I did not understand that. I was very much afraid of going out of the heyimas and being caught in my old life again, going the wrong way again in false thinking and despair. A half-month or so after the Sun, I began to feel and say that I was still weak and ill and could not leave the heyimas. To this Tarweed said, “Aha! About time for you to go home!”
I thought him most unfeeling. When I was working with Milk, in my worry I began crying, and presently I said, “I wish I had never had this vision!”
Milk looked at me, a glance across the eyes, like being whipped in the face with a thin branch. She said, “You did not have a vision.”
I snivelled and stared at her.
“You had nothing. You have nothing. The house stands. You can live in a corner of it, or all of it, or go outside it, as you choose.” So Milk said, and left me.
I stayed alone in the small room. I began to look at it, the small warm room with earth walls and floor and roof, underground. The walls were earth: the whole earth. Outside them was the sky: the whole sky. The room was the universe of power. I was in my vision. It was not in me.
So I went home to live and try to stay on the right way.
Part of most days I went to the heyimas to study with Tarweed or to the Blood Lodge to study with Milk. My health was sound, but I was still tired and sleepy, and my household did not get very much work out of me. All my family but my father were busy, restless people, eager to work and talk but never to be still. Among them, after the month in the heyimas, I felt like a pebble in a mountain creek, bounced and buffeted. But I could go to work with my father. Milk had suggested to him that he take me with him when he worked. Tarweed had questioned her about that, saying that the craft was spiritually dangerous, and Milk had replied in the patient, patronising tone she used to men, “Don’t worry about that. It was danger that enabled her.”
So I went back to working with power. I learned the art carefully and soberly, and set no more fires. I learned drumming with Tarweed and speaking mystery with Milk. But it was all slow, slow, and my fear kept growing: fear and impatience. The image of the roan horse’s rider was not in my mind, as it had been, but was the center of my fear. I never went to ride, and kept away from my friends who cared for the horses, and stayed out of the pastures where the horses were. I tried never to think about the Summer dancing, the games and races. I tried never to think about lovemaking, although my mother’s sister had a new husband and they made love every night in the next room with a good deal of noise. I began to fear and dislike myself, and fasted and purged to weaker myself.
I told Tarweed nothing of all this, shame preventing me; nor did I ever speak of it to Milk, fear preventing me.
So the World was danced, and next would come the Moon. The thought of that dance made me more and more frightened; I felt trapped by it. When the first night of the Moon came I went down into my heyimas, meaning to stay there the whole time, closing my ears to the love songs. I started drumming a vision-tune that Tarweed had brought back from his dragonfly visions. Almost at once I entered trance, and went into the house of anger.
In that house it was black and hot, with a yellowish glimmering like heat lightning, and a dull muttering noise underfoot and in the walls. There was an old woman in there, very black, with too many arms. She called me, not by the name I then had, Berry, but Flicker: “Flicker, come here! Flicker, come here!” I understood that Flicker was my name, but I did not come.
The old woman said, “What are you sulking about? Why don’t you go fuck with your brother in Chukulmas? Desire unacted is corruption. Must Not is a slave-owner, Ought Not is a slave. Energy constrained turns the wheels of evil. Look what you’re dragging with you! How can you run the gyre, how can you handle power, chained like that? Superstition! Superstition!”
I found that both my legs were fastened with bolts and hasps to a huge boulder of serpentine rock, so that I could not move at all. I thought that if I fell down, the boulder would roll on me and crush me.
The old woman said, “What are you wearing on your head? That’s no Moon Dance veil. Superstition! Superstition!”
I put up my hands and found my head covered with a heavy helmet made of black obsidian. I was seeing and hearing through this black, murky glass, which came down over my eyes and ears.
“Take it off, Flicker!” the old woman said.
I said, “Not at your bidding!”
I could hardly see or hear her, as the helmet pressed heavier and thicker on my head, and the boulder pushed against my legs and back.
She cried, “Break free! You are turning into stone! Break free!”
I would not obey her. I chose to disobey. With my hands I pressed the obsidian helmet into my ears and eyes and forehead until it sank in and became part of me, and I pushed myself back into the boulder until it became part of my legs and body. Then I stood there, very stiff and heavy and hard, but I could walk, and I could see and hear, now that the dark glass was not over my ears and eyes but was part of them. I saw that the house was all on fire, burning and smouldering, floor, walls, and roof. A black bird, a crow, was flying in the smoke from one room to the next. The old woman was burning, her clothes and flesh and hair smouldering. The crow flew around her and cried to me, “Sister, get out, you’d better get out!”
There is nothing but anger in the house of anger. I said, “No!”
The crow cawed, saying, “Sister, fetch water, water of the spring!” Then it flew out through the burning wall of the house. Just as it went it looked back at me with a man’s face, beautiful and strong, with curly fiery hair streaming upward. Then the walls of fire sank down into the walls of the Serpentine heyimas where I was sitting drumming on the three-note drum. I was still drumming, but a different pattern, a new one.
After that vision I was called Flicker; the scholars agreed that it’s best to use the name that that Grandmother gives you, even if you don’t do what she says. After that vision I went up to the Springs of the River, as Crow had said to do; and after it I was freed from my fear of my desire.
The central vision is central, it is not for anything outside itself; indeed there is nothing outside it. What I beheld in the Ninth House is, as a cloud or a mountain is. We make use of such visions, make meanings out of them, find images in them, live on them, but they are not for us or about us, any more than the world is. We are part of them. There are other kinds of vision, all farther from the center and nearer to the mortal self; one of those is the turning vision, which is about a person’s own life. The vision in which that Grandmother named me was a turning vision.
The Summer came, and the people came down from Chukulmas. My brother of the Serpentine did not ride his roan horse in the races; a girl of the Obsidian of Chukulmas rode that horse, and he rode a sorrel mare. The roan stallion won all races and was much praised. After that summer he would race no more, but be put to stud, they said. I did not ride, but watched the races and the games. It is hard to say how I felt. My throat ached all the time, and kept saying silently inside myself, goodbye, goodbye! But what I was saying goodbye to was already gone. I was mourning and yet unmoved. The girl was a good rider and beautiful, and I thought, maybe they are going to come inland together, but it did not hurt or concern me. What I wanted was to be gone from Telina, to begin living the life that followed the turning vision, that followed the gyre.
So in the heat of the summertime I went with Tarweed upriver to the Springs of the River at Wakwaha.
On the Mountain I lived in the host-house of the Serpentine and worked mostly as electrician’s assistant at odd jobs around the sacred buildings and the Archive and Exchange.
In the morning I would come outdoors at sunrise. All beyond and below the porch of that house I would see a vast pluming blankness, the summer fog filling the Valley, while the first rays of the sun brightened the rocks of the Mountain’s peaks above me. I would sing as I had been taught:
“It is the Valley of the puma,
where the lion walks,
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br /> where the lion wakes,
shining, shining in the Seventh House!”
Later, in the rainy season, the puma walked on the Mountain itself, darkening the summits and the Springs in cloud and grey mist. To wake in the silence of that rainless, all-concealing fog was to wake to dream, to breathe the lion’s breath.
Much of each day on the Mountain I spent in the heyimas, and at times slept there. I worked with the scholars and visionaries of Wakwaha at the techniques of revisioning, of recounting, and of music. I did not practice dancing or painting much, as I had no gift for them, but practiced recalling and recounting in spoken and written language and with the drum.
I had, as many people have, exaggerated notions of how visionaries live. I expected a strained, athletic, ascetic existence, always stretched towards the ineffable. In fact, it was a dull kind of life. When people are in vision they can’t look after themselves and when they come back from it they may be extremely tired, or excited and bewildered, and in either case need quietness without distractions and demands. In other words, it’s like childbearing, or any hard, intense work. One supports and protects the worker. Revisioning and recounting are much the same, though not quite so hard.
In the host-house I fasted only before the great wakwa; I ate lightly, with some care of which foods I ate, and drank little wine, and watered it. If you are going into vision or revision you don’t want to keep changing yourself and going in a different way—through starving one time, the next time through drunkenness, or cannabis, or trance-singing, or whatever. What you want is moderation and continuity. If one is an ecstatic, of course it’s another matter; that is not work, but burning.
So the life I led in Wakwaha was dull and peaceful, much the same from day to day and season to season, and suited and pleased my mind and heart so that I desired nothing else. All the work I did in those years on the Mountain was revisioning and recounting the vision of the Ninth House that had been given me; I gave all I could of it to the scholars of the Serpentine for their records and interpretations, in which our guidance as a people lies. They were kind, true kin, family of my House, and I at last a child of that House again, not self-exiled. I thought I had come home and would live there all my life, telling and drumming, going into vision and coming back from it, dancing in the beautiful dancing place of the Five High Houses, drinking from the Springs of the River.
The Grass was late, in the third year I lived in Wakwaha. Some days after it ended and some days before the Twenty-One Days began, I was about to go up the ladder of the Serpentine heyimas when Hawk Woman came to me. I thought she was one of the people of the heyimas, until she cried the hawk’s cry, “kiyir, kiyir!” I turned, and she said, “Dance the Sun upon the Mountain, Flicker, and after that go down. Maybe you should learn how to dye cloth.” She laughed, and flew up as the hawk through the entrance overhead.
Other people came where I was standing at the foot of the ladder. They had heard the hawk’s cry, and some saw her fly up through the entrance of the heyimas.
After that I had neither vision nor revision of the Ninth House or any house or kind.
I was bereft, and relieved. That terrible grandeur had been hard to bear, to bring back, to share and give and lose over and over. It had all been beyond my strength, and I was not sorry to cease revisioning. But when I thought that I had lost all vision and must soon leave Wakwaha, I began to grieve. I thought about those people whom I had thought were my kinfolk, long ago when I was a child, before I was afraid. They were gone, and now I too must go, leaving these kinfolk of my House of Wakwaha, and go live among strangers the rest of my life.
A woman-living man of the Serpentine of Wakwaha, Deer-tongue, who had taught me and sung with me and given me friendship, saw that I was downcast and anxious and said to me, “Listen. You think everything is done. Nothing is done. You think the door is shut. No door is shut. What did Coyote say to you, at the beginning of it all?”
I said, “She said to take it easy.”
Deertongue nodded his head and laughed.
I said, “But Hawk said to go down.”
“She didn’t say not to come back.”
“But I have lost the visions!”
“But you have your wits! Where is the center of your life, Flicker?”
I thought, not very long, and answered, “There. In that vision. In the Ninth House.”
He said, “Your life turns on that center. Only don’t blind your intellect by hankering after vision! You know that the vision is not your self. The hawk turns upon the hawk’s desire. You will come round home and find the door wide open.”
I danced the Sun upon the Mountain, as Hawk Woman had said to do, and after that I began to feel that I must go. There were some people living in Wakwaha who sought vision or ecstasy by continuous fasting or drug-taking and lived in hallucination; such people came not to know vision from imagination, and lived without honesty, making up the world all the time. I was afraid that if I stayed there I might begin imitating them, as Deertongue had warned me. After all, I had gone wrong that way once before. So I said goodbye to people, and on a cold bright morning I went down the Mountain. A young redwing hawk circled crying over the canyons, “kiyir! kiyir!”—so mournfully that I cried myself.
I went back to my mothers’ household in Telina-na. My uncle had married and moved out, so I had his small room to myself; that was a good thing, since my cousin had married and had a child and the household was as crowded and restless as ever. I went back to work with my father, learning both theory and practice with him, and after two years I became a member of the Millers Art. He and I continued to work together often. My life was nearly as quiet as it had been in Wakwaha. Sometimes I would spend days in the heyimas drumming; there were no visions, but the silence inside the drumming was what I wanted.
So the seasons went along, and I was thinking about what Hawk Woman had said. I was rewiring an old house, Seven Steps House in the northeast arm of Telina, and while I was working there on a hot day a man of one of the households brought me some lemonade, and we fell to talking, and so again the next day. He was a Blue Clay man from Chukulmas who had married a Serpentine woman of Telina. They had been given two children, the younger born sevai. She had left the children with him and left her mothers’ house, going across town to marry a Red Adobe man. I knew her, she was one of the people I had gambled with as a child, but I had never talked to this man, Stillwater, who lived in his children’s grandmother’s house. He worked mostly as a chemist and tanner and housekeeper. We talked, and got on well, and met to talk again. I came inland with him, and we decided to marry.
My father was against it, because Stillwater had two children in his household already and so I would bear none; but that was what I wanted. My grandmother and mother were not heartily for anything I did, because I had always disappointed them, and they did not want three more people in our house, which was crowded enough. But that, too, was what I wanted. Everything I wanted in those years came to be.
Stillwater and the little boys and I made a household on the ground floor of Seven Steps House, where their grandmother lived on the first floor. She was a lazy, sweet-tempered woman, very fond of Stillwater and the children, and we got on very well. We lived in that house fourteen years. All that time I had what I wanted, and was contented, like a ewe with two lambs in a safe pasture, with my head down eating the grass. All that time was like a long day in summer in the fenced fields or in a quiet house when the doors are closed to keep the rooms cool. That was my life’s day. Before it and after it were the twilights and the dark, when things and the shadows of things become one.
Our elder son—and this was a satisfaction to my grandmother at last—went to learn with the Doctors Lodge on White Sulphur Creek as soon as he entered his sprouting years, and by the time he was twenty he was living at the Lodge much of the time. The younger died when he had lived sixteen years. Living with his pain and always increasing weakness and seeing him lose the use of his hand
s and the sight in his eyes had driven his brother to seek to be a healer, but living with his fearless soul had been my chief joy. He was like a little hawk that came into one’s hands for the warmth, for a moment, fearless and harmless, but hurt. After he died, Stillwater lost heart and began longing for his old home. Presently he went back to Chukulmas to live in his mothers’ house. Sometimes I went to visit him there.
I went back to my childhood home, my mothers’ house, where my grandmother and mother and father and aunt and cousin and her husband and two children were. They were still busy and noisy; it was not where I wanted to be. I would go to the heyimas and drum, but that was not what I wanted, either. I missed Stillwater’s company, but it was no longer the time for us to live together; that was done. It was something else I wanted, but I could not find out what.
In the Blood Lodge one day they told me that Milk, who was now truly an old woman, had had a stroke. My son came with me to see her and helped her in her recovery; and since she was alone, I went to stay with her while she needed help. It suited her to have me there, and so I lived with her. It was comfortable for both of us; but she was looking for her last name and learning how to die, and although I could be of some help to her while she did that, and could learn from her, it wasn’t what I wanted myself, yet.
One day a little before the Summer I was working in the storage barns above Moon Creek. The Art had put in a new generator there, and I was checking out the wiring to the threshers, some of which needed reinsulation; the mice had been at it. I was working away there in a dark, dusty crawl-space, hearing the mice scuttering about overhead in the rafters and between the walls. Presently I noticed with part of my attention that several people were in the crawl-space with me, watching what I was doing. They were greyish-brown people with long, slender, white hands and feet, and bright eyes; I had never seen them before, but they seemed familiar. I said, while I went on working, “I wish you would not take the insulation off the wires. A fire could start. There must be better things to eat, in a grain barn!”
Always Coming Home Page 33