Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath
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Santa Fe is quiet today. Down in the plaza some Indian women are laying out jewellery on blankets under the shaded boardwalk of the Palace of the Governors. The afternoon wind has brought humidity, and the possibility of a thunderstorm; art stores and restaurants and parking lots are empty. Although the city is reputed to be at ease with itself, you only have to walk around the plaza before the tourists have arrived or after they have gone to sense the air of restlessness and disquiet. The chamber of commerce sells the city as a place of such antiquity and harmony that its three cultures – Hispanic, Native American and Anglo coexist in steadfast and separate juxtaposition, and extrapolates from this the myth that the City Different is a place of relaxed permissiveness. In fact, New Mexico has a history sufficiently long to have blurred the distinctions between Hispanic and Native American into a complex and pleasing slurry, without annihilating either. It is the newcomers who, unable or unwilling to grasp the subtleties of the place, have saddled it with the label ‘tricultural’ and, with that simple tag, rewritten history. A colonial census of 1790 recognized seven ethnic groups in Santa Fe: White Spanish; Coyote, or Spanish and New Mexican Indian; Mulatto, or half-Afro-American; Genizaro, who were Indians captured by Plains Indians and sold back to Spanish colonists as slaves; Indio or Indian; Mestizo, or a mixture of Spanish and Mexican Indian; and Color Quebrado, which pretty much summed up anyone left over. They were in part united by the conservative lifestyles most suited to harsh terrain and in part by trading alliances. Anglo-saxon culture, in particular liberal anglo-saxon culture, came late to New Mexico, and laid itself like skin on the soup beneath. Since the influx of wealthy, liberal, overwhelmingly white vacationers and retirees in the 1980s and 1990s, land prices have soared in Santa Fe. Every day a letter or an op-ed piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican mourns the conversion of the city from living place to outdoor museum.
I’m going to tell you about Pete. Pete makes his living as a New Age technoshaman. A technoshaman is a shaman with a computer, apparently. It’s a profession with a scientific bent. In fact, much that goes on among New Agers is of a scientific bent, for science can be harnessed in support of more or less any kind of ideology and, by being thus appropriated, spoiled for any other. Afterall, what does it matter if computers powered by crystal matrices and extra-low frequency psychic protector lenses and human beings grown from lemur babies sound improbable? Gene splicing and nanotechnology and virtual reality are pretty crazy too.
Pete the Technoshaman has been developing his technoshamanistic software for eleven years and has chosen to base his code on the Mayan calendar on the grounds that the mathematics of the Mayan grid is the same mathematics as the mathematics of life, a numerically reciprocal permutation table. Pete’s mission has something to do with the rising level of chaos, which, according to Pete, will lead inexorably to the world being in flames and bridges burning behind us.
‘There’s no going back to the Garden of Eden,’ he says, ‘which didn’t even really exist anyway.’
In his living room he has an AppleMac fixed to a number of electronic gizmos with flashing LED displays and impressive monitors. From here he carries on his practice, assisted by his wife, Beth, who is also and incidentally a shaman herself, although not of the technological variety.
Beth fetches some coffee.
‘It all looks, uh, amazingly complex, but how is this Mayan grid business actually going to make a difference?’ I ask.
Pete the Technoshaman gathers himself, sweeps his hair back, double-clicks on his mouse, and says with casual authority, ‘Hey, I’m doing my bit.’
The coffee arrives, and we sit at Pete’s Mac staring idly at a notice flashing on the screen which reads ‘You may activate the program at any time.’
‘You know,’ says Pete with palpable sadness, sucking on his coffee cup, ‘I don’t have answers as to what can happen to the teeming billions, man, but at least I don’t have to wonder what I’m doing here anymore.’
His friend Carl, stationed on the sofabed reading a copy of National Geographic, looks up and interjects:‘Yeah, it sounds so cold-hearted to say that not a lot can be done, but you know, maybe that’s not so bad. I mean, we’re spiritual beings, right?’
‘You know,’ says Pete, bringing up a graphic of the solar system on the Mac, ‘we’re in a wrenching transitional period. Some people would say that because you’re not handing out sandwiches in Somalia you’re not doing anything. But McKenna’s right. The world’s salvation is in pushing the imagination.’
Carl throws down his National Geographic and shakes his head. McKenna, I happen to know, is a West Coast writer who thinks that magic mushrooms provide an insight into alien worlds. He’s become somewhat of a cult figure among men of a certain age.
‘The whole world’s on LSD,’ says Carl, randomly.
‘Information’s the thing, man,’ continues Pete, ‘The future of consciousness and the future of medicine.’ He clicks on his mouse and brings up a flowchart marked in Greek lettering. Then, taking up a phial he walks over to Carl, yanks out a lock of hair with a quick flip of his wrist, puts the hair into the phial, and inserts it into a larger tube connected with electrodes to a piece of metal, and also by some mysterious means, to the computer.
‘This, for example, is kinesiology.’
‘Wow,’ says Carl, evidently impressed.
‘I just place my finger, thus,’ placing his right index finger on the piece of metal, ‘on the electro-kinesiological reaction plate and there’s an electromagnetic disturbance created by the hair that my finger picks up, as it were, intuitively. Understand?’
I nod; Carl simpers.
‘It’s the same as if I touched you. Any live cell will do, you know, because they all react in unison. I don’t need a liver cell to know what’s going on in the liver.’
I mention in passing that I had always imagined hair cells to be dead.
Pete’s wife returns from putting the baby to bed and proceeds to settle down to some other domestic chore.
‘I am a biological scientist,’ replies Pete definitively. In the corner of the room his wife bites her lip.
‘So you know, I rub my finger on the plate and intuitively click the mouse on this list, so.’
He removes the hair phial and replaces it with a bottle of colourless fluid.
‘All the restitutive elements – crystals, colours, food, so forth – are stored in the memory banks of the machine as holographic references, each item is associated with thirteen Mayan numbers, which store enough information on each substance not to have to bother having the real things.
‘Take this bottle of water here. We simply …’ Clicks on the mouse, two doubles.
‘And the numbers are transferred into an electromagnetic pulse so the geometry of the water changes. Or the same information can be transferred to a lamp, or coded as a fractal type for psychoemotional problems or a sound with the information subliminally tagged onto it.’
‘You mean, you don’t need to see your patients?’
‘Uh-uh. They just phone right up, and we send them a tape with the sound on it, whatever …’ He’s picking out the bottle of water and putting back Carl’s hair. From another room the baby begins to howl.
‘Oh Lordie.’
‘What?’ asks Carl, looking a little worried.
‘Just checked the energy levels. Seems like your digestive problem is somewhat better already.’
‘Yeah?’ says Carl.
‘See,’ Pete points to a chart on the screen, which has changed from blue to yellow. ‘If this technology developed you could just grow body parts. Incidentally …’ He double-clicks, the screen shifts, blackens and the message ‘You may activate the program at any time’ blinks back. ‘Tim Leary is speaking