INDIGNATIO!

SHEMTHEPENMAN TILTS AT WINDMILLS

THE INSCRIPTION ON THE TOMB OF JONATHAN SWIFT

FIRST, THE BACKGROUND:

The Spanish term santa ira, which literally means sacred or holy anger, has no close equivalent in English. I suppose that was why Jonathan Swift borrowed saeva indignatio from Latin for the self-composed Latin epitaph on his tomb in St. Patrick´s Cathedral in Dublin, which, if you didn´t know, is an Anglican church. In English, the epitaph means that he now lies “where savage indignation cannot longer lacerate his heart”, which, as I will explain, is what currently lacerates mine and perfectly fits Wiki´s gloss, i.e.: “Moral Outrage: A deeply principled anger aimed at correcting societal wrongs rather than attacking out of mere bitterness”. Lest we forget, wrath is an attribute of Jehovah.

Please note the clarification that santa ira is not a reaction to an insult or offense whose slightness is way out of proportion to your heated reaction to it. Instead, both in Colombia and abroad, people believe that I am exaggerating or neurotic or in a bad mood or have a “complex”.

That was the response of the editor of a Jewish cultural magazine in the U.S. who rejected my article which objected to Cynthia Ozick´s absurd claim that those of our blood cannot be enthralled by the religious music of Bach and be a real Jew.

Granted, that is a trivial example of the resort to righteous indignation, compared, say, to the campaign of the Madres del cinco de mayo which alerted the world to the barbaric crimes of the military junta in Argentina. And, likewise, the murder of some of those mothers was an extreme example of the manner in which such protests are sometimes treated. The usual reaction of the apathetic and subconsciously guilty majority is to say that the indignant are locos. An example of that has been my quixotic diatribes on Substack about the idiocies of Colombian bureaucracy. I don´t need to be told that it is futile, but I still insist that if no one complains about this (and much graver) problems, nothing is ever going to change in Locombia.

In this particular case, pride has been the complement of sacred ire. True, writers tend to be prickly but if they are mistreated, they have the right to hit back. Let my readers judge for themselves.

******

NOW, THE SPECIFICS:

Around the time that the pandemic was waning, I became seriously (but not alarmingly) ill for the first time in years. It may have been a flu that was circulating at the time, but the fundamental cause was clearly my emotional response to a difficult situation in my family. I didn´t have a fever, nor was I bedridden, and I continued with my wake-up regime of a cold, open-air shower. After a few days of an autonomous fast (on the principle of “starve the body to kill the cold”), I recovered my appetite but ate sparsely. Meanwhile, I was weak and depressed. However, at my advanced age and with my strong determination, as a writer, to make up for decades of wasted time, I forced myself to undertake the only task I was capable of at the time, namely, to transcribe, on my computer, a handwritten diary of the six weeks I spent at Mapiá, the Amazonian seat of the Santo Daime ayahuasca church of Brazil, a decade before.

I could only do it an hour or two at a time but it boosted my morale at a time when I wasn´t up to the physical activities (like gardening and long walks) which keep me fit and in a positive state of mind.

Anyone who believes in the virtues of natural medicine knows that health (whether good or bad) is the result of a subtle interaction between physical and emotional influences, which, in turn, are the reflection of ethereal energies. My depression and lassitude weren´t the only evidences of these forces. As I´ve said, I willed myself to get better and so, one afternoon, I took my dog for a walk along the road which borders my property. Toby was neither obedient nor sensible, but as it was a weekday and the traffic was light, I reckoned that the risks were minimal. Instead, he charged at a motorbike, which instantly clipped and killed him. As if that weren´t mortifying enough, the bike crashed and injured its driver and within a short time, I was confronted by some cops, all of it witnessed by gossipy neighbors (when you live in a tightknit rural community, maintaining a reputation as a decent, responsible person is vital).

While these manifestations of negative energies may strike my readers as insignificant, I hope that they will explain the emotional charge behind what happened afterwards. Like a mariner who salvages a memento of his loved ones from a shipwreck in which he´s lost everything else, the article, based on the diary, which I subsequently wrote became a holy relic for me.

After a month, I recovered, and apart from having to indemnify the motorcyclist for his broken wrist and damage to his bike, there were no repercussions of the accident. By then, the diary was safely archived in my computer, but it was only the raw material and I decided to let it settle for a while before turning it into a comprehensible account of my time in Mapiá.

To do that, I faced two challenges. What with the heat, discomfort and double cultural shock (one from the jungle, the other from frequent sessions of ayahuasca), I was only able to write about my experiences in a cryptic, telegraphic manner, so that the diary was less memoir than aide-memoire and my memory tends to be fallible. So, the first step was to decipher it, in the expectation that its sign language would be a prompt for recovering les temps perdu. That done, I had to assess the extent to which my future readers would be knowledgeable about the setting, personages, idiosyncrasies and ceremonies in Mapiá.

When I began drinking and writing about that medicine (a.k.a as yajé Colombia) in the early 1990´s, it was virtually terra incognita for educated Westerners apart from a few field scientists, anthropologists and government officials who worked in the remote frontiers of Colombia and Peru. Nowadays, many in our mainstream society are familiar with at least the basics, thanks to a host of books and online reports and videos, and thousands of Americans and Europeans have taken advantage of the growing sector of ayahuasca tourism to try it at first hand.

The current global fascination with ayahuasca has mostly been limited to its indigenous practices, which are thought to be the most “authentic”, a vague term, I believe. The animistic chants, feather crowns, necklaces of fangs and thatched ceremonial huts of the native healers certainly live up to the expectations of their First World clients and they also have a certain tradition behind them, but they also make a lot of concessions to modern times, like cellphones, online advertising, canned music and the like.

Due to my own circumstances and temperament, I belong to the indigenous school, hence I was initially skeptical when I ventured into Santo Daime but I eventually realized that they have a powerful magic of their own, that is, their ritualism is a valid complement to the native one, instead of its debasement.

The problem was getting this across to my potential readers. Since my aim was to publish it in the academic journal of the Amazonian branch of the National University of Colombia, I assumed that most of them would already have a direct or second-hand knowledge of the country´s indigenous ceremonies (and also be able to at least read my text in English) but few would be familiar with Santo Daime, which in many respects is sui generis.

As their ritual calendar, crucifixes, images of and hymns to Jesus, the Virgin and different saints show, the religious orientation of Santo Daime is strongly Christian, but not exclusively so, as evidenced by its official name: the Eclectic Church of the Universal Flowing Light. Thus, it also draws on Afro, indigenous, oriental and Kardec “spiritist” beliefs, among others. Next is the “staging” of their ceremonies, which marks the strongest contrast with the indigenous ones, which, in Colombia, tend to be rather informal about the site; dress, placement and posture of the participants; separation of the sexes; permission to talk, sing or play a guitar or leave the ceremonial hut and so forth (though a few healers are strict about such norms). The only (tacit) one is not to disturb the journeys into the beyond of others, but, here too, the taitas (as the Colombian healers are known) tolerate a certain degree of collective “free expression” (dance, song, totemic cries) that can be noisy and even chaotic at times.

By contrast, the ceremonies of Santo Daime are strictly regimented, indeed choreographed, starting with their temples, which are hexagonal, with an elaborately decorated altar in the center, surrounded by rows of lines marked on the floor which the participants stand in, the men on one side and the women on the facing one. Then, there are Daime´s manner of cooking of the medicine, ceremonial dress, the colorful decoration of their temples and especially, the collective singing of hymns and dancing in unison which sometimes go on for ten to twelve hours.

After that, I would have to explain the natural setting, history, infrastructure, customs, persons I met etc. of an isolated community, located deep in the jungle (at almost a whole day´s voyage by launch from the nearest town) whose whole reason for being is ayahuasca. And even its economy, in which the circulation of money is minimal.

I decided to intersperse sections of an objective description of the life and rituals of Mapiá with sections, based on my diary, of my personal impressions, including some (I hope) tactful references to the inter-personal conflicts which are inevitable in such a small, remote and enclosed community.

It was a lot of hard work but, as a writer who claims the world record for pink slips from all but three of the many scores of publications I´d approached, I was nearly certain that the piece would appear, because it wasn´t a “blind” submission (meaning from a nobody) but addressed to a journal which had already accepted six articles of mine, all related to the medicinal/sacred plant substances of the indigenous Amazon. After being ignored by so many blind magazines, it was a tremendous incentive. How wrong my expectations proved to be!

By then, the editor responsible for their publication, a friend on the faculty of the university, had now been replaced by another professor. That didn´t discourage me, because I assumed that, as a specialist in Amazon studies, he would understand that my article perfectly fit the agenda of the journal.

Revising my emails to and from the new editor, I give a rough chronology of what happened next:

July 2024 –submission of article

A while later – article rejected because I didn´t use the online platform, which hadn´t worked, using an email attachment instead.

August 2024 – submitted a condensed version, reducing the 15,000 words to the 10,000 word limit.

Nov 2024 – reply from the editor: “Our decision is to reject the article because the author did not reduce the text within the specified time limit.

Irrational, because, first, the article is not about “current events” and could appear in a future issue. And second, while an editor (after consulting his editorial committee and peer reviewers, as is standard in academic journals) has every right to reject a submission, it should NOT be because it hasn´t complied with petty bureaucratic requisites, which fail to take into account its rigor, originality and clarity.

Instead, it should be on the grounds that it does not add to our knowledge of the subject or is not within the scope of the publication or is poorly written or researched or it´s style is awkward or it has factual errors. However, if the article is appealing, but not quite up to the standards of the publication (without being absolutely atrocious), the editor is obliged to suggest corrections to the author and as happened with some of my previous articles, finally publish the piece after the author has corrected its flaws.

Either way, the most important obligation of an editor is to communicate with the author. What followed and continues to this very day clearly shows that he failed to honor it: an absolute refusal to respond to many emails and cellphone calls asking for at least an explanation and at best, an apology.

It didn´t take me long to get the point. Nevertheless, righteous indignation led me to continue to hassle him and, irrational though it may have been, it did give me a spiteful satisfaction, the posthumous one I imagine Swift enjoyed when it was too late to right the wrongs which enraged him, along with the hope that others would follow his example.

Due to the same urge, I wasn´t willing to give up either: even if my crusade was obviously futile, I might be even to create a scandal that would rebound on the editor. Hence, I also e-mailed my grievance to the editor´s assistant, the former editor, my ex-wife (who lives in Leticia), other members of the faculty I´d met when I taught English at the campus for a semester and academics I didn´t know who were on the advisory board of the journal. Some promised to contact the editor, others never replied and a few did support me without budging the editor at all.

During all this time, my wife, son and others close to me repeatedly told me that I was a dreamer, a deranged, vengeful monomaniac. Which maybe I was, but, as I kept telling them, it was a matter of principle, which is the origin of righteous indignation. While I was sometimes tempted to give up, another consideration kept me going. To explain: I would amend Dr. Johnson´s dictum to read “No one but a fool ever wrote anything that wasn´t going to be published”.

Oh, if I could only go back to my time in New York City in the 1950´s and 60´s and somehow retrieve what I began writing decades later! It was the pre-internet era when print was flourishing, you could pick up a phone and actually speak to an editor (sometimes with the recommendation of a writer or critic both of you knew), instead of a faceless computer jockey who (I´ve sensed) is sometimes a trendy twenty-something with a minimal knowledge of the canon. In the good old days, an unknown, free-lance writer with a modicum of talent had a good chance of being published and even eking out a living from his work.

The whole point of writing is to be read. Granted, by discriminating readers, which, while always a minority, would be a larger one than the 35 or so followers of my weekly Substack post, whereas the journal in question is initially read by hundreds and later consulted by others, the reason why, to my surprise, some of my previous articles have been cited by academics investigating ayahuasca and kindred subjects.

However, after nearly two years of failing to get published in it, I was about to throw in the towel and turn to Substack. Then, I had a last-minute inspiration: contact the director of the Leticia branch of the university, who, as his superior, might be able to pressure the editor to at least send me a convincing explanation for rejecting my article.

To do that, I needed the person´s email, but when I looked at the website of the Leticia branch of the university and emailed the members of the faculty I´d appealed to before, it was to no avail. Despite my aversion to A.I., I resorted to it: lo and behold, the email of the director immediately appeared on the screen.

After a detailed explanation of the situation in the email I wrote to her, I resorted to a kind of Machiavellian blackmail, saying that the editor´s lack of professionalism and elemental courtesy would, if it became known, harm the international reputation of the university.

A few weeks after that, she sent me a text message in which she said she would send my email to the editor. After another few weeks went by, without any response from her or the editor, I sent a text message to her, pointing out that if “send” only meant “forward”, it would be useless, because after ignoring me for nearly two years, the editor wasn´t going to change his mind, unless . . .she used whatever authority she had over him to support me.

From the start, I was almost certain that my ploy was going to be in vain as well. It would be a violation of the academic protocol which ordains that each member of the faculty dare not meddle with the fief of another, as proved by the absence of any message from one or another during the two months from then to now.

As revenge is a dish best eaten cold, I have taken my time to reveal the cause of my righteous indignation on Substack, in the full knowledge that the journal is never going to publish the article and its impact will be minimal. But now that it´s a matter of public record, so to speak, in the long-term it might embarrass the guilty parties and lead to reforms.

As to posting the article itself on Substack, I am still of two minds. After all the effort I put into it, I obviously want it to be read, even if only by a few. On the other hand, since the mainstream cultural and literary magazines I would prefer it to be published in often reject pieces that have appeared in other outlets, I now have to calculate the chances of their discovering it on a Substack site by an obscure and little-read author. Whatever happens, I will continue to honor the injunction on the tomb of Jonathan Swift: “Go forth, traveller, And imitate, if you can, A valiant champion of manly freedom”. Vamos a ver.