and they do not have to say a word.
But those who know the name of the bear
have to go out alone and apart
across hollow places and bridges,
crossing dangerous places, careful:
and they speak. They must speak. They must say
all the words, all the names, having learned
the first name, the bear’s name. Inside it
is language. Inside it is music.
We dance to the sound of the bear’s name,
and it is the hand we take hands with.
We see with the dark eye of that name
what no one else sees: what will happen.
So we fear darkness. So we light fires.
So we cry tears, our rain, the salt rain.
All the deaths, our own and the others’,
are not theirs, but our own, the bear’s gift,
the dark name that the bear gave away.
A MARRIAGE
From the Madrone Lodge of Telina-na.
Seventh House Woman got up from the hillside.
With white arms, with white body, with white hair,
she got up from the grasses of the hillside
in early morning in the rainy season.
Where the hills fold together steep above the creek,
where the hillsides are open between the oaks,
facing the southeast, the white woman stood among the grasses
The Sun took her hand.
So was the sacred thing done,
so, there, their hands touching,
their hands holding, there, so:
she took the Sun’s hand
and became transparent, entering the Ninth House.
THE DEER DANCE
A very old and sacred song of the Blue Clay House. Given for translation and inclusion in this book by Madrone Red of the Blue Clay House of Sinshan.
In the Sixth House a deer walked
made of rain,
its legs rain falling.
It danced in a spiral on the earth.
In the Seventh House a deer jumped
made of clouds,
its flanks clouds hanging.
It danced in a spiral on the rocks.
In the Eighth House a deer ran
made of wind,
its horns wind blowing.
It danced in a spiral in the valley.
In the Ninth House a deer stood
made of air,
its eyes still air.
It danced in a spiral on the mountain.
In the spiral of the deer dancing
a hawk feather has fallen.
In the Hinge of the Nine Houses
a word has been spoken.
PUMA DANCE
This song is taught in Sinshan to people preparing to go up alone on the hills on a journey of the soul.
I put down my southwest foot,
four round toes, one round pad,
in the dirt by the digger pine,
in the dust by the digger pine
on the mountain.
I put down my northwest foot,
four round toes, one round pad,
in the dirt by the bay laurel,
in the dust by the bay laurel
in the foothills.
I put down my northeast foot,
four round toes, one round pad,
in the dirt by the madrone,
in the dust by the madrone
on the mountain.
I put down my southeast foot,
four round toes, one round pad,
in the dirt by the live oak,
in the dust by the live oak
in the foothills.
I am standing in the middle
of the lion world
on the mountain of the lion,
in the hills of the lion.
I am standing in the tracks of the lion.
INITIATION SONG FROM THE FINDERS LODGE
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
From the People of the Houses of Earth in the Valley to the Other People Who Were on Earth Before Them.
In the beginning when the word was spoken,
in the beginning when the fire was lighted,
in the beginning when the house was built,
we were among you.
Silent, like a word not spoken,
dark, like a fire not lighted,
formless, like a house not built,
we were among you:
the sold woman,
the enslaved enemy
We were among you, coming closer,
coming closer to the world.
In your time when all the words were written,
in your time when everything was fuel,
in your time when houses hid the ground,
we were among you.
Quiet, like a word whispered,
dim, like a coal under ashes,
insubstantial, like the idea of a house,
we were among you:
the hungry,
the powerless,
in your world, coming closer,
coming closer to our world.
In your ending when the words were forgotten,
in your ending when the fires burned out,
in your ending when the walls fell down,
we were among you:
the children,
your children,
dying your dying to come closer,
to come into our world, to be born.
We were the sands of your sea-coasts,
the stones of your hearths. You did not know us.
We were the words you had no language for.
O our fathers and mothers!
We were always your children.
From the beginning, from the beginning,
we are your children.
THE BACK OF THE BOOK
Húíshev
of-two-legged-people
wewey
[adj.] all
tusheíye
[s.n.] work
rru
this [is]
gestanai
doing things well, art
m
and
duwey
[o.n.] all
gochey.
shared, held in common
The Whole Business of Man is the Arts, and All Things Common.
—WILLIAM BLAKE
NOTE: As stated in the First Note at the front of the book, The Back of the Book consists largely of information. According to the distinctions proposed in the “Note Concerning Narrative Modes” here, things from here on will be just as fictional, but more factual, although equally true.
Since accent marks give a bristly and forbidding look to a page of English print, they have been left out so far; but in The Back of the Book and the Glossary they are used to indicate long i, o, and u in Kesh words. Pronunciations are given here, “The Kesh Alphabet.”
Long Names of Houses
Often the houses of the nine towns of the Valley had quite long names, wh
ich I have sometimes shortened in translation, through cowardice. I was afraid that these long names—Rain Falling Straight Down House, Here With Its Back to the Vineyards House, Danced the Sun a Hundred Times House—might sound quaint, that they might sound “primitive.” I was afraid that people who lived in houses with names like that could not be taken seriously by people who live in places with names like Chelsea Manors Estate, An Adult Community, or Loma Lake Acres East, a Planned Recreation Development. Though the adage runs the other way, the unfamiliar also risks contempt.
The length of some of these names might also make them seem improbable; would anybody actually say, “Do come see us, we live in Nine Buzzards Over the Mountain House in Kastóha-na!” In fact, they probably wouldn’t, since anyone they talked to would very likely know where they lived. In the uncommon event of inviting strangers, they would mention the house’s location or looks—“in the southeast arm, with red doors on the porches”—by way of address, as we might say, “2116½ Garden Court Drive, you take the second San Mateo exit going north and turn right at the third stop light and go two blocks.”
Anyhow, the people of the Valley had no objection to long names. They liked them. Perhaps they enjoyed the fact that they had plenty of time to say them. They were not ashamed of having time. They lacked drive, that great urge to get done which powers us, sending us forward, ever forward ever faster, reducing San Francisco of the slow settlers to Frisco and Chicago of the even slower natives to Chi and the town of the mission of our lady of the angels becomes Los Angeles, but that takes too long so it becomes L.A., but jets go faster than we do so we use their language and call it LAX, because what we want is to move on quick, to go fast, get through, be done, done with everything. To get it over with, that’s what we want. But the people who lived in the Valley and gave interminable names to their houses were in no hurry.
It is hard for us to conceive, harder to approve, of a serious adult person not in a hurry. Not being in a hurry is for infants, people over eighty, bums, and the Third World. Hurry is the essence of city, the very soul. There is no civilisation without hurry, without keeping ahead. The hurry may lurk invisible, contradicted by the indolent pose of the lounger at the bar or the lazy gait of the stroller along the hotel walkway, but it is there, in the terrific engines of the TWA or BSA supersonic planes that brought her from Rio, him from Rome, here to NY, NY for the IGPSA conference on implementation of GEPS, and will rush them back tomorrow, hurrying across the world of cities where there is no tense left but the present tense, every second and tenth of a second and millisecond and nanosecond clocked, the readout moving always a little faster, and the A rising. Mozart’s A was a hundred and forty cycles a second, so Mozart’s piano is out of tune with all our orchestras and singers. Our A is a hundred and sixty, because the instruments sound more brilliant tuned up higher, as they all rise like sirens towards the final scream. There is nothing to be done. There is no way to heighten the pitch of the instruments of the Valley, no way to abbreviate their institutions and addresses and names to capital letters, no way to get them to move ahead.
As their names tended to spread out and take time to say or write, so the houses themselves tended to take up room and elaborate themselves, a porch added on here, a wing there, so that the essentially simple plan might, over the slow lapse of years, burgeon and bulge and exfoliate like an old oak tree vastly gnarled and spacious. The basic plan was usually an oblong or a shallow V shape, the foundation being of half-sunk fieldstone on which two storeys in stone, adobe brick, or wood were built. Washrooms, workrooms, storage rooms, and such were in the basement. The first and second floors—they counted down from the roof—were divided into hearthrooms, kitchens, and sleeping rooms and porches, four or five rooms to a floor in the small houses, twelve or fifteen in the big ones. Such a house might contain one numerous household, or as many as five different households; generally two or three households shared a house, often for generations. Each family had at least one private entrance, so there might be several outside staircases to the upper and lower porches and balconies. It was on these porches that most of the life of the house went on, except in cold weather.
Many houses had no front and back: the front of the top floor might be the back of one ground-floor household and the side of the other—it depended on where your front door was. The foundation storey was often set out to get the light on the northwest side, and retired under the upper floor and balconies for summer shade on the southeast side, which gave such houses a lurching look; but they were soundly planned and built, and often stood for centuries.
A house was oriented to the local terrain and lightfall—hillslopes, other houses, trees, creeks, shade and sun patterns—and secondarily to the compass, the corners pointing N, E, S, W, which meant that the walls faced the preferred half-directions.
The siting of the house was determined by the ideal plan of the town—the heyiya-if figure. Each house made part of that pattern, an element of the Left Arm curving to meet the Right Arm of the five heyimas buildings at the Hinge of the Town—which was always running water or a well. The pattern was not neat or orderly (neither was the town), and nothing was in rows; yet the shape was there, and was felt, the interlocked curves springing from/returning to the center. In Kastóha-na and Telína-na there were several Left Arms, for to build so many houses in a single curve would either have crammed them together or strung them out inconveniently.
The area within the loose curve of the houses, planted with some trees and perhaps containing a few sheds or booths, but mostly left open and mostly either muddy or dusty, was the common place of the town. The corresponding empty area within the curve of the five heyimas on the Right Arm of town was called the dancing place. But both places were common, and they danced in both.
One town of the nine did not quite fit this description. Tachas Touchas was (notoriously) settled by “people from outside”—from the northwest, traditionally. Certainly the village architecture showed a likeness to the styles of towns far north of the Valley on the west-running rivers of the redwood lands. The houses of Tachas Touchas were all wood, redwood or cedar, with shallow cellars, and no use of adobe. They stood so close that they shared rain-gutters, in a tight curve, all facing inward. The Hinge of the town was a lively falls in Shasash Creek, and the Right Arm was laid out and built conventionally. But the circle of dark, tall, steep-roofed houses under the sheer rise of Bone Mountain, black-green with fir, was somberly impressive and quite different from any other Valley town. Disapproval of the “tightness” of the town plan was frequently expressed outside it; inside it, the people of Tachas Touchas rebuilt, when, from century to century, a house must be taken down and replaced, in their immemorial and peculiar fashion; which perhaps did express or encourage a “tight,” aloof, inturned quality in the character and manners of the townsfolk.
Wakwaha, at the other end of the Valley world, was also exceptional; being the Benares, Rome, or Mecca of the Valley, much visited by people from the other towns, its Left Arm included five long, single-storey hostels, maintained by the Five Houses, where visitors could housekeep for a few days or for months; and the Right Arm took in more area than the Left, containing not only the five great heyimas, but a dozen or more buildings of public and sacred use and significance, such as the Archives, the Conservatory, and the Theater. The Hinge of Wakwaha was one of the high sources of the Na, a beautiful steady spring rising from the volcanic rocks of a deep canyonhead of the Mountain. The site was a difficult one to put a fair-sized town on, but the steep, uneven ground and the sweep of the mountain slopes and canyon walls above and below the town gave it both grandeur and charm. Some of the houses of Wakwaha were very old, built of the stone they stood on and seeming to have grown from it; the madrones that shaded their roofs and walled courts were immense, but the walls had been there long before the trees. They had old, long names, these houses. Rising Up From Where the Quarrel Ended was one of them. Another was called Jackrabbit’s Grandmother’s Ho
le House. But then some equally old had very short names; there was a house called Wind, a house called High. And others had names that had lost their meaning over the years, worn away by the changing of the language—Angrawad House, Oufechohe House.
Though people in a small society may talk slowly, their language is likely to change quickly; even written, it keeps flowing, leaving the old spellings and usages high and dry. So the names of the nine towns, being old, had no translatable “meaning,” except for Wakwaha-na, the town at the holy spring of the Na (but it could also mean the dancing way of the Na). Chúkúlmas probably meant Live Oak House originally, and the -mal- in Ounmalin is hill or hillock. The people of Tachas Touchas insisted, without offering evidence, that the name of their town in their forgotten northern tongue meant Where the Bear Sat Down. But why Sinshan and its mountain were Sinshan, or what Kastóha meant and why it changed, as it apparently had done, from Hastóha, and why the oldest house in Madídínou was called Madídínou Animoun, nobody knew. No doubt the etymologies could have been traced from data in the Memory Banks of the City of Mind, with a few weeks or months of work at the Exchange. But what for? Need every word be translated? Sometimes the untranslated word might serve to remind us that language is not meaning, that intelligibility is an element of it only, a function. The untranslated word or name is not functional, It sits there. Written, it is a row of letters, which spoken with a more or less wild guess at the pronunciation produces a complex of phonemes, a more or less musical and interesting sound, a noise, a thing. The untranslated word is like a rock, a piece of wood. Its use, its meaning, is not rational, definite, and limited, but concrete, potential, and infinite. To start with, all the words we say are untranslated words.
Some of the Other People of the Valley
I. Animals of the Obsidian
All domestic animals were considered to live in the First House, the Obsidian.
SHEEP.
The several strains of Valley sheep were all derived from crossing “foreign” breeds traded or stolen from neighboring peoples’ flocks with the Odoun breed of the Upper Valley: a small, compact animal with loose, fine wool, dark legs and face, two or four short horns, and a pronounced Roman nose. The lambs were born dark, and about half had dark or mixed wool when adult. Every town kept sheep; individuals or households might have one or several sheep in the town flock, and sheepherding and care of the flock was in the charge of the town’s Cloth Art. The towns of Chúmo and Telína-na ran large flocks on Sheep Mountain and in the Odoun Valley, northeast of Chúmo. To let the pasturage and soil recover and to fatten the sheep on saltgrass, these flocks were taken down the River to the floodplains at the Mouths of the Na in the middle of the rainy season, and not taken back up onto the hills until the weather began to get hot, between the Moon and the Summer dances. Mutton and lamb were the festival meat of the Valley, and sheepskin leather and woolens of all grades and kinds were staple fabrics of use and wear. The sheep was not a symbol of passive stupidity and blind obedience as it is to us (and indeed the Valley sheep were both athletic and wily), but rather was regarded with a kind of affectionate awe, as an intrinsically mysterious being. The ewe was the sign and symbol of the Blood Lodge and of the First House, and sheep were called the Children of the Moon.
Always Coming Home Page 45