Chapter 9
While at first I was more than content to find myself earning my way as a Gypsy Joker via the various modes available to a tantric performer of modest artistry and secret power, after a time I became gradually seized by the somewhat incoherent desire to expand my sphere of interest and enhance my possibilities, for I could not forever deny that my sole means of earning ruegelt consisted of a smattering of my mother's noble art and the electronic enhancement of my modest attainments in the disciplines of same which was mine courtesy of my father's craft.
Moreover, the more I took minor parts in tantric tableaus whose feature players displayed a diligent and indeed obsessive dedication to the true mastery of the high art of which I was no more than a feckless dilettante, the more I realized that I lacked the inner drive to endure the long hours of study and exercise required to achieve the status of a tantric maestra.
Indeed, the atmosphere of the carnival was not exactly conducive to dedicated diligence in the pursuit of any single craft or art, at least not for a youthful spirit new to the life of a true Child of Fortune, for every waking hour offered up a smorgasbord of possible pursuits, not to say a plethora of diversions to distract me from any thought of gainful employ whatever. There were jugglers, sleight of hand artistes, singers, musicians, und so weiter wandering the grounds, and to a Gypsy Joker, admission to the shows and performances taking place within tented walls was gratuit. Not to mention endless possibilities for idle hours of amorous dalliance, though this began to lose a certain piquancy for a laborer in the vineyards of the tantric trades.
Then too I had the example of the polymathic Pater Pan, by the definition of our tribe the ideal Child of Fortune incarnate, far more interested in playing jack-of-all-trades than in becoming a true maestro of any of them, whom, naturellement, I desired to please with the ultimate homage of successful emulation.
Moreover, the Gypsy Jokers did not confine their trades to the environs of the camp; the buskers who thronged our caravanserei also roamed the nearby vecinos giving impromptu performances on the streets thereof for contributions. So too did other members of the tribe hawk finger food, geegaws, and our simple crafts beyond the confines of our bidonville of tents. The street trade served to spread the repute of our carnival; contrawise, the mythos of the permanent fete enhanced the street trade.
Indeed, as Pater Pan would often enough declare, the true venue of the Child of Fortune was out in the streets among the bustling throngs of the quotidian worlds of men, for here we had performed our highest public roles when we were Troubadours and Tinkers, Romany and Hippies, for by playing the part of the Free Spirits of the worlds, we did our part to keep the spirit of the people free. In this, he told us, pecuniary profit was happily at one with a sense of noblesse oblige.
Be such grandiosity as it may, it began to seem to me that it was time to venture forth from the cozy confines of the encampment I had come to call home into the streets of Edoku where once I had been a helpless waif but where I now might carry the piebald banner of the Gypsy Jokers forth as a soldier of a Children's Crusade whose Holy Grail was the ruegelt to be gained therein.
While the spirit was willing, my skills were, to say the least, somewhat circumscribed. I could not sing, dance, juggle, do sleight of hand, or play a musical instrument, and the opportunities for tantric performances on crowded thoroughfares were few and far between. Yet such was my desire to venture forth as a true Child of Fortune of the streets that at length 1 swallowed my pride and deigned to try my hand at the street hawkers' trade.
Exerting my erotic charms to gain the good graces of Dani Ben Bama, a youth who, while he could in no way be mistaken for a chef maestro, was generally regarded as our premiere artiste of finger food, I spent several days wandering the vecino of glass towers with trays of his dainties. These were a cunning assortment of steamed dim sum of variously flavored doughs filled with all sorts of viands, legumes, sweet curries, and flavored creams, liberally spiced with assorted mild intoxicants, and I knew full well that I could find no more promising fare to hawk than this.
But truth be told, though I sallied forth each day with high hopes, more often than not I would return with but a few coins and a great heap of stale buns. For once on the street, I lacked the chutzpah and enthusiasm to continually proclaim the virtues of my wares at the top of my voice or to accost strangers; instead, my technique consisted of wandering aimlessly about in a daze with the haughty expression of one performing a task she clearly considered below her natural station.
At length even Dani, avid though he was for my continued tantric ministrations, was reluctantly moved to suggest that I favor another enterprise with my services.
I met with little more success hawking such items of adornment as embroidered sashes, netsuke of wood and metal, belts woven of silver wire, mirror-berets, und so weiter, though at least the craftsmen of same could afford to be more tolerant of my failures, since these items were not perishable and could be sent back to market with a peddler of more puissant skills.
Finally, I did somewhat better with jewelry crafted by Ali Kazan Bella. Ali was a lusty young man whose good humor and considerable tantric skills I quite enjoyed, and his jewelry , while crude by Edojin standards, manifested a skill and somewhat demented energy for which I could generate a sincere enthusiasm. With cunning little knives he had fashioned himself and under the influence of central nervous system enhancers, Ali carved necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and brooches out of single blocks of wood; filigree bijoux of such intricate fineness that at first glance they appeared to be twisted together out of wire.
This jewelry epitomized precisely those qualities which charmed the Edojin when it came to quaint Child of Fortune crafts: rude materials mimicking those of a higher technological level, clear evidence of long hours of tedious hand labor, and what they called "the wu of blood, sweat, and tears."
Adorned, indeed bedecked, with several rings on every finger, bracelets up and down each arm, a dozen or more necklaces, several pairs of earrings, and brooches pinned all over my tunic to the point where I was fairly armored in wooden filigree, I cut a figure of sufficient bizarrite to attract considerable attention even on the streets of Edoku, and even I, the least forward of street hawkers, was able to do a reasonable trade.
Still, even this modest success as a peddler left me discontent with my place in the life of the streets, or rather, perhaps, such success at the expense of my own dignity after a series of failures resulting at least in part from the disdainful husbanding of same, forced upon me the perception that I was really quite indifferent to success or failure as a mere merchant of the wares of others. Indeed, if I had desired such a vie, I would have been much better advised to remain on Glade and become an agent for the wares of my own father in the haut monde of the wealthy rather than a peddler of snacks and trinkets in the streets.
No, though I continued to hawk his jewelry upon occasion out of affection for Ali, and though I continued to supplement my modest share of this trade with tantric performances in the camp, at length I admitted to myself that I had developed a genuine personal ambition that went beyond mere membership in the Gypsy Joker tribe or even becoming a free spirit of the streets.
It seemed to me, then as now, that it was the Gypsy Joker buskers who wandered Great Edoku performing for what fortune and the impromptu audiences tossed their way who were the true Children of Fortune, the spiritual raison d'etre of our very existence in the wider scheme of things. For it was they who were in truth both living out and extolling the ancient and noble legends of the Gypsies and Hippies, the Troubadours and the Arkies, and, by serving as avatars incarnate of the spirit of the Child of Fortune's millennial romance, keeping it alive in the Second Starfaring Age.
With hindsight's vision, I perceive that this was my first dim inkling of my own future calling, the formless desire to live a life where the spirit meets the mind, to share the vie of the tale-teller or performer, to immerse myself in some higher enterprise for the ding an sich, to present the product of my own inner being for the titillation and edification of an audience of kindred spirits.
Vraiment, at the time I desired nothing more than the egoistic pleasure of the vie itself, for I had no tale to tell or song to sing, nor the craft to do so if I had. Indeed, that was the precise nature of my dilemma: I had fixed my heart's desire upon the life of a street performer, yet I lacked even a passing acquaintance with any entertainer's art.
Naturellement, it was to Pater Pan that I turned for wisdom in the sated afterglow of an evening's erotic exercises in his tent.
"Pas problem, girl!" he told me airily after a less than cogent recitation of my desires. "For sure you will have little difficulty extracting free instruction from some male maestro of your chosen art!"
Curled in his sheltering arms, I nodded my assent. "But what art may that be?" I said.
"You know not?" he said in some perplexity.
I shrugged. "I am less than pleased by the sound of my own voice in song, when it comes to musical instruments, I seem to have several thumbs, I have no interest in sleight of hand, juggling, or dance ..."
Pater laughed. "Apprentice yourself to a street theater group then," he told me. "You can hardly converse for ten minutes without betraying thespic talent!"
I rolled this conceit around the palate of my mind; while it seemed to me that my life on Glade and my small successes on Edoku gave a certain evidence of my talent for playing roles, these had always been of my own crafting, and something about a life of mouthing other people's words left a taste for which I did not entirely care.
I shook my head. "Something about it pleases me not ..."
"Q'ue?"
'Je ne sais pas ..."
"If not you, then who?" Pater demanded. "Speak, girl, I command you, the free sprach of your heart of hearts!"
Something in the tone of his voice, some arcane magic of personal puissance, did indeed impel me to give free verbal rein to the glossolaia of my unformed thoughts.
"I wish to do what you do, Pater, which is to say, I wish to be like you, or rather my own version of the spirit you say we share, which is to say, I wish to live the life of that which I speak, or speak the life of what I am. I mean, you speak, vraiment to become, as you say, both the singer and the song, metaphorically of course, since even I lack the hubris to attempt to subject an audience to my cracked warblings, I mean, that is ... Merde!"
I threw up my hands and snorted in frustration, unable to encompass with any precision that mystery for whose clear image I was searching.
But Pater Pan understood more than what I was saying, or perhaps was able to see the unoccluded vision behind my fog of words. "Aha!" he cried. "It is a ruespieler you wish to become, though perhaps you know it not."
"Ruespieler? Me?"
On the one hand, his declaration rang a chime in my spirit which immediately harmonized with its vibration, but on the other hand, the notion was one which I had never consciously considered. Certainement, ruespieling required not the least bit of musical ability or physical dexterity. Nor was one constrained to play out a role crafted by another or mouth someone else's words. Au contraire, a ruespieler needed only stories to tell, the loquacity to tell them, and the chutzpah to stand in the street and begin spieling in the confident hope that passersby would be moved by her art to listen and then be moved by her tale to contribute to the cause.
"Ruespieler ...?" I repeated much more thoughtfully. "Me ...?"
"Surely you have noticed your own gift of gab?" Pater said dryly. "It was your tantric powers which gained you access to my arms, but for sure it was the power of your blarney which made you a Gypsy Joker without having to pay the fee!"
I was not burdened with false modesty to the point where I need deny this obvious truth. Having accepted this satori from my guru, I could then easily enough perceive that I had always used words and the twists I could put on their meanings to achieve certain practical ends. While my career as a femme fatale of Nouvelle Orlean could not have flourished in the face of tantric ineptitude, surely I had known full well as far back as my initiation with Robi that words were a necessary part of the armamentarium d'amour. Indeed, had I not fought my parents to a standstill by artfully turning their own words to my devices? Had I not at length enticed the incomprehensible Edojin to direct me to a hotel by besting them at their own verbal sport?
As for chutzpah, while I had to admit that I fell short of the necessary amount when it came to hawking the wares of cooks or craftsmen, I was not entirely unforthcoming when it came to peddling my own goods.
But alas, it was precisely this in which I found myself lacking, for while my mystique was what I was hawking in Nouvelle Orlean and my electronically enhanced tantric services thusfar in Edoku, the goods of the ruespieler were stories, and of these I had none.
"I do believe you are right when it comes to ambition," I told Pater, "and I perceive that I may have both the talent to play with words and mayhap the courage to stand naked on the street and declaim, but what story can I tell?"
"There is only one story to tell, and we all tell it," Pater said. "Like the Cloth of Many Colors, each patch has its own tale, but the true story is the whole."
"And what story is that?" I demanded dubiously.
"The story you must learn to tell, of course. What else?"
"Merde! And how do you expect me to learn it if you won't tell it to me?"
"But I've been telling it to you since the first ape climbed down from the trees!"
"May we descend from the lofty heights of the zen koan to the realm of quotidian knowledge?" I suggested dryly. "Just how am I to trap this mythical unicorn of a story?"
"Fortunately, virginity is not required," Pater said archly. "In the realm of maya, it is simply a matter of listening to enough versions until you are sufficiently moved to sew your own patch into the fabric. In even grittier terms, ruespieling, like any art, is a matter of applying the will of the spirit to the diligent study of the craft."
"Quelle chose!" I said with less than enthusiasm. "Do my ears deceive me, or have I truly heard an endorsement of diligent study from the lips of Pater Pan?"
"For sure!" Pater exclaimed grandly. "It has taken me several millennia of diligent study to create that ultimate triumph of the ruespieler's art, my own magnificent legendary self!"
***
I was only to perceive the inner truth of this extravagance much karma later in the depths of the Bloomenveldt, when it was to lead me out of the forest of flowers and back into the worlds of men, but even then, as soon as I began to take practical steps to learn the ruespieler's art, I started to see a certain bizarre veracity behind Pater Pan's modest and outrageous boast.
Having no story to tell to earn myself ruegelt, I continued to vend both my own tantric services and Ali's jewelry in order to maintain a small supply of same while I spent more and more of my time listening to the ruespielers who worked the carnival and following them forth when they took their tales into the street.
Indeed it was the very self-created legend of which Pater Pan had boasted which was the cloak of mythos onto which the tales of the Gypsy Joker ruespielers were sewn. Or mayhap, just as likely, it was Pater Pan who had sewn his own mythic persona together out of swatches of tales snipped from cycles of stories that may indeed have begun as odes sung by bards of the preliterate primeval past, or at any rate certainly seemed to have antecedents that predated the Age of Space. Whether the ruespielers of the Gypsy Jokers unraveled the fabric of the legend of Pater Pan to craft their own tales, or whether Pater had assembled his cloak of personal mythos out of tales told by generations of ruespielers, or whether indeed the truth of the matter was both, the eternal Child of Fortune was the hero of all the most popular tales, and the domo of the Gypsy Jokers was clearly enough the main avatar thereof in the lore of the tribe.
Indeed, each ruespieler had a rather limited repertoire of tales, or so it seemed to me, many of them shared in common, though the more successful ruespielers all had a tale or two that they had made entirely their own, and all would style the tales they held communally somewhat differently, turning what in one version might be romance into another version's farce.
Lance Della Imre told the best version of the most oft-told tale, Spark of the Ark, the story of the Eternal Arkie, who chose to span the entire history of the First Starfaring Age by the expedient, outre even to the Arkies, of passing all but the peak moments thereof in cryogenic slumber.
"And where did he go when the Jump Drive rang down the final curtain on the great slow centuries of the First Starfaring Age?" Lance would demand in his peroration, the most perfect segue from a tale into a plea for donations that any of the ruespielers had contrived.
"Everywhere! Nowhere! Into the space between which lies within our human hearts! There, in that urchin in a Public Service Station smock, here, within this simple teller of the tale, and best of all within the Arkie Sparkie hearts of all you poor quotidian creatures who still retain the nobility of spirit to honor the Arkie Spark within yourselves by showering the teller of the tale with ruegelt!"
Sheila Jin Omar's favorite tale, The Pied Piper of Pan, was perhaps closest to the immediate personal inspiration of the source, since, like myself, she enjoyed certain intimacies with same, and well do I remember her artful declamation thereof, if not without a certain jealous pique.
"Hola, was the Age of Space the wondrous time when our species first pecked its way free of the natal egg of Earth and ventured forth into the starry realms beyond. Mighty for those bygone days in argent and spacefaring science was the land called from afar the Gold Mountain, and all-powerful was its board of directors, the Pentagon, who dreamed of building a new Gold Mountain, an arkology, in which generations of their minions might travel to conquer worlds circling distant stars.
"But alas, the Pentagon was utterly mean-spirited and ruthless in the service of this mighty and noble task, and so those who should have had their wanderjahrs as Children of Fortune were constrained thereby to expend their youth as wage slaves in durance vile.
"Cependant, energy, as the mages even then declared, can be neither created nor destroyed, only channeled or transformed, and no more certainly than when it comes to the kundalinic fires of youth, for to seek to destroy them in the name of obedient servitude is only to arouse and inflame the Serpent's ire.
"Thus did the Serpent Kundalini arise in outrage, and smite the land of the Gold Mountain as Circe had the minions of Odysseus, for behold, the army of young wage slaves was now nowhere to be found, and the fabriks and streets were overrun with a plague of rutting, savage, evil-smelling, hairy, ordure-smeared pigs.
"The pigs were everywhere, soiling the cities, spreading loathsome diseases, smearing the very name of their land with excrement, so that the land of the Gold Mountain came also to be known as the Belly of the Beast. Desperately did the Pentagon strive to complete the arkology Gold Mountain so that they might flee themselves in a simulacrum of their lost golden age from the swinishness and chaos they had themselves unwittingly released.
"Ah, but then did the Pied Piper of Pan appear in the city of the Pentagon, playing that eternal priapic music which has power over both man and beast, and lo, in his passage, the pigs gave over their rootings and ruttings and danced along gaily in his train.
"I will aid you in the nobility of your enterprise," the Pied Piper told the Pentagon, and he declared that he would pipe all the swine out of the Belly of the Beast and into the Gold Mountain, after which it would be a simple matter to let in the void.
"To this the Pentagon readily enough agreed, with scarcely an honest thought as to how the Piper would be paid.
"And so did the Pied Piper of Pan lead the pig people from the Belly of the Beast, but so too did he lead the wage slaves of the Pentagon into the Gold Mountain, for naturellement, the former were only the manifestation in the realm of maya of the thwarted youthful spirits of the latter.
"True to his word, once all were aboard the arkology, the Piper let in the void, but true to his spirit, the void to which his charges were exposed was the one which only the song of the Yellow Brick Road can fill.
"Vraiment, as the tune was changed from the music of unreason to the song that our species had long ago followed from apes into men, so did the wage slaves of the Pentagon follow it out of the Belly of the Beast and into their true selves as Children of Fortune, as the first spacefaring generation of our tribe, as wanderkinder on the first arkology to brave the long light years between the stars, as the first bright flickering of the Arkie Spark. Thus at the very dawning of the First Starfaring Age was the Child of Fortune in glory from the Belly of the Beast reborn."
Thus was the conclusion of one ruespiel the beginning of another, thus did the ruespielers ring changes on each other's interpretations of the tribal mythos, thus did the same familiar figure in various incarnations play the perfect master hero, thus was Pater Pan both the inspiration and creature thereof.
Naturellement, the ruespielers also had access to the vast store of word crystals, books, tapes, computer chips, scrolls, und so weiter that our species has accumulated over several millennia of creating fictions, to which they resorted when all else failed, and even I could have had an instant repertoire by the simple expedient of plagiarizing the perfect masters of the past.
But this was an expedient which somehow never crossed my mind even before I saw how audiences would melt away when they recognized an oft-told tale, or rather, as I was to learn, when the Child of Fortune ruespieler wandered too far from his own mythos.
For on Great Edoku, where the most sophisticated maestros of every art and the greatest of mages gathered to do commerce, the only charm of the ruespieler was that her stories, like the mildly intoxicating dim sum of Dani or the wooden filigree jewelry of Ali, were volkchoses of our demimonde, expressions of the spirit which moved through us.
Whether this was a form of condescension or whether, as Pater and the ruespielers would contend, Children of Fortune, or at any rate Gypsy Jokers, were justly treasured by the Edojin for the wu of their true essence, je ne sais pas, for the inner beings of the citizens of Great Edoku remain unfathomable to me to this very day.
Be that as it may, if one wanted to secure ruegelt from the Edojin, one played the avatar of the Child of Fortune, and extolled the virtues of the tribe, which by his own admission had its highest expression in the living legend who walked among us.
While I was entirely innocent at the time of the art of literary criticism or the lore of human psychoethology, I did sense that Pater was right when he said that all of the stories were patches of the cloth of some whole, vraiment, that in keeping with his identity as the Gypsy King of the Jokers, his boldest lies were also a kind of truth, for from the point of view of the Edojin, at any rate, the Pater Pan who walked among us, the legend whose mantle he had assumed, had in some ultimate sense indeed ridden the long light years with the Arkies, liberated the wage slaves of the Pentagon, been an ancient Gypsy King, no matter whether the flesh in which the same was now contained had passed through all that history or not.
As to the ur-tale itself, the Void at the Axis of the Great Wheel about which all the specific stories revolved, this, alas, remained a central mystery, at least to my perceptions. Which is to say that while the shedding of my intellectual virginity was no less exhilarating than the shedding of my erotic virginity had been, I entered the boudoir of the former with far less craft and self- reparation than the latter, and as a consequence I was far more reluctant to be more than a voyeur.
Each day I resolved to essay my first ruespiel in the form of one of the tales I had heard, and each day I put off my debut to the next, until finally I perceived that I should be content to learn and listen until the spirit was ready to speak through me.
As to when and how my own song would finally be called forth, I had the volktales of our tribe to guide me and the embodiment thereof for a sometime lover, and what I had learned from both was that the Spirit of Fortune spoke through the vie of its Children, that one need first dance to the music before learning to sing the song.
And so there was a time for me that was Golden, a long summer's day of youthful awakening and carefree adventure of the spirit that need never end, or so at the time I thought.
Everything that I did was alive with meaning, for was I not a Child of Fortune in my heart of hearts, leading the life that the spirit thereof commanded, thereby contributing my small part to the mythos of the whole, and enhancing my own enjoyment thereof with the intoxicant of a noble raison d'etre for same thereby?
While I spent more and more of my time trailing after ruespielers and absorbing their tales, I neglected not, or at least not entirely, the more pragmatic aspects of the vie of the Child of Fortune, which is to say that though my deepest attention was to the entirely nouvelle monde of the imagination and intellect which had opened up before me for the first time, I certainly retained a healthy enough loathing for fressen bars to continue to perform as a tantric artist and to hawk Ali's jewelry at least with enough diligence to keep such stuff from passing through my lips.
Nor did my dedication to my newfound role as student impel me to or require a life of monkish celibacy. Indeed there was a certain enzyme of aphrodisia produced in a young brain whose cortices of imagination and intellect were aroused to the levels of excitation of the adolescent erotic backbrain.
Far more ruespielers than one were to benefit amorously from the kundalinic circuit established between my avidity for their tales and my pheromonic receptors. Upon listening to a reasonably attractive ruespieler declaim a tale to my liking, I would often develop a lusty desire to plumb its deeper meanings en boudoir, and indeed, after all his available erotic energies had been depleted, the fellow was then persuaded to discourse on his craft, if only to dissuade further challenges to his sated manhood. Moreover, once both my tantric puissance and sincere desire became general lore among the ruespielers, I was not without volunteers willing to trade instruction in their craft for demonstrations of mine.
Throughout this long golden summer's day, Pater Pan remained my friend and lover in equal measure, displaying naught but approving amusement at my self-appointed role as courtesan of the ruespielers, while demonstrating often enough that the embodiment of their collective oeuvre was also a natural man.
It seemed to me that my life had attained a plane of perfection, that I inhabited a golden dreamland designed for my own delectation, and if this was a street of dreams, I saw nothing beyond into which I ever need awake.
All that was required to raise this perfection to transcendence was the moment when I was finally moved to perform my own tale. Vraiment, there was a certain sweet tension in the contemplation of my debut as a ruespieler, not unlike the joys of contemplating one's first passage d'amour with a new object of desire, and as with such kundalinic energies, the pleasure of the charge lasts longer than the pleasure of release.
Mayhap the foregoing was the rationalization of a sluggardly soul content to drift along in a bliss without risk or change, and indeed I regarded standing alone in the street and declaiming with a certain trepidation. But in truth, since I had no tale to tell, I could hardly be faulted for lack of spiritual courage for failing to make a fool of myself by blathering in public for the sake of hearing my own empty words. Did not the true Child of Fortune wait for the spirit thereof to speak through her?
Be that as it may, all things pass, and even our days of Golden Summer must one day end as our minds do tell us, though the fact that the universe would seem to have imposed this stricture upon us will no doubt remain forever beyond the praise of the human heart.