Sunday, March
5th
Dear Diary,
It has been
a while since I had some time to write down my thoughts and deal with what's been
happening in my life, but it has been totally hectic in the past few weeks. So much has
changed and I can't really tell if it's for the better or for the worst. It
certainly has made my life more interesting and I'm facing a big, new challenge in
more than just one way: I have actually found a real Sentinel! I never would have believed
that I would write those words. Unbelievable but true.
And it was
mere coincidence. This is what my doctoral thesis is all about, what I had hoped and tried
to find for such a long time and I can still hear my own words as I stood right in front
of him, telling him to his face what he was and where he came from. "In all tribal
cultures every village had a Sentinel. Now, a Sentinel is chosen because of a genetic
advantage: a sensory awareness that can be developed beyond normal humans. Your time spent
in Peru has got to be connected with what's happening to you now. I've got hundreds of
documented cases of one or two hyperactive senses, like smell, where people work for
perfume companies, but not one single subject with all five. You could be the real
thing!" But all Detective Jim Ellison could do, was stare at me as if I was some kind
of lunatic freak on drugs. Not surprising really if I consider who he was and what
he'd just walked into. The man was shocked, which I was kinda expecting.
When
Clarice had faxed me the information on her latest patient, a Cascade PD Detective Jim
Ellison, I couldn't believe my eyes. The man experienced loud noises that shouldn't
be loud, smelled things that no one else could smell, had weird visuals and his tastebuds
were off the map! I wasn't sure if I should laugh or cry. There was no indication of
a hyperactive tactile response in her fax, but maybe he just didn't say anything. It
all must have already been weird and confusing for the guy as it was.
And I knew
where he came from, the moment he walked through the door of my office. Or rather through
the door of Rainier University's artifact storage room No 3. The sceptical look of a
middle-class cop with a middle-class up-bringing in a middle-class neighbourhood.
I tried to
break the ice and appear casual and non-threatening. Sort of buddy-to-buddy. I was just
listening to one of my research music tapes for a presentation on tribal battle music.
"Notice how the war chant of the Yanomamo headhunters finds its echo in the cellars
of Seattle? I'm sure your dad used to say that stuff all the time about the Stones.
"Hey, hey, turn that jungle music down." But the moment the words had left my
lips, I knew that that wasn't the right thing to have said to the guy. He wasn't
even showing his age or anything. It was just the way he looked. Standing there with his
beige pants, his lumberjack-type shirt, black leather jacket and short army-style haircut,
studying the much younger, long-haired student in jeans in front of him. And when he
started calling me "Chief", I knew that I had totally lost his respect. If I
actually ever had it in the first place.
Of course
my mouth, as always, ran away before my brain could catch up and when I told him that he
just may be the living embodiment of my field of study, and that he could be a behavioral
throw-back to a pre-civilized breed of man, he totally flipped and called me a
neo-hippy witch doctor punk'. Oh well, not really something I haven't
heard before in my lifetime.
And then he
went into police mode. Pushing me up against a wall and threatened me with larceny and
false impersonation and harassing a police officer. Then he said my behavior was giving
him probable cause to shake my office down for narcotics!
Oh man.
Chill, I thought!
I can still
remember how I first got interested in Sentinels. It was after reading Murray Gell-Mann's
The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and Complex'. For me, the
best thing was not so much his discussion of technical issues, as the way it showed
something of the excitement and majesty of the quantitative, scientific way of looking at
things. Certainly Gell-Mann's passion for living things helped to explain the bare-bones
equations that scare people like me away from that part of science.
Numbers and
equations are just so not my thing.
In one
passage he noted that the ornithologist Charles Munn, studying feeding flocks in a
tropical forest in Peru, found that they typically are accompanied by 'sentinel' birds
that call out to warn of approaching raptors. And then I stumbled over Sir Richard
Burton's research on tribal Sentinels. The man was so way ahead of his time. His
insight enabled him to reach conclusions that conflicted with the orthodox theories of the
day, and of course were not accepted until he was forgotten or ignored. Too independent to
repeat the words or reflect the ideas of others where they seemed to him to conflict with
the truth, and too honest to remain silent where he deemed it his duty to speak, or that
the reward of his work was to be sent to some remote and insanitary corner of the earth to
die.
Somehow
that's how I see myself sometimes.
But instead
of disappearing, Burton usually managed to discover new facts and make additions to
science wherever he had withdrawn himself to. But it was his theory that in all tribal
cultures every village had someone who patrolled the border and watched for approaching
enemies, change in the weather, movement of game, that fascinated me. Burton argued that a
Sentinel is chosen because of a genetic advantage. A sensory awareness that can be
developed beyond normal humans and that is honed by solitary time spent in the wild.
Pretty much like Charles Munn's sentinel birds.
And now
I'm Jim's partner.
No -
correction: observer! He told me never to refer to us as *partners*. But I can live with
that if it helps to make this work. Afterall, fieldwork is fundamental to anthropolgy and
during months, more often years of fieldwork, anthropologists gather new data on human
groups and the role of culture in the lives of human beings, right?
My old
teacher Professor Stobbard always told us that only if you're living in the village
with no other business but to follow native life, you see the customs, ceremonies and
transactions over and over again. You see examples of their beliefs as they are actually
lived through, and the full body and blood of actual native life fills out soon the
skeleton of abstract constructions. Facts must be allowed to speak for themselves.
Boy, this
is starting to sound way too much like one of my lectures.
But
Stobbard was right. It's only by intimate, long-term acquaintance with the subject of
the study that one gains insight. Let's face it, without an ethnographer, there is no
ethnography.
But is that
still the case? Are Jim and I still just subject of study and researcher?
I have the
feeling that my objectivity is slowly slipping away day by day. Since the day when the
warehouse I was renting was blown to bits in an explosion, I moved in with Jim and even
though it was just meant to be temporary, I'm still there and he doesn't want me
to leave. To be honest, I don't want to leave either and it's not because
I'm now in the perfect situations to study my subject, but because we have become
friends. Real good friends. And that's something I would have never expected to
happen. Probably because we are so different. It's like two worlds have collided. But
our friendship means a lot to me and I'm beginning to wonder if my dissertation would
not maybe harm him at some point.
Could the
thing, which brought us together, be the one thing, which will drive us apart?
Since
meeting Jim, I have thought a lot about when Sentinels seemed to begin to fade out of any
type of historical or anthropological recordings. It must have been when the psychology of
forest man gave way to the psychology of field man, as timber retreated from the axe. In
this new way of life, in that removal from the dictates of the wild trees to the safer
confines of a cabin or a house, men also put a distance between the savage and vigilant
behaviour necessary for survival by hunting and the milder behaviour possible for
agricultural folk. Culture became more possible at each remove from the wilderness and
more critical of that primitive past.
Not that I
would call Jim Ellison primitive'.
Okay, so he
thought I had called him "some sort of caveman", but all I meant was that he
represented a throw-back to pre-civilized culture. I shouldn't have really expected
him to understand that. He's not an academic. He's a police detective who is
also an ex-Army Ranger.
Jim wanted
to get rid of his senses and not figure out how they worked. And I had to state the simple
facts to him. The undeniable truth I knew he would have to come to accept somehow if he
wanted to hold on to his life and his sanity. "You're a detective with
hyperactive senses. You're a monster, man, a human crime lab with organic surveillance
equipment. What more could you want?" Jim just said one word to me and his eyes told
me that he trusted me to be the one to give it to him.
Control.
And now
I'm sitting here, merely five weeks after we've first met in that small hospital
room and I'm asking myself where we're gonna go from here and what will happen
to us on the way.
Without so
many words, Jim has asked me to be his Guide, his partner, his back-up. But can I truly do
that? Do I know what I'm getting myself into here? I can feel that this will no
longer be just a research project for my doctoral thesis. In all my other research
projects, it was just me involved and it never effected another person. I was putting
myself at risk, I was out there on my own, I was making decisions for myself. Decisions,
which only effected myself. But now, I would be responsible for another person. Another
life depended on me. Another person trusted me and my knowledge and that I instinctively
felt what was right. But would that be enough?
Geronimo
once said "While living, I want to live well. I know I have to die sometime, but even
if the heavens were to fall on me, I want to do what is right."
And I guess
that's what I'll do.
Heading Into The Light
By: Ceridwen