Myths of Origin

by Catherynne M. Valente

  It is all familiar now, after the passage of constellations and the ingestion of the Compass Rose, holding now that flaming cross inside me, in this sign thou shalt conquer, north-brow south-hips east-wrist west-thigh, in this sign thou shalt walk until the end of days, in this sign thou shalt blaze and burn, in this sign thou shalt stride tall through this Place, this happy Garden of Lies, in this sign thou shalt eat berries and lie under the moon, and let it tan your skin silver.

  I carry Direction inside me like a child, a watery infant daughter of a circuit of dawns, connected by the fibrous strength of my spinal fluid and thread sun from the enamel of my teeth. She, in all her diamond gills and sunfish fins is anchored in my rich belly, wrapping her precious little Compass-form in my umbilicus like a mummy, and so I am her sarcophagus, too. Her mother and her coffin.

  And the directions never change, magnetic north is always at the crown of my mercurial head, south always at the arch of my holy foot, for I carry the Rose within, growing like a Vedic moon. O serpentine I, having a tail fat with scales linked like opaline chain mail, and thus no way to give birth to this precise little cat-child, kept inside an adamant muscle wall. It pushes against my ribcage, stretching the skin of my lifting belly. Amphibious and infertile, webbed into frozen fecundity, Great-With-Child, never Birthed, never Mother. Trapped in the swallowing, breasts heavy and pendulous with milk, unable ever to feel the tug of that small mouth against them. Ever huge with the weight of oceans, of a thousandthousand mountains, halted in freeze frame like an urn. Ambrosial blood swimming between us, the eater and the eaten and the eater again, sucking at the soil of the womb like a clear-petalled lilac. And in this habit of motion-forward, I have learned:

  The Void of the Labyrinth does not exactly stretch, or exactly coil, or exactly twist. But it snarls. A bolt of belligerent lightning-silk angrily unraveled, corded, torn, circumnavigating itself in a rattling feint, coming apart and crushing in. And it changes, like the horned moon, cycling without pattern. Walls mutate like film noir rape scenes, tearing at pearl skirts with mud-brick fingers that leave stigmatic bruises.

  Roads. Oh god, I cannot speak of it, but the Roads have filled me entirely, stuffed and crammed into every corner, oozing out of my body like icy caviar. They are my avenue-bracelets and my fat sapphire street chokers, my gold scarab short-cut armbands and my boulevard harem anklets, they are my cobblestone coin belts and my alleyway-agate earrings. Long Paths criss-cross my torso like ammunition belts, and the innumerable dead-ends pierce my breasts beautifully, hanging pendulously, swinging with laughter, slapping triumphantly against my bronzed belly.

  And. There are here tremors of Doorways. They appear in the morning like dew-dampened butterflies, manic and clever. They travel in packs. At night the hinges change from right to left, or vanish completely. Some are no more than flaps of fur, iridescent in the light of the Walls, or sweeping veils of gauze and silk, long curtains like a woman’s hair. Like my hair. Some are hard and ornate, carved with a fantastic code of Arabic and Greek, letters drawn in a paste of crushed diamonds and the hooves of a drowned horse, written with the elegant tip of a black cigarette holder. These have heavy knockers and bulbous knobs, brassy and baronial, in intricate shapes; I have seen a knob like a griffin’s fierce mouth, open in a scream with her tongue made of rose quartz, feathers fanning out magnificently in silver on the face of the Door. And a falcon-claw knocker all of amber, the reptilian talon, the three terrible nails ending in their razor points, all wrapped about with the leather of bondage, the flying trails of a hunter’s bird cascading down the polished Door, ending in a large lacquered ball with which to strike and enter.

  But they are not beautiful to me, any longer. They cluster whispering and break and dance in and out of vision. And they hunt. Like sleek foxes they creep along the places where the Wall meets the Road and wait. They will glide up silently and swallow you as you lie beneath a sighing willow, or stalk you through three dozen twists and turns of the Labyrinth, seizing you as you come upon one of the long boulevards. They are savage creatures, and hungry. On what do they open? I have learned only to avoid them, and I could not say. I did not exactly come here, and I will not exactly go. I have always been Here, I have always been about to escape. I have never been arrived, always in transit, slowly digested by the Road with Doors snapping at my heels. I will never tell the tale of:

  “One day I woke up and I was here.”

  But perhaps it was so, I could not say. Then equally perhaps I shall one day fall asleep and be not here. If this is true, what came before has dissolved from me, lost like milk teeth. But I think, rather, that it has always been as it is, and there was never a beforethis nor will be an afternow. I am accepting. This is not a thing to be solved, or conquered, or destroyed. It is. I am. We are. We conjugate together in darkness, plotting against each other, the Labyrinth to eat me and I to eat it, each to swallow the hard, black opium of the other. We hold orange petals beneath our tongues and seethe. It has always been so. It grinds against me and I bite into its skin.

  I accept. It is not always unpleasant under this particular cubic yardage of sky. I once (will? never?) thought in miles and leagues, counting my measured footsteps with my abacus-lips. I once chanted the low, quiet black magic of numbers and distance, of meters and kilometers like coiled snakes in baskets. I wrote over my whole body with sap, calculating how many times my feet had abused the earth, how many times the stones had gnawed my toes. No more, I have forgotten numbers. I washed the sap in a marble fountain of a serpent-woman spewing clear water from her gaping mouth, that despairing cavern. And I walked on, my pack secure on squared shoulders. I accept.

  I am not exactly alone. There are Others. Of course there are the Doors, and they are company of a brutal sort, but I glimpse now and again a flash of golden fur or tinfoil tail in a stream. And I hear rustling in the nights that is not the sibilant gliding of an impending Door. I could not say what creeps and whispers through the branches and down the threaded Road, but I hear it, and I am not afraid.

  I am the Seeker-After. I am the Dragon and the Damsel, I am the Castle and the Dungeon, the Mad and the Madness. I am the Man and the Bar, I am the Sword and the Flesh. I am the Player and the Game.

  I am the Walker and the Maze.

  YUME NO HON:

  THE BOOK

  OF DREAMS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: The chapter headings are taken from the Japanese calendar of the Heian period, which are in turn adapted from the Chinese calendar, which is made up of 72 divisions.

  The chapter “Rotted Weeds Metamorphose Into Fireflies” is in part adapted from the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian creation myth.

  The world of dew

  Is the world of dew

  And yet, and yet—

  —Issa

  The East Wind Melts the Ice

  Put a truce to any thoughts of departure. I am she who glides through the sky when the snow is falling fast, the lady of frost and darkness. I am a ghost, which is not to say I ever lived. I am a memory, which is not to say I ever died. I begin at the moment the ice on the river begins to crack like bones of glass. I am a silence written on pulp-mash paper, in ink drawn from village-wells.

  Inward is the only conceivable direction. All arrows point within. So too, this book, which faces down and in, along the sallow thread of my tongue, into darkness and out again.

  If I were to tell you that I am an old woman-hermit, who lives on the side of a mountain I cannot name in the year of the ascension of Taira Kiyomori, this would be true. It would, of course, be as true to say I stood outside the Theban wall whose mud-bricks are the color of pages and asked riddles with lips of verdigris. It would be as true to say I drove six brown horses around the walls of a burning city, that I gathered my husband in fourteen pieces and knelt in delta-silted river reeds with my arms full of his flesh. It would be as true to say I invented the world last year, from coffee beans and plantain leaves mixed in my veins. We are a body of Contradiction, flesh-full an
d fleshless.

  But perhaps I am just a mad old woman squatting in the wreckage of a pagoda halfway up the mountain, mending my sandals for the seventeenth time and scraping in my bean patch, waiting for the new green shoots to slide out of the earth like stars. Perhaps I am only she, Ayako of One-Name-Only, who each night brews a sour tea of dandelion roots and watches the stars slide out of the sky like bean-shoots. It is possible that I only dream her, her rags and thin hands, her snow-cold calves and breathing eyes. It is possible I have never been anything but her.

  If I do not dream her, then these are my hands deep in the soil of the Mountain whose silence booms in her heart as though it were an empty hall. If I do not dream her, then the others are a mist on the wild goose’s wing , the dream of my lion-haunches and terrible teeth.

  I wish to be dreaming her, so that I may call these others true.

  Larvae Begin to Twitch in Their Cocoons

  (To be alone is to work at solitude. It is very difficult, a lifetime’s work, like the building of a temple. The first years are the carving of steps from camphor wood and the bodies of infant cicadas. Desire is still present like a moth—he flits onto your hair, your thigh, your smallest toe. He sits so quietly, small and brown, intricate as leaves. And you are not truly alone, because he is there, slightly furry against your skin, breathing.

  The next years are the erection of a great Gate, red as poppy-wine, with guardian statues of jasper and knuckled silver. Now you are learning, you have begun to fashion your solitude with skilled hands, to chisel away at all that is not loneliness, to dwell in seclusion as you would in moon-white larval flesh. Desire has gone, but Need remains, and you look down the path for the shape of any human at all. Soon you begin to dream that they come. Your joints have begun to fuse, to make an utterly separate beauty.

  The interior hall comes next, in shadow and rough-cut incense. You had thought yourself a Master already, but in these years like flapping crows you begin to scream, and your screams become the temple bells of perfect bronze, and you clutch their silken ropes, caught in the great work. These are the maddened years, when you have only the strangling Self. You are a pre-suicidal mass. There is no release from it now, and you begin to sow seeds in a little garden, understanding for the first time that there are no endings for you.

  After a bushel of winters tied with chewed leather, the roof is laid out, corners dipped in boiling gold, arcing up towards the sky, which has begun to speak to you. You have polished and cut and painted with hawk’s blood the edifice of your solitude, and it shines so under the dead moon.

  And you are the icon, the holy relic to be housed. Your bones have calcified into sanctity. You are the created thing, unfathomably apart, clothed in antlers and rain-spouts. There is nothing now but you and Alone, not even a body, which long ago hushed itself into the snow-storms. It is completed, your magnum opus. A fontanel has re-appeared at the crown of your head, pulsing gold and silver—you are an infant again in the arms of the empty air.)

  I have been alone for a long time.

  Fish Swim Upstream, Breaking the Ice with Their Backs

  The dream-pagoda has five floors. It is red like dripping wax and in my cloud-body I have not climbed to the top. I think I meant to, once, but the cycles of fat salmon spawning took my smooth limbs and left juniper twigs. I huddle, or she does, the dream-Ayako, on the first level, against a wall that was once lacquered green and blue.

  I cannot tell if it is me curled on the damp earth. The gray spider perched on her dusty wall seems equally myself. I apologize, it is what happens when the loneliness is built up and frescoed in costly paints. Solitude becomes populated with a legion of selves, each laid on each like stacked frames of film, like pig’s ears in the noontime market, or the floors of a pagoda that once was red. The original is lost, just one of a thousand thousand silvern copies, scattered upwind.

  Laying over the dream-tower is the dream-wall. It is brown, glum-grained and jaundiced by a Sun which frowns under her straw hat. Dream-men pressed the earth together to build it, and now it is my Nest. In this copy, which is not Ayako but comes from her like a long braid which begins at her crown, I can feel the bristle of fur like a bronze brush on my thighs, the jut of morphine-wings on my back. It is the dream of the lion-haunches, which is familiar as a shoe.

  A Boy comes to the dream-wall. He is smooth and brown as an almond tree, with wide-set eyes and a cruel mouth. His hips sing of palm-oiled pleasures and I like him in a moment, because his beauty touches me like a hand. My paws are deep-padded and hungry—I breathe his smell in sheaves, smell of cinnamon and burned bread. My belly yearns for him, knows he is meant for me, will swell inside me like a black apple. I am certain of him, of how he will feel inside me, how his sweat will taste.

  But he is waiting for me, and I oblige, for the dream-body knows the thing for which it is intended. Riddles, and games, and adulation.

  “What is my name?” I ask in a voice like the sound of the Mountain gnawing his knees. The Boy looks at me with a quixotic raise of his brows.

  “That is not a very good riddle,” he replies, and I let his voice slide through me like spiced honey. He is worried, now, for he must suspect that he cannot possibly guess the answer among the possible answers that spread out in his brain like a Euclidean plane. When he attempts it, I can hear his tongue thicken in his mouth.

  “You are named Truth, for only Truth can loose what is bound.”

  And it is a good answer, better than most can dredge from themselves, pulling their words up like wooden well-buckets. My belly exults.

  “No, beautiful boy, dream-within-dream. I am called She. She who travels when the snow flies fast. She who devours with woolen teeth. She who asks. I am all possible shes. There is no other She born under any mockery of a moon. I am the she-Wolf, the she-Axe, the she-Belly. I am the destination of that which is He. I cannot be guessed, and I am never known.”

  And then the dream-boy was inside me, in my throat and in my lion’s stomach, whose ulcerated walls pulse in time to the flooding of rivers. My teeth drank him, and I slept in the corpulent sun.

  Woman rises out of no-woman, and Ayako stirs in her sleep.

  River Otters Sacrifice Fish

  Metamorphosis. It is a long line of bellies, chained together flesh-wise, circling each other in a blood-black smear. The sparrows pick cold red berries from the mud, the hawks pluck the sparrows from the sky. The fish swallow grasshoppers, the otters gulp down the fish. The world eats and eats and eats, and stomach to stomach it embraces itself. Hawk is Berry, Otter is Grasshopper. Woman is Fish and Sparrow.

  Ayako sees this as she watches the new sun tiptoe on the river. She understands it, for she, too, has a belly which longs to pull creatures into it. The I-that-is-Ayako knows that dream-bellies also connect, along a strange umbilicus of tamarind bark and snow-pea shells. In the half-shelter of our ruined pagoda, I can see the stars, the constellations rotating in their angular anatomy. Over my/our flaxseed hair the kimono-sleeve stars tumble like lost feathers. The river whispers arcane spells, thick-voiced and gurgling with pleasure at the face it holds in its ripples, which is mine. The dream-face, with eyes of new apples, for in dreams, all eyes are green. The River and the Mountain split me between them—they have a treaty which is re-negotiated regularly. Codicils are added, addendums and appendices drawn up with rustling laughter. There is no time here—Thursday has been killed in his sleep. They can afford to wait.

  It is a small dream, this. It follows the seasons and eats orange kabocha squash boiled with wild greens. And into the dream occasionally some black-eyed boy or girl comes, to bring me a sack of rice or a little box of tea. They come from the dream-village, which has not the gentility to know it is a dream, because they pity the old woman on the Mountain. And I long to ask them riddles they cannot answer, I long to hold them belly-to-belly. They go back down the Mountain with innocent feet, back to huts and miso and smoked fish.

  Because in her body, I hardly speak at a
ll any longer. The rusted brass hinges of my voice have gathered dust. I put my/our hands to the soil of the garden, and can feel the heat of growing things, meant to be soon inside my body. The Mountain marks me, knows I am meant to be in his belly, etching his shape against the sky-that-is-not, pinioning the woman, the cobbled personae, the dancing cranes and bobcats and lizards and singing monkeys and squirrels to the slivers of dreams pretending to be stones. He gathers his blue and green and white to consume me, he gathers the gray and the gold. His chortling streams and the meadows lie restful and sweet, as though the moon-goddess had smoothed an emerald taffeta dress over her slender knees. He is impassive and huge, he mocks and waits.

  Inside her/me the dreams are burning, falling, raw as bark-stripped pine. There is no sound where they step, for it is possible they are not really there, that these shadows are not theirs, that she is not doubled and tripled, tumbling backwards through bodies like scalding water.

  And some secret avalanche on the far side of the Mountain rumbles as he clears his diamond throat.

  Wild Geese Go North

  I dreamed cannon-winds shot through my belly; each strand of wind carried talons and curved beaks which tore my flesh. My navel was cut out like a coin, my mouth was filled with dead leaves. I dreamed that I was the first belly. I dreamed my flesh dark and star-sewn. My womb bore up under a five-clawed hand, slit down a scarlet meridian, and black daises grew from the skin of its depths.