Bling Bling in the ATL

Was riding around with my girls Ani and Len two, three nights ago. We were en route from a fire spinning party at Freedom park to some late night food. I was unsettled. I had just worked out that Len and I had some unfinished business to do with my boyfriend - and she didn't know yet.

And I hate fire spinners. I know how to spin fire because my mom taught me Maori poi ball dance when I was young. I never learned the firedance, because it is a dance for young men. But I've seen it, been thrilled by it. I don't have a copyright on swinging live kerosene around on a string, but these kids go to Burning Man one time, then rip an ancient polynesian dance out of history into something savage and trippy. I see them, and I think, you get what you pay for - no grace, no history, no wonder. Pefe. Weak.

I'd joined the fun, tried to adapt. I know some the standard Maori spinning tricks that these kids hadn't discovered yet. They would never discover the heart of what they'd borrowed - that the fire is for warriors, for teasing the village with the beauty of young men, their courage, their strength. The firedance is peekabo for the kids - spooking your nieces and nephews with scary faces and fire, then making them see that its just uncle, and watching them giggle and lose their caution and ask you to do it again. The firedance is a sermon for the adults. When the firedancer puts out a flame with his mouth, then lights next with the heat he is taken in, he is teaching mana. He is showing the fire that passes through us, that we quench and create. He is showing us how we are alive, why we eat our enemies' bodies to steal their strength, why we revere our families in the bones of our dead.

Burning poi balls for pleasure - I don't know what that is. Perhaps these pefe palagis do not know where their body worship leads - they seem to discover it incompletely and by accident, little Donner parties starving in the wilderness. But I showed the burners in the park how to bring two discs of light spinning into one, and then in one hand, flip the double disc over your head, and back again. They clapped and called me fearless.

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An hour later, somewhere between Midtown and Buckhead, maybe a little east of the North-South backbone of skyscrapers that runs from the capital to the 75/400 junction, Ani and Len and I, we got lost. I steered us under dark trees past sleeping cul de sacs and Ani was giggling in the backseat. She sees me lost a lot. I've come to the conclusion that I have a background program which siphons off my cognitive dissonance, along with my car keys, my ability to orient myself - those little markers of where I'm going, where I am, where I'm supposed to be.

Len asked, "You know, I don't recognize anything. Where are we?" I wasn't ready to tell her about our conflict of interest, but I had a memory spasm of Oedipa Mass, her car a single melted crystal of urban horse, the onramp a hypodermic needle inserted into the freeway veins of the city. " We're in the third space of Atlanta," I replied.

Len cracked up. For her the third space is a dehydrated trauma patient who tucks liters of blood and IV fluid into nowhere, then suddenly drowns. Neither in the cell nor in the vein, the third space is before the shock, after the permeability of your capilaries fail, the lining of your organs absorb life force with capacity unknown to man made products. If Huggies could patent a diaper, or Kotex a tampon, that had a tenth the absorbtive capacity of your gastrointestinal wall under stress, they would kill the competition.

For me the third space is cocktail knowledge for doctor parties. If I get a group that can't banter with patients I pull out the third space and dress it up as T.S. Eliot's shadow, hanging between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence. As I drink, it grows. The third space is where I hang my car keys when I'm upset. Its the time-space dimple where memories disappear and reemerge throughout life. It's where I am right now, its the punchline when you cross a Jew and a cannibal, its lost, Samoa, nowhere.

I get sucked into my third space for days. Years, to be honest. But the crises deserve special attention. Today I light my way out by reading the Genesis. Sort of literary fire spinning, I suppose. The good book has many interpretations - I come at it more from Friendster (the 'Judas begat Phares and Zara and Phares begat Esrom' of our times) and Thucydides than from some wish to comprehend G-d. For me, it is the story of people and of a people.

I can't read the Torah, emerge generation by generation through time to arrive at today. There are no cannibals in the bible. Manna is bread from heaven, not the flesh of our brothers. There are no references to people eaters. By page three of Genesis, the Samoans had left the building. Togarmah, one of Noah's grandkids, he takes off for Turkey. His children who did not stay populate India, Asia, Indonesia. And their children - archeological evidence ties the Samoans to migrations out of Taiwan via Papua New Guinea 10,000 years ago. God probably sent us to find some islands because he promised Noah he woudn't make another flood.

I have to circumvent the story of Genesis, journey round the world and rejoin it in three thousand years after the epilogue. Thousands of years and umpteen generations later, some skysplitter alien papalagi sons of Issac show up on the horizon dead smack in the middle of the pacific and find us waiting there. Fearless. The papalagis give us the wheel and electricity, time and business, industry and garbage. Most importantly a book and a map. They say to us, 'The world is round. If you go far enough, you come back where you started. Look here, this is where we are from, and read this book, it is the story of our darkness and light - of our common humanity.'

And we say, "This is us? This little dot? These unholy, least significant of gods people? Who wrote this book, who drew this map?" And then we eat them.