LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN

Chapter 17 - Sylvan Lake: "The Libyad, book 20"

In that same watershed year of 1991, when Premier Gorbachev was finally
dismantling the hoax of the "Cold War" and the Berlin Wall, and the USA responded by
piously taking credit for it all and then bombing the hell out of Iraq, I had lunch in the
quiet and good satisfaction of the "heartland" with former US Senator Jim Abourezk. He
was of Lebanese ancestry so naturally the topic of our conversation, at a healthy sidewalk
deli on mainstreet Rapid City, turned to his work with the Arab-American anti-
discrimination committee for the Palestinians, and about whom I expressed not only my
sympathies but also my own high regard for their fellow Libyans, in whose country I had
lived for 3 years in the 60s as a high school "dependent" of the US Air Force.
"Really?" he asked, munching a salad and saying hello every two minutes to friendly
fellow citizens passing to and fro on the happy, clean sidewalks.
"Yes," I replied, feeling very out of place among suits and kosher pickles. "I'd love to
go back there someday."
"Really?"
Trying with all my might not to be a smart-ass, as an up-and-coming "leader" with all
the responsibilities and mature requirements thereunto in my burgeoning 40s, I
responded, "Yes."
To make a long story pithy, I got a call the very next day from the Libyan Ambassador
to the United Nations formally inviting me to Tripoli for a big conference, in which
Colonel Muammar al-Qathafi's notorious Jamahiriya government was paying all
expenses for a lot of Native indigenous leaders of the entire western hemisphere to come
on over and get it together against their common enemy "The Great Satan" who was you-
know-who. "Jim Abou said you would like to come," the very kind and slightly boyish
voice of Amb. Ali Treiki said on the other end of the line. It was obvious Jim Abou was a
very big wheel in these international circles. I replied that yes, indeed, I'd love to come.
By a circuitous route which the US State Department had concocted in their hysteria
about Libya's alleged bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 back in 1988, in which Americans
were forbidden to travel wherever they liked, and poor Libyan slobs in tar paper shacks
were deprived of food and medicine by the vitriolic US-backed economic sanctions
against them, I had to go to Tripoli by way of Belgium and Tunisia, and then by bus
across the border into the "World's greatest exporter of Terrorism" for the 1980s and most
of the 1990s.
But, as Senator Abourezk joked, "The Libyans can't get dinner together. How are they
going to be pulling off all these elaborate terrorist attacks everywhere?"
In 1992, and again in '94, we helped get some diplomatic options in the works, with
trips to The World Uranium Hearing in Salzburg Austria, and The Hague. By 1998 I was
again in New York sipping cha-hee tea with the new Amb. Abuzed Omar Dorda, in his
luxurious penthouse suites, and discussing Barry Fell's book 'America B.C.", which had a
fascinating chapter titled "Libyans in Zuni", comparing the linguistic characteristics of
ancient Tafinagh scripts in the North Africa desert to the Pueblo language. In between
literary afternoons and gourmet meals out of the "Big Black" skyscraper the slobs of the
Libyan Jamahiriya {People} owned in midtown Manhattan, a few limousine-driven
blocks to the edifices of the U.N., we made some breakthroughs in the stalemated
Lockerbie Pan Am 103 negotiations and arranged for the alleged bombers to go to the
World Court in The Hague. The Libyan Government officially thanked me for my work
in the long and complicated work, and offered to help fund the Bear Butte Council back
home, as well. I in turn wrote a long review of the "Brother Colonel" and his book
'Escape to Hell' on their geocities website.
Muhammad Matri at the Embassy, Mustafa Fetouri in Belgium, and the anti-Qathafi
opposition in Minneapolis led by Tariq Bagdadi all assured me we'd never see a penny of
investment or an official word of endorsement or government-to-government recognition
from the Libyans, "because the CIA yanks their chain." It was true. To this day nothing
has been forthcoming from the Tifinaghs to the Zunis of a substantial nature. Rumors,
probably instigated by the CIA and NSA or whatever other nefarious agency is currently
working at the Libyan Desk [for reference see Lawrence Durrell's 'The Alexandria
Quartet' or John LeCarre's film 'The Constant Gardener'], that AIM has gotten millions
from Libya, the Irish Republican Army, or Madame Blavatsky are all horseshit. Richard
Grass is still living in a hovel across the street from Thelma Rios, even after numerous
trips to Geneva and New York paid for by the UNPO (Unrepresented Nations and
Peoples Organization) or the Council of Churches to present detailed paperwork about
the Treaty, genocide according to the Geneva Convention and the International
Declaration of Human Rights, and compacts among our many nations.
But what I did get done, and recited from memory at the 2000-year old amphitheatres
at Sabratha and Leptis Magna, was another epic 'The Libyad'. Invited again in the year
2000 and again in '02, the tale of a peaceful Libyan named Muhammad practicing true
Jihad, and imprisoned and tortured for years in military brigs in Israel and Ellsworth Air
Force Base, South Dakota, without legal representation or redress of grievances,
resonated in the perfect acoustics of those ancient theatres. In high school we had done
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar out there. The kind and gentle Libyans loved it, especially
the comparison of a Jihadist with Crazy Horse, in a magical underground cave under the
appropriately named Sylvan Lake high in the sacred Black Hills:

The Libyad, book 20

________________

"He was baptizing the mutltitudes at the Temple-

Tomb where the sacred running creek comes from
a cave, emerging from the source of the great Underworld
where the elders and relatives said Crazy Horse
was born. It was a lovely sunny day where they had
walked all morning in the Black Hills, up, uphill
along the gently rising canyons and granite gorges
until the creek grew smaller, thinner, colder
in the rocky ridges, where icewater came out
of the ground; until they were in other extra-
geographical caves, under mountainous rocks
shaped like men, carved, under a Sylvan Lake
past the manmade mountains: under other mortal
Otherness. The desperate sinners of dishonest mankind
clamored about him for help, healing, benefaction,
asking, "Master, do you know Mount Rushmore,
the temple of the American gods, is just over there?
Over there." They were not speaking familiarly,
no common sense in their desperate clamor as he
washed their minds of sinful Disbelief, greedy
truthlessness and fear; glancing over his shoulder
beyond the cave and creek to a corner of white
shining granite like marble where George Washington
watched them sternly, and implacable Jefferson,
Lincoln like Ahab or Daniel glowering at the killer
apes of the world like Pluto, darkly, in black
Old Testament suits of rotten death, and the rich
Roosevelt gloating from the rocky mountain.
The Black Hills of South Dakota in the United States
grew grayly, cloudily, from western thunderstorms
until icewater came out of the spongy rocks
and the faithless congregation, talking in many
tongues, nightmarish mankind, ran for cover from
the night of unnatural day; but Muhammad
stood in the rain and prayed with his arms
outstretched, dangerously near the heights
where electrical storms strike.
He saw Zeid
on the ledge over the Grotto of Pan
leading into the river's source, terrifying
Zeus of Banyas, the Temple-Tomb of the Goats
at Caesarea Philippi where he had prayed many times
in the thunderbolts. "Get out of the rain,
you idiot!" his father roared. They both ducked
into the damp black grotto where an old Indian
introduced himself as Worm.
People outside
in the gray daylight of unnatural life wondered
why the Baptizer had disappeared, and where.
He saw them huddling blindly in the cold wind.
He didn't know whether to embrace his father
or not, who seemed aloof and relaxed like
a spirit in a dream; and he was younger than he
had been at the end of his life, healthier
like his son remembered him. Their talk was not
consecutive, or sequential, nor was the Temple
of Pan at the grotto on Mount Hermon exactly
as he remembered it on the high Golan plateau
over the hot deserts around Galilee, Iturea,
and Jordan: and the images of Mount Rushmore
were mixed in too with the tale the old Worm
was telling them of his son as they walked deep
into the black legendary cavern. Muhammad
in his sleep knew he was also fully awake
because he knew that exquisite blackness within
blackness was all the Source of all the miracles
and eternity he would ever need to know.
The words were part of it. "Do you want to die?"
the voice of God asked. "No," he replied, and
in that answer lay his Geodesy. It was enough
that a swirl and pleasing cacophony of many
tongues chattered at him like water trickling,
echoing off the walls all around him, like Nemesis,
the goddess Echo in love with Pan. Banyas
was his home, the Arabic translation of Panion
of the Greeks, of great Alexander who prayed there,
and Gad the eldest of the shepherd Jacob called it
Baal Gad to oppose the nearby temple of Dan.
It was part of the whole labyrinth of the mythic
grammar that ran from Mount Zionai of Isaac to Baalbek
and Delphi, Avalon, the Black Hills aligned
to the shaft of the Arrow on earth from the belt
of Orion, from Sirius, Osiris, the feather of
the Sacred Arrow, the universal World Mountain
a configuration of stars on earth seen by the Prophets.
He was flying through space westwards from Sirius
across Atlantis to Orion and out to the arrowhead
Hawai'i, the Pleiades in the Pacific, the sacred
paradise Oceanus. "Hawai'i," Annie cooed nakedly
beside him like the doves on Oahu, on the rainbow
mauka mountains green, black with lava heiau
temples of the first Polynesian British, sailors,
star-voyagers, astronauts steering by hokule'a
the north star, the whole planet guided by the stars,
and Annie, nakedly fragrant of plumeria and babies.
"Your whole life passing before you, behind you,
Brah?" Worm joked, almost maliciously, horny Pan,
Mobruk in a room of the palace glittering with silver
crystal. Muhammad was startled again
in his dank dark underground prison cell
at the instantaneous magic of the Other
World, and Zeid his father smiled at him too.
"We're in jail, you know? Qathafi busted
our asses." Asses and goats, clean and sleek
like well-fed pets, walked on the tables
and sat on the chairs like family. "Grandson,"
Zeid smiled happily, petting a gray jackass.
He did not seem to know that his death
was redeemed by his son's kinder memory
of Islam, Arabia, due, renewed by memory,
to some better impulse freed of his father's old
patriotism and money, fundamentalism, fear,
what Annie had called "this physical gravity."
Their minds were better for it, and they
liked each other as they had when they were
younger, freer, friendlier. Worm was telling
them about his own great son and how he was
Crazy Horse only when the boy was safe
at home, with his mother, and their family,
while the warriors were out protecting them
from enemies, hunting buffalo, stealing
horses from the Crows and Snakes.
"You call
me Hercules because I have killed men, like
Crazy Horse too, the father angrier and more
violent than the son? I was the murderous
general at Golan with the 68th Syrian Brigade
in 1973, October 11th to be exact, a Thursday.
We were facing the Israeli 7th and Barak
brigades under General Eytan, after days of
bloody fighting. We were with the Moroccan
Brigade and remnants of the shattered 7th
Infantry Division. Remember? You were there.
Rafiq Hilawi commanded the 68th. Eytan
opened the attack at 11 AM along our right flank
at Mt. Hermon. After negotiating the thick
mine fields along his front, Colonel Ben-Gal's
7th Brigade smashed us at the Hader crossroads.
Our unit broke. The 7th reached the Hader
junction about 3 miles east of the Purple Line.
The Barak Brigade on the south managed to
penetrate several miles farther, capturing
the Druze village of Horfa. But the going was
slow and the fighting tough for all of us."

In the residue of the grotto Muhammad

sat with Worm, old soldiers remembering
losses and victories, wars, poignancy,
reflection, remaining philosophically upon
them. Telepathic words of "rivalry, competition"
were spoken, "of the conquests and ideas
of my father, Worm, which do not survive the
great leveller of death. What does it
matter now who won a few miles of a road,
or the sovereignty of Syria, Israel, or even
Libya? I know that Crazy Horse must surely
feel as I do." Worm nodded. "Yes. He was
a gentle boy, not a warrior. I was the one
history, fiction, confused with him
with the love for fast horses, battle, and
Nation. That's where you are wrong about
your father, though, Muhammad, and your
judgement, condemnation, of him. Ghosts
haunt him too, of those he's killed. I know.
But it is an act, we thought, of survival,
butchery no different than the bloody hunt
to feed our families. Your Hercules is not
wrong, or evil - just human, an animal
somehow trying to sacrifice his skin to his
own spirit, for his own god, his own spirit.
My son was born here, in this cave, on
this creek, like a dream. You're a father
so you know what I mean. He was your Dionysus,
whom we call Iktomi, a Trickster too smart
for his own good, unliked, a peaceful poet
or prophet despised by rational men. He
was not well-liked. Nor was I. Nor are you."
Muhammad understood and sighed deeply
of the cave air, thick and dank like
a tomb, a jail cell, an echoing grotto. He thought
of the Golan Heights and his many years there
on that bare expanse of black basalt rock
unmarked by trees, with miserable dust-
laden hamlets, houses hewn of black stone,
a scene studded with burned out tanks,
shattered vehicles, smoking ammunition
trucks, fleeing panic-stricken villagers
with donkeys laden with bedding, women with
babies, shepherds watching their flocks
in the wretched pastures exploding with
shells, bleak, northward from Kuneitra,
nauseating flesh and decapitated corpses in
piles everywhere. It could have been Wounded
Knee, or the Little Bighorn, he supposed,
musing in the dark underneath Mount Rushmore.
He had to go hide in the caves at Banyas
Falls too, there, up in the hills far away
from the soldiers who had cheered his
ambush tactics and victories, his absurd
efforts at authentic Jihad misunderstood.
He went up and away from them all to the
cold springs of the source of the Jordan
River, below steep cliffs. He missed his
father's company. He grieved for their
loneliness, as Jesus must have grieved also,
and Gad, and Abraham. His father had long
long been his best friend and partner.
They had dreamed of great deeds together,
as Jesus did surely dream with Herod
of his father's house, and Masada, Caesarea,
Jericho, and the Gospels funded by his
brother Philip the Tetrarch, the Caesars
and Augusti of the imperial college
St. Mark recorded, and Homer, and Merlin,
of Troy; of Constantine Merlin's grandfather
rebuilding Troy at Constantinople, the
Christian Emperor from Troy. Oh, he
sighed, and stared at the icicles and
stalagtites like Sirius and Orion pointing
to the Pleiades, the single continuous
story of 'The Geodesy' from Troy running
unbroken like a starry silver Arrow from Homer.
Zeid loved the Holy Suras but he'd
been a peasant, a poorly educated worker
who rose to warriorhood in the 1930s
with Omar Mukhtar, fighting Mussolini.
What else could he have done? What else
could he do? He hoped for his son to be
better than him, wiser, braver; but he
didn't know that would lead to Dionysian
truths, rebellious Revolution against war,
labor, hunting, Libyan or Arabic patriotism
and Islamic propriety. Zeid didn't know
it meant imprisonment would mean death,
destruction of the rebellions of both
patriotisms, and himself synonymous,
simultaneous, with the seeds, twins in
the scriptural rewrites of their modern
millenial history, symbols of Zeus and Son
stalked by the vengeful Mother Goddess
Eve, co-creator making the Myth possible
by making the unnatural Anti-Natural Eggs
in the first place; what Worm would call
Thunderbird Eggs, crystals, cavern people,
underworld Aliens like Iktomi emerging in
the sunlight, blinding Zeus, while Hera
kills Dionysus for the sins of the father.
Only Pan or Worm could tell Zeus all about it,
Uncle Mobruk in Mecca, and Muhammad
in his mighty vision heard Fatima explain
that she was Goddess Libya."

[end of Chapter 17]