Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  TABLE MANNERS.

  They set the table with plates, dishes, bowls, cups, drinking glasses, and so on, often beautiful and in considerable variety, but not in great profusion, since dishes, after all, have to be washed. For soups and sloppy dishes they had spoons of china, wood, horn, and metal; otherwise they ate with their fingers. There was no tabu or “sinister” hand; it was presumed that you came to table with clean hands, and you could eat right-handed, left-handed, or with both hands—neatly. The various kinds of bread served as containers, supporters, and soppers. Meat was sliced or cut before serving, poultry was jointed. The table might be set bare or on a tablecloth or on mats of cloth or platted reed, bamboo, cattail, or grass; there was a bowl or two of water to wash the fingers in, and often a large cloth napkin was passed around at the end of the meal.

  As the Kesh seldom used chairs, the tables were low. People sat on the floor, with the legs straight out, curled to the side, or crossed tailor-fashion, or they sat on the low chest-bench that ran along two or three sides of most rooms, and pulled a little stool-table up before them to eat from.

  They counted three meals a day: breakfast, often of milk, bread or mush, fresh or dry fruit; a lunch of leftovers or uncooked food; and dinner, usually after sunset, hence early in winter and quite late in summer. They were, however, inclined to eat small amounts when hungry rather than to stuff in a great deal of food at a set time. This may be because food was both plentiful and handy; because no person was particularly privileged/obligated to prepare, dispense, or withhold food; and finally because heavy eating was considered embarrassing and gorging shameful, but greed could be satisfied more or less invisibly by casual but persistent snacking. As I remarked above, the Kesh were not a thin people.

  Kesh Musical Instruments

  The instruments discussed here may all be heard on the sound recording that accompanies this book.

  Instruments of professional quality, or for ceremonial use, were made by members of the Drum Art under the auspices of the Yellow Adobe House.

  HOUMBÚTA.

  The houmbúta or great horn was played in both theatrical and sacred music. Most scrupulous care was taken in selecting the madrone wood for the seven-foot-long conical body of the instrument, and each detail of the curing, shaping, and carving was essential to the capacity of the wood to gather, shape, and focus the sound of the breath. The funnel-like mouthpiece made of deer antler should be “like a lily that receives the warm rays of the sun”; though only five inches long, it was proportioned as a mirror image of the body and bell of the horn. The nine thin madrone slats forming the body were pitch-sealed and fiber-wrapped. The bell, nearly two feet long, was made of electrum, and was joined to the wooden body with pitch and fiber wrapping.

  DOUBÚRE BINGA.

  The name—“many vibrations”—described a set of nine brass bowls, kept in a box which opened out to form a platform on which the player arranged them in the heyiya-if pattern, five to the left and four to the right. The bowls varied in diameter from four to eleven inches, and their musical pitches spanned a major ninth. Tonal quality depended on the type of mallet—hard wood, soft wood, or cloth-covered—the part of the bowl struck, and the strength of the stroke. Seldom used solo, the instrument provided a rhythmic shimmering flow of tones which one musician described as “like the shining of the sun on running water, moving forward yet turning back…”

  YOYIDE.

  This single-stringed instrument was about four feet long, and looked from the front like a sinuous teardrop. The beautifully recurved bow was about two feet long, and strung with a combination of horsehair and human hair, which was believed to give the instrument its singularly sensitive tone.

  WEÓSAI MEDOUD TEYAHÍ.

  Every Kesh child knew how to make a flute, and there seemed to be endless kinds of flute in the Valley, endblown and sideblown, with or without reeds, made of wood, metal, bone, and soapstone. The bone reed flute was one of the oddest: five or six inches long, it was made from the thighbone of a deer or lamb. The bore began at the smaller end of the bone, descended to the larger end, then returned upward to the reed-holder: a cattail reed mounted between willow-wood fittings. The sound escaped from a bore in the side of the bone. By applying subtle pressure to the reed-holder the player could create stunning microtonal glides, and by sliding the fingers on and off the five holes could produce strange, piercing, wailing, birdlike tones. Tabit of the Madrone and Yellow Adobe of Wakwaha, who demonstrated the instrument said to us, said that he had to keep it away from his cat, “who kept trying to get the bird out of it.”

  TÓWANDOU.

  This nine-stringed hammer dulcimer was actually two instruments in one. The larger, half-moon-shaped, about five feet long, had five strings; the smaller, with four strings, faced it. They shared the soundingboard of cherry wood. The canoe-shaped body was of finely carved and polished myrtle (bay laurel). The longest string of the larger dulcimer, the “hinge string,” was unbridged; the walnut bridge of the other strings formed a gently heyiya-if curve. The tówandou was much used to provide music for dancing and plays, and its sound meant festival in the Valley. The finest instruments were kept by the Yellow Adobe heyimas in each town; travelling players or troupes used those or carried a smaller, portable version of the instrument.

  BOUD.

  Everybody in the Valley played some kind of drum—usually a small one with a wooden or stretched-hide head tapped softly with the fingers or whole hand or with a rawhide-wrapped stick. The drum accompanied singing, dancing, meditating, and thinking. It was played many together or all alone. It was “the other heart” to the Kesh.

  Drums played by professional musicians were often large and elaborate in construction. The wehosóboud, wood drum, might have up to nine tongues or bars of different tone carved into its top, and a set of a dozen different pairs of sticks and mallets; such a drum was a melody instrument of considerable expressiveness. Among the stretched-head drums, the ceremonial drum was most impressive: a pair of large kettledrums (up to four or five feet across, one larger than the other in the five to four ratio) were so connected that when struck they rotated around a central pole, which suspended them about three feet above the ground. This majestic rotation controlled the pace of the drumbeat. These instruments, some of them very old, were never brought up from the heyimas; but even in informal, aboveground music-making their deep resonance and tempo might be sensed.

  DARBAGATUSH.

  The “handhitter” was an occasional instrument, providing a rhythmic accompaniment to a song or dance. It exploited the tendency of the bark of certain kinds of eucalyptus tree to come off in sheets or strips which curl up into tubes as they dry Five to nine of these pleasant-smelling pieces, a couple of feet long, were chosen and lashed together with grass-stems at one end, and the bundle was held in one hand and hit against the open palm of the other to make a satisfying rattling clack, if the singing or dancing was by a fire, indoors or out, it was customary to burn the darbagatush when the music was done.

  Darbagatush

  Maps

  The people of the Valley drew maps—mostly of the Valley. They evidently enjoyed laying out and looking at the spatial relationships of places and objects they knew well. The better they knew them, the better they liked to draw and map them.

  Children often drew maps of the fields and hills about their home town, often in incredible detail—a dot for every rock, a mark for every tree.

  Small, schematised, symbolic maps of the Valley or a part of it were often carried by people going on a downriver journey to the ocean or upriver to Wakwaha. As most people knew every feature of the landscape, from mountains to molehills, within four or five miles of their home, and the entire length of the Valley was less than thirty miles, these maps were less guides than talismans.

  The larger maps were remarkably accurate, considering that their function was mostly aesthetic or poetic; but then, accuracy was considered a fundamental element or quality of poetry.


  Maps of the Valley were always drawn as charts of the Na and its confluents, and maps of areas within the Valley took the principal creek or creek-system as their axis. The source of the stream is at the top of the map. Compass directions may be noted, but the map is oriented to the flow of water, and “down” is the bottom of the page. There is often an element of perspective in the drawing of hills and mountains, but no foreshortening. Towns and other man-made features are usually marked with a symbol (the heyiya-if for towns); and the mapmakers did not like to write on their maps, it seems, for some have no lettering at all, and many have only an initial, or the most cryptic, crabbed indications, for the names of the towns, creeks, mountains, and so on. Since practically every feature of any interest or permanence had a name, the mapmakers may have followed a practical course in refusing to try to crowd them all onto the map.

  “Some of the Paths around Sinshan Creek”

  A Kesh map of the watershed of Sinshan Creek, given to the Editor by Little Bear Woman of Sinshan.

  Only Sinshan Mountain, Blue Rock, the Spring of Sinshan Creek, and a few other springs and hills are named on the map.

  The note written on the lower right part of the map reads, “Northwestwards fifteen under toyon boulder. Before the Grass.” Little Bear Woman had no idea what it referred to; she said the map “had been around the house for a long time.”

  The Watershed of Sinshan Creek

  This map is based upon and elaborates Little Bear Woman’s map of the Sinshan and Madidinou region, including fewer paths and more place-names.

  The Finders Lodge made and used maps of regions adjacent to the Ranges of the Valley, and of the area for some hundreds of miles around. Those were kept up-to-date both by the exploring parties sent out by the Finders, and by reference to the constantly updated aerial maps in the Exchange computers.

  Maps of the whole continent and of the seas and other continents, and globes of the world, were used as teaching aids by the Madrone Lodge. Every town had at least a few of these world maps. They certainly came from the Exchange to start with, and they could have been updated at request; but the request was seldom made, to judge by the venerable fragility of most of the beautifully drawn and imaginatively decorated world maps displayed and shelved in the Madrone Lodges. The rest of the world was not a matter of very urgent concern to most people of the Valley. They were content to know that it was there. Most of them had a vague idea of global geography; their notions of global and continental distances were both inadequate and exaggerated. For most (not all), real geography included the Volcano country in the north and the desert mountains in the south; the Pacific Ocean was the west; to the east was the Inland Sea and its shores, the Range of Light, the Omorn Sea, and the remote Range of Heaven or Range of the Rocks. Beyond these, “the lands go on and on to the sea again, you know…and so on round till you come back to the Valley.”

  The World Dance

  The World Dance celebrated human participation in the making and unmaking, the renewal and continuity, of the world.

  While the people of the Valley danced the Sky Dance for all people and beings of the earth, the Sky People were dancing their part of the ceremony, the Earth Dance. The dead and the unborn danced on the wind and in the sea, birds in the air, the wild animals in secret places in the wilderness. (“Animal dancing is not like our dancing. We do not know their ceremonies. They dance their lives.”) The linked spirals of these two cosmic dances formed the sacred image, the heyiya-if.

  The World was danced during the dark of the moon after the equinox of spring. The ceremonies went on for three days, and on the evening of the third day the crescent moon would be first visible at sunset. The Madrone Lodge and the Black Adobe Lodge were in charge of the dance.

  THE FIRST DAY OF THE WORLD.

  The earthly performance of the World Dance began at daybreak, underground, in the Black Adobe earth lodges. These were underground chambers, always located outside town, on the hunting side. They were not as large as the heyimas of the Five Houses, so the dancers generally went in shifts, coming out after a few hours to make place for others. All the dancers of the First Day of the World were older people, “those whose children have children.”

  As with many of the ceremonies called dances, during long periods no actual dancing went on: the ceremony in the earth lodge was a long chanting, led by the trained singers of the Black Adobe and Madrone. The deep ceremonial drum underground beat a heartbeat rhythm without break from sunrise to sunset. Old people of the town waited near the lodge in silence, or returned home from the singing in silence; children were cautioned not to speak to their grandparents, who would not reply. The old people dancing fasted all day. They tied feathers in their hair, or wore a cape of thin, dark wool onto which feathers had been sewn: feathers not taken from birds raised or hunted, but found.

  None of the words of the songs of the First Day were written down.

  As the sun set, the steady drumbeat stopped. People would begin to gather in the dancing place, the open area in the curve of the five heyimas. They brought wood for fires—especially apple-wood, saved for the occasion: the apple was a tree connected with death.

  At dusk the dancers came up from the Black Adobe lodge and into the dancing place. Those who danced this part of the ceremony had trained for it and were dressed for it, wearing black, tight-fitting clothes tied close at wrist and ankle, barefoot, their hair, face, hands, and feet smeared with white and grey ash. They were members of the Black Adobe and Madrone Lodges, and any townspeople who had asked to train with those lodges for the dancing. They came in file, singing. The words were archaic and the songs, complex and somber, using very wide intervals, had an eerie and depressing quality.

  The dancers carried applewood torches, unlighted, upside down. When they were all gathered in the dancing place, the Speaker of the Madrone came from the west with a lighted torch: from it the dancers lighted their torches, and with them, dancing, lighted the fire that was laid ready in the dancing place. (If it was raining, high poles bearing a canopy would have been set up over the area; all the heyimas kept such equipment for rainy-season ceremonies.) The fire was not a roaring bonfire, but was kept small and hot. The dancers circled it in a shuffling line, carrying themselves in a kind of crouch, knees bent and arms raised and bent, the hands at about face level, shaking. All the other people attending stood or squatted in an outer ring. Most of the people of the town (or of that arm of the big towns) were there; all those who had lost a relative or friend to death since the last World Dance were there.

  The Dead Singers kept up the shaking dance and kept the chant going, gradually increasing the tempo and raising the pitch, until suddenly one of the silent watchers in the dark outer ring called out the name of a person who had died during the past year. Others repeated the name in the rhythm of the chanting. The dancers picked it up. The name was repeated over and over, and all the various names the dead person had had were spoken and repeated, until the Dead Singers suddenly gathered in around the fire, chanting loud and fast and rocking their bent arms as if throwing or pushing something into the flames: and as suddenly ceased to sing, and crouched down, head bowed to earth and body trembling. And the mourners did the same. Then slowly and softly the insistent beat of the dance was taken up by one voice and another, the dancers got up and danced, the chanting increased in pitch and tempo, until another name was “thrown on the fire.”

  In the little towns of the Lower Valley there were years when nobody died, when there were no names to throw on the fire. The Ceremony of Mourning would be held, but only the dancers who had trained for it participated; the others sat in silence in the outer ring; the ceremony lasted only a couple of hours at most. In the big towns there were always deaths to be mourned, and there the ceremony became increasingly participatory and emotional as it went on. The first names thrown on the fire were usually those of older people; late in the ceremony it was the names of dead children that were spoken, and those born dead, who were a
ll named at their burial so that they might be mourned at the Mourning. As the ceremony went on, the people in the outer circle joined in the rocking dance motions and in the chanting, and began to cry out as the names of the dead were spoken again and again, and to call to the dead, and to weep aloud. All rocked, all sang, all wept together, and sank back into the grieving silence together, and again were shaken by the growing beat and by the voices crying the names of the dead. The barriers of shame and self-containment were broken down, the fear and anger of loss made public, and these quiet people screamed aloud in their admission of pain.

  When the last name had been thrown on the fire, the leaders of the dance began to slow and quiet the tempos, and the character of the chanting changed, the archaic words telling about places the souls of the dead may go in the Four Houses, and becoming a rain chant. The fires were allowed to die. At last the Speaker said, “The names have been spoken.” The dancers brought water up from the Blue Clay heyimas and poured it on the fire, then formed in line and in silence and the dark returned to the Black Adobe lodge. The mourners marked their faces with the wet ash of the dead fire before going home. A traditional breakfast of milk, cornbread, and spring greens was eaten before they went to bed, or in the morning. The ashes of the mourning-fires were scattered on the plowlands next day by the dancers of the rite.

  THE SECOND DAY OF THE WORLD.

  People were likely to be worn out by the intense, passionate ceremonies of the previous night, and nothing got under way until well after noon. The five heyimas—the Houses of Earth—were in charge of this day’s ceremonies of praise. Processions were made up of people between about seventeen and fifty or sixty years old, and the leaders were older adolescents and young adults who were “living on the Coast”—observing the period of sexual abstinence that was considered appropriate to their age. How many people joined the ceremony, and how elaborate it was, depended pretty much on these young leaders, and varied a great deal from year to year and from town to town; the following description is of a kind of ideal ceremony which was probably never fully performed in all its details.