(A poem in answer to a friend who asked, "What did you learn in Latin America?") 1. You can kill rats best with the flat of a machete. 2. A bamboo rod a meter long is good for killing bats. You hit them once to knock them down and then kill them with a series of further strikes. 3. It's depressing and useless to kill bats, since they will continue to visit your jungle hut in the middle of the night to hang upside down in the roof, screech and defecate, no matter how many of them you kill. 4. Rivers flow slower at the edges, and sometimes even flow backwards there. 5. Half-cooked monkey may give you parasites. These parasites are curable. If you eat peyote after taking the medicine to kill the parasites, you may think you hear the thousands and thousands of parasites screaming in pain as they die. 6. If you pick leaves off a vine to make a hallucinogenic potion, you may have the sensation that the leaves are terrified and yet excited about the prospect of being picked. They may seem to be dying bravely, like soldiers or like Buddhists, knowing that the life of the vine they come from is protected because it is a plant cultivated by humans. 7. Handmade sandals made with recycled car tires may begin to fall apart in heavy rain, driving the nails that hold the leather to the rubber up into your feet. You have to throw them over a cliff then and walk along down the rocky road barefoot, or wearing only a pair of socks, in the heavy rain that is gradually soaking your backpack. When it gets dark, you have to make your way with a tiny flashlight, listening to the sound of rocks falling onto the road in front of you and behind you. Don't worry, though, because after three hours of walking through the blackness in the rain, your flashlight beam will hit "El patron de alacranes," the Patron of Scorpions, a boulder next to the road right outside the house of the shaman who lets you stay at his place, and the shaman himself will be up, still, though it's midnight, concerned about you and tending the fire. He will give you dry blankets to sleep on and some corn tortillas to eat.

Yesterday Ronnie took Jill and Christine and me to the Rossau Cemetery, the oldest Jewish Cemetery in Vienna. It was way out in the Ninth District. We took the D streetcar towards Nussdorf past Freud's old apartment and office. Got off someplace. Walked into an old age home. Past the desk, past some non-Jewish old folks in wheelchairs and out into the courtyard. That's where the cemetery was. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, big slabs of stone with Hebrew calligraphy on them. Ronnie and Jill deciphered bits of the inscriptions: a name or two. I went around finding some stones with pitchers carved into the tops: that means Levites, my tribe by patrilineage, the ones who washed the hands of the priests back in the temple in Jerusalem. One stone had a carving of two "Mr. Spock" hands: that was the stone of a Cohen, the priest tribe, descendents of Moses' brother Aaron. Ronnie said, "In nineteen forty-three the Jewish community moved the stones and buried them someplace else to save them from the Nazis. After the war they dug them up again and brought them back." Some even older gravestones found in other places had been mortared into the cemetery wall. Most were no more than fragments. The Hebrew letters were larger, looser, less professional, more childlike, expressionistic, almost dreamlike. Stone voices whispering from the fourteen or fifteen hundreds. Ronnie deciphered a bit: "This means 'dripping,'" he said, puzzled, then finished the phrase: "'...My eyes are dripping.'"

Regarding the big question--what are we doing here on the planet at this time, and how did we get to this point-- I had kind of an eye-opening experience in the Art History Museum here in Vienna a few years ago. So much of the art depicted humans killing animals--hunting scenes and such things. Or killing creatures which were half-human and half-animal, like a huge sculpture of Herakles clubbing a centaur to death. Art of this type seemed to depict an epoch in human evolution where we were asserting our superiority over animals; but more than that--it seemed we were transforming their energy into our energy, diverting biomass and resources to ourselves. Conquering wild lands. Driving back or harnessing the animal powers. For instance, Gilgamesh killed Humbaba, the monstrous guardian of the cedar forests. St. George killed the dragon. St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. Theseus killed Medusa, Oedipus the Sphinx. You have to do things like this if you are going to grow a human population. You have to kill off whatever might harm the humans. Humans have to gain access to that cedar forest to cut down trees to build things. The first thing the Secoyas did when they moved upriver on the Aguarico in 1973 was to kill all the caymans. I'm only talking about the part of the story that makes sense to me. Or that I've heard of. This business about the desacralization of nature being the cause of environmental destruction--it's really exactly why I headed for the shamans--I had such a need to resacralize it. To reassert mythological thought; to speak to the non-human beings as an equal. I still feel this way, but I don't romanticize the past as I once did. The Celts practiced human sacrifice. Probably, as in Mesoamerican human sacrifice, it was all done for very positive reasons: you had to feed the gods so they could make life! We don't believe in that any more. Human sacrifice is mentioned in the (monotheist, patriarchal, anti-earth) Hebrew Bible as an obscenity that pagan Caananite neighbors practiced. As per the Book of Kings (1), the priests of Baal cut themselves while they prayed, like the Mayas. In 1990, the Huaorani shaman Mengatohue told an acquaintance of mine, "The great spirit is putting a lot of power into white people." No explanation as to why; that's just how he saw it. Recently I've been thinking of it this way: the earth is like a company with many departments. One of the departments has become very successful, and resources are diverted from the others to support it. A lot of responsibility has now fallen on the employees in this department to do good to the company--a lot of pressure. Just a thought.

Vienna, June 16, 2007 Kurt Waldheim--former Secretary General of the United Nations, former President of Austria, former First Lieutenant in the German Wehrmacht--died two days ago. His picture is in all the newspapers, and the question of his character has come up again. Today his two-page political testament was published in the papers. "Ich bitte um Versöhnung," he wrote shortly before he died. "To all those who critically confronted me, I send my greeting, and ask them to think about their motives again, and--if possible--to grant me a late reconciliation." Today there was an event in Kirchstetten, Austria, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of W.H. Auden, the British/American poet who summered there from 1958 until his death in Vienna in 1973. There were some talks about Auden, and some lunch, and then we all went to Auden's old house, whose upstairs study is preserved as a mini-museum. Many of the poet's things are still there, including books, furniture, and slippers. In Auden's study, the British poet Glyn Maxwell read a number of Auden's poems very movingly. Before and after Maxwell's reading, I spoke with a local man who turned out to have been close to Kurt Waldheim during Waldheim's tenure as Secretary General of the United Nations in New York. I offered my condolences. I asked him whether Waldheim had been unjustly attacked for having covered up his past, and he said yes, absolutely. "Let's be honest: the United States government is controlled by Jews," he said, adding, "And the World Jewish Congress raised millions of dollars in funding by attacking Waldheim." He further noted that his own father had been in the Wehrmacht, and told him that if anyone questioned what was happening--i.e., the war effort--they and their family would be killed. He said that at the UN, Waldheim was a bridge-builder, a man skilled at negotiation, a tireless negotiator, a worker for peace. I said, "I'm half-Jewish and I completely accept that individuals in Waldheim's generation could not go against the Nazi machine without committing suicide themselves. But I want the truth to come out. I don't want people hiding what they did. I don't think badly of people who had the bad luck to be swept up in something terrible when they were young." He said, "People in Waldheim's position preferred to be silent for fear of being attacked." I said, "Maybe we can begin more sensible dialogues now. I don't want to attack people. We just want to know what happened to our families." We parted. Questions hung in the air: Whose story is this? How much information needs to come out? On what terms can reconciliation happen? The image I have of Waldheim today is of someone very human, caught up in something he didn't understand, later regretful about it, though not as regretful as his critics would have him be. One of the men Waldheim served under was executed for war crimes in 1946. So at what point should Waldheim himself have felt comfortable telling the world everything? He certainly seems to have known what was going on, but he seems not to have been personally responsible in any criminal sense for atrocities. The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal publically defended Waldheim along these lines. Misleading people about one's past is not in itself a crime. It seems natural, though less than ideal, that people who were still furious at the Nazis would have wanted to criticize him. Today the Holocaust is as much a nightmare for the Austrians and the Germans as it is for the Jews. One of my Austrian students told me tearfully once of the day he learned of the Holocaust at the age of nine when he walked in on his mother watching a documentary on TV and she explained to him the bulldozers pushing emaciated human corpses. Former Wehrmacht soldiers have either remained convinced of the rightness of the Nazi cause--a small minority--or, more commonly, refused to talk about it. Or both. One of my current students tried to interview his grandfather about the war for a school project, and his grandfather flatly refused to talk about it. The impression I got was of a concrete container full of toxic chemical waste that wants to be buried just like it is so the poison won't leak out. It's one response, heroic in its way. I'll finish this post about reconciliation with some lines from Auden's elegy for the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who died at the beginning of 1939 as the Second World War was about to break out. Whatever side of whatever nightmare one is on, Auden's challenge--for action that is personal, psychological and emotional, even spiritual in the best sense--is worth taking seriously: Make a vinyard of a curse. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice. With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress. In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

They buried Waldheim today. There was one Jew at the funeral: The one up on the cross.

I dreamt it was Holocaust Remembrance Night in Austria. I was walking on a grassy slope in the dark, when into view came a cluster of about forty helium balloons, some gray and some black, that had been released to symbolize the souls of those who had died in the concentration camps. The balloons were flying together close to the ground, moving across the landscape like solemn, beautiful ghosts.