4 SOPHIA IS CALLED AS BITTER AS SALT Sophia Rosencruetz was in her office filing papers; she felt bitter about the drudgery when her real work was out there, among the Native Americans. She looked at the date on her calender: Monday, July 9, 2001, and thought that this was more than just a good year for a science fiction novel or a few days after the Independence Day of a nation which had been absorbed into the United Nations, anyway...somehow all those old science fiction movies about her era just seemed corny...she really didn't care much for science fiction-- This was a sad day as she recalled that it was the anniversary of her twin brother Christian's death: a drunken automobile accident-- In faith she was Moslem--the black Muslims were making more converts among white people these days; at heart she was an American artist though she still had guilt about her Electra complex as she pictured her unconscious mind as a sunset: she was also an amateur artist, she'd have to paint that someday, yes, Electra glide in blue--ultramarine blue and Hooker's green for the Invisible landscape...and Jay was rapidly filling Two Ways' place. Jay Bluebird: Rugged. Handsome. A macho man to be conquered by a macho woman. Or to let him seduce her and finally quell the fires that raged like an inferno at the core of her savage id. Not that she'd been a virgin. She'd been vorkling since sweet sixteen. Vorkling was punk zoc slang for sex besides being a sport in which she had lettered, and her letters for it were Lambda Sigma Delta, the coed fraternity where she had lived. But filing papers today was just drudgery when what she really wanted to do was Social Work, talking with people, getting involved in their lives...but not too involved, like she had been with George. Such routine drivel, office work, seemed worlds away from the world of the reservation--they really ought to have a secretary to do it, but the central office in Fargo could only pay for a part-time one so she was left to do a lot of the shit-work herself. All of a sudden an angry Two Ways burst into the office of the caseworker. "Sophia...Father Vincent just smashed another peyote ceremony! We were praying down at Deadman Coulee--you know, where the road forks--and Father Vincent drove up in his pickup and..." Sophia was perturbed, and somehow this violation of the Native American Church seemed a greater tragedy than her loss of Christian. She said to the distraught girl, "Hold on, Tina, can I get you a glass of water? If necessary, I'll drive you to the emergency room at the Invisible Hospital for a shot of thorazine to bring you out of it, okay? Calm down! Now slowly, what happened?" Tina took a sip of the hard water which left stains in the sink--finally, she said, after breathing heavily for a minute or two, "We were praying to the Smoky--you know, Mescalito--" "Yes, I am familiar with the god of the sacred mushroom--in fact, some scholars even believe that early Christianity may have been a sacred mushroom cult and--" Tina said, "I don't care about the so-called One God of the Christians, He's not as great a spirit as the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka--we were praying to our god out by the coulee and Father Vincent came and knocked over the clay pots and kicked out the fires and...and sprinkled everything with Holy Water. He said that he was exorcising all the demons that were there from worship of the devil, he called it...there is no devil in our religion, only Coyote, and he is merely a Trickster, not evil or the Spirit of Evil..." "Ahura Mazda," Sophia said. "What?" "The Persian god that the Jews got the idea of the tempter from--I agree, there is no devil; belief in demons is only an excuse to cover up our own weaknesses. Continue," Sophia said. "What was I saying? Oh yeah: And he had a bunch of thugs with him, people from the Church, you know, the Catholic Church, not just Catholics but Lutherans and Pentecostals as well: oh, there was Paul Two Bucks and Dick Many Deer, there were others like Mary Eagleman and her brother Joseph; they're Mormons, I think...anyway, I is stoned immaculate, I and I vibration...what was I saying? And then--they kicked out the fire and scattered everyone...." Tina was sobbing. "You know how it is--there's drugs like the white man does them, you know, white punks on dope and all the dead bodies piled up in mounds: Mescalito, be the Death of me! And there's the Indian's way? Well, when you break it up...it's like the world is the abortion of an evil god; it keeps you from breaking through to the other side--oh God, help me, Soph-kid, I'm having a bad trip...! God, lizards, Jesus Christ, fossils, Quetzacoatl, cool air heights: I'm lost in dizziness, and it ain't the Sacred Vertigo! The dizzy spin I'm in...like leaves in fall before winter...is winter before fall or after it...I forget--" Sophia rushed to put her arms around Tina. "I can see you're extremely upset. Tell me--what do you see? I know what you're going through; I've been to a couple of meetings myself and I dropped acid back in college; used to drop it every chance I got until some heavy busts started coming down...God, such beauty and such emptiness--I know you're seeing your naked soul, and you're seeing something in it you can't confront. Let go! Let Day destroy the Night!" "But Night divides the day. All color, the rainbow...here is another blood-wine sign of the times: Colors...I see colors, red, blue, black, white, red, yellow, and violet--but all the Light in my soul is corroded like acid...and the lights, they're flashing orange and green. You have a green shirt," Tina said, when actually it was flamingo pink. "Why did you break up with my brother and break his heart? You can please yourself but somebody's gonna get it!" She put up her dukes. Sophia assumed a martial arts posture. "I know karate. Don't force me to use it!" Tina lashed out at her, but stoned, missed her target. She saw still trajectories; she saw day-glo colors and velvet black shadows in a riverrun. She lunged forward again and Sophia easily leaped out of the way. Tina leaped ahead once again and this time touched Sophia, but Sophia gave her a karate flip and she landed on her backside. She looked up and said, "Fighting ain't getting us nowhere; we're friends and your love life--you tease and you flirt--ain't none of my business. Please help me. I'm caught in a world of velcro flies and green shirts!" "Come on outside with me," Sophia said. "Buildings are bad places to trip; they're too much like the closed-off womb--you want to be outside, in nature, free...mother nature speaks of the Reality, the Oneness of the Spirit--that's it, through the door. Keep going, try not to stumble." "I have no place to fall," Tina said. "There's an abyss beneath my feet and I'm walking a narrow path of crystal. You are a skeleton." "No, I'm not--I'm your friend," Sophia said as she kept trying to talk the frightened girl down from her bad trip. "That's it: Through the hallway--remember, you're back in the womb, and you're about to become born again, though in a way those who say they're Born Again can never understand; you're being reborn in Mescalito's Way--all gods are One in the Oneness which is the absolute Duality of God and Nature, Oneness is an accident, as Ib'n Senna once said...." Tina bitterly replied, "Don't try to convert me now; I'm too immersed in the peyote way to see any spirit but Mescalito--a mere humble servant of Wakan Tanka." Sophia continued, ignoring the girl's protests at her trying to rationalize being involved with two such different religions as Islam and the Native American Church at the same time, saying, "You're being propelled along the birth canal, warm jets caress you; you're outside now; you're reborn: into a world of open country joy. See all the hills, the endless rolling hills? That's your world: unbounded. You're in what the psyber-punks call Psyberia: the land of fantasy. You can be anything you want; you can be the unicorn; you can be the Phoenix; you can commune with the gods." And somehow it all made sense in spite of Muhammad. Though the girl's bad trip filled her with dread fear and loathing, she had converted already once in her life; she could do it again. Daily you could read accounts of how Jim Jones, a submarine laced with cocaine and dipped in PCP was driving young black teenagers crazy to an early grave. And this was just the beginning. This was not the Garden of Eden of the hippies. Tina said as she beheld the endless prairie fading into pink and violet as though in an invisible sunset--for it was only noon: "Yes--I'm back in the clear. I see the smoky orange light at the end of the long, dark tunnel; and your breasts are bleeding limes...or are they pink grapefruits?" Sophia asked, hesitantly, "Do you think you could wait for me out here while I make a phone call?" "Sure," Tina answered. "The peyote god is not angry with me as I thought when I was being born again...oh, the inner mounting flame--he is angry with Father Vincent: Father Vincent has all the gods of our tribe to answer to!" "Good," Sophia said. "I'll try to be back out here in a minute--now don't wander off!" "You have no face, you are receding," Tina said. "I feel like I'm vorkling and about to comfortably come." Allah, be with her, Sophia thought as she rushed to the phone, fearful to let Tina out of her sight for more than a few minutes. She dialed Chief Iron Heart's number: "Hello, Chief? This is Sophia Rosencruetz. I want you to get up here right away and see what your priest is doing!" Chief Iron Heart's voice was heavy over the phone lines, as though he were bound by guilt or fear--or perhaps power, but a power that had been corrupted, not like the peyote way or Sufi mysticism--or science and not religion, sociobiology. Chief Iron Heart said, "If you are referring to the smashing of the peyote ceremonies, Father Vincent...he had my full knowledge and approval. We must modernize if we are to keep pace with the white man, and that means getting the drugs off the reservation." Sophia was angry now: "If it were crack or cocaine or alcohol it would be a different story. But psychedelic drugs are in a class by themselves--they're different from all other drugs. I know; I've taken them myself. I used to eat acid like Jim Morrison: it cleanses the Doors of Perception even though it sometimes can freak you out: It' how you use them that counts. I'm disappointed in you, Chief. There's been plenty of good scientific work like Stanislav Grof's to show that it unleashes prenatal memories: It's the return to the womb; they can handle it when it's in a ceremony because it provides a set of cultural cues which control the drug; they can't handle it when...oh, hell, I'll show you! Goodbye. I'll be over in ten-fifteen minutes." Outside the Social Services Center building Sophia looked for Tina, but she was gone. Then she saw her, climbing Lion Hill--up a sheer face of rock, then tumbled back down. Sophia's heart raced. Like her pulsing heart, Sophia raced up the hill. Tina suddenly rose to her feet when Sophia was about fifteen feet away, said, "Open country joy--yes!" and spread her arms like a bird and prepared to leap. Sophia raced up behind her and grabbed Tina at the last minute. "Whoa! Kid, you nearly killed yourself there." "Bison of the mountains; oh you buffalo with the mottled eyes and the hairy hides: the White man has taken the bison away, up into the mountains and hills and rivers of endless seas; we were the first to dance at the gates of delirium so fast--" Sophia led her to the jeep while Tina was staring vacantly into the sky, saying to her, "Tina--do you think you can come with me? Do you think you can hold on that long?" "I'm fine, Soph-kid; I'm fine...it's just when I have to go indoors that I get paranoid." "Come on, then, let's get you to my jeep," the slender Social Worker said as Sophia led the way to her vehicle. "It's right over here, in the parking lot of the..." Tina was pale and breathing heavily from all the climbing and no doubt also from the acid rush of the drug; Sophia left her a few minutes to catch up. The two of them climbed into the jeep--Sophia drove nervously down US Highway #2 to the white house where Chief Iron Heart lived; tensely, she studied her image in the rearview mirror: her lipstick was Cherry-o, the latest zoccie fashion; her mascara was thick; her hair was perfect: dreadlocks. Dyed blond. God is a Dyer, she thought, a quotation from the Gnostic scriptures--ever since those scholars of an esoteric religion had begun to prove that it had influenced the development of early Christianity, indeed, that parts of the Bible were based on Gnostic writings--in fact, John was a full-fledged Gnostic gospel that had found its way into the orthodox canon--havoc had been wreaked among the followers of Christ; the evangelists denounced this scientific work as heresy, but they were still trying to prove "Creationism" was science, so no one in their right minds took them seriously; instead, the effect had been mass defections to new cults, agnosticism, and atheism; as man and woman once again faced the existential crisis of alienation, blurred reality, and despair. Sophia was very anxious because she had a very stoned young woman beside her, only in her mid-20's, while Sophia herself was ten years older than this woman--and she wasn't certain that she could prove her holistic point about drugs and religion to Chief Iron Heart; she was afraid that the outlandish nightmares this young girl was going through would only prove to the Chief the reductionist contention that psychedelic drugs merely caused brain damage--but even if they did, were the losses any worse than those produced by alcohol when alcohol produced so much violence among the Indians and the peyote ceremonies were finally turning them away from that? It was a difficult debate, no matter whose side you looked at it from. "Try," Sophia said as the 4WD cruised the highway into midday, "Try and show them the beauty of the Indian way." "Dawn," Tina said. "You are the Dawn." The jeep bumped over miles of country roads, came at last to the town of Mandan. She drove straight to the Chief's house, high upon Water Tower Road, where the neighbor boy was watering the lawn. Sophia, hesitantly, almost like the Mother she wanted to kill in Electra blues--and Christian and she had been Mother and Father to each other--said, "Tina? We have to go indoors now. We have to return to the womb yet one more time--do you recognize this house? Do you know where you are?" "I'm stumbling through the parking lot of the Invisible 7-11. My head is in Mississippi mud but my heart's in Texas rodeos and the Big Beat: God, I love zoc." "Tina?" Sophia asked once more, "We have to go indoors now. We have to show the Chief what his priest's work is doing to the minds of his victims. Will you come in for just a minute, to show Chief Iron Heart the warm colors, the vibrations, your blue aura?" "From open country joy to the womb? I...I am your Burger Woman; I moved back to the res...res...oh God, what was I saying? Reservation. I resolve to sin no more, Father; I resolve...I have a reservation--" "You're obviously too barbled right now to do either of us much good. Sit here and stay put! I'll get the Chief!" Sophia raced for the door, frantically pressing the doorbell. When the Chief answered, Sophia angrily said, "Chief, I want you to see what Father Vincent did to Tina Two Ways!" Iron Heart followed Sophia to the jeep. "Tina Two Ways...she's obviously stoned," the priest remarked with both disdain and fear--because the Social Worker was very adept at getting government grants for the tribe and he'd never seen her so angry. "Stoned out of her gourd. This just proves what I was saying: We've got to get rid of drugs on our reservation. If the Indian spends all his time stoned in some mockery of true religion we'll never catch up with the white man; we need science, not the superstitions of--" "I had fifteen credits of psychology to be a social worker," Sophia said. "Do you want to hear what science has to say about psychedelic drugs?" The old Chief said with a tone of irreverent irony, "Yes, I would." "Timothy Leary's work is currently making a comeback: He said that the two most important factors in any drug trip are the set and the setting; that is, the place you are in when high and the way you feel about what the drug is going to do for you when you take it. That much of Timothy Leary's work has never been challenged; it's science, not magic, though your people--they say it's magic and..." "It is magic," Tina said. "Anthropologists--I have nine credits in anthropology--tell us that ritual is the key factor in primitive psychedelic drug religions. Again, set and setting. Where you take it and what you expect to get out of it. In other words..." Iron Heart interrupted, saying, "Are you telling me that these people get something different out of a peyote ceremony than a street punk on U-boat or..." "A kid on the street corner eating peyote buttons he gets from a drug dealer; yes. Because they have a ritual. Now when you interrupt that ritual--when you throw the drug users out from one setting to another, they get the same effect as if they were taking the drugs on the street. You get what's happening to Tina Two Ways. You're better off just letting them work off the peyote in the context of ritual than interrupting that Ceremony and getting Space Cadets like..." Tina objected, "I'm not a Space Cadet; I'm a Starship Tripper...." "Then," Chief Iron Heart said, "Father Vincent may not be permitted to remain on the Reservation, contingent on a trial by the Tribal Council." Sophia grinned wickedly. "I'd like to be there when you tell him that, Chief--I'd like to see the look on his face." "Now you can," Father Vincent said, walking up the sidewalk from out of nowhere like some angel or demon. "I was just on my way to see the Chief, to tell him that I'd just successfully smashed another peyote ritual, and I heard this...this blasphemy! Putting psychology and anthropology before the word of the Lord. I swear, I will have vengeance on that old Jerome Four Feathers for the trouble he's caused." Tina burst out laughing, a high, staccato laugh. Hesitantly, Sophia added her own laugh. Even the Chief added his deep baritone to the laughter. The old Priest's eyes read OVERLOAD. Father Vincent said again, "I swear, with the Lord to help me, I will have my vengeance on that old Four Feathers." This time no one laughed. #