By Hanns Heinz Ewers 1907 (Die blauen Indianer)Copyright 2009 by Joe E. Bandel
Translated by Joe E Bandel
Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923
In reading over my notes my first observation is that science needs to determine whether and to what extent the role of a restricted diet of fish plays in the gradual development of blue coloring in the Momoskapans as well as the still apparently uninvestigated coloring of the Santa Marta Indians as well.
These Colombian tiger skinned Indians eat a lot of tortoise, the Mexican blue skinned eat absolutely none. Perhaps this is a good starting point for further research?
Then it needs to be determined if the increased memory of the tribe is related to this restricted diet from the sea as well. One can only wish that limping science would finally once get to the bottom of this.
As for the facts themselves, I don’t need them anymore. I have spent a long half-year in the attempt and received a series of long vanished childhood memories that are thoroughly uninteresting to me. I have become completely indifferent on the matter and conclude that I was only able to last that long due to my strong stomach and to satisfy my equally strong curiosity.
Unfortunately I find that with the Momoskapan Indians no single individual remembers all the events of his life back into the first year of life. But many do have a few memories that reach back that far.
This is not that remarkable when you consider that this little tribe for countless generations has never eaten meat or enjoyed some other fruit of the field. They depend exclusively upon the gifts from the sea and also from a certain little mussel that is very rich in phosphorous.
By the way, this practice is not determined from some religious law where other food from the land is “taboo” or forbidden. It is simply because there is nothing else growing, creeping or running in this pathetic wilderness fit to eat. The blue Indians do enjoy a little variety and were extremely grateful for the remainder of my canned provisions.
The Momoskapans are also very lazy, unintelligent and extremely peace loving. They can’t understand the use of weapons at all. Through the visit of the French doctors they have become accustomed to receiving gifts from the strangers that reside with them.
They came to me with the greatest willingness and as soon as they halfway grasped what I wanted brought all the members of the tribe that were distinguished by an especially strong memory. While this was a good start these confessionals soon became ordeals, especially because of needing to have the conversations through my two interpreters and old Kaziken of the Momoskapan tribe that only spoke a little Islapekish. My good start was not very long lasting.
Then one day a yellow one was brought that told me a most amazing tale. First he gave an account of all kinds of foolish stuff out of his earliest childhood. But then he spoke of his honeymoon, told how they captured thirty large red snappers and cooked them. Shortly after that he and his wife were in Acapulco. He described exactly how it looked. That is not at all remarkable except that the boy was scarcely thirteen years old, had never been married and had never been away from the Momohuichic river.
I asked him about it. He looked at me very stupidly and grew quiet. But the old one grinned and said, “Pala”. (it was his father)
I must say that I didn’t sleep that night and it was not mosquitoes that kept me awake. Either the youth had lied to me or I had discovered an astonishing phenomenon, a memory that went back beyond birth and was pulled out of a parent’s lifetime.
Couldn’t it be possible? I have green eyes like my mother and a protruding forehead like my father. Everything can be inherited, every characteristic, talent, every disposition. Why can’t the memory be inherited?
The young kitten that is barked at by a dog arches its back and hisses. Why? Because it instinctively remembers out of the memories of thousands of generations that that is its best defense! The hedgehog curls into a ball with bristles on every side as you turn it. This action also comes from some strange custom that it has not learned on its own. Instead it comes out of the memories of an unending number of ancestors.
That is what instinct is, the memories of the ancestors. And these Indians whose brains work no differently than ours, these Indians who are only unique in the foods that their forefathers also enjoyed have evolved this wonderful memory. Why shouldn’t an ancestral and higher memory be capable of being inherited out of the brains of the forefathers? The forefathers live again in their children.
Yes, but what lives on? Perhaps the grimace! The daughter is musical like papa and the youth left handed like mama. Coincidence? No, no. We die and our children are entirely different people. The mother was a prostitute and the son became a missionary or the father was Attorney General and his daughter sings in a casino.
Our undying souls must comfort themselves by singing Hallelujah in heavens green meadows somewhere far away from this earth we know and love. It is the only thing permitted.
We take great pains to do something so that our memory will not die. We die peacefully when we are in encyclopedias. Then we are immortal- for a second in a few centuries. Still everyone wants to live a little longer in humanities memory or at least in the memories of their friends and family. That is why the fat citizen has children, to carry on his name.
It’s true; the artist has it right. Somehow we live on in our children many generations after our death. As women with emotions and sorrow they carry and give birth under miserable torment but with each birth we rise from the dead and as men later fertilize our great-grandchildren. Then once more blossoms our first thought drawn from a chorus in a distant land and we first become aware of our groping feet and once more cast our wavering seed upon the rocks.
Something lives on and perhaps the best. Many die- and perhaps the best. Who is to know? Everything dies and what does not die is kept safely in memory. What is forgotten is entirely dead, not that which dies. People are beginning to grasp that it is not the remembering of the past that is good but the forgetting. Remembering is foolishness, an illness, and a disgusting pestilence that chokes out the new life. We do not want to constantly look back in honor of our fathers and mothers but more deeply separate from them because we are more than they are and greater than they are!
We want to tear down yesterday because we know that today we are alive and that our today is a much better one. That is our strong belief and it is so strong that we do not even think about it. We don’t consider that our great today- tomorrow will be a pathetic yesterday only fit for the rubbish heap.
It is an eternal war with eternal defeat if we do not gain victory over our inherited memories. We are slaves to the ideas of our fathers. We spend our lives tormenting ourselves in their chains, suffocating in the restrictive fortress that our forefathers have created. We need to build a bigger house. When we are dead it will be worn out as well and our grandchildren will lie in the chains that we have created.
But if that is the truth what is it that I have now discovered? Am I today at the same time my father, my forefathers and myself? If what my brain carries does not die but lives on in my children and grandchildren how can the eternal revolution ever become reconciled?
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I gave commands that everyone be brought to me whose memories extended back beyond birth. Everyday someone was brought, men, women and children. I determined that the memories of the father’s and of the mother’s both extended back but the latter prevailed by far.
In all cases tribal members could only remember portions of events out of the lifetimes of their parents. The most frequent were coincidental to the marriage celebrations in general as well as to the last year of the parent’s life before the child was born.
In one case I was able to determine that the memory was out of an episode of a life even more generations back. This was with a young girl whose mother had died at her birth. Her memories went back to the lifetime that apparently belonged to her grandmother or great-grandmother.
These confessions in themselves were all inconceivably uninteresting. They all repeated themselves in the same variations, sitting there almost sleeping and looking like grey headed sea eagles. Out of the totality of my notes I only have two points of interest that appear significant.
My blue confessors never once said:
“My father did- My mother, my grandmother did-“
They always spoke as if it were themselves. A few of the older people like Kazike who helped interpret for me were very clear about this. Many of the remembered episodes did not relate to this life at all but were taken from a distant one and most were not particularly important or have special significance. Most of the tribal members had done the same things their parents had done.
The second point is this:
They themselves never remembered experiencing the death of their father or their mother. That is most natural because their parent’s memory that they carried never went beyond the moment of their own conception. Almost all of them later saw their parents die with their own eyes resulting perhaps in the unconscious tendency of taking these memories as their own.
This gives rise to the little paradox that is sometimes amusing enough as when the boy that has never left his sandy beach describes the majesty of Acapulco or when another youth scarcely ten years old speaks with the wise mien of an ancient midwife of his seven births. Or when a child cries in mourning that he has been seized by a fish and drown. The spirit of a little brother lives in him that his mother had given birth to before he was born and passed on to him.
