CHORUS II:
Oh, I don’t know, he looks after it as well as he can, sick and lame as he is, and people help him, after all. But the creek cut off that bend there, and he didn’t irrigate enough.
CHORUS III:
Somebody was saying he used to be very prosperous.
CHORUS I:
Well, and so he did. But nothing prospers for him these days, it seems.
CHORUS IV:
That poor old cow, the brindle, she was the last of his family cattle in the herds, wasn’t she?
CHORUS II:
Every lamb his ewes bore was sevai.
CHORUS IV:
Nothing he looks after bears; nothing he cares for grows.
CHORUS V:
It makes my back ache to see him trying to work there. He can hardly lift the hoe.
CHORUS III:
What does he bother trying to work for, anyhow? That corn won’t bear. A stupid old man, wasting work like that.
CHORUS I:
But what went wrong, after all? He used to be prosperous, as you said—wealthy, generous, a river flowing! What went wrong?
CHORUS III:
I’ll ask him. Hey, old Chandi! What did you do, so that everything went wrong for you?
CHANDI (leaning on his hoe and speaking quietly and very slowly):
My wife died. My household was destroyed. My children died before me. Illness came into me. No one of my mothers’ house was left living here. What I care for perishes. What I am given I lose. What I gave is all I had and it is gone.
CHORUS III:
It’s no wonder you haven’t any friends.
CHANDI:
My people are the people of my House, the House of Summer, the Serpentine.
CHORUS IV:
Well, of course, we’ll go on looking after you. But I have to say this, it’s hard to feel friendly or brotherly about a person who does everything wrong. With a friend you feel at ease, you want to share everything, you can laugh together. Who can laugh with you? I want to burst into tears every time I see you! So I don’t really want to see you—I wish I didn’t have to.
CHORUS V:
It’s true. In the old days I used to be in love with you. I thought about you all the time. Now I never do. I’ve forgotten what your wife was named. Sickness has made you hideous; I don’t like even to touch your hand.
CHORUS I:
Dansaiedo was her name, Dansaiedo, and when I see you I always think of her, dying so terribly. I don’t want to think about that.
CHORUS III:
You turned the wheel too hard, old man, that’s the truth. You got what you asked for.
CHANDI:
I asked for nothing. I gave. When was I ungenerous?
CHORUS IV:
You were generous to a fault.
CHANDI:
How shall a human being live well, then?
CHORUS I:
If I knew that I’d tell you!
CHORUS III:
What’s the use of asking questions like that?
HORUS II:
Nobody understands such things.
CHANDI (turning to the two crouching dark figures across the Hinge):
How was I to live my life well? Can you answer me?
The two dark figures remained silent and motionless. The music clashed and jangled strangely.
As the lights were brought lower so that they cast long shadows, the first of the two dark figures rose and walked slowly to the center back of the double stage. There it turned to face the audience, revealing under its dark hood a copper mask which caught the light in a startling ruddy flash—the setting sun.
Chandi turned to face it, back to the audience. His arms came up in the broad, embracing gesture.
CHANDI:
Heya hey heya!
Heya heya!
Beautiful the day was in the Valley.
The dark figure crouched slowly down, stooping and so hiding the sun-mask. The lights darkened further.
CHANDI:
There are the stars, shining.
There is nothing between the stars,
the dark dancing.
Into the Continuing Tone the musicians suddenly began to weave the tune of the Heron Dance. Stooping and half-naked, stiffly and painfully, Chandi began to dance the dance which he practiced in splendor in the first scene: but all the motions and turns were reversed, so that the dance carried him across the stage to the right. The last of the dark figures joined him, following his movements like a shadow. Together they vanished into the darkness. In the almost completely darkened, high, large room the musicians held the Ending Tone until it died away very gradually into silence.
After the performance, I asked a member of the cast if they varied the action and dialogue much from one performance to the next, and she replied, “Well, only to fit the evening or the town. This summer we’re playing this play Clayface’s way.” Clayface was the actor who played Chandi. She went on, “I saw Chandi in Wakwaha last year, with Wind Deer; he raged and railed and went mad. He’s an older actor, he can do that. Clayface is young to play Chandi, so he does it this way, very gently. I think it works. Maybe it goes too fast at the end; but the dances he does at the beginning and the end, they’re very fine!” I agreed with her.
I asked some of the audience if they had seen widely different interpretations of this play, and found that they had; the action can be handled quite differently: for instance the fire, suicide, and illness which successively carried off Chandi’s wife, daughter, and son in this version can be one cataclysmic event, and the deaths could take place onstage if the actors want to harrow up the audience’s feelings directly. The events of Chandi’s “fortunate” and “unfortunate” years can be acted out and dwelt upon in any number of ways, and Chandi’s response to them could be quite different from the complex tone of resignation that Clayface struck. However, Thorn said to me, “Even when his friends and the Four-House people answer his question, how to live well, still you don’t know if their answers are right…”
I asked Clayface—who offstage turned out to be not more than twenty-five, shy-mannered, soft-spoken, and not tall—if he thought Chandi died in hope or in despair. After thinking quite a while he replied, “In pain. That’s why his friends are afraid of him. But we don’t have to be, because it’s a play. So, you see, that’s what matters.”
Pandora, Worrying About What She Is Doing, Finds a Way into the Valley through the Scrub Oak
LOOK HOW MESSY this wilderness is. Look at this scrub oak, chaparro, the chaparral was named for it and consists of it mixed up with a lot of other things, but look at this shrub of it right here now. The tallest limb or stem is about four feet tall, but most of the stems are only a foot or two. One of them looks as if it had been cut off with a tool, a clean slice across, but who? what for? This shrub isn’t good for anything and this ridge isn’t on the way to anywhere. A lot of the smaller branch-ends look broken or bitten off. Maybe deer browse the leafbuds. The little grey branches and twigs grow every which way, many dead and lichened, crossing each other, choking each other out. Digger-pine needles, spiders’ threads, dead bay leaves are stuck in the branches. It’s a mess. It’s littered. It has no overall shape. Most of the stems come up from one area, but not all; there’s no center and no symmetry. A lot of sticks sticking up out of the ground a little ways with leaves on some of them—that describes it fairly well. The leaves themselves show some order, they seem to obey some laws, poorly. They are all different sizes from about a quarter of an inch to an inch long, but each is enough like the others that one could generalise an ideal scrub-oak leaf: a dusty, medium dark-green color, with a slight convex curve to the leaf, which pillows up a bit between the veins that run slanting outward from the central vein; and the edge is irregularly serrated, with a little spine at each apex. These leaves grow irregularly spaced on alternate sides of their twig up to the top, where they crowd into a bunch, a sloppy rosette. Under the litter of dead leaves, its own and
others’, and moss and rocks and mold and junk, the shrub must have a more or less shrub-shaped complex of roots, going fairly deep, probably deeper than it stands aboveground, because wet as it is here now in February, it will be bone dry on this ridge in summer. There are no acorns left from last fall, if this shrub is old enough to have borne them. It probably is. It could be two years old or twenty or who knows? It is an oak, but a scrub oak, a low oak, a no-account oak, and there are at least a hundred very much like it in sight from this rock I am sitting on, and there are hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands more on this ridge and the next ridge, but numbers are wrong. They are in error. You don’t count scrub oaks. When you can count them, something has gone wrong. You can count how many in a hundred square yards and multiply, if you’re a botanist, and so make a good estimate, a fair guess, but you cannot count the scrub
oaks on this ridge, let alone the ceanothus, buckbrush, or wild lilac, which I have not mentioned, and the other variously messy and humble components of the chaparral. The chaparral is like atoms and the components of atoms: it evades. It is innumerable. It is not accidentally but essentially messy. This shrub is not beautiful, nor even if I were ten feet high on hashish would it be mystical, nor is it nauseating; if a philosopher found it so, that would be his problem, but nothing to do with the scrub oak. This thing is nothing to do with us. This thing is wilderness. The civilised human mind’s relation to it is imprecise, fortuitous, and full of risk. There are no shortcuts. All the analogies run one direction, our direction. There is a hideous little tumor in one branch. The new leaves, this year’s growth, are so large and symmetrical compared with the older leaves that I took them at first for part of another plant, a toyon growing in with the dwarf oak, but a summer’s dry heat no doubt will shrink them down and warp them. Analogies are easy; the live oak, the humble evergreen, can certainly be made into a sermon, just as it can be made into firewood. Read or burnt. Sermo, I read; I read scrub oak. But I don’t, and it isn’t here to be read, or burnt. It is casting a shadow across the page of this notebook in the weak sunshine of three-thirty of a February afternoon in Northern California. When I close the book and go, the shadow will not be on the page, though I have drawn a line around it; only the pencil line will be on the page. The shadow will be then on the dead-leaf-thick messy ground or on the mossy rock my ass is on now, and the shadow will move lawfully and with great majesty as the earth turns. The mind can imagine that shadow of a few leaves falling in the wilderness; the mind is a wonderful thing. But what about all the shadows of all the other leaves on all the other branches on all the other scrub oaks on all the other ridges of all the wilderness? If you could imagine those even for a moment, what good would it do? Infinite good.
Dancing the Moon
Told to the Editor by Thorn of Sinshan.
The World is danced at the dark of the moon after the equinox of the rains; and the second time the moon comes full after that, we dance the Moon.
Sometimes when the dance begins the weather is still raining and cold, but usually the dry season has begun and the nights are getting warmer. Sometimes the grasses are still making seed and sometimes they’re ripe and beginning to dry. Always the sei (lantern flower, calochortus) are in flower. Lambs and fawns are weaned but still going close beside the ewes and does. The birds are mating and nesting. The quail call in the daytime and the small owls at night. The creeks are running lively in their courses. It’s a pleasant time of year, and a good time to make love.
At the World Dance people get married; that’s a wakwa of sorting out things, getting things right and flowing on the two sides of the world; that’s a wakwa of lasting and staying. The Moon Dance doesn’t do anything like that. It goes the other way. It goes out and apart, undoing, separating. You know the heyiya-if comes in to the center and at the same time it’s going out from the center. A hinge connects and it holds apart. So under the Moon there are no marriages. No households. Under the Moon there are no children. If a woman conceives in the dancing, usually she aborts the fetus; if she bears the child she does so because she meant to, she wanted a child with no father, a moon child.
Children don’t like the Moon Dance. There are frightening things in the other dances, the White Clowns at the Sun, the mourning fire at the World, people getting crazy drunk at the Wine; but children have a part in all those wakwa, the giving at the Sun, the Last Day of the World, the singing at the Wine. But in the Moon dancing, nothing is for children. It’s all backwards, it’s a reversal, you see. It’s sex without anything that belongs to sex—responsibility, marriage, children. Because young people are the most sexual, adolescents can’t dance it. Because it’s a women’s dance, in the House of the Ewe, men are in charge of it and have it their way. Everything’s turned round. The full moon reflects the sun’s light, reverses it, not making daylight but making the dark light. The full moon rises at sunset and sets at dawn.
Well, so the children stay indoors, and adolescents too, or they go off somewhere together for the first night of the Moon at least and maybe for the whole time. Bay Laurel boys go off camping; and Blood Lodge girls spend the night together in a house or up in the hills in a summerhouse if the weather’s dry. They stay apart, boys together and girls together. They look after themselves and keep apart. And they look after the little kids.
And man-living women and woman-living men don’t usually dance the Moon; they go off to summerhouses, or look after the children indoors. Unless they’re willing to make love with other? sexed people. That’s part of the backwardness, the reversal: Moon dancing is supposed to be sex without conception, so only people who can conceive are supposed to dance it. Women usually stop dancing the Moon when they’re around fifty, sometimes a long time before that. Of course old men always dance it, they make a big point of it. So there’s always more men than women under the Moon.
Sometimes forest-living people come in for the Moon. And people come from other towns. Sometimes there’s a man or woman dancing that you never saw before, you don’t know where they live or who their mother was. You have to ask them, “In what House do you live?” so that you don’t find yourself and that person committing incest.
Talking about it this way is strange. The Moon is all license and incontinence—but there are all these rules you have to keep in mind! It’s because it’s a backward-time, I suppose. And also, it isn’t simple for a woman to live a man’s way. You ask some man to tell you about the Moon, when I’m done; he might tell you a different story! But I don’t know; there are just as many rules for the men.
A man could tell you more than I can about what they do before the moon comes full. For the fourteen days before it, all the men that want to dance do some sweating and singing. They use the old sweathouse down where Sinshan Creek goes round the outside of Adobe Hill there. After sweating they run out and jump in the irrigation reservoir. In the big towns up-Valley they have sweathouses built aboveground. In Kastoha and Chukulmas they heat the sweathouses with steam from hot springs. Here they just have a fire in the rock-pit and then pour water on it, you know. They do that any time of day, and they go naked to and from the sweathouse. And after sweating and bathing they come and sing in the common place. The songs are mostly matrix words. I don’t know them; only men sing them. They sing deep down in their chests, in their bellies. It sounds like thunder far away, or like rain, or like thresher engines, very deep and soft. The women don’t come out to listen to that singing. They listen from inside the houses or the workshops, doing whatever they’re doing. They don’t act like they’re listening.
[A man of Sinshan, Fourth Quail, sang us two of the men’s songs sung before the Moon; he said there was no harm in writing them down, “but writing down matrix words makes about as much sense as writing down dance-steps!”
BEFORE THE MOON SONG I
Meyan meyan
barra amarraman
ah, eh, eya meyan
BEFORE THE MOON SONG II
Ehe ene ene
&n
bsp; ehi meyan heyu
Fourth Quail sang these without accompaniment, in the deep, “inward,” chest-voice described by Thorn. As performed by a group, with repetitions and part-singing, each song would last several minutes.]
So for five and five and four days the men bathe and sing; and they don’t have sex with anybody, they stay continent, married or unmarried. Sometimes women tease them, but it’s better not to; they’ll get back at you under the Moon.
On the day before the night of the full moon the women who want to dance go bathe at the reservoir, all together. If you don’t want to dance that year you might talk about it and say, “I’m staying with the children tonight in such a house,” or, “I’m sleeping tonight with the girls who haven’t come inland.” Even so, the men may come to the house and sing and call to make you come out and dance. There’s always some silly woman who says she’s not going to dance and doesn’t want to dance and hates the Moon, but doesn’t mean it; she just wants the men to come to her house and call her, so that everybody hears them calling her. And then she comes out, of course. Nobody comes out who doesn’t want to.
After the sun goes behind the ridge, women and men both start coming out of the houses into the common place. And the music starts down inside the Obsidian heyimas. The musicians come up, and come along the path to the Hinge of the town and sing there, and then come on along the path into the common place, singing and drumming and playing all the time. Oh, the Moon music isn’t like any other music! You can’t stay still, you have to come out and dance. It gets running in your bones, the drumming, and the men singing down soft. There’s a matrix word in the Moon songs: abahi. They sing that over and over, abahi, abahi, and the drums going syncopated in and out, abahi, abahi. And it’s getting darker, and the moonlight’s beginning to show behind the digger pines on the top of the ridge. By moonrise you’re dancing in a line with the other women, just stepdancing in place. The men are beginning to make a line that moves forward gyring and reverses and goes around the women’s line. Then the men’s line breaks up, and four or five of them break through the women’s line, break it apart, split it. You go on dancing in two lines, and then they break the lines again, and again, until each woman is dancing alone. Then the men may encircle a woman, or begin to pairdance with one. And it goes on like that. There’s no set pattern of how it happens. You can pairdance for a while, and then he goes off to another woman or group, and some other man or men come facing you or circling you, and begin dancing with you. The women don’t move from place; unless a man takes your hand you stay put; only the men move and choose.
Always Coming Home Page 27