he uses as if at a canvas, or perhaps a sand painting: sketching outlines, stippling in shading and cross-hatching. An image quickly emerges in the fine red dirt, several feet across, yet so precise and subtle that it takes on seeming three-dimensionality: a layered sketch, depicting an open, vaulted canyon seen from above. So deft is the perspective and execution that one feels oneself peering downward into an open atrium, dug down from the surface of the mesa, lined with laddered trails that lead into the earth. Now one can see the details of that pictured canyon take shape in the red-dirt sketch: the small junipers that hold the slopes in place, the free-fallen rocks that have tumbled from the canyon’s walls to its base, the rusted wreck of an old Studebaker, no doubt overrunning the highway above in some forgotten late-night accident, even the hint of a river course, at the bottom of the canyon that is itself a mere two-dimensional drawing; and yet, as one gazes, the river at the shadowed bottom seems almost to be moving.

The distant chuff of the train comes again, seemingly from all directions—but now even from beneath the earth—at once. The bright cold air rings, as if the horizon, a 360-degree hoop of azure blue, is a bronze gong struck precisely, a single time, with a hammer. Then, drifting down the faint breeze from the west—or, again, from under the ground—comes the sound of a steam engine’s whistle: almost human in its whispered dopplered vocality, but animal-like in its huffing respirations. Faint words—a name for the train—seem to hang in the air, or perhaps they have come from inside one’s own head:

“The Beast.”

The Colonel draws a last few lines in the red dirt, and then stands, looking down, making a complex gesture with his right hand in the air immediately above the drawing. A faint iridescent puff of dust? steam? smoke? arises from its center, seemingly from deep down in the trompe l’oeil canyon.

Then the Colonel turns and squints toward the horizon. It is hard to know precisely where his gaze is directed, though the one-pointedness of his attention is inarguable. The chuff of the train is louder now, seemingly from all directions at once. And now the ground beneath our feet seems to be trembling.

The brim of the flat-crowned Stetson obscures the Colonel’s face, though his dark eyes glint in those shadows. He breathes out, and we feel ourselves breathing with him, and it is as if the whole world is exhaling with us. There is a moment of stillness—as if the universe itself has paused—and then his teeth flash through his grizzled beard in a sudden grin. He gestures toward the red-dirt drawing that lies at our feet, and then…outward?...toward the train—now invisible but audible from all directions. His words ring in the momentary silence, seeming to hang in the crystalline blue air.

“Inside worlds or outside, right, young’un? Who knows which is more real?”

Evelyn Nesbit a/k/a "Cecile Lapin," c1905

Bassanda's contingent possibilities for Joy
Evelyn Nesbit, Cecíle Lapin, and the contingent alternate-historical possibilities—and obligations—of joy

Sharp eyed observers, or those familiar with turn of the 20th century high society—and scandal—will recognize that the portraits of Cecile Lapin in THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE are, in fact, derived from public domain images of the artist’s model, dancer, society woman, and prototypical media star Evelyn Nesbit (1884/5-1916). The subject, in the 19-Oughts, of an enormous level of attention via paintings, photographs, and her involvement in one of several “Trials of the [New] Century,” she was most notoriously the subject of a love triangle between a rich white male rapist and a rich, white, and psychopathic husband who abused Evelyn, murdered the rapist—and still walked.
From rural Pennsylvania and the child of a penniless single mother, in her teens Nesbit was widely photographed and painted as either an exotic or an ethereal presence by JC Beckwith, FS Church, and, most famously, Charles Dana Gibson, the model for the latter’s famous illustrations of the idealized Edwardian “Gibson Girl.”

Her nearly-penniless mother, who served in some periods as her manager, insisted that she never let Nesbit post “in the altogether,” but from a 21st century perspective, the numerous period photographs and lush oil paintings of a semi-nude teenager are deeply disturbing.

Seeking career alternatives by entering Broadway theatre in 1901 as a chorus line dancer, she quickly became a favorite of wealthy men-about-town, most two or more decades her senior, though she also kept company, more willingly, with her nearer-in-age contemporary, the youthful John Barrymore, who loved her for the next 35 years.

John Barrymore, c1916In 1905, when Evelyn was no more than 20, she married the drug-addicted millionaire Harry Thaw; a year later, in a shocking public assault, during a performance of Mam’zelle Champagne Thaw shot and killed Stanford White, who he alleged had raped Evelyn while she was unconscious. After not one but two “Trials of the Century,” the Thaw family’s wealth, and their manipulation of the press, elicited a verdict for Harry of “not guilty by reason of insanity.” His “confinement” to the Matteawan State Hospital amounted to little more than house arrest; he subsequently fled to Canada, and upon return was absolved of all penalties, though Nesbit was finally able to divorce him in 1915. Traveling the rough circuits of international theatres, cinemas, and nightclubs, her 1920s and ‘30s experience was marred by alcoholism, controversy, and a continued and deeply dysfunctional relationship with the murderous and abusive Thaw—who finally died in 1947.
Nesbit later relocated to California, and took classes in sculpting and ceramics, eventually teaching at the Grant Beach School of Arts and Crafts. She died in Santa Monica in 1967.

Her early autobiography was published as Tragic Beauty: The Lost 1914 Memoirs of Evelyn Nesbit, but perhaps the best-known and most empathetic portrait is in E. L. Doctorow’s retconned historical novel Ragtime (1975), itself a significant model for the Chronicles of Bassanda, wherein Nesbit and the anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman make common cause. She was portrayed by Elizabeth McGovern in Miloš Forman’s film version, where her most moving interactions are with the immigrant “Tateh,” played by Mandy Patinkin—a character and an actor who are both, by all accounts, every kind of gentle, ethical, honorable man that the real Nesbit never knew.

Evelyn was a stunningly beautiful woman but an unnervingly beautiful child—unnervingly, because one can sense the creepy exploitative intentions behind the lens and the easel. We can all think of later iterations, in our media culture, of the sexualization of childhood by patriarchy, and they rightly appall us.

The acid-tongued Mark Twain, for example, had no illusions about the greed, selfishness, and violence of Thaw, or White, or any of the other rich oligarchs upon whose molecule-thin pretensions to “class” he bestowed the epithet “The Gilded Age. One needn’t even wonder what Mr Clemens would have thought of the gold toilets and bronzer of the sociopathic child-raping grifter who was POTUS 45, because Twain talked about the abuse of Evelyn Nesbit.1

So by what right do we bootleg these (admittedly public domain) images of poor, beautiful, abused Evelyn Nesbit, to serve as iconic representations of the Bassandan heroine Cecile Lapin? In truth, the imagined character of Cecile came first—this Norman-born, peasant-raised, self-educated Sorbonne graduate student; comrade of the Colonel, the General, and Madame Algeria; lover of Ismail Durang: a Bassandan freedom fighter and the heroine of THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE--and then, when we went looking for visuals, mostly as an aid to creative imagining, Evelyn appeared.

Yes, these images are public domain, appearing on Wikimedia Commons and ubiquitously across the copyright-gray Internet—but the fact they are “copyright free” does not mean we have the right simply to hijack Evelyn’s image, shed of her back-story or indeed of her own agency, or to bend it to our narrative, unless we acknowledge the karmic debt such use carries.

But in one particular portrait from 1905, Nesbit stares, long dark hair tousled and her white shift half off one shoulder, directly into the camera—and the power and directness of that gaze, that sense that this 20-year-old’s eyes have seen things no child should see, conveys some sense of the steely courage and dogged willingness to give love, even after heartbreak, that we sought to find within the contingent tale of Cecile Lapin, Ismail Durang, and the Cause of Bassanda. This Nesbit is the woman who fought for herself, for her son by Thaw, and for the opportunity, armed against the world that would have consumed her beauty, abused her person, and cast her aside, to determine her own fate.

So what are the ethics of historical contingency? How do we acknowledge the karmic debt, and maybe even put some better karma out into the world, on behalf of Evelyn Nesbit and of all others who might suffer similarly, in either fiction or history?

In his novel Dune, set in a millennial future across an ecosystem and feudal infrastructure of hundreds of planets, the visionary polymath Frank Herbert establishes a new set of moral ethics in a post-technological world in which computers are banned, including the commandment (from his “Orange Catholic Bible,” compiled from ecumenical sources including the “Maometh Saari,” “Mahayana Christianity,” “Zensunni Catholicism,” and “Budislamic” traditions, after the Butlerian Jihad which had destroyed and condemned computers):

“Thou shalt no disfigure the soul.”

It is likewise a core spiritual value in the world of Bassanda.

And Bassanda ethical teachings—and those of the historian—extend the commandment even further,

“Thou shalt not disfigure the past.”

In the case of Evelyn Nesbit/Cecile Lapin as an actress in the story of the Great Train, this means we are commanded to honor her story through the agency of our telling: its pain, its loss, and its potential. Employ no images, visual or textual, which exploit her childhood; seek instead that imagery that conveys an adult woman’s joy, strength, and agency. Build a narrative which celebrates both the best of Evelyn as she was and those parts of Evelyn which could have been, had her circumstances been better; give her agency and acknowledge her heroism. Make hers—with that of S. Jefferson Winesap, another traumatized and minoritized creation—the main narrative voice. Allow Cecile an arc of sadness, loss, suffering, but also of defiance, and the transcendence of suffering through courage—as we would, if we could change the history of the past, do for Evelyn Nesbit as well.

We can no longer change the circumstances of Evelyn Nesbit’s life. But we can perhaps provide a contingent alternate narrative, an imagined history of that life, as “Cecile Lapin,” which finds heroism, joy, and cathartic transformation.

The body of sutra (sacred texts) associated with our universe’s ancient Iliot shamanic tradition, infused with Buddhism and primitive Christianity as was Herbert’s O.C. Catholic Bible from the imagined worlds of Dune, provides the following, which shapes the imagined world of Bassanda, its own alternate and imagined histories, biographies, and ethics. We dedicate and rededicate ourselves to the moral rigor of this commandment from the Bassandayana, on behalf of Cecile Lapin, Evelyn Nesbit, and of the contingent stories of joy we will give them:

“Thou shalt not disfigure the future.”

1
TWAIN, MARK. “1907: Autobiographical Dictations, March–December.” In Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, edited by BENJAMIN GRIFFIN, HARRIET ELINOR SMITH, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Amanda Gagel, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick, and Christopher M. Ohge, 1st ed., 3–195. University of California Press, 2015. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctv1xxtgh.5.

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