This Mankiller Tour began eons ago, in February, with a small huddle of expats and curious Mexica, a crackling sound system and doubtful, generous Buddhists, riven pilgrims, end-of-the-road outcasts, trollers of purpose to go with their days, all of us gathered under the mantle, the flayed-open cordillera of Morellos, under the unvanquished Aztec pyramid on the cliff edge that has seen so much. Then to Mexico City, that troubled open heart of the Americas, to a shuttered room in a suite of rooms that was once home to a family of prestige and now much reduced. There were eco-anarchists, militant seekers, Buddhists again, some of certainty and some of confusion, wavering Catholics and Old World Jews and genteel kids volunteering their young days to the cause. To my agile, straining spontaneous translator and to my being troubled aloud they bent their ears, some of them, and listened and considered.
Sometime during the course of that second evening I was obliged to know something I did not seek, or did not count on: I’m in Mexico, I don’t speak Spanish, I’m talking about death and its details through a translator, and people of speckled lineage and jangled conviction are leaning in, are considering, are giving me the gift of their evening. This caravan of unlikelies has prevailed ever since, as it has wandered America. I’m not likely the best judge of it, singing inside this small disturbance, but things seem to have gained a certain momentum. For a crucial while I had a band, my name for the remarkable musician Gregory Hoskins who graced my pleas for mercy and for grace under mortal pressure with his own faithful cantos of muscular sorrow. People came, jammed doorways and stood on chairs and they lingered afterwards, unwilling it seemed to go back to a home unchanged by an unlikely evening of mortal mysteries.
Today I’m on a plane again, this time heading to lands left long ago by those whose heirs I’ve become. It isn’t a homecoming, surely not, but it’s not another place on a list of places, either. This breezy little tome I’ve written, Die Wise, was graced with a noble introduction by a denizen of England and of times gone by, name of Martin Shaw, with whom I was briefly reunited a week ago for a riotous night of elegy and lament worthy of the ages. (Keep a weather eye for a film record of that boisterous event, crafted by Ian McKenzie, that might see light later this winter.) In the spangled generosity of his Forward Mr. Shaw took me for a citizen of the Other World. And this was to my knowledge the first time I was recognized, the first time this drizzle of sorrow and love for life that is my claim for Orphan Wisdom was seen and called by name. This stirred my gratitude. I have gratitude for him personally and specifically, surely, but I’ve another gratitude that arrived in this slurry of anticipation and pause, one that rises in the departure lounge as I make my way back across the Atlantic, tracing the furrows ploughed centuries before when We Who Left, who could not afford to stay, parted ways so deeply with You Who Stayed, to become the great European fantasy of America. And Mr. Shaw wrote of we who left: “To us, when you left you became spirits. How does dying wise function when to we who stayed you are already dead?” This is surely the arche of sorrow and longing and the uprooting of the world in search of home that America has become. It is to this wonder that I am returning.
So this is the whisper inside these evenings that I propose, the murmur inside the orphan wisdom for a troubled and troubling time that I bear: that the time may be dawning now, as we glimpse the myriad endings of the order that was so strangely born, for the old ancestries to be met and claimed, that we begin finally to occupy that seat reserved for us at the groaning board in the mead hall of life by our precursors, by the Old Ones of those who may gather with me and with each other these November nights for grief, for mystery and for the sake of an orphan wisdom for these strange and stranger days that may be striving to be born. Would that we wrangle from it all a memory worthy of this story of our scattering and our coming round.
Stephen Jenkinson
