Word games played orally included pass-along stories, each person in the circle telling “what happened next” and ending on a cliffhanger which the next person had to deal with and go on from. It seems that riddling as such did not exist in the Valley.
I saw no game like chess or any of the checkerboard games, nor any version of go; and the Kesh had no cards. Board games were of the Snakes-and-Ladders or Parcheesi type, very simple and mostly played by young children or adults with young children. In Tachas Touchas children went to the Red Adobe heyimas to play a dice-roll game called Going to the Nine Towns the Hard Way, in which the traveller’s way around the huge, ancient, wonderfully illustrated board was beset with rattlesnakes, wild dogs, angry millers, fireballs and thunderbolts, supernatural ground squirrels, and other dangers and reverses before they finally reached Wakwaha on the Mountain.
Some Generative Metaphors
Provided by the Editor as an exercise in cultural relativism, or in a fit of spring cleaning.
The Metaphor: THE WAR.
What it generates: STRUGGLE.
Universe as war: The triumph of being over nothingness. The battlefield.
Society as war: The subjection of weak to strong.
Person as warrior: Courage; the hero.
Medicine as victory over death.
Mind as warrior: Conquistador.
Language as control.
The relationship of human with other beings in war: Enmity.
Images of the War: Victory, defeat, loot, ruin, the army.
The Metaphor: THE LORD.
What it generates: POWER.
Universe as kingdom: Hierarchy from one god down. Order from chaos.
Society as kingdom: Hierarchy from one king down. Order from chaos.
Person as lord/subject: Class, caste, place, responsibility.
Medicine as power.
Mind as lord/subject: Law. Judgment.
Language as power.
The relationship of human with other beings in the kingdom: Superiority.
Images of the Kingdom: The pyramid, the city, the sun.
The Metaphor: THE ANIMAL.
What it generates: LIFE.
Universe as animal: Organic, indivisible wholeness.
Society as animal: Tribe, clan, family.
Person as animal: Kinship.
Medicine as rest.
Mind as animal: Discovery.
Language as relationship.
The relationship of human with other beings as animals: Eating. Interdependence.
Images of the Animal: Birth, mating, dying, the seasons, the tree, the diverse beasts and plants.
The Metaphor: THE MACHINE.
What it generates: WORK.
Universe as machine: Clock and clockmaker. Running and running down.
Society as machine: Parts, functions, cogs; interrelations; production.
Person as machine: Use. Function.
Medicine as repair.
Mind as machine: Information.
Language as communication.
The relationship of human with other beings as machines: Exploitation.
Images of the Machine: Progress, ineluctability, breakdown, the wheel.
The Metaphor: THE DANCE.
What it generates: MUSIC.
Universe as dance: Harmony. Creation/destruction.
Society as dance: Participation.
Person as dancer: Cooperation.
Medicine as art.
Mind as dancing: Rhythm, measure.
Language as connection.
The relationship of human with other beings as dance: Horizontal linkings.
Images of the Dance: Steps, gestures, continuity, harmony, the spiral.
The Metaphor: THE HOUSE.
What it generates: STABILITY.
Universe as house: Rooms in one mansion.
Society as household: Division within unity; inclusion/exclusion.
Person as householder: Selfhood.
Medicine as protection.
Mind as householder: Belonging.
Language as self-domestication.
The relationship of human with other beings in the house: Inside/Outside.
Images of the House: Doors, windows, hearth, home, the town.
The Metaphor: THE WAY.
What it generates: CHANGE.
Universe as the way: Mystery; balance in movement.
Society as the way: Imitation of the nonhuman; inaction.
Person as wayfarer: Caution.
Medicine as keeping in balance.
Mind as wayfarer: Spontaneity. Sureness.
Language as inadequate.
The relationship of human with other beings on the way: Unity.
Images of the Way: Balance, reversal, journey, return.
Three Poems by Pandora,
Written Sideways from the Valley to the City of Man
THE HIGH TOWER
Noble the Tower built with stones of Will
on the rock of Law: eternal that habitation.
In the House of the One may dwell the multitudes.
But the heathen are cast out to die as animals.
So we said, very well then,
and came away from the Kingdom
to the fields of grass, where we made small houses.
We build with dirt and wood and water.
We live with the animals and plants,
eating and praising them, and die with them;
their way is our way made mindful,
a river running over stones and rocks.
We live in the low places
like water and shadows.
Our houses do not last long.
We have lost sight behind us
of the spiritual Tower.
We go on down along the river.
NEWTON DID NOT SLEEP HERE
I don’t care if I am possible.
What are the bridges between us?
Wind, the rainbow,
mist, still air.
We must learn to step on the rainbow.
(Even Old Jealousy
called it a covenant.)
We must learn how to walk on the wind.
What links us (O my sister soul)
is the abyss between us.
We must learn the fog path.
What parts us (O my brother flesh)
is our kinship of one house.
We must learn to trust thin air.
NOT BEING SINGLEMINDED
No god no king no One no thing
that comes one at a time
no dupli repli multi identiplication
prolifer proliferation same after same
so no city. Sorry.
Here
is no away to throw to.
A way with no away.
Some people, not very many,
trying to keep a lot of things in mind,
going beside the water,
singing heya, hey, heya,
heya, heya.
Living on the Coast,
Energy, and Dancing
LIVING ON THE COAST.
This was the Kesh term for the period of sexual celibacy expected of all adolescents. For a long time I found this custom anomalous, uncharacteristic of the Valley culture as a whole. These people who sought a realistic and undemanding attitude towards sexuality, avoiding excess both of indulgence and of abstinence, whose style of control and self-control was one of ease, not of rigidity, seeking grace rather than rule, and whose children were at the center of their world—why did such people come down on adolescents with such an extreme demand so sternly enforced?
For a while I explained it to my own satisfaction by connecting it to the Kesh prejudice against early parenthood, which was very-strong, as strong as their prejudice against bearing/siring more than two children, and no doubt related to it, rationally enough. Big families start with young parents. Whatever elements of reason lay at its root, however, the attitude was passionate: they considered early parent
hood to be unwise, unhealthy, and degrading. Pregnancy in a girl under seventeen or eighteen was always aborted, I was told, and the same involved concerned the pregnancy, not the abortion. A boy in his teens who fathered a child was treated with such contempt by his townsfolk that he might be driven to exile or suicide.
But still, why celibacy? After all, due to genetic damage from ancient catastrophes, the rate of conception was rather low and the rate of full-term healthy birth very low, by our standards; and contraceptives (condoms, diaphragms, and sponges of milkweed rubber and other materials, and herbal spermicides compounded by the Doctors Lodge) were effective, available, and completely socially approved. Boys and girls by the age of ten knew all the uses of contraceptives, and most of them had used them—for children’s sexual play was taken altogether for granted, indulged, and even encouraged. Along around the age of ten, however, the children themselves began to abandon sexual play, because they wanted to outgrow it, to imitate the celibate adolescents. But why, just as the sexual urge began to declare itself and reach power and potency, this ban, this unnecessary, absolute reversal?
When I finally saw the period of celibacy as a reversal I began to see it as fully characteristic of the culture of the Valley.
Explaining this will involve discussing a couple of key words, which were first discussed in the section on the Serpentine Codex.
HEYIYA.
The first element of this word, hey- or heya, is the untranslatable statement of praise/greeting/holiness/being sacred.
The second is the word iya. This means a hinge: the piece of hardware or leather that connects a door to the opening it closes and opens. Connotations and metaphors cluster thick to this image. Iya is the center of a spiral, the source of a gyring motion; hence a source of change, as well as a connection. Iya is the eternal beginning, the process of energy arising and continuing. The word for energy is iye.
Energy manifests itself in three principal forms: cosmic, social, and personal.
The cosmos, the universe, was usually referred to rather casually in Kesh as rruwey, “all this.” There was a more formal and philosophical word, em, meaning extent-and-duration, or spacetime. Energy in the physicist’s sense, the fundamental power interconvertible with matter, was emiye.
Ostouud described weaving or the weave of a fabric, bringing together, relating, and so was used to mean society, the community of being, the fabric of interdependent existences. The energy of relationship, including both politics and ecology, was ostouudiye.
Finally personal energy, selfhood of the individual, was sheiye.
The interplay of these three forms of energy throughout the universe was what the Kesh called “the dancing.”
The last of the three, selfhood or personal energy, ramified into another set of concepts, which I shall treat very summarily:
Personal energy was seen as having five main components, relating to sex, mind, movement, work, and play, each with an inward-coming and outward-going aspect.
1. Lamaye, sexual energy. Lamawoiye, the energy that goes into sex (Freudian libido?).
2. Yaiye, extraverted thought. Yaiwoye, introverted thought.
3. Daoye is kinetic energy proper. Shevdaoye is energy expressed in athletics, travelling, all bodily skills, labors, activities. Shevdaowoye, personal movement, is the body itself.
4. Ayaye, playing, learning, teaching. Ayawoye seems best translated as “learning without a teacher.”
5. Sheiye, personal energy, considered as work: the basic activities of staying alive—getting and preparing food, housekeeping, the arts and work of life. Shewoiye, work directed inward, work towards personhood or selfhood, might be translated as soulmaking.
To be alive was to choose and use, consciously or not, well or ill, these energies, in a manner appropriate to one’s stage of life, state of health, moral ideals, and so on. The deployment of iye was really the principal subject of education in the Valley, in the home and in the heyimas, from infancy till death.
Personal energy was of course a personal matter; the individual made the choices, and the choosing, wise or foolish, mindful or careless, was the person. But no choice could be made independent of the superpersonal and impersonal energies, the cosmic/social/self-relatedness of all existences. Another word very important in Kesh thinking, túuvyai, mindfulness, might be described as the intelligent awareness of this interdependence of energies and beings, a sense of one’s place and part in the whole.
Now, finally, as all these abstracts might be applied to an actual life in the Valley: A baby existed more in terms of physical energy and relationship (emiye, ostouudiye) than as a person. As the child grew, its outward-going personal energy (sheiye) got going and began to differentiate, first into moving about and playing and learning (shevdaoye, ayaye), the proper activities of the young, not to be hindered or pent or, in Blake’s term, curbed. More slowly, the energies of sex and mind (lamaye, yaiye) would develop and find expression, still mostly outward-going, extraverted. And in the years called “clearwater” for girls (nine or ten till regular menstruation) and “sprouting” for boys (ten or eleven till full puberty), personal energy proper, the person working, would emerge.
With adolescence all these outgoing, centrifugal, growing energies began to be doubled by the inward-coming, centripetal energies of the mature human being. The adolescent had to learn how to balance out all these forces and so become a whole person, a “person entirely,” yeweyshe. The means of doing so with economy, intelligence, and grace was the regulation of energies. And here we come back round to the rule of celibacy, the reversal.
Children were going towards sexual potency. Adolescents, as they attained it, turned from it. At the time they became able to “work” as sexual beings they ceased to do so—consciously, by choice. All the outgoing energies were now to reverse, to come back in to the center, to work in the service of personhood, at its most vulnerable and crucial stage.
In this reversal the young “person-becoming” went elsewhere, to those inward places where the unborn wait to be born (the image is mental, and physical: what goes on in the head and what goes on in the testes and ovaries are not separable events). They went to live “on the Coast” When they had made that journey, when they had gone there, they were ready to come “inland,” to come home.
Of course the understanding, willing choice was an ideal. In practice, most young people undertook celibacy out of mere social conformity, obediently, and because its rewards were considerable. One started living on the Coast with a celebration at home, a ceremony in the heyimas, and a whole wardrobe of new clothes; and the adolescent in undyed clothing was held in honor and treated with a notable tenderness. One was supported by the entire fabric of relationships, kin, House, bond, lodge, art, and town. And how long one lived on the Coast really was up to the individual. The celibate period might be only a year or so, or might go on into the early twenties. All that was to be avoided was the extreme: early promiscuity or obsessive asceticism.
Living on the Coast, then, was the beginning of living mindfully. It was a “hinge” act. From it would arise the work of being a person, itself part of the work of relationship, and that part of the universal work, the river flowing, the dancing, the turning of the galaxies. Weyiya heyiya—everything hinges, is holy.
WAKWA.
The phrase translated as “regulation of energies,” iyevkwa, is a technical term—Kesh psychotechnological jargon, heyimas language.
In ordinary talk, the element kwa turns up only in the word wakwa, a very common word and a very complicated one. It can mean: a spring, running water, the rising or the flowing of water, to flow, to dance, dancing, a dance, festival, ceremony, or observation, and a mystery, both in the sense of obscure or unrevealed knowledge, and in the sense of the sacred means by which mysterious being or knowledge may be approached and revealed. As Mica, my teacher, said to me, the word is a small bag to hold so many nuts.
An actual spring or current of water is usually specifi
ed as wakwana. The town at the headwater and principal spring of the Na River is Wakwaha: Springway. This word as an ordinary noun/verb, wakwaha, means the course of the water as it leaves a spring, the way it goes: a very potent image and concept in Kesh thought. It also means “danceway”—the way a dance is danced, the way a ceremony is ordered, the order of happenings in an event, the direction an action tends. The pattern or figure made by an event or process is wakwaha-if.
Wakwa as mystery takes two forms. Wegotenhwya wakwa, literally sent-behind-wakwa, means mystification, the occult: rites or knowledge deliberately hidden or unrevealed. Gouwakwa, the dark dance, means mystery itself: the unknown, the unknowable. To the sun rising, the Kesh said, “Heya, heya!” in praise and greeting. To the darkness between the stars they spoke also, saying, “Heya gouwakwa.”
Love
There are six Kesh words which can be translated as “love,” or conversely one can say that there is no Kesh word for love, but there are six words for different kinds of love. At first I thought the Kesh distinctions were similar to the Islandian—that subtle and useful trilogy of ania, apia, alia—but the overlap of meaning is only partial. The following list is the best I can do.
wenun: noun and verb, to want, desire, covet (“I love apples.”)
lamawenun: noun and verb, sexual desire, lust, passion (“I love you!”)
kwaiyó—woi dad, heart goes to—: to like, to feel an impulse of warmth toward (“I like him very much.”)
Always Coming Home Page 53