Atdtda27: You people really just believe everything you're taught, 776-778

[Paul Nightingale]

Riverbanks replace maps to guide Kit and Prance in their search for
Magyakan, "everywhere, and mysterious--a heroic being with unearthly gifts",
a description that sees him likened to the taiga. There is a loss of the
overview provided by maps; so one is always here, perhaps, although what
follows is a form of mapping that will challenge Kit's subjectivity.

Reference to the taiga draws attention to its spread across continents, the
way it ignores political (ie human) boundaries; and what follows is an
account of myth's similar capacity for travel. Or resistance. For Prance the
taiga represents darkness, aka Shamanism, "the common enemy" (777) that
religion, ie organised religion, must try to "eradicate". Authority and
resistance-as-ignorance, defined as the practices of "primitive people".

Kit suggests that Agdy/Agdi/Ogdai is "just the name of whoever sends these
iron things down" etc (776), a reading alternative to Prance's emphasis on
"conflation" (which in turn signifies ignorance, or myths that travel, a
localised ignorance of the controlling overview). Cf. the earlier stories
surrounding the so-called Kieselguhr Kid, who might or might not be one
person. If indeed the Kid is Webb, succeeded by Reef and/or Frank, then this
is another area of Traverse life that excludes Kit.

Kit's function here is to provoke Prance through interrogation. His
introspective account of the terrain has given way to a role as interviewer,
all of which involves mouthing the party line: "... no 'state religion' in
the U.S.A. ..." etc (777). This is a clash of histories, alternative big
pictures, Kit offering "it's guaranteed in the Constitution", Prance
countering with a critique ("one long religious war ..." etc) that
deconstructs the (localised--what Americans believe in) myth of the
constitution. The exchange concludes with an attempt on Kit's part to offer
a personal alternative: "Guess I'll have to go to Cambridge and get smart"
(778), recalling and replaying the trajectory he did follow in going to
Yale. Prance, referring to his own former self as "a religious youth" notes
that "[i]t might easily have taken other forms".

One thinks of another journey undertaken by Kit, with Colfax to see Tesla;
returning to New York, Colfax tells Kit he could never successfully hide
from his father: "Sooner or later you find you're trusting people you
shouldn't ..." (329). What Prance here calls "these conflations" (776) is
similar to the operation of the Twin Vibes. According to Prance, people
believe whatever shamans tell them: "it's like Americans, only different"
(777). At the end of the section/chapter Kit "recall[s] the purity, the
fierce, shining purity of Lake Baikal, and how he had felt standing in the
wind" (778). Repetition in this sentence emphasises the impact the scene had
on him as the chapter opened (768). A pristine beauty was accompanied there
by a "certainty" that has been succeeded, or replaced, in the narrative by a
"bickering numbness of spirit" (778). At the end of the chapter he recalls
Hassan, whose inscrutable 'otherness' proved less confrontational than
Prance's mockery.