My words, illustration Spike Hibberd, published IsNot magazine Issue #9, February 2007.
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Factoid
- James Hibberd
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- The son of a creative and scientific family, I was born and dwell in the 19th century core of Melbourne. A graduate of history, I mediate my relationship with life with words and ideas and gentle hedonisms. I love high brow, old style and new pop underground, to which I add a shlock lining, but disdane the middle of the road.
Links to allies
This Site
Dear People,
The intention of this site is to showcase examples of my written work, which includes fictions and texts for creative individuals and enterprises.
To date, my writings have been contributions to the creative communities of opportunity provided by IsNot magazine and The Narrows artspace.
While my medium, skills and ideas are clearly derived from established traditions of literature, I have sought to work in non-literary forums.
Why? I do think creative people tend to dwell in inward looking villages, whereas the most intersting things happen at the crossroads, where different types do mix, so that is where I like to find myself.
I warmly welcome your reponses, requests, opportunities and constructive criticism.
Kindly,
James Hibberd
The intention of this site is to showcase examples of my written work, which includes fictions and texts for creative individuals and enterprises.
To date, my writings have been contributions to the creative communities of opportunity provided by IsNot magazine and The Narrows artspace.
While my medium, skills and ideas are clearly derived from established traditions of literature, I have sought to work in non-literary forums.
Why? I do think creative people tend to dwell in inward looking villages, whereas the most intersting things happen at the crossroads, where different types do mix, so that is where I like to find myself.
I warmly welcome your reponses, requests, opportunities and constructive criticism.
Kindly,
James Hibberd
WALLPAPER
I assert that writing is as much the space in which it is presented, as the actual content of the text itself, the font, and the rest of the paraphernalia and filigree of the written word.
The written word has been corralled into pens for print, familiar and commodifiable: books, newspapers, magazines.
Recently, words have escaped the farm and run feral in the transcendent wilderness of the net, a liberation much celebrated by the people.
This has left a host of surfaces and spaces neglected and ready to be seized by the freebooters of the written word.
I have devoted recent years to writing splices of my memory on the wallpaper in my habitation: intimate autobiography.
I live in the splendid squalor of the Excelsior Hotel, a bar and residence for isolated men, located in a neighbourhood lost in transition between industry, immigration and bohemiana.
I have left my days of prominence as a conventional author and journalist years behind me. Not a dead-end street - just closed to traffic. I drifted on a high sea of ales and liquors, but have become a superb navigator, and need not return to harbour.
My work on wallpaper has brought my past into the present and will project it into the future.
I have devoted my lounge to tranquil childhood, bedroom to wanton youth, kitchen to the appetites of my adulthood and the bathroom to the tranquillity of my present old age. The toilet walls are inscribed with chronicles of my death, foretold.
Lampshades have spiral narratives of the lives of my parents and ancestors cut from the cloth. At night they illuminate the narratives of I on the walls.
The laundry sink features an account of the decline and collapse of my marriage to Annabel Argent.
Sewn on my pillowslips are recollections of my youthful dreams and ambitions, my imagined feats as a pilot, mountaineer, explorer, cardsharp, raconteur, but not the avant-gaurde.
Heavily stitched on my mattress beneath the sheet, so it cannot be seen but is perceived by my sleeping flesh, are words which describe my carnal encounter with Carola Crabapple, forming an outline of her magnificent physique.
As an artistic counterpoint, a self-portrait is burnt in the old carpet with cigarette butts.
But my principal works are on wallpaper.
My retreat to the margins can be inverted into a triumphant repositioning, unforseen by arbiters of taste and the powers that be in the world of the written word.
By working in spaces neglected by convention I hope my work can assume the status of a blazing sun in the cosmos of literature, as opposed to the passing asteroids and gyrating planetoids of book celebrity, best-sellers, Hollywood versions and the like.
After all, the best seminal ideas come from below: witness the blues.
Some of my brothers at the Excelsior say that this is what old men do, use their last days to look back. After all, there is not much looking forward to do, and the outlook is grim.
I have in fact realised a perfect artistic-psychological symbiosis: disciplined and minimal writing, all on my own walls, a finite page but ever-present, around and about me.
More can be achieved with less. Our masters do tell us efficiency is at the heart of the quest of human civilisation.
This is a testimony to my small symbolic contribution.
The hotel manager, Hugo Weinstein, rather than reacting with outrage, recognises my achievements and their potential. But, he has accused me of perversely seeking recognition and wealth, while lurking drunk in obscurity in his dirty Hotel.
Mr. Weinstein believes that, left to my devices, my work will only receive wider recognition post-mortuum, in the manner of things, leaving him to reap the benefits as curator of a masterpiece.
Rumour at the bar even has it that Hugo actually has solicited a number of Arts Agents, who have inspected my lodgings in my rare absences, or during my frequent stupors, and ultimately seeks to cash-in on my labours.
That either means removing me from the Hotel, or removing my rooms from the Hotel, or perhaps extracting the wallpaper and other relevant fittings, and reconstructing them at a different location. All by arrangement with Mr. Weinstein.
I am now wary of well-dressed and well-spoken strangers, and mostly keep to myself.
I keep a naked manikin, face painted in my likeness, in the bath, smoking a cigar. He is forbidden to join me when I shower. That is one of my eccentricities.
Published in IsNot magazine Issue #7 July 2006
The written word has been corralled into pens for print, familiar and commodifiable: books, newspapers, magazines.
Recently, words have escaped the farm and run feral in the transcendent wilderness of the net, a liberation much celebrated by the people.
This has left a host of surfaces and spaces neglected and ready to be seized by the freebooters of the written word.
I have devoted recent years to writing splices of my memory on the wallpaper in my habitation: intimate autobiography.
I live in the splendid squalor of the Excelsior Hotel, a bar and residence for isolated men, located in a neighbourhood lost in transition between industry, immigration and bohemiana.
I have left my days of prominence as a conventional author and journalist years behind me. Not a dead-end street - just closed to traffic. I drifted on a high sea of ales and liquors, but have become a superb navigator, and need not return to harbour.
My work on wallpaper has brought my past into the present and will project it into the future.
I have devoted my lounge to tranquil childhood, bedroom to wanton youth, kitchen to the appetites of my adulthood and the bathroom to the tranquillity of my present old age. The toilet walls are inscribed with chronicles of my death, foretold.
Lampshades have spiral narratives of the lives of my parents and ancestors cut from the cloth. At night they illuminate the narratives of I on the walls.
The laundry sink features an account of the decline and collapse of my marriage to Annabel Argent.
Sewn on my pillowslips are recollections of my youthful dreams and ambitions, my imagined feats as a pilot, mountaineer, explorer, cardsharp, raconteur, but not the avant-gaurde.
Heavily stitched on my mattress beneath the sheet, so it cannot be seen but is perceived by my sleeping flesh, are words which describe my carnal encounter with Carola Crabapple, forming an outline of her magnificent physique.
As an artistic counterpoint, a self-portrait is burnt in the old carpet with cigarette butts.
But my principal works are on wallpaper.
My retreat to the margins can be inverted into a triumphant repositioning, unforseen by arbiters of taste and the powers that be in the world of the written word.
By working in spaces neglected by convention I hope my work can assume the status of a blazing sun in the cosmos of literature, as opposed to the passing asteroids and gyrating planetoids of book celebrity, best-sellers, Hollywood versions and the like.
After all, the best seminal ideas come from below: witness the blues.
Some of my brothers at the Excelsior say that this is what old men do, use their last days to look back. After all, there is not much looking forward to do, and the outlook is grim.
I have in fact realised a perfect artistic-psychological symbiosis: disciplined and minimal writing, all on my own walls, a finite page but ever-present, around and about me.
More can be achieved with less. Our masters do tell us efficiency is at the heart of the quest of human civilisation.
This is a testimony to my small symbolic contribution.
The hotel manager, Hugo Weinstein, rather than reacting with outrage, recognises my achievements and their potential. But, he has accused me of perversely seeking recognition and wealth, while lurking drunk in obscurity in his dirty Hotel.
Mr. Weinstein believes that, left to my devices, my work will only receive wider recognition post-mortuum, in the manner of things, leaving him to reap the benefits as curator of a masterpiece.
Rumour at the bar even has it that Hugo actually has solicited a number of Arts Agents, who have inspected my lodgings in my rare absences, or during my frequent stupors, and ultimately seeks to cash-in on my labours.
That either means removing me from the Hotel, or removing my rooms from the Hotel, or perhaps extracting the wallpaper and other relevant fittings, and reconstructing them at a different location. All by arrangement with Mr. Weinstein.
I am now wary of well-dressed and well-spoken strangers, and mostly keep to myself.
I keep a naked manikin, face painted in my likeness, in the bath, smoking a cigar. He is forbidden to join me when I shower. That is one of my eccentricities.
Published in IsNot magazine Issue #7 July 2006
CURED MEATS
By Basil Basilovec
Izmit Anglochou not only survived the leap from his flaming window, but immediately began shouting at me. Something about my mother.
I return the favor from my window sill, close the wooden shutters and lock the latch. Matter resolved I think. I can content myself with the astrolabe, Pro-Tools, cured meats and slivovitz.
He can play in the snow and frost.
Our enmity became two eggs which we each nested, and mine hatched first.
We were watching each other, but avoiding gaze meeting gaze. There was too much unrealized anger between us. The cold politeness was a lie, and, with my act of courage we have found the truth which will ultimately redeem us, as men, if not as friends.
I would have regurgitated these over-digested reflections by text, but given the scale of my self-indulgence, I send them by cable.
My friend, I hope you will humor me, at the very least; my conscience demands an audience, even if distant.
You remember I met Beatrice on the brigantine sailing from Malacca.
I was obsessed by her virtues – personal, carnal and utterly imaginary.
The trade wind mixed her musk with a dank fruit scent from the cargo. With this arousing essence I filled my nostrils, and then sinuses, so it caressed every lobe of my brain.
My strategy to win Beatrice was passivity. So much of my romantic conviction was conjured I could not afford to contrast it with reality.
Everyone knew of course. Especially Carmichael Buntine in his worsted wool pants. He began the voyage as her companion and confidant, but before long had found fresh fields to exercise his equestrian talents, despite the cramped quarters.
Why was Mr. Buntine fearful rather than hostile? I had no real agenda.
He must have read the honesty in my eyes.
After we had disembarked in this, our adopted colonial metropolis, from time to time, I would encounter the couple by those social coincidences that occur in a large society comprised of many smaller ones.
His eyes would contract to pins and prick to keep me at bay. I was still his rival, even though we had never exchanged more than formalities, and, for my part, I had long discarded that particular fixation.
Years later I chanced by Mr. Buntine at a chamber of commerce function.
I understood that he was by then estranged from Beatrice.
There was a spark of friendship that kindled in his eyes and brows, nothing I had seen before.
What was this reversal? Was I now a fellow-traveler in his romantic misadventure?
Conjure a friendship from ashes?
I withdrew into a tortoise shell of perfunctory politeness, nervous excuses, consulted my digital diary and fob watch, and I was gone.
Too much had happened that could not be denied, despite nothing having happened between us, at all.
The actual bone of contention in any conflict or rivalry must be driven by muscular passions and animated by spirited imagination to become the full grown and ravenous creature.
I am not above indulging in this myself.
In Montenegro, I had idealized the love of Gustav Panslav and Prinzika. Trust, complementary humor, moods in equilibrium, very compatible physiques and genuine happiness in a time of alliances of convenience and circumstance.
They should have been carved in marble, buried and unearthed and put on public display, the embodiment of true romantic monogamy which is so rarely fulfilled.
The scandal of their infidelity splattered us with bile and silent screaming jealousy.
Gustav took up with his new companion in a house on a hill top from which all approaches were from below and visible from a distance. They sanctified their unholy beginnings with the graces of wedlock but the disguise fooled no one.
They had placed themselves in considerable danger. Friends and kinfolk divided into two camps, a civil war. I was a partisan for her past. My private hostility and public abuse of Gustav became an opportunistic guerilla campaign.
Without accountability how will morality survive?
One by one we stole his goats and righteously devoured the spoils. When the mob climbed the hill waving fire-brands Prinzika had long since abandoned what we called her cause. She had tired of re-opening old scars and left us for a different land. Her zealous champions, I included, carried on oblivious as to her absence.
So you might better understand me, think of my homeland in Montenegro.
My kin occupy three valleys in our precipitous Dinaric Mountains. We are devoted to our vendetta with the neighboring people, easily distinguished by their mixing of white sheep with black goats, and reluctance to use more than a curved knife to eat.
Although to the naive outsider we are indistinguishable, we believe we are distinct and opposed in every custom conceivable – except our equal exchange of retribution for retribution.
On both sides this loathing and violence has become almost a celebration, which fills our conversation, populates our stories and legends, brings our friendships and families to life, and bestows a meaning and purpose more ennobling than just putting the next sausage in the mouth.
There is the disagreement over how we came to fight them.
This has become a bitter schism in it own right, with wounds and ghosts to be avenged.
All this may seem to be resolved, if not made irrelevant, by the presence of the Turk. The forays of his Satrap are an ironic gift shared freely and in good will amongst us - the presence of an enemy more revoltingly foreign and despised than each other.
I myself grew tired of this game – a man cut from a heroic cloth must find his own story, not borrow an old one.
I cannot help think, despite so much time and distance, that if I had not killed my brother for breaking the taboo, we would have grown to become bitter and fully fledged enemies, rather than wasting the potential of our brotherhood in a premature, albeit prescient, moment of fratricide.
I now realize that family and friendships are most important, and I will always regret not having discovered and fulfilled such a precious relationship.
Published in IsNot magazine Issue #6 May 2006
Izmit Anglochou not only survived the leap from his flaming window, but immediately began shouting at me. Something about my mother.
I return the favor from my window sill, close the wooden shutters and lock the latch. Matter resolved I think. I can content myself with the astrolabe, Pro-Tools, cured meats and slivovitz.
He can play in the snow and frost.
Our enmity became two eggs which we each nested, and mine hatched first.
We were watching each other, but avoiding gaze meeting gaze. There was too much unrealized anger between us. The cold politeness was a lie, and, with my act of courage we have found the truth which will ultimately redeem us, as men, if not as friends.
I would have regurgitated these over-digested reflections by text, but given the scale of my self-indulgence, I send them by cable.
My friend, I hope you will humor me, at the very least; my conscience demands an audience, even if distant.
You remember I met Beatrice on the brigantine sailing from Malacca.
I was obsessed by her virtues – personal, carnal and utterly imaginary.
The trade wind mixed her musk with a dank fruit scent from the cargo. With this arousing essence I filled my nostrils, and then sinuses, so it caressed every lobe of my brain.
My strategy to win Beatrice was passivity. So much of my romantic conviction was conjured I could not afford to contrast it with reality.
Everyone knew of course. Especially Carmichael Buntine in his worsted wool pants. He began the voyage as her companion and confidant, but before long had found fresh fields to exercise his equestrian talents, despite the cramped quarters.
Why was Mr. Buntine fearful rather than hostile? I had no real agenda.
He must have read the honesty in my eyes.
After we had disembarked in this, our adopted colonial metropolis, from time to time, I would encounter the couple by those social coincidences that occur in a large society comprised of many smaller ones.
His eyes would contract to pins and prick to keep me at bay. I was still his rival, even though we had never exchanged more than formalities, and, for my part, I had long discarded that particular fixation.
Years later I chanced by Mr. Buntine at a chamber of commerce function.
I understood that he was by then estranged from Beatrice.
There was a spark of friendship that kindled in his eyes and brows, nothing I had seen before.
What was this reversal? Was I now a fellow-traveler in his romantic misadventure?
Conjure a friendship from ashes?
I withdrew into a tortoise shell of perfunctory politeness, nervous excuses, consulted my digital diary and fob watch, and I was gone.
Too much had happened that could not be denied, despite nothing having happened between us, at all.
The actual bone of contention in any conflict or rivalry must be driven by muscular passions and animated by spirited imagination to become the full grown and ravenous creature.
I am not above indulging in this myself.
In Montenegro, I had idealized the love of Gustav Panslav and Prinzika. Trust, complementary humor, moods in equilibrium, very compatible physiques and genuine happiness in a time of alliances of convenience and circumstance.
They should have been carved in marble, buried and unearthed and put on public display, the embodiment of true romantic monogamy which is so rarely fulfilled.
The scandal of their infidelity splattered us with bile and silent screaming jealousy.
Gustav took up with his new companion in a house on a hill top from which all approaches were from below and visible from a distance. They sanctified their unholy beginnings with the graces of wedlock but the disguise fooled no one.
They had placed themselves in considerable danger. Friends and kinfolk divided into two camps, a civil war. I was a partisan for her past. My private hostility and public abuse of Gustav became an opportunistic guerilla campaign.
Without accountability how will morality survive?
One by one we stole his goats and righteously devoured the spoils. When the mob climbed the hill waving fire-brands Prinzika had long since abandoned what we called her cause. She had tired of re-opening old scars and left us for a different land. Her zealous champions, I included, carried on oblivious as to her absence.
So you might better understand me, think of my homeland in Montenegro.
My kin occupy three valleys in our precipitous Dinaric Mountains. We are devoted to our vendetta with the neighboring people, easily distinguished by their mixing of white sheep with black goats, and reluctance to use more than a curved knife to eat.
Although to the naive outsider we are indistinguishable, we believe we are distinct and opposed in every custom conceivable – except our equal exchange of retribution for retribution.
On both sides this loathing and violence has become almost a celebration, which fills our conversation, populates our stories and legends, brings our friendships and families to life, and bestows a meaning and purpose more ennobling than just putting the next sausage in the mouth.
There is the disagreement over how we came to fight them.
This has become a bitter schism in it own right, with wounds and ghosts to be avenged.
All this may seem to be resolved, if not made irrelevant, by the presence of the Turk. The forays of his Satrap are an ironic gift shared freely and in good will amongst us - the presence of an enemy more revoltingly foreign and despised than each other.
I myself grew tired of this game – a man cut from a heroic cloth must find his own story, not borrow an old one.
I cannot help think, despite so much time and distance, that if I had not killed my brother for breaking the taboo, we would have grown to become bitter and fully fledged enemies, rather than wasting the potential of our brotherhood in a premature, albeit prescient, moment of fratricide.
I now realize that family and friendships are most important, and I will always regret not having discovered and fulfilled such a precious relationship.
Published in IsNot magazine Issue #6 May 2006
LOOKING BACK
'Looking Back', response to art by Hamish Carr, exhibition at Span Galleries, Melbourne, November 2005 (2nd page)
(1st page)
Midnight Cowboy
Midnight Cowboy (1969) is the story of two unlikely companions, Joe Buck and ‘Ratso’ Enrico Rizzo, allies bound together by extreme circumstance and dire poverty, despite their abundant incompatibility. Mired at the grimy low end of the food chain in New York City, Joe and ‘Ratso’ conspire to get ahead, but actually struggle to survive, in a ‘rags to rags to rags’ plot line that serves as an antidote for and lurks below the American dream of escape from penury and toil to wealth and leisure. Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a genial and cretinous Texan, flees rural poverty. He reverses the traditional American paradigm: the man from the Wild West heads east, to New York City, which he hopes will be his very own Babylon. Handsome Joe Buck hits the sidewalks dressed as a ranching cowboy, aiming to become a professional stallion to the moneyed ladies of the city: "Well, I ain’t a for-real cowboy. But I am one helluva stud."
As an exercise in free enterprise and social mobility, Joe is on to something. The world of sex transcends class roles and signifiers (clothes, colour, speech), which – as is well known – are imperceptible (race aside) and irrelevant once one gets down to business.
Despite some hits and near misses, Mr Buck’s considerable potential does not lead to a great deal of fulfilment: Joe is simply too slow witted to get a firm handle on the target market. Enter Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), a scabrous bum, who after initially ripping Joe off, belatedly becomes his ‘manager’ and partner in misadventure. Gambits ensue with ladies of night and day, miscellaneous opportunists, furtive gays and somehow, a psychedelic party (a la The Factory), episodes which ultimately ram home the futility of their efforts to exceed themselves. The two lead a perilous existence, sharing Ratso’s squat, living by opportunism, eaten by hunger. Joe’s New York dream having proven a mirage, Ratso leads them into a new Exodus for a different kind of Promised Land: Florida.
"The two basic items necessary to sustain human life are sunshine and coconut milk. Did you know that? That’s a fact. In Florida, they got a terrific amount of coconut trees there. In fact, I think they even got ‘em in the, uh, gas stations over there. And ladies? You know that in Miami, you got, uh, you listenin’ to me? You got more ladies in Miami than in any resort area of the country there. I think per capita on a given day, there’s probably, uh, three hundred of ‘em on the beach. In fact, you can’t even, uh, scratch yourself without getting’ a belly-button, uh, up the old kazoo there."
While the USA has no formal class system, it most definitely has social strata. At first glance contradictory, the contrasting myth/reality that anyone can ‘make it’ ($$$) and the evident extremes of personnel wealth, are actually mutually complementary. The economic system in question, freewheeling enterprise capitalism, rewards effort and business innovation (sometimes), facilitating social mobility upwards and downwards, dissolving any rigid class system. The consequences of this dynamic economic individualism on those that have little to offer and no traction in mainstream (let alone affluent) society are boldly and ruthlessly depicted in this movie.
Midnight Cowboy was directed by John Schelsinger, a north London Jew, and is the first and only X rated move to win the Best Picture Oscar.
Published in catalogue for Lily Hibberd exhibition Dangerous Liaisons October 2005.
As an exercise in free enterprise and social mobility, Joe is on to something. The world of sex transcends class roles and signifiers (clothes, colour, speech), which – as is well known – are imperceptible (race aside) and irrelevant once one gets down to business.
Despite some hits and near misses, Mr Buck’s considerable potential does not lead to a great deal of fulfilment: Joe is simply too slow witted to get a firm handle on the target market. Enter Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), a scabrous bum, who after initially ripping Joe off, belatedly becomes his ‘manager’ and partner in misadventure. Gambits ensue with ladies of night and day, miscellaneous opportunists, furtive gays and somehow, a psychedelic party (a la The Factory), episodes which ultimately ram home the futility of their efforts to exceed themselves. The two lead a perilous existence, sharing Ratso’s squat, living by opportunism, eaten by hunger. Joe’s New York dream having proven a mirage, Ratso leads them into a new Exodus for a different kind of Promised Land: Florida.
"The two basic items necessary to sustain human life are sunshine and coconut milk. Did you know that? That’s a fact. In Florida, they got a terrific amount of coconut trees there. In fact, I think they even got ‘em in the, uh, gas stations over there. And ladies? You know that in Miami, you got, uh, you listenin’ to me? You got more ladies in Miami than in any resort area of the country there. I think per capita on a given day, there’s probably, uh, three hundred of ‘em on the beach. In fact, you can’t even, uh, scratch yourself without getting’ a belly-button, uh, up the old kazoo there."
While the USA has no formal class system, it most definitely has social strata. At first glance contradictory, the contrasting myth/reality that anyone can ‘make it’ ($$$) and the evident extremes of personnel wealth, are actually mutually complementary. The economic system in question, freewheeling enterprise capitalism, rewards effort and business innovation (sometimes), facilitating social mobility upwards and downwards, dissolving any rigid class system. The consequences of this dynamic economic individualism on those that have little to offer and no traction in mainstream (let alone affluent) society are boldly and ruthlessly depicted in this movie.
Midnight Cowboy was directed by John Schelsinger, a north London Jew, and is the first and only X rated move to win the Best Picture Oscar.
Published in catalogue for Lily Hibberd exhibition Dangerous Liaisons October 2005.
95%, or THE KALLAWAYA MEDICINE MEN
The plastic bottle of alcohol was labelled 95%.
It even tasted warm before it made its fiery way down our throats to rage in our stomachs. Luckily the village elders’ drinking philosophy was slowly and steadily, passing the little cup around the circle, spilling an offering to Pachamama the earth goddess as we went.
We were sitting and standing about the courtyard of Max’s farmhouse, all built of mudbrick, timber, stone and thatch, grimy kids and swine rolling in the dirt, the scent of cookfires and garden beds in our nostrils.
The gentlemen of the council were happy to interrupt their meeting to welcome three travellers from Australia to their little village of Chari hidden in the backwoods of Bolivia.
They apologised that their church was in ruins, but they did not believe in such Gods. Instead they professed that they maintain their ancient worship of the rivers, rocks and mountains, the creators, spirits and demons, and exercise their power to communicate with them, see other worlds and work magic wonders.
These old peasant men, wiry and stout, have lived all their lives in a mountain valley. I can’t recall how we managed to introduce ourselves, explain our modern lives, or our distant island home, but in hindsight I don’t think it mattered. They could see who we were. They had a way of focusing their gaze on us intently, silently opening us up and looking inside to see what forces were at play. Perhaps they had interpreted our coming as a good sign.
Max and the other elders invited us to return to Chari to join the fiesta opening their new museum. We were fascinated, and agreed to return.
Chari is in the deep valley of the Charazani River that runs past the colossal Apolobambas mountain range, the Peruvian frontier to one side, the teeming Amazonian jungle to the other, and the Agean waters of Lake Titicaca behind. There are no significant cities or roads in the region. It is a remote backwater in Bolivia, itself a remote backwater.
Max and the elders are Kallawaya. This is an ancient sacred culture of secret knowledge, of myth, magic and medicine local to the Charazani region. Its mysteries are passed on to chosen boys by means of an unwritten language, known only by the Kallawaya. They are governed by a group known as the Council of the Ancients.
I had been warned they would not welcome strangers.
We found the Kallawaya welcoming and immensely proud of their traditions. It is their world in that valley. But they are very reluctant to reveal how their traditions work. They call upon the powers of nature and the unseen by offerings and incantations, but also use an impressive array of natural ingredients to work herbal medicine. I am not normally interested in traditional healing, and sceptical about magic. Yet to encounter an ancient people with knowledge of the healing virtues of two thousand plants gathered from all sides of the South American continent is impressive, even to the sceptical.
To get there we had boarded a rusting old bus at 5am in an alley behind a fruit market, behind a cemetery in the backblocks of La Paz, Bolivia’s shambling capital city. The vehicle filled up with peasant folk. Warm clothes, warm faces, baggage, sacks and the odd hen. The driver awoke, the engine rumbled and we were off before the dawn.
The journey to the Charazani valley is an all day affair, skirting impossible mountain ranges that resemble serrated jawbones, crossing rocky brown flatlands, passing the shores of Titicaca, stopping in rustic market towns to eat pastries in street stalls, then over a wide green highland plain to finally descend into the valley, arriving at Charazani.
The hillside town is small, quiet and pretty and is named after the river that flows below it. A plaza, a few eating houses, some stores, a library, medical centre, three simple hotels, two phones and one hot thermal pool, all clinging to the valley wall. Pleasant, an ideal base for visiting rustic villages, launching expeditions into the mountains and jungles, and meeting the local wizards.
Life for the locals is centred on the villages, the fields and open grazing terrain in the highlands. The villages are small collections of cottages built by hand and separated by little lanes, streams, gardens and animal pens. The fields are terraces carved out of the steep hillsides, worked by strong-armed peasants. Young shepherds guide their llama flocks along mountain paths to the tune of their panpipes, swine roam untended, woodcutters swing axes, women wash clothes in rocky rivers while children and old men bathe. It seemed a poor and arduous existence, but filled with the satisfaction of doing everything with your own hands and the beauty of living close to nature.
To come to such a place is filled with attractions and experiences, but there are none you can reserve or buy. You have to arrive and interact with the local people and environment.
The day of the Chari festival. We arrived amidst the preparations carrying two milk crates filled with beer. We were welcome and encouraged to participate and photograph.
The museum is a U of stone buildings with thatch rooves surrounding a courtyard. To one side, men prepared meat, to the other, the women prepared soups. They cooked on woodfires. In the centre the band rehearsed and inside the museum the Kallawaya performed their ceremonies. Max and the other wise men had received little bundles of cotton, shell, feather and other pretty bits from their people as magic offerings, and proceeded to bless them with incantations and alcohol, taking a few nips themselves. A Guinea Pig was produced, sacrificed by bare hand and its innards read: the signs were good. The Kallawaya brought out a sacred desiccated llama foetus, decorated with ribbons, with which everyone in turn was blessed upon the brow in an ambience of reverent silence. All the offerings, the guinea pig and the dried llama were then burnt.
A truck pulled up and the mayor of Charazani had arrived, flanked by a few of his best men. He shook every hand and his honchos put bottles of beer in them. The party started. The village men were clad in their ponchos and the band played a melodic anthem on pipes and drums. Beer was poured into a common cup, passed around and around the gathering, never empty, with plenty spilt on the dirt for old Pachamama.
The elders delivered their speeches in soft and reluctant voices. The mayor was eloquent, a performer by trade.
The womenfolk unleashed a feast of soups, everyone receiving twelve different bowls, which were of course impossible to consume.
The museum was then opened with presentations of local tapestry weaving, medicinal plants and ancient history.
Then they brought out bottles of the 95%.
The Kallawaya are not evangelistic mystics trying to peddle answers. They were modest, slow to speak, keen to observe, content in their knowledge and isolation. They trusted us for reasons I could not discern and shared their world with us.
They explained that their culture began millennia ago. Their forebears had served as magicians and doctors to a series of lost American Kingdoms, culminating with the celebrated Incas. Having survived the Spanish Empire and the chaos of liberated Bolivia, they perceive the order of today as temporary, and are patiently assured that they will outlast it.
A strange notion to encounter coming from our civilisation that regards itself as the pinnacle of human achievement, to be seen by people we call primitive as only a passing stage, that will whither and disappear like all others before it. Whether right or wrong, you have met people proudly from a different world, and that can challenge and affirm your sense of who you are.
The fire of the 95% had evaporated the twelve soups in my belly. The men produced the spiced llama, potatoes and bananas that had been baked in an underground oven, and we sat down around the stone courtyard to devour the portions.
Only by now had the children overcome their shyness and began to barrage us with questions, smiles and poking tongues. Drinking continued into the evening, the village band resumed its piping and a circling peasant waltz took us into the night.
Many stomps and twirls later and we rode home in the back of the Mayors’ Ute, gazing at the stars and the silhouette of the Andes.
Unpublished travel writing
17 May 2003.
It even tasted warm before it made its fiery way down our throats to rage in our stomachs. Luckily the village elders’ drinking philosophy was slowly and steadily, passing the little cup around the circle, spilling an offering to Pachamama the earth goddess as we went.
We were sitting and standing about the courtyard of Max’s farmhouse, all built of mudbrick, timber, stone and thatch, grimy kids and swine rolling in the dirt, the scent of cookfires and garden beds in our nostrils.
The gentlemen of the council were happy to interrupt their meeting to welcome three travellers from Australia to their little village of Chari hidden in the backwoods of Bolivia.
They apologised that their church was in ruins, but they did not believe in such Gods. Instead they professed that they maintain their ancient worship of the rivers, rocks and mountains, the creators, spirits and demons, and exercise their power to communicate with them, see other worlds and work magic wonders.
These old peasant men, wiry and stout, have lived all their lives in a mountain valley. I can’t recall how we managed to introduce ourselves, explain our modern lives, or our distant island home, but in hindsight I don’t think it mattered. They could see who we were. They had a way of focusing their gaze on us intently, silently opening us up and looking inside to see what forces were at play. Perhaps they had interpreted our coming as a good sign.
Max and the other elders invited us to return to Chari to join the fiesta opening their new museum. We were fascinated, and agreed to return.
Chari is in the deep valley of the Charazani River that runs past the colossal Apolobambas mountain range, the Peruvian frontier to one side, the teeming Amazonian jungle to the other, and the Agean waters of Lake Titicaca behind. There are no significant cities or roads in the region. It is a remote backwater in Bolivia, itself a remote backwater.
Max and the elders are Kallawaya. This is an ancient sacred culture of secret knowledge, of myth, magic and medicine local to the Charazani region. Its mysteries are passed on to chosen boys by means of an unwritten language, known only by the Kallawaya. They are governed by a group known as the Council of the Ancients.
I had been warned they would not welcome strangers.
We found the Kallawaya welcoming and immensely proud of their traditions. It is their world in that valley. But they are very reluctant to reveal how their traditions work. They call upon the powers of nature and the unseen by offerings and incantations, but also use an impressive array of natural ingredients to work herbal medicine. I am not normally interested in traditional healing, and sceptical about magic. Yet to encounter an ancient people with knowledge of the healing virtues of two thousand plants gathered from all sides of the South American continent is impressive, even to the sceptical.
To get there we had boarded a rusting old bus at 5am in an alley behind a fruit market, behind a cemetery in the backblocks of La Paz, Bolivia’s shambling capital city. The vehicle filled up with peasant folk. Warm clothes, warm faces, baggage, sacks and the odd hen. The driver awoke, the engine rumbled and we were off before the dawn.
The journey to the Charazani valley is an all day affair, skirting impossible mountain ranges that resemble serrated jawbones, crossing rocky brown flatlands, passing the shores of Titicaca, stopping in rustic market towns to eat pastries in street stalls, then over a wide green highland plain to finally descend into the valley, arriving at Charazani.
The hillside town is small, quiet and pretty and is named after the river that flows below it. A plaza, a few eating houses, some stores, a library, medical centre, three simple hotels, two phones and one hot thermal pool, all clinging to the valley wall. Pleasant, an ideal base for visiting rustic villages, launching expeditions into the mountains and jungles, and meeting the local wizards.
Life for the locals is centred on the villages, the fields and open grazing terrain in the highlands. The villages are small collections of cottages built by hand and separated by little lanes, streams, gardens and animal pens. The fields are terraces carved out of the steep hillsides, worked by strong-armed peasants. Young shepherds guide their llama flocks along mountain paths to the tune of their panpipes, swine roam untended, woodcutters swing axes, women wash clothes in rocky rivers while children and old men bathe. It seemed a poor and arduous existence, but filled with the satisfaction of doing everything with your own hands and the beauty of living close to nature.
To come to such a place is filled with attractions and experiences, but there are none you can reserve or buy. You have to arrive and interact with the local people and environment.
The day of the Chari festival. We arrived amidst the preparations carrying two milk crates filled with beer. We were welcome and encouraged to participate and photograph.
The museum is a U of stone buildings with thatch rooves surrounding a courtyard. To one side, men prepared meat, to the other, the women prepared soups. They cooked on woodfires. In the centre the band rehearsed and inside the museum the Kallawaya performed their ceremonies. Max and the other wise men had received little bundles of cotton, shell, feather and other pretty bits from their people as magic offerings, and proceeded to bless them with incantations and alcohol, taking a few nips themselves. A Guinea Pig was produced, sacrificed by bare hand and its innards read: the signs were good. The Kallawaya brought out a sacred desiccated llama foetus, decorated with ribbons, with which everyone in turn was blessed upon the brow in an ambience of reverent silence. All the offerings, the guinea pig and the dried llama were then burnt.
A truck pulled up and the mayor of Charazani had arrived, flanked by a few of his best men. He shook every hand and his honchos put bottles of beer in them. The party started. The village men were clad in their ponchos and the band played a melodic anthem on pipes and drums. Beer was poured into a common cup, passed around and around the gathering, never empty, with plenty spilt on the dirt for old Pachamama.
The elders delivered their speeches in soft and reluctant voices. The mayor was eloquent, a performer by trade.
The womenfolk unleashed a feast of soups, everyone receiving twelve different bowls, which were of course impossible to consume.
The museum was then opened with presentations of local tapestry weaving, medicinal plants and ancient history.
Then they brought out bottles of the 95%.
The Kallawaya are not evangelistic mystics trying to peddle answers. They were modest, slow to speak, keen to observe, content in their knowledge and isolation. They trusted us for reasons I could not discern and shared their world with us.
They explained that their culture began millennia ago. Their forebears had served as magicians and doctors to a series of lost American Kingdoms, culminating with the celebrated Incas. Having survived the Spanish Empire and the chaos of liberated Bolivia, they perceive the order of today as temporary, and are patiently assured that they will outlast it.
A strange notion to encounter coming from our civilisation that regards itself as the pinnacle of human achievement, to be seen by people we call primitive as only a passing stage, that will whither and disappear like all others before it. Whether right or wrong, you have met people proudly from a different world, and that can challenge and affirm your sense of who you are.
The fire of the 95% had evaporated the twelve soups in my belly. The men produced the spiced llama, potatoes and bananas that had been baked in an underground oven, and we sat down around the stone courtyard to devour the portions.
Only by now had the children overcome their shyness and began to barrage us with questions, smiles and poking tongues. Drinking continued into the evening, the village band resumed its piping and a circling peasant waltz took us into the night.
Many stomps and twirls later and we rode home in the back of the Mayors’ Ute, gazing at the stars and the silhouette of the Andes.
Unpublished travel writing
17 May 2003.
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