Dancing at the Edge of the World
Page 4
maybe they do not want to look down and see Victor Hugo glimmering au fond du puits.
Brigham, this is stupid stuff!
Tell us a story, old man,
or old woman as the case may be,
or old Tiresias, chirping like a cricket,
tell us a story with a proper end to it
instead of beginning again and again like this
and thereby achieving a muddle
which is not by nature after anything in particular
nor does it have anything consequent to it
but it just hangs there
placidly eating its tail.
In the Far West, where Brigham Young ended up and I started from, they tell stories about hoop snakes. When a hoop snake wants to get somewhere—whether because the hoop snake is after something, or because something is after the hoop snake—it takes its tail (which may or may not have rattles on it) into its mouth, thus forming itself into a hoop, and rolls. Jehovah enjoined snakes to crawl on their belly in the dust, but Jehovah was an Easterner. Rolling along, bowling along, is a lot quicker and more satisfying than crawling. But, for the hoop snakes with rattles, there is a drawback. They are venomous snakes, and when they bite their own tail they die, in awful agony, of snakebite. All progress has these hitches. I don’t know what the moral is. It may be in the end safest to lie perfectly still without even crawling. Indeed it’s certain that we shall all do so in the end, which has nothing else after it. But then no tracks are left in the dust, no lines drawn; the dark and stormy nights are all one with the sweet bright days, this moment of June—and you might as well never have lived at all. And the moral of that is, you have to form a circle to escape from the circle. Draw in a little closer around the campfire. If we could truly form a circle, joining the beginning and the end, we would, as another Greek remarked, not die. But never fear. We can’t manage it no matter how we try. But still, very few things come nearer the real Hoop Trick than a good story.
There was a man who practiced at the Hoop Trick named Aneirin.
But let us have the footnotes first.
“We have to bear in mind that the Gododdin [and its associated lays] are not narrative poems…. Nowhere is there any attempt to give an account of what it was really all about.”2 I disagree with this comment and agree with the next one, which points out that the work goes rolling and bowling all about what it is all about. “While some of these [early Welsh poems] will ‘progress’ in expected fashion from a beginning through a middle to an end, the normal structure is ‘radial,’ circling about, repeating and elaborating the central theme. It is all ‘middle.’ ”3
This is the Gododdin; Aneirin sang it. [I]
Men went to Catraeth, keen their war-band. [VIII]
Pale mead their portion, it was poison.
Three hundred under orders to fight.
And after celebration, silence.
Men went to Catraeth at dawn: [X]
All their fears had been put to flight.
Three hundred clashed with ten thousand.
Men went to Catraeth at dawn: [XI]
Their high spirits lessened their lifespans.
They drank mead, gold and sweet, ensnaring;
For a year the minstrels were merry.
Three spears stain with blood [XVIII]
Fifty, five hundred.
Three hounds, three hundred:
Three stallions of war
From golden Eidin,
Three mailclad war-bands,
Three gold-collared kings.
Men went to Catraeth, they were renowned, [XXI]
Wine and mead from gold cups was their drink,
A year in noble ceremonial,
Three hundred and sixty-three gold-torqued men.
Of all those who charged, after too much drink,
But three won free through courage in strife:
Aeron’s two warhounds and tough Cynan,
And myself, soaked in blood, for my song’s sake.
My legs at full length [XLVIII]
In a house of earth.
A chain of iron About both ankles,
Caused by mead, by horn,
By Catraeth’s raiders.
I, not I, Aneirin,
Taliesin knows it,
Master of wordcraft,
Sang to Gododdin
Before the day dawned.
None walk the earth, no mother has borne [XLIX]
One so fair and strong, dark as iron.
From a war-band his bright blade saved me,
From a fell cell of earth he bore me,
From a place of death, from a harsh land,
Cenan fab Llywarch, bold, undaunted.
Many I lost of my true comrades. [LXI]
Of three hundred champions who charged to Catraeth,
It is tragic, but one man came back.
On Tuesday they donned their dark armour, [LXIX]
On Wednesday, bitter their meeting,
On Thursday, terms were agreed on,
On Friday, dead men without number,
On Saturday, fearless, they worked as one,
On Sunday, crimson blades were their lot,
On Monday, men were seen waist-deep in blood.
After defeat, the Gododdin say,
Before Madawg’s tent on his return
There came but one man in a hundred.
Three hundred, gold-torqued, [XCI]
Warlike, well-trained,
Three hundred, haughty,
In harmony, armed.
Three hundred fierce steeds
Bore them to battle.
Three hounds, three hundred:
Tragic, no return.4
“I, not I, Aneirin”—“won free”—“for my song’s sake.” What is Aneirin telling us? Whether or not we allow that a story so muddled or all middle can be a narrative, or must be lyric or elegiac, but do classic Greek definitions fit Welsh Dark Ages traditions?—so, as Barbara Myerhoff pleaded, in all courtesy let us not argue about it at this point, only perhaps admitting that the spiral is probably the shortest way of getting through spacetime and is certainly an effective way to recount the loss of a battle—in any case, what is Aneirin trying to tell us? For all we know or shall ever know of the Battle of Catraeth is what he tells us; and there is no doubt that he very much wanted us to know about it, to remember it. He says that he won free for his song’s sake. He says that he survived, alone, or with Cynan and two others, or with Cenan—he seems to have survived in several different ways, also, which is very Welsh of him—he says that he survived in order to tell us about his friends who did not survive. But I am not sure whether he means by this that he must tell the story because he alone survived; or that he survived because he had the story to tell.
And now for quite another war. I am going to speak in many voices for a while. Novelists have this habit of ventriloquy.5
“The SS guards took pleasure in telling us that we had no chance of coming out alive, a point they emphasized with particular relish by insisting that after the war the rest of the world would not believe what had happened; there would be … no clear evidence” (a survivor of Dachau).
“Those caught were shot, but that did not keep Ringelblum and his friends from organizing a clandestine group whose job was to gather information for deposit in a secret archive (much of which survived). Here … survival and bearing witness become reciprocal acts” (Des Pres).
“[In Treblinka] the dead were being unearthed and burned [by work squads], and soon the work squads too would go up in smoke. If that had come to pass, Treblinka would never have existed. The aim of the revolt was to ensure the memory of that place, and we know the story of Treblinka because forty survived” (Des Pres).
“I found it most difficult to stay alive, but I had to live, to give the world the story” (Glatstein, from Treblinka).
“Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness” (Primo L
evi, from Auschwitz).
“It is a man’s way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died…. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity” (Nadyezhda Mandelshtam).
“Conscience … is a social achievement…. on its historical level, it is the collective effort to come to terms with evil, to distill a moral knowledge equal to the problems at hand…. Existence at its boundary is intrinsically significant…. the struggle to live—merely surviving—is rooted in, and a manifestation of, the form-conferring potency of life itself” (Des Pres).
“We may at least speculate that … survival depends upon life [considered] as a set of activities evolved through time in successful response to crises, the sole purpose of which is to keep going” (Des Pres).
“Living things act as they do because they are so organized as to take actions that prevent their dissolution into the surroundings” (J. Z. Young).
“It seems as if Western culture were making a prodigious effort of historiographic anamnesis. … We may say … this anamnesis continues the religious evaluation of memory and forgetfulness. To be sure, neither myths nor religious practices are any longer involved. But there is this common element: the importance of precise and total recollection…. The prose narrative, especially the novel, has taken the place of the recitation of myths…. The tale takes up and continues ‘initiation’ on the level of the imaginary…. Believing that he is merely amusing himself or escaping, the man of the modern societies still benefits from the imaginary initiation supplied by tales…. Today we are beginning to realize that what is called ‘initiation’ coexists with the human condition, that every existence is made up of an unbroken series of ‘ordeals,’ ‘deaths,’ and ‘resurrections.’ … Whatever the gravity of the present crisis of the novel, it is nonetheless true that the need to find one’s way into ‘foreign’ universes and to follow the complications of a ‘story’ seems to be consubstantial with the human condition.”6
“For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh…. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”7
Why are we huddling about the campfire? Why do we tell tales, or tales about tales—why do we bear witness, true or false? We may ask Aneirin or Primo Levi, we may ask Scheherazade or Virginia Woolf. Is it because we are so organized as to take actions that prevent our dissolution into the surroundings? I know a very short story that might illustrate this hypothesis. You will find it carved into a stone about three feet up from the floor of the north transept of Carlisle Cathedral in the north of England, not all that far from Catterick, which may have been Catraeth. It was carved in runes, one line of runes, laboriously carved into the stone. A translation into English is posted up nearby in typescript under glass. Here is the whole story:
Tolfink carved these runes in this stone.
Well, this is pretty close to Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s earliest form of historiography—notch-cutting. As a story, it does not really meet the requirement of Minimal Connexity. It doesn’t have much beginning or end. The material was obdurate, and life is short. Yet I would say Tolfink was a reliable narrator. Tolfink bore witness at least to the existence of Tolfink, a human being unwilling to dissolve entirely into his surroundings.
It is time to end, an appropriate time for a ghost story. It was a dark and stormy night, and the man and the woman sat around the campfire in their tent out on the plains. They had killed the woman’s husband and run away together. They had been going north across the plains for three days now. The man said, “We must be safe. There is no way the people of the tribe can track us.” The woman said, “What’s that noise?” They listened, and they both heard a scratching noise on the outside of the tent, low down, near the ground. “It’s the wind blowing,” the man said. The woman said, “It doesn’t sound like the wind.” They listened and heard the sound again, a scraping, louder, and higher up on the wall of the tent. The woman said, “Go and see what it is. It must be some animal.” The man didn’t want to go out. She said, “Are you afraid?” Now the scraping sound had got very loud, up almost over their heads. The man jumped up and went outside to look. There was enough light from the fire inside the tent that he could see what it was. It was a skull. It was rolling up the outside of the tent so that it could get in at the smokehole at the top. It was the skull of the man they had killed, the husband, but it had grown very big. It had been rolling after them over the plains all along and growing bigger as it rolled. The man shouted to the woman, and she came out of the tent, and they caught each other by the hand and ran. They ran into the darkness, and the skull rolled down the tent and rolled after them. It came faster and faster. They ran until they fell down in the darkness, and the skull caught up with them there. That was the end of them.
There may be some truth in that story, that tale, that discourse, that narrative, but there is no reliability in the telling of it. It was told you forty years later by the ten-year-old who heard it, along with her great-aunt, by the campfire, on a dark and starry night in California; and though it is, I believe, a Plains Indian story, she heard it told in English by an anthropologist of German antecedents. But by remembering it he had made the story his; and insofar as I have remembered it, it is mine; and now, if you like it, it’s yours. In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
Notes
1. Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, trans. Ingram Bywater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 40.
2. K. H. Jackson, The Gododdin: The Oldest Scottish Poem (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969), pp. 3–4.
3. Joseph P. Clancy, introduction to The Earliest Welsh Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1970).
4. Clancy’s translation of the text of the Goddodin, in ibid.
5. The following citations appear in Terence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
6. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 136, 138, 202.
7. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1925), p. 5.
WORKING ON “THE LATHE”
(1979)
In January of 1980, the stations of the Public Broadcasting Service first showed the film based on my novel The Lathe of Heaven. The magazine Horizon asked me for a piece to accompany release, and so I wrote this fragmentary memoir of my first involvement in film-making.
To answer a question I am often asked: No, I didn’t write the script. I worked on it, though, and learned a good deal about scripting, and about film-making, as “creative consultant,” with far more real consulting and creative power than usual in that position.
The other question is usually “Do you like the movie?” And I say, Well, we sure could have used another quarter of a million bucks, but I think we turned a shoestring into a pretty good silk purse. Since the tight budget forced us to shoot in a few weeks, without retakes, in Dallas not Portland, we couldn’t get the close, gritty, local texture of life I longed for. And though Ed Emshwiller’s war in space—using, I believe, Frisbees for flying saucers—is a delight, our Alien is a disaster: stiff and mechanical instead of beautiful and strange and sea-turtlish. But not only is the film faithful to the sense of the book; the acting, the directing, the camera work, the music, all of very high quality, integrate and work together to make a strong, vivid film, quite independent of the book. Yes, I like it.
PORTLAND
“Hello,” said this voice,
“I’m David Loxton of the TV Lab at WNET, and I want to come talk to you about making a TV film of one of your novels.”
“No, you don’t,” I said, terrified.
“Well, actually I do,” said the voice in a mild, astonished tone.
I could not say that the only thing I dread more than phone calls from strangers is visits from strangers, because that’s not the sort of thing you can say to strangers.
“I’m sorry I have this English sort of accent,” said the voice. “It’s because I’m English, but I live in New York. Would it be all right if I came on Wednesday?”
He said it “Weddnsdy”; there was no doubt he was English.
“You can’t come all the way to Oregon,” I said desperately, but it was no use. He came. He conquered. We made a TV movie out of one of my novels.
David wanted me to choose which novel. I picked The Lathe of Heaven because it’s the only one of my books that I ever enjoyed imagining as a film. When I began imagining it as a TV film I enjoyed it still more and very soon had dropped my novelist’s suspicions and skittishness and was taking the project seriously; because, as I listened to David, I began to understand the possibilities. In television there’s no need for the spectacular; in fact the medium rather leads away from it—inward; in science-fiction terms, from outer to inner space. And The Lathe of Heaven is about dreams and dreaming—what Dr. Haber, the dream specialist in the novel, calls “the all-night show on Channel One.” There’s a good deal in common between the mind’s eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
Then also Lathe had the virtue—given a Public Broadcasting Service budget—of being set on Earth in the very near future and having a small and almost entirely human cast. There was really only one Alien Being to worry about, and it could wear a space suit or shell, which would help. But what about melting Portland? “No trouble,” David said grandly. “We can quite easily melt Portland. Especially if we film that bit in Dallas.”
David Loxton is a large man, with large dreams.