unne: noun and verb, trust, friendship, affection, lasting warmth (“I love my brother.” “I love her like a sister.”)
iyakwun: noun and verb, mutual connection, interdependence, filial or parental love, love of place, love of one’s people, cosmic love (“I love you, Mother.” “I love my country.” “God loves me.”)
bahó: as a verb, to please, to give pleasure or delight (“I love to dance.”)
The principal distinction between 3 and 4 is one of duration—3 is brief, or a beginning, 4 is lasting or continuing. The distinction between 4 and 5 is more difficult. Unne implies mutuality, iyakwun asserts it; unne is loving-kindness, iyakwun is passion; unne is rational, moderate, social love, iyakwun is the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Written Kesh
Reading and writing were taken to be elements of human social existence as fundamental as speech itself. From the age of three or four a child learned to read and write at home and in the heyimas, and no Kesh was illiterate, except those with brain or vision dysfunction; the latter often compensated for their inability to read by developing their verbal memory to a fantastic degree.
The Kesh were less inclined than we to consider speaking and writing as one activity taking different forms. Anything we speak can be written down, and we seem to feel that it should be written down if it is of any importance: writing authenticates speech, and has taken priority over it. We now read what our speechmakers are going to say before they say it. The current uses of computers enhance and enforce this fitting of the word into the visual mode. The Kesh had a few kinds of writing that were never spoken or read aloud, but since they also had some very important kinds of speech that were never written down, they did not identify speaking and writing as forms or aspects of the same thing; to the Kesh they were two kinds of language, either of which might be translated into the other, if it was useful or appropriate to do so.
The alphabet in use while we were in the Valley had been developed several centuries earlier by a group of people in the Madrone Lodge of Wakwaha who were dissatisfied with the alphabet then in use. Either because it had been borrowed from another language or because Kesh had changed a good deal in sound, this ornate “fesu” alphabet was cumbrous and arbitrary, using 67 letters to represent the 34 phonemes recognised by the Kesh. The “aiha” (new) alphabet of 29 letters plus the Four-House and Five-House signs was pretty nearly phonetic (discrepancies are noted in the chart below). The design of the letters was severely chastened, and perhaps overrationalised. Scholars learned to read fesu out of antiquarian curiosity, but all documents of interest had long since been retranscribed into aiha writing.
Ink Pot
Pen and brush were the writing instruments. A steel pen in a wooden holder was the commonest (the Kastoha ironworks produced steel in quantity sufficient for pen-nibs, sewing needles, knifeblades, razors, and certain other fine tools and small machine parts). In the heyimas quill pens were used, since feathers were themselves considered to be words. The brush, of hair set in bamboo, was an alternative for those who preferred it. Most poets seemed to favor brush calligraphy, perhaps because it enlivened the rather monotonous aiha letters.
Glass-nib Pen
Brush/Pen
Pen ink was made of tannin from oak and walnut galls, ferrous sulphate (vitriol), and indigo, and was bottled in small, broad-based, grey ceramic pots of a pleasing shape. Brush ink, made from the soot of burnt pitch or oil mixed with glue and camphor, was shaped in cakes and sticks, like Chinese ink. Printing ink was a mixture of rosin, linseed oil, a pinetar soap, soot, and indigo.
Paper was made in a fascinating variety of weights and textures, using mixtures of fir and other wood pulp, cotton, linen, cattail and other reeds, milkweed, and practically any other fiber. In the paper workshop of the Book Art in Telína-na I saw a poem brush-written on a cloudy, filmy, unsized paper which the poet said he had made from dandelion clocks and thistledown, carded. The poem was less memorable than the paper, I thought.
The Book Art and the Oak Lodge of each town made and provided paper and ink, writing materials and printing materials, and the facilities for making and using them.
A poem or a set of poems might be written on one large sheet of paper, and short works were often written on scrolls rolled vertically on wooden rods. Books were made like our books, bound by gluing and sewing one margin of the sheets, and covered with calfskin leather or goatskin parchment or heavy cloth on paperboard. People who wrote a good deal generally made their own paper and blank books. Fine copies and printed editions of literary pieces were usually the work of copyists and printers in the Book Art, and were called wudaddú, “going back through,” rendition, performance—the word used also for an oral recitation, the acting of a written play, or the performance of a piece of music.
Paper Duster
The Kesh Alphabet
KESH ALPHABET
ENGLISH ALPHABET
INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET
k
[k]
·
g
[g]
sh
[ʃ]
ch
[tʃ]
l
[l],[ɫ] (The two kinds of l in ‘little’)
n
[n]
s
[s]
d
[d], [ḍ], [ð]
t
[ṫ]
r
[r̃], [ř], [dr], [ð]
f
[f]
v
[v]
m
[m]
b
[b]
p
[ṗ]
w
[w], [w]
·
hw
[hw] (As in English “what”)
y
[y], [y]
h
[h], sometimes [x]
·
o
[ɔ] (As in English “off”)
·
ó
[o] (As in “oat” without glide)
ou
[ow] (As in “go”)
·
ú
[u] (As in “toot”)
u
[ə]; [ʌ] (As in “the”; as in “but,” “dumb”)
e
[ɛ] (As in “yet”)
·
a
[a] (As in “father”)
ai
[ay] (As in “tie”)
i
[ı] (As in “pit”)
í
[i] (As in “meet”)
Five-House sign, pronounced [z] (a suffix to words in the Five House mode, which is not used in most kinds of writing)
Four-House sign, (there is no spoken sign)
·
Doubled letter sign, written over the letter.
Note concerning the Kesh r: depending on context it may be a trill, a flap (as in English “steady” or “Betty”), the fricative [ð] as in “then,” or a stop [dr]; and as a final sound it is often very like American English “hard r” in “her.”
It will be noted that the order of the aiha alphabet was a fairly orderly progression of the consonants from the back of the mouth forward to the lips, back through the semiconsonants from dental to glottal, and forward again through the vowels. The glides ou [ow] and ai [ai] were included as letters in the alphabet, the equally common glides ei or ey [ɛy] and oi or oy [ɔy] were not, for no reason anybody could cite. The symbol or letter () signalling the Five-House or Earth Mode, sounded as [z], the Four-House or Sky Mode sign (), which represented no sound, and the doubled-letter sign written above the letter, were not included in the order of the alphabet as written or recited.
Text was written and read left to right, top to bottom; but clowns practiced reverse writing, bottom to top, right to left, the letters reversed.
There were no capital letters; punctuation and spacing separated sentences. Vowels were usually written larger than consonants.
&
nbsp; PUNCTUATION.
In inscriptions and mural writing little punctuation was used except for a slanting stroke to divide sentences. In ordinary and literary writing, punctuation was careful and complex, including indications of expression and tempo which we use only for music. The principal signs were:
Equivalent to our period
A “double period,” roughly equivalent to a paragraph break
Equivalent to our comma, indicating a phrase within a continuing sentence
Equivalent to our semicolon, indicating a self-contained phrase within a continuing sentence
These four signs, like our punctuation, were syntactically meaningful and aided clarity. The next five concern dynamics and tempo:
Equivalent to our dash, signifying a pause. Repeated, a long pause; repeated more than once, a longer pause
word
Kesh underlining, just like ours, denotes emphasis or stress
ẇȯṙḋ
The opposite of underlining: de-emphasis, a soft or even tone
Written over a word, a fermata: prolong the word. Written in the margin: rallentando: read this line or these lines slowly
Written in the margin: speed up, or resume normal reading pace
The Modes of Earth and Sky
Much spoken Kesh was in a mode which occurs only once in this book, in a line of dialogue in Dangerous People. The Five-House or Earth Mode was indicated by a final z-sound added to the noun/verbs of the sentence, and was used when one was speaking to and of living persons and local places, in one of the present tenses or with the auxiliaries meaning “can,” “be able,” “must,” in everyday informal conversation.
The Four-House or Sky Mode would be used in all discourse concerning Four-House people and places (those unborn, dead, thought, imagined, dreamed, in the wilderness, etc.) and in all past and future tenses, as well as with the auxiliaries of the conditional, optative, subjunctive, etc.; in the negative; in making abstract or general statements; and in all formal discourse and rhetoric and works of literature both written and oral. There was a letter of the alphabet for the [z] phoneme that indicated the Earth Mode, but, evidently, it was very seldom used. People who in real life would use the Earth Mode talking would keep to the Sky Mode in even the most realistic history or novel.
So in an actual conversation one would say, “Pandora, are you living in Sinshan now?”—Pandoraz, Sinshanzan gehóvzes hai ohu—the two proper nouns and the verbal both in the Earth Mode. But the same question in a play or any narrative would be—Pandora, Sinshanan gehóves hai ohu. The negative, whether colloquial or formal, would be: Pandora Sinshanan pegehov hai, “Pandora is not living in Sinshan now.” And the past would always be in the Sky Mode: Pandora Sinshanan yinyegegohóv ayeha, “Pandora did truly live a little while in Sinshan.”
Though my note on the narrative modes shows that the Kesh did not distinguish factual from fictional literature as we do, the precision of their use of these basic modes of the language indicates a clear awareness of the difference between the actual and the imagined.
A Note and a Chart Concerning Narrative Modes
The principal mode of our thinking is binary: on/off, hard/soft, true/false, etc. Our categories of narrative follow the pattern. Narrative is either factual (nonfiction) or nonfactual (fiction). The distinction is clear, and the feeble forms such as the “novelised biography” or the “nonfiction novel” that attempt to ignore it only demonstrate its firmness.
In the Valley the distinction is gradual and messy. The kind of narrative that tells “what happened” is never clearly defined by genre, style, or valuation from the kind that tells a story “like what happened.” Some of the Romantic Tales certainly recount real events; some of the sober Historical Accounts concern events which we do not admit into the category of the real, or the possible. Here of course is the difference: where you stop, on what grounds you stop, and say, “Reality goes no further.”
If fact and fiction are not clearly separated in Kesh literature, truth and falsehood, however, are. A deliberate lie (slander, boast, tall tale) is identified as such and is not considered in the light of literature at all. In this case I find our categories perhaps less clear than theirs. The distinction is one of intent, and we often do not make it at all, since we allow propaganda to be qualified both as journalism and as fiction; while the Kesh dismiss it as a lie.
The accompanying chart attempts to show these continuities and discontinuities.
Spoken and Written Literature
Some Valley texts were unwritten in two senses of the word. In the first place they have not, after all, been written yet. In the second place they never were written: they were oral texts. Those of the second kind included in this book have thus been translated twice, from Kesh into English and from breath into print—and, if you like, they can be translated back from print into breath, your breath.
The Kesh distinguished writing and speaking, the written and the spoken word, not as two versions of one thing, but as different activities with a large area of overlap, different languages with a large but not total area of translatability. They saw as a primary distinction between the oral and the written text the quality of the relationship established.
Undoubtedly one can and will say (formally or informally) what one wouldn’t write (or wouldn’t say knowing that it was being recorded). The writer’s solitude might look like maximum freedom, but the immediate relationship between speaker and hearer(s) may increase freedom by increasing trust. (A writer of course may remain anonymous as a speaker cannot, but anonymity or a pen-name, denying the self, denies even the possibility of trust.)
Between writer and reader, the text itself mediates. It may be properly seen as a communication rather than a relation. In Kesh terms, the connection between writer and reader is not a present one: it is made in the nonpresent, in the Houses of the Sky—and so all written narration is in the Four-House Mode. But speaking a text, prepared or improvised, and listening to it constitute a relationship in the Five Houses of the Earth, a connection of present contemporaries, “people breathing together.”
The written word is there, for anyone, at any time. It is general and potentially eternal. The spoken word is here, to you, now. It is ephemeral and irreproducible. (We might question the latter word; but mechanical reproduction, even the moving picture with sound, makes an image of but does not reconstitute the occasion, the time, the place, or the people there.)
The trust or confidence that can be established between writer and reader is real, though entirely mental; on both sides it consists in the willingness to animate, to project one’s own thinking and feeling into a harmony with a not-yet-existent reader or a not-present and perhaps long-dead writer. It is a miraculous and entirely symbolical transubstantiation.
When the artist and the audience are together, collaboration on the work becomes mundane and actual; the work shapes itself in the speaker’s voice and the listeners’ response together. This powerful relationship can be, and in politics frequently is, abused: the speaker may appropriate the power to himself, dominating and exploiting the audience. When the power of the relationship is used not abused, when the trust is mutual, as when a parent tells a bedtime story or a teacher shares the treasures of the intellect or a poet speaks both to and for the listeners, real community is achieved; the occasion is sacred.
It would confuse things, however, to make a correlation of oral with sacred, written with secular literature, in the Valley: because the binary opposition sacred/secular was one they didn’t make. There were indeed certain songs, dramas, instructions, and other oral texts connected with the great festivals and with sacred occasions or places, which they never wrote down or recorded in any way. For instance the Wedding Song, sung every year at the World Dance, known to every adult in the Valley, remained unwritten; it belonged “to the breath,” they said. To reproduce such a text would be, in their view, most inappropriate, not because it was sacrosanct but because its oral/occasional/communal
character was essential. (When it was indicated to me that to record or transcribe would be inappropriate, I honored the request. A particular and valuable exception was made for me in the case of the death songs called Going Westward to the Sunrise, printed in the section called “How to Die in the Valley,” and discussed again below.)
We mostly seem to feel it appropriate and desirable that all spoken words, even office memoranda, recordings of private conversations, grandmother’s tales, be saved on tape, stored in memory banks, transcribed, written, printed, preserved in libraries. Perhaps not many of us could say why we save so many words, why our forests must all be cut to make paper to mark our words on, our rivers dammed to make electricity to power our word processors; we do it obsessively, as if afraid of something, as if compensating for something. Maybe we’re afraid of death, afraid to let our words simply be spoken and die, leaving silence for new words to be born in. Maybe we seek community, the lost, the irreproducible.
Always Coming Home Page 54