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'Round Earth, Open Sky'
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Kirpal Gordon URLn
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The enthusiastic narrative language and wild thought patterns of the characters in the prolific author Kirpal Gordon’s new novel "Round Earth, Open Sky," also call forth memories of Leonard Cohen’s "Beautiful Losers" – another frantic guru novel imbued with a the spirit of an Indian holy person, Catherine Tetakwitha. Round Earth too presents a driven and frantic spiritual quest that culminates in Canada.
In this case the Native American holy man is not Native American at all. He is a “sky man” who has fallen through an opening in the heavens, and in his Earthly body behaves in a manner similar to the shamanic teacher in the works of Carlos Castaneda.
This is a tale that may lead one to ponder the notion of native shamans – and to wonder if they are what we think they are. The shamans and sorcerers, this book suggests, may just be intangible beings that fall through the sky and take on human form, which then insert themselves among the native population as either guides or troublemakers.
Befriended by an American Sephardic Jewish photographer, Moses, on his “hunt” for material—the Sky Man indicates Moses’ totem is the wolf. Sky Man is making his way across the American Southwest to find his way back to the point where he can find the opening in the sky to return to his “people.”
In the process he conducts what we beings of limited consciousness consider to be antiquated healing practices, while speaking to those he befriends in telepathic “picture language.” Sky Man sees into the energies and sometimes the destinies of people around him. He enters into dreams to get at the past and map out future plans: his own and everyone else’s.
When early on, Sky Man brings Moses in his car to a screeching halt, as he carries a partly dismembered wolf over his shoulder on the side of the road, he tells Moses exactly why he was destined to find him and why Moses himself stopped to pick him up. Of course he is not believed. That said, it is not long before Sky Man’s driver will cease dismissing outrageous prophecies from his travel companion, no matter how implausible they may be.
Moses is somehow remarkable himself—neurotic, in big trouble with love, and desperate for subjects as a photographer. He amiably takes the “Luftmensch” on board, and the man with powerful “medicine” from the other side becomes his technical assistant and gofer, setting up the photographic equipment at every important stop they make in their quest. Their trail takes them ever farther North to Native territory in Canada.
This may sound complex, but in fact Sky Man’s back-story is blessedly simple. He simply fell through the sky from the other side, takes on a human body and set off to find his way home. The really puzzling back-story is actually that of the body he lives in. “Maurice,” a suicide, who leapt from a boat in desperation, has a history so immensely complicated—in terms of his love affairs, his engagements with violence, his middle class Detroit family, his strange abilities at native “healing” apparently at the age of 11, plus his encounters with a strange shamanic figure when he was a child – that the reader and Moses and Sky Man himself, whom everyone takes to be Maurice, for the obvious reasons, are almost completely stumped.
For much of the novel it is impossible to grasp who this man is--who is still a kid to those who remember him—this former owner of this body, a healer and a suicide, can possibly be. (Moses too lives under a pseudonym due to past infractions of the law.)
So with Maurice, or at least his body, accompanying the pair all the way, they enlist the help of Maurice’s former flame, Tot, and Rainie, an attorney who is Moses’ own abandoned lover. Add to that a crew of characters steeped in native shamanic couture deep in Ontario, all of them trying to clarify the confounding past of the man whose body Sky Man inhabits.
Resurrection tales go back well beyond that of Osiris, and aptly, Sky Man also goes by the name Heysus Kristay – which is what a Latina woman calls him when he heals her son. In a sly way this modern myth seems to suggest that somehow we are following a Jesus and Moses on the road.
At no time does Sky Man try to hide his identity. It is quite acceptable to everyone in the story, which gives it a flavor of the absurd. He speaks of his origins and visions quite matter-of-factly to everyone they meet, uttering the refrain—“Nothing to it.”
The inevitable humor of his unabashed discussions of his easy reading of people’s thoughts can be found in exchanges such as the following, in which Sky Man, picking up on Moses’ ancestral vibrations asks: “What does it mean, crying alone in the desert to a strange god?” His driver responds: “That’s what I am, a Jew dude.”
Sky Man reaches the logical conclusion: “Then I am a Jew too, Moses Dude.”
The scenes leading to the climax see characters taking part in grand spiritual rites and dream events that seem to have little or nothing to do with their characters.
In terms of character—many of them pass through altered states quite abruptly. What successful attorney, to investigate a situation, throws off her clothes and follows a mass of slithering snakes down into a cave knowing they are in fact a supernatural being which she has never seen? (She brings back a shedded snakeskin as proof of where she has been.)
This clash of worldly types with the mystical realities they must investigate may indeed pose a challenge for some readers to “suspend disbelief.” Nevertheless there is plenty of farce and a lot of the grotesque for those with a taste for either. None of the characters in this novel have trouble suspending disbelief and there is a great pleasure in joining them.
Such novels of the imagination emerge from a tremendous act of will. They are even further from the mainstream now than they were in the '50s, '60s and '70s. It is for fans of the outrageous, who reject our simple notion of reality, and who like to laugh at the absurdity spiritual beings making contact with us mundane humans. It is also for those who appreciate deconstructions of the idioms of modern English. Sky Man applies them as soon as he picks them up.
Though the byzantine back-story of Maurice’s corpse, (that is, Sky Man’s body) is a challenge, it works as it does in Noir novels. What we have here is supernatural detective work. Gordon’s novel gives one the sense of being back in Ixtlan, with a more disoriented version of Yaqi guide Don Juan, but just as full of insight—cracking jokes in hip idioms he learns from his Jewish-American companion all the way to the mountaintop.
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See also reviews on http://www.examiner.com/review/shamans-on-the-road-round-earth-open-sky-by-kirpal-gordon
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