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Overview
Join the Abominable Snowman as, determined to transcend his cannibalistic past, he studies Tibetan Buddhism under the Dalai Lama. Pace the walls of Ilium with fair Helen as she tries to convince both sides to abandon their absurd Trojan War. Visit the nursery of Zenobia Garber, born to a Pennsylvania farm couple who accept her for the uncanny little biosphere she is. Scramble aboard the raft built by the passengers and crew of the sinking Titanic—and don’t be surprised when the vessel transmutes into a world even more astonishing than the original Ship of Dreams.
Reality by Other Means offers readers the most celebrated results from James Morrow’s decades-long career designing fictive thought experiments. Anchored by seven previously uncollected stories, this omnibus ranges from social satire to theological hijinks, steampunk escapades to philosophical antics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819575753 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/21/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 247 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Bigfoot and the Bodhisattva
After thirty years spent eating the chilled coral brains of overachieving amateur climbers who believed they could reach the summit of Mount Everest without dying, a diet from which I derived many insights into the virtues and limitations of Western thought, I decided that my life could use a touch more spirituality, and so I resolved to study Tibetan Buddhism under the tutelage of His Holiness, Chögi Gyatso, the fifteenth Dalai Lama.
The problem was not so much that I nourished myself through cerebrophagy, but that I felt so little pity for the unfortunates on whom I fed. Chögi Gyatso, by contrast, was reportedly the reincarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Evidently he had much to teach me.
As far as I know, I was the first of my race to undertake an explicitly religious quest. Traditionally we yeti are an unchurched species. Our ideological commitments, such as they are, tend along Marxist lines, the natural inclination of any creature with a dialectical metabolism, but we try not to push it too far, lest we lapse into hypocrisy. After all, it's difficult to maintain a robust contempt for the haute bourgeoisie when their neuronal tissues are your preferred source of sustenance.
We live by a code and kill by a canon. Yes, kill: for the raw fact is that, while the typical cyanotic climber who winds up on the yeti menu may be doomed, he is not necessarily dead. We always follow protocol. Happening upon a lost and languishing mountaineer, I assiduously search the scene for some evidence that he might survive. If I spot a Sherpa party on the horizon or a rescue helicopter in the distance, I continue on my way. If death appears inevitable, however, I tell the victim of my intention, then perform the venerable act of nang-duzul, hedging the frosty skull with all thirty-eight of my teeth, assuming a wide stance for maximum torque, and, finally, snaffling off the cranium in an abrupt yet respectful gesture. The sha is traditionally devoured on the spot. It's all very ritualistic, all very in nomine Patris et Fili et Spiritus Sancti, to use a phrase I learned from the left cerebral hemisphere of Michael Rafferty, former seminarian, bestselling author of eighteen Father Tertullian detective novels, and failed Everest aspirant.
No matter how scrupulously he observes the norms of nang-duzul, the celebrant cannot expect any immediate cognitive gain. He must be patient. This isn't vodka. Two or three hours will elapse before the arrival of the shashespah, the meat-knowledge, but it's usually worth the wait. Typically the enrichment will linger for over a year, sometimes a decade, occasionally a lifetime. Last week I partook of a tenured comparative literature professor from Princeton, hence the formality of my present diction. I would have preferred a south Jersey Mafioso to a central Jersey postmodernist, the better to tell my story quickly and colorfully, but the mob rarely comes up on the mountain. My benefactor's name was Dexter Sherwood, and he'd remitted $65,000 to an outfit called Karmic Adventures on the promise that they would get him to the summit along with six other well-heeled clients. The corporation fulfilled its half of the contract, planting Dexter Sherwood squarely atop the planet, but during the descent a freak storm arrived, and it became every man for himself. I have nothing good to say about Karmic Adventures and its rivals: Extreme Ascents, Himalayan Challenge, Rappelling to Paradise, Jomolungma or Bust. They litter the slopes with their oxygen tanks, they piss off the sky goddess, and every so often they kill a customer. My Parents Froze to Death on Everest and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.
I shall not deny that a connoisseur of long pork occupies ethically ambiguous ground, so let me offer the following proposition. If you will grant that my race is fully sentient, with all attendant rights and privileges, then we shall admit to being cannibals. True, we are Candidopithecus tibetus and you are Homo sapiens, but my younger sister Namgyal long ago demonstrated that this taxonomy is no barrier to fertile intercourse between our races, hence my half-breed niece Tencho and my mixed-blood nephew Jurmo. Do we have an understanding, O furless ones? Call us psychopaths and Dahmerists, accuse us of despoiling the dead, but spare us your stinking zoos, your lurid circuses, your ugly sideshows, your atrocious laboratories.
This agreement, of course, is purely academic, for you will never learn that we exist — not, at least, in consequence of the present text. I do not write for your amusement but for my own enlightenment. In setting down this account of my religious education, all the while imagining that my audience is your cryptic kind, I hope to make some sense of the tragedy that befell His Holiness. And when I am done, you may be sure, I shall drop the manuscript into the deepest, darkest crevasse I can find.
I did not doubt that Chögi Gyatso would agree to instruct me in the dharma. For the past four years my clan and I had faithfully shielded him from the predations of the People's Liberation Army during his thrice-yearly pilgrimages from Sikkim to Tibet. Thanks to me and my cousins, the true Dalai Lama had thus far enjoyed twelve secret audiences with his false counterpart in Lhasa. His Holiness owed me one.
"Why do you wish to study the dharma?" Chögi Gyatso inquired, knitting his considerable brow.
"My eating habits cause me distress," I explained.
"Digestive?"
"Deontological."
"I know all about your eating habits, Taktra Kunga," said His Holiness, soothing me with his soft hazel eyes. He had a moon face, a shaved pate, and prominent ears. Behind his back, we yeti called him Mr. Sacred Potato Head. "You feed on deceased climbers, extracting sha-shespah from their brains."
Although our local holy men were aware of yeti culinary practices, they'd never learned all the sordid details, assuming in their innocence that we restrained our appetite until the donor was defunct — an illusion I preferred to keep intact. "Every species has its own epistemology," I noted, offering His Holiness an intensely dental grin.
"For me you are like the carrion birds who assist in our sky burials," said Chögi Gyatso. "Scavenging is an honorable way of life, Taktra Kunga. You have no more need of Buddhism than does a vulture."
"I wish to feel pity for those on whom I prey," I explained.
A seraphic light filled His Holiness's countenance. Now I was speaking his language. "Does it occur to you that, were you to acquire this pity, you might end up forsaking sha-shespah altogether?"
"It's a risk I'm willing to take."
"I shall become your teacher under two conditions. First, each lesson must occur at a time and place of my own choosing. Second, you must forgo your usual cheekiness and approach me with an attitude of respectful submission."
"I'm sorry to hear you think I'm cheeky, Your Holiness."
"And I'm sorry if I've insulted you, Your Hairiness. I merely want to clarify that these lessons will be different from the banter we enjoy during our journeys to Lhasa. We shall have fun, but we shall not descend into facetiousness."
"No talk of James Bond," I said, nodding sagely. Like the fourteenth Dalai Lama before him, Chögi Gyatso was an aficionado of Anglo-American cinema. Until I began my study of the dharma, our mutual affection for Agent 007 was the only thing we really had in common.
"Or perhaps much talk of James Bond," the monk corrected me, "though surely even more talk of Cham Bön, the dance celebrating the gods."
The motives behind our trips to see the false Dalai Lama were essentially political rather than religious, although in His Holiness's universe the art of the possible and the pursuit of the ineffable often melded together. Having once dined on Laurence Beckwith, a Stanford professor of twentieth-century Asian history, I understood the necessity of these furtive treks. The disaster began in 1950 when the People's Liberation Army crossed the Upper Yangtze and marched on Lhasa with the aim of delivering the Tibetan people from the ravages of their own culture. By 1955 the collectivization process was fully underway, with Mao Zedong's troops confiscating whatever property, possessions, and human beings stood in the way of turning this backward feudal society into a brutal socialist paradise. Over the next four years it became clear that China intended to dissolve the Tibetan government altogether and imprison Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and so on the evening of March 17, 1959, that regal young man disguised himself as a soldier and fled to Dharamsala in India, where he eventually established a government-in-exile, got on the radar of the secular West, and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
A mere two months after Tenzin Gyatso passed away, Beijing shamelessly appointed a successor, a bewildered three-year-old from Mükangsar named Shikpo Tsering. On his tenth birthday, Shikpo Tsering was taken from his parents, placed under house arrest in the Potala Palace, and ordained as Güntu Gyatso, the fifteenth Dalai Lama. No Tibetan Buddhist was fooled, and neither were we yeti. Güntu Gyatso is no more the reincarnation of Tenzin Gyatso than I am the reincarnation of King Kong. Among my race he is known as the Phonisattva.
Meanwhile, the monks in Dharamsala set about locating the genuine fifteenth Dalai Lama. When a chubby infant from Zhangmu, Töpa Dogyaltsan, passed all the tests, including the correct identification of the late Tenzin Gyatso's eyeglasses, prayer beads, hand drum, and wristwatch from among dozens of choices, he forthwith became Chögi Gyatso, the latest iteration of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. On Chögi Gyatso's twenty-first birthday, the monks relocated their itinerant theocracy to the austere environs of Gangtok in Sikkim. The Panchen Lama told the outside world that certain benevolent deities, communicating through dreams, had demanded this move. He did not mention that these same gods evidently envisioned His Holiness periodically slipping across the border to advise the false Dalai Lama in matters both pragmatic and cosmic.
And so it happened that, one fine white day in February, my lair became the locus of a royal visit. The unexpected arrival of Chögi Gyatso and his retinue threw my girlfriend, Gawa Samphel, into a tizzy, and I was equally nonplussed. Had we known they were coming, Gawa and I would have tidied up the living room, disposing of the climber skulls strewn everywhere. We were fond of gnawing on them after sex. Death is healthier than cigarettes. To their credit, the monks pretended not to notice the bony clutter.
Gawa served a yeti specialty, pineal-gland tea sweetened with honey. His Holiness drained his mug, cleared his throat, and got to the point. As the leader of "the tall and valiant Antelope Clan" — an accurate assessment, the average yeti height being eight feet and the typical yeti heart being stout — I could perform a great service for the long-suffering Tibetan people. If I and my fellow Shimis would escort His Holiness through the Lachung Pass to Lhasa three times each year, doing our best to "peacefully and compassionately keep the Chinese patrols at bay," the monks back in Gangtok would send forth 800,000 prayers a week for the continued prosperity of my race. His Holiness promised to compensate us for our trouble, one hundred rupees per yeti per six-day pilgrimage.
"I want to help you out," I said, massaging my scraggly beard, "but I fear that in the course of shielding you from the Mao-Maos we shall inadvertently reveal ourselves to the world."
"That is a very logical objection," said Chögi Gyatso, flashing his beautiful white teeth. He had the brightest smile in Asia. "And yet I have faith that these missions will not bring your species to light."
"Your faith, our skin," I said. "I am loath to put either at risk."
"Faith is not something a person can put at risk," His Holiness informed me, wiping the steam from his glasses with the sleeve of his robe. "Faith is the opposite of a James Bond martini — it may be stirred but not shaken."
To this day I'm not sure why I assented to become His Holiness's paladin. It certainly wasn't the money or the prayers. I think my decision had something to do with my inveterate affection for the perverse — that, and the prospect of discussing secret-agent movies with a young man whose aesthetics differed so radically from my own.
"I had no idea you were a James Bond fan," I said as Chögi Gyatso took leave of our lair. "Now that I think about it, the titles do have a certain Buddhist quality. The World Is Not Enough. You Only Live Twice. Tomorrow Never Dies. Live and Let Die. Is that why you like the series?"
"You are quite correct, Taktra Kunga," His Holiness replied. "I derive much food for meditation from the Bond titles. I also enjoy the babes."
Whether by the grace of the Bön gods, the vicissitudes of chance, or the devotion of his yeti protectors, Chögi Gyatso's pilgrimages proved far less perilous than anyone anticipated. Whenever a Chinese patrol threatened to apprehend His Holiness, my six cousins and I would circle silently around the soldiers, then come at them from behind. The Mao-Maos never knew what hit them. A sudden whack between the shoulder blades — the blow we apes call glog, the lightning flash — and the startled soldier wobbled like a defective prayer wheel, then fell prone in the snow, gasping and groaning. By the time the patrol recovered its collective senses, Chögi Gyatso was far away, off to see the sham wizard on his stolen throne.
Our victories in these skirmishes traced largely to our invisibility. This attribute of Candidopithecus tibetus is highly adaptive and entirely natural. Like the skin of a chameleon, our fur transmogrifies until it precisely matches the shade of the immediate snowscape. So complete is this camouflage that we appear to the naïve observer as autonomous blazing orbs and disembodied flashing teeth. Set us down anywhere in the Himalayas, and we become eyes without faces, fangs without serpents, grins without cats.
Committed to conveying His Holiness to Lhasa with maximum efficiency, we eventually devised an elaborate relay system using modified climbing gear. Our method comprised a set of six grappling irons outfitted with especially long ropes. By hurling each hook high into the air and deliberately snagging it on the edge of a crag, Cousin Jowo, the strongest among us, succeeded in stringing a succession of high-altitude Tarzan vines between the gateway to the Lachung Pass and the outskirts of Lhasa. Once these immense pendulums had been hung, it became a simple matter for Cousin Drebung, Cousin Yangdak, Cousin Garap, Cousin Nyima, and myself to swing through the canyons in great Newtonian oscillations, gripping our respective ropes with one hand while using the opposite arm to pass His Holiness from ape to ape like a sacramental basketball. Cousin Ngawang brought up the rear, carefully detaching the six hooks and gathering up the ropes, so the Mao-Maos would remain oblivious to our conspiracy.
Naturally my clan and I never dared venture into Lhasa proper, and so after depositing Chögi Gyatso at the city gates we always made a wide arc to the east, tromping through the hills until we reached the railroad bridge that spanned the Brahmaputra River like a sleek tiger leaping over a chasm. His Holiness's half-brother, Dorje Lingpa, lived by himself in a yurt on the opposite shore. We could get there only by sprinting anxiously along the suspended rails. The passenger train made two scheduled and predictable round-trips per day, but the freight lines and the military transports ran at odd hours, so my cousins and I were always thrilled to reach the far side of the gorge and leap to the safety of the berm.
Dorje Lingpa worked for the Chinese National Railroad, one of four token Tibetans in their employ. Six days a week, he would leave his abode shortly after dawn, walk twenty paces to the siding, climb into his motorized section-gang car, and clatter along the maintenance line, routinely stopping to shovel snow, ice, stones, rubble, and litter off the parallel stretch of gleaming highspeed track running west into Lhasa. Whereas the typical Beijing technocrat had a private driveway and a Subaru, Dorje Lingpa had his own railroad siding and a personal locomotive.
A considerate if quixotic man, His Holiness's half-brother always remembered to leave the key under the welcome mat. My clan and I would let ourselves into the yurt, brew some buttered tea, purchase stacks of chips from our host's poker set, and pass the afternoon playing seven-card stud, which Cousin Ngawang had absorbed from a Philadelphia lawyer who'd run short of oxygen on the South Col. Chögi Gyatso and Dorje Lingpa normally returned within an hour of each other — the true Dalai Lama from counseling the Phonisattva, his brother from clearing the Lhasa line. Usually Chögi Gyatso remembered to bring a new set of postcards depicting the changing face of the capital. The Lhasa of my youth was a populous and noisy yet fundamentally congenial world. Thanks to the dubious boon of the railroad, the city now swarmed with franchise restaurants selling yak burgers, flat-screen TVs displaying prayer flags, taxi cabs papered with holograms of stupas, and movie theaters running Bollywood musicals dubbed into Mandarin.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Reality by Other Means"
by .
Copyright © 2015 James Morrow.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Gary K. Wolfe
Bigfoot and the Bodhisattva
The Cat's Pajamas
Arms and the Woman
The War of the Worldviews
Bible Stories for the Adults, No. 17: The Deluge
Spinoza's Golem
Known But to God and Wilbur Hines
Daughter Earth
The Vampires of Paradox
Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant
Lady Witherspoon's Solution
Martyrs of the Upshot Knothole
Auspicious Eggs
The Iron Shroud
Fixing the Abyss
The Wisdom of the Skin
The Raft of the Titanic
Acknowledgements
What People are Saying About This
“James Morrow, a master of the reductio ad absurdum, is a thoughtful satirist whose sharp but never gratuitous wit takes aim at serious issues in beautifully crafted prose that is always a pleasure to read.”
“In these angrily compassionate tales, Morrow ventriloquizes Dante and Swift in writing as cutting as freshly strung barbed wire. Each posits an astonishing otherness that debunks a menacing human folly while also eliciting gasps or guffaws of outraged delight.”
“No matter where—or when—he sets his stories, Morrow's a clean stylist with an accurate grip on the diction, the character, and the metabolic rate of the narrator. Intelligent and funny, this is the best kind of mind candy.”
"No matter where—or when—he sets his stories, Morrow's a clean stylist with an accurate grip on the diction, the character, and the metabolic rate of the narrator. Intelligent and funny, this is the best kind of mind candy."—Kit Reed, author of The Story Until Now
"In these angrily compassionate tales, Morrow ventriloquizes Dante and Swift in writing as cutting as freshly strung barbed wire. Each posits an astonishing otherness that debunks a menacing human folly while also eliciting gasps or guffaws of outraged delight.""—Michael Bishop, author of A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
"Here's undeniable proof that James Morrow is our Jonathan Swift—a funnier, more fantastical Swift. Morrow can be brainy and absurd, hilarious and profound, scatological and philosophical—all on the same page. After you stop laughing, you keep thinking, and that's when you realize you're in the hands of a master. No one else sounds like him, and no one else has sharper satirical knives.""—Daryl Gregory, author of Afterparty
"James Morrow, a master of the reductio ad absurdum, is a thoughtful satirist whose sharp but never gratuitous wit takes aim at serious issues in beautifully crafted prose that is always a pleasure to read.""—Pamela Sargent, author of The Shore of Women
"Even as Reality by Other Means points out what is wrong with society, James Morrow never lets us forget that society is made up of individuals who matter, be they a soldier on the battlefield, a hitchhiker on the Ark, or our daughter the Earth. No one has used the devices of satire and science fiction to give us literature this smart, this elegant, this compassionate. I hope that Morrow, who understands that the only way out is for us to reason together, will forgive me for saying that I admire his works beyond all reason.""—F. Brett Cox, coeditor of Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Foundation
"No matter where—or when—he sets his stories, Morrow's a clean stylist with an accurate grip on the diction, the character, and the metabolic rate of the narrator. Intelligent and funny, this is the best kind of mind candy."—Kit Reed, author of The Story Until Now
“Even as Reality by Other Means points out what is wrong with society, James Morrow never lets us forget that society is made up of individuals who matter, be they a soldier on the battlefield, a hitchhiker on the Ark, or our daughter the Earth. No one has used the devices of satire and science fiction to give us literature this smart, this elegant, this compassionate. I hope that Morrow, who understands that the only way out is for us to reason together, will forgive me for saying that I admire his works beyond all reason.”
“Here’s undeniable proof that James Morrow is our Jonathan Swift—a funnier, more fantastical Swift. Morrow can be brainy and absurd, hilarious and profound, scatological and philosophical—all on the same page. After you stop laughing, you keep thinking, and that’s when you realize you’re in the hands of a master. No one else sounds like him, and no one else has sharper satirical knives.”