Dancing at the Edge of the World
Page 32
All the long road
in chains, even if, after all,
we come to
death’s ordinary door, with time
smiling its ordinary
long-ago smile.
Levertov is never “above the battle,” never talks down, never shows off. A poet’s obscurity may be the inability of pain to speak clear, but Levertov, hard disciplinarian of her own mind and soul, forces pain to speak itself, and I take her words literally. The poem “Thinking About El Salvador” begins this way, and this is the truth:
Because every day they chop heads off
I’m silent.
In each person’s head they chopped off
was a tongue,
for each tongue they silence
a word in my mouth
unsays itself.
Courage is perhaps the keynote of Levertov’s mind and art, but never heroics; no standing tall in Oblique Prayers. This courage permits simplicity and—though she says “oblique”—a prayer so direct that it must say Thou, the old word of the soul, the poets’ word.
To the Morton Bay Figtree, Australia,
a Tree-God
Soul-brother of the majestic beechtree,
thy sculpted buttresses only more sharp-angled,
leaves darker, like the leaves of ilex—
vast tree, named by fools who noticed only
thy small hard fruit, the figlike shape of it, nothing else—
not thy great girth and pallid sturdy bark,
thy alert and faithful retinue of roots,
the benign shade under the rule of thy crown:
Arbor-Emperor, to perceive thy solemn lustre
and not withhold due reverence—
may it not be for this, one might discover,
a lifetime led, after all?—not for
those guilts and expiations the mind’s clock ticks over,
but to have sunk before thee in deep obeisance,
spirits rising in weightless joy?
In Women as Mythmakers, Estella Lauter writes of “that emerging world-view of relationship between self and world which does not accept the categories that have enclosed our lives”—the category of Man versus Nature chief among them. Here that nonacceptance which is acceptance states itself gently, the movement which both bows and rises being timelessly that of a woman dancing.
Susan Griffin, in The Roaring Inside Her, writes of woman and nature, woman as animal, and warns rationalists of the danger of dissecting live lions. Carolyn Kizer doesn’t keep the roaring inside her. She roars it. Her poetry is intensely, splendidly oral, wanting to be read aloud, best of all read or roared by the lion herself, golden at the waterhole over the remains of a disemboweled prig. Adherents of the buttoned-down school may confuse Kizer’s flamboyance with carelessness, but lions have that casual look too.
The room is sparsely furnished:
A chair, a table, and a father.
Kizer is a marvelous poet of anger and laughter; also, increasingly, of measure and of grief. From “Afterthoughts of Donna Elvira”:
True to your human kind
You seemed to me too cruel.
Now I am not a fool,
Now that I fear no scorn,
Now that I see, I see
What you have known within:
Whenever we love, we win,
Or else we have never been born.
A few poems from Yin are also in Mermaids in the Basement; the two books complement each other with little repetition, and together give a full view of the state of this poet’s dark, brilliant, and sardonic art. “The wolf ran at my side,” Eve Triem writes, and the wolf runs here too. The last poem in Mermaids, “A Muse of Water,” states the rejection of a division between Man and Nature as women now perhaps must state it, not by speaking against Man “for Nature,” but as nature, naturally, as flesh, as grass, as water, as woman. It is a deep, desolate, and beautiful poem. Let the theorists beware of reductionism; this matter of the woman-animal was never a simple one. The dissecter’s knife twists in his hand, and as Kizer says in “Pro Femina,”
… the role of pastoral heroine
Is not permanent, Jack. We want to get back to the meeting.
But the meeting is a larger one than any held by corporations or governments. And if Jack kills the last wolf, Jill must become her.
Mary Jo Salter, Henry Purcell in Japan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Eve Triem, New as a Wave: A Retrospective, 1937–1983 (Seattle: Dragon Gate Press, 1984); May Sarton, Letters from Maine (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984); Denise Levertov, Oblique Prayers (New York: New Directions, 1984); Carolyn Kizer, Yin (Brockport, N.Y.: Boa Editions, 1984); Carolyn Kizer, Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1984).
THE MYTHOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA
by John Bierhorst
(1985)
The oral literature of the American Indians, transcribed and translated, is a treasurehouse for all American readers and writers—the only literature entirely rooted in this ground, the only words that, like corn and sequoias, begin here. Instead of being treated as “primitive” curiosities that only an anthropologist could love, Native American prose and poetry are increasingly appreciated and reverenced by non-Indians, as a vital link to a lost past, of course, but more importantly as a living literature. After all, most of it was written down between 1850 and 1950. The plots, the forms, the traditions may be ancient, but the actual pieces are no older than the novels of Dickens or the poems of Yeats.
John Bierhorst, who has given us excellent selections of this oral poetry and prose in The Sacred Path and other collections, presents now a systematic overview of one type or branch of literature in The Mythology of North America.
What makes a myth different from a legend, a folktale, a story? Bierhorst has a notable gift for making such complex and much argued distinctions clear by using the material to explain itself:
In North America, where more than a hundred native languages are still spoken and oral traditions once passed freely between cultures, storytellers have tended to divide narratives into two basic categories. Typically, the Eskimo used to speak of old stories and young stories. Among the Winnebago, stories were either waikan (sacred) or simply worak (narrated). To the Pawnee, the distinction was between true and false. The second of the two categories, which varies from tribe to tribe, can refer to fiction, nonfiction, or a mixture of both; mainly it sets up a contrast with the first category, which, whether defined as old, sacred, or true, corresponds to the English word “myth.”
Later on Bierhorst mentions that among the Tlingit “there are two kinds of stories, tlagu (of the long ago) and ch’kalnik (it really happened).” What he is concerned with in this book are the tlagu, the old, sacred, true stories. Their truth is of that order which may be ranked above or even opposed to factuality. That they are old may mean that they are agelessly young and meaningful. As for their sacredness, it is not always of the kind monotheists easily or willingly recognize as such. From De Angulo, Bierhorst quotes an Achomawi tale-teller:
What is this thing that the white people call God? They are always talking about it. It’s goddam this and goddam that, and in the name of the god, and the god made the world. Who is that god? They say that Coyote is the Indian God, but if I say to them that God is Coyote, they get mad at me. Why?
For people willing to take that question seriously, those willing to take risks of the mind, the pleasure of these myths will often lie in the way they revalue the world, cleansing the doors of perception. Like all great works of art, the great myths change you. Anyone who has attentively read or heard such a story as Archie Phinney’s “Coyote and the Shadow People” will know that the Greek myth of Orpheus is only one version of a deep and powerful human theme, and will have enriched their understanding of such matters as the landscape of the Western Plains, and married love, and death. Imagination is, after all, an intensely practical activity.
This Coyote sto
ry can be read in full in Phinney’s Nez Percé Texts, and with commentary by Jarold Ramsay in Traditional Literatures of the American Indian, edited by Karl Kroeber, or in Ramsay’s own recent Reading the Fire. Bierhorst gives almost no full texts or tellings; this is not a collection of myths but a survey, a guidebook to the mythologies of the whole continent, arranged first by region, second by theme. It is a formidable undertaking; the author’s clear mind and style keep it from becoming a thicket of complications. The introduction provides a lucid short history of how and when and why and by whom these oral literatures were written down and translated. From Schoolcraft (our one-man Brothers Grimm) through the magnificent salvage work of Boas and his students and colleagues, both Indian and non-Indian, through the Benedictine school of myth as key to culture, Bierhorst brings us up to the recent studies of the performer and the performance—in other words, the artist and the art. Dell Hymes and others, by bringing sensitive and informed linguistic and literary criticism to bear on the “artless” and “formless” myths of the “savage,” have revealed wonderful sophistications of structure and richness of meaning. Oddly, Bierhorst scarcely mentions the structuralist analysis of myth; I found the monumental volumes of Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologies mentioned only once, in a back-of-the-booknote. (Does anybody else miss the lowly footnote? Does anybody else get tired of turning back and forth trying to find the notes to the chapter you’re in the middle of, except you’ve forgotten the number of the chapter and lose your place looking for the notes in the back and it all ends up more like beating eggs with a whisk than reading a book?)
Bierhorst also chooses not to mention the secondary collections of Native American myths (those reworked from the originals, like Theodora Kroeber’s Inland Whale, or gathered directly from the written sources, like Jarold Ramsay’s Coyote Was Going There, or based immediately upon oral performance, like Dennis Tedlock’s presentation of Zuñi tales in Finding the Center). The notes in the back refer only to chapter bibliographies listing the original sources. There is a courtesy in this towards the originators and true owners of the myths, in leaving out all “middlemen” as far as possible. But the paraphernalia of the notes is pretty formidable for the untrained reader. And the book, being a survey of a vast wealth of material, surely will often serve not only as an end in itself but as an introduction. Readers will want to go on from Bierhorst’s synopses and descriptions of myths; but few will know how to cope with the great, grey-green volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology or how to find the other primary sources, mostly available only in major libraries. A fuller bibliography, a descriptive or evaluative guide to the many secondary collections of Native American myths, would have added greatly to the value of the book. Bierhorst might even have begun steering us away from the silly and patronizing versions, the kind the newspapers dug up when Mount St. Helens erupted. We were told then how St. Helens, Mount Hood, and Mount Adams were “the beautiful maiden Loo-Wit” and “the braves Wy-East and Klick-It-Tat” who quarreled over her—the word “maiden” making it clear that this was quaint, the hyphens making it clear that Indians could not pronounce words of more than one syllable, and so forth. But now listen to a story being told the way these stories were told (at night, in winter, and if you don’t listen Grandmother will pinch you):
She saw a hair, she took it up, looked at it, looked at the hair, one hair, she looked at the hair she had found. “Whose hair? I want to know.” She looked at it long, looked at the hair, one long hair. The woman thought, “Whose hair?” she thought.
That is a California story; things in California used to move at their own sweet pace. Gertrude Stein grew up in California, too. Bierhorst gives us only that passage, and few retellings would have the courage to keep to that slow, oral rhythm. But there is a magic at work there in the words, in the repetitions, the circling gait, which is as essential as the plot (the fearful incest story of Loon Woman). In giving us an overview of the mythologies of so many different cultures, Bierhorst can usually give us only the plot, the gist, the marrow without the bones, as it were. Even so, even in synopsis, many of the stories are moving and fascinating; and Bierhorst’s descriptions of the background and history, the connections and crossovers of the myths and mythologies, and his glimpses of the world views of the various peoples and regions, are lucid and thoughtful. The Mythology of North America may not be a landmark, but it is a shapely and solid stepping-stone—perhaps a more valuable thing than a landmark, after all.
John Bierhorst, The Mythology of North America (New York: William Morrow, 1985).
SILENT PARTNERS
by Eugene Linden
(1986)
Taped to the front of their cages … were depictions of a number of Ameslan signs and their meanings…. “Oh, they sign all the time,” he said. “That’s why we put up the posters. The technicians kept seeing the chimps make these gestures, and they wanted to be able to respond.”
Only in the Peaceable Kingdoms of art and Eden are the relationships between humans and animals innocent and harmonious; here and now they are complex, uneasy, often cruel, and always profound. City dwellers, seeing only people plus an occasional Peke or pigeon, can pretend that nothing on earth matters but us; but if we want to eat or breathe, our dependence on nonhuman life is absolute and immediate, though mostly unexamined. When we use animals, as work partners, for food, or in laboratories, the ethics of the relationship become both urgent and obscure. In the matter of the use of animals in laboratory experiments, some extremists confuse use with misuse and demand a total ban, while others justify means by ends and demand that atrocities be condoned. Eugene Linden has picked a particularly tangled but fascinating aspect of this difficult topic to explore in his third book about the apes used in language experiments.
In the seventies, when ecology was considered something more than an obstacle to quick profits, experiments on the language capacities of animals were, as Linden points out, an apt expression of the generous and risk-taking temper of the times. They were attempts to cross boundaries. And they were greeted with excitement in part because they were conducted, not as manipulations of a “subject” by an “objective” experimenter, but as partnerships. Language is not one-way communication but essentially exchange, and to carry on the experiments, the individuals of two different species had to work together, to collaborate. Indeed, the teaching of language and the learning of it may go further than collaboration and require collusion:
Ordinary discourse was characterized on our part by shameless cuing, outright prompting, and dubious interpretations of Gillian’s gnomic, if not unintelligible, utterances. In fact, … Gillian began to demonstrate most of the behaviors critics have cited as evidence that apes cannot learn language: she interrupted, she repeated phrases incessantly, she responded inappropriately, and she jumbled her word order.
Gillian isn’t a chimpanzee; she is Linden’s then eighteen-month-old daughter. The point he is making is that normal human language acquisition is not a cool, methodical, detached affair but an intensely felt enterprise involved essentially with relationship. Chimpanzees and gorillas being sensitive creatures with notoriously strong emotional responses and attachments, it seems hardly surprising that “the interesting, if maddeningly inconclusive, results with regard to more complex uses of language came from experiments in which the ape had a relationship with the experimenter—experiments in which the use of the language was a natural part of the animal’s day.”
The experiments, and criticisms, based on the assumption that an animal is a kind of machine tried to eliminate emotional relationship and emotional reward from the attempt to find out if the ape brain could be programmed for language. Experiments such as the one that trained a chimp to express its wishes on a computer with food as reward for “correct” response have no more to do with language capacity than any animal circus act. But the temptation to use the stimulus-response machine model is strong, because the only model we have for language use is the human one: and it is a very d
angerous one, for how is the experimenter to avoid anthropomorphizing, carrying the analogy too far? Such questions mine the whole terrain and make for exciting travel in it. Eugene Linden knows the minefield well and guides us through it with intelligence and unfailing good humor. This last is an achievement in itself, for as the passage just quoted continues,
It was from such experiments that the most extravagant claims for ape language use came—experiments with the fewest controls and the most passionately committed experimenters. Thus we had a situation bred perfectly for the most vituperative type of debate.
And we got it! As he reports the vituperation, the increasing defensiveness of experimenters and bad faith of some critics, the sensationalism and sentimentalism of much media coverage, Linden’s candor and fair-mindedness contrast wonderfully with the prejudice and paranoia he describes. He does not pretend, however, to stand above the battle; his concern is ethical and urgent. For, after all the claims and counterclaims, now that we no longer see photographs of long, thumbless, inhuman hands signing “friend” in the language of the deaf or read dismissive pronouncements from the lofty terraces of academic theory, now in the mid-eighties, what has become of the experimenters and their participants—Washoe, Lucy, Nim Chimpsky, Ally, Koko?
Linden’s answers to that question are all to some degree painful and all extremely interesting, if only as tragicomic drama. Personality—both human and ape—is paramount from the first experiments to the last. Silent Partners is a great display of science as snake pit, and those who liked The Double Helix can get the same evil glee from it. But the cost of these experiments and their repression may have been more than intellectual.
It may be that the language-using chimps are suffering the consequences of having shown themselves before the world was ready to see them, and the scientists who trained them, the disgrace of having a good idea before the world was ready for it.