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Beaming and the Beginning



Loren McIntyre is an accomplished photographer and old Amazonian hand but in his enthusiasm for photographing an 'uncontacted' tribe allows himself to be led into the jungle without laying a trail. Lost, he is now wholly dependent on their continued friendly disposition towards him. To add to this complexity, none of the tribe, at this point, has anyone who speaks either Portuguese or Spanish. He is adrift in a wholly impenetrable linguistic space except for body language and the 'beaming'.

The beaming is McIntyre's terminology for his communication with one of the tribe's headmen, a form of telepathy, where McIntyre finds in his head words emerging in English that he feels comes from the headman, and which the headman's subsequent behavior confirms. McIntyre is conscious that this makes him sound deranged (from the perspective of our current materialist assumptions) yet it is a conviction that never leaves him - and the existence of this ''ancient" form of communion/communication is confirmed later by another tribesman, from a wider group, who does speak Portuguese. MacIntyre's own genetic interpretation of how 'beaming' arose strikes this reader as unconvincing but the sincerity of the perceived phenomena is not so. It has a living tangibility about it.

If this were not strange enough, the tribe's wider behavior is deeply puzzling. They seem to be gathering, and preparing to go on a taxing journey but this journey is not in space but in time. The tribe is going to 'the beginning'. Feeling a profound sense of the pressure of the encroaching outside world, their response is to go into the beginning so they can be free of all that is not them. Entering the beginning is accompanied by ritual, including the ingesting of hallucinogenic substances, realizing a conviction that going there will release them into a new mode of life. 

Whether it does or not, we never fully discover because McIntyre makes a harrowing escape, during a flood, and the tribe is dispersed but this ritualized time travel leads McIntyre into serious reflections on the nature of time, the contrast between indigenous and ''civilized" and our fascination with beginnings of all kinds, including his own in the sources of rivers, in this case the Amazon.

The second half of the book recounts McIntyre's search for the Amazon's source, successful as it turns out, and how it confirms at least one of the tribes' intuitions of whence the river comes - from the sky, from the snow/ice compacting on a distant mountain range, trickling down the 'right' side of the mountain - and the river's circular motion - rain to water flow to evaporation back to rain. Everything eventually returns to its beginning. As he stands by his discovery, he feels the presence of the headman who continues to communicate with him from ''the beginning'' through the beaming.

The whole reminds you of how that sense of a paradise lost (and its reclamation) is profoundly cross-cultural - our origins haunt us and suggest to us certain potential futures - as here too in the Himalayas where too at a time of social stress, a lama leads a search for a lost kingdom, not quite of this world, a lingering paradise: https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2019/04/searching-for-paradise-in-hidden.html Here to the outcome remains ambiguous - the supernatural likes to hide!

Meanwhile, the book as a whole as well as being deeply thoughtful is a rollicking read as simply adventure, both harrowing and uplifting - and comes with all those terrible Amazonian insects that bite, bore, and burrow!


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