“But what if a dream is followed and leads to trouble or hurt?”
“Why, then we see we misunderstood the message of the dream. Common sense! Reason.”
“You admit that common sense and reason are useful.”
“Indispensible! But they follow the dream.”
“In the world, we put them first.”
Sbgai laughed and looked at me closely. “And in the world you are able to tell the difference between a prophet and the ravings of a damaged brain?”
When I remained silent he asked me for a definition of “insane.” It seemed an ingenuous question, and it was only after I had struggled and sweated and been sent spinning around and around by his demands for clarification that I caught the smile on his face and stopped. He gave a great guffaw and hugged me. It was impossible to be angry. I laughed and said, “Your name is not Sbgai, it’s Socrates.” I told him a little about Socrates.
“And what happened to him?” asked Sbgai.
“He was executed for corrupting the young.”
Sbgai nodded without sadness or regret, but with simple confirmation of the expected. “Probably he was one of us, chosen after the winter fast and sent out.” By a quick look at his face I could see that he was not joking.
I gave up trying to be an agricultural expert and simply did my share of the work, following the methods they had arrived at through eons of dreaming. I had no dreams, or none that I could remember.
During the next winter fast I fared better, dozing most of the time like the children. Each time I woke I mended tents or fed people. I brought plenty of water to Augustine, and gave her some of my rations, as she was still nursing. Both she and the baby came through the fast very well. And when we went to the la-ka on the first day of spring, and old Doe, from our ka, asked, “Has any kin been chosen?” it did not even occur to me to stand.
For in the depths of the winter fast I had finally had one fleeting dream, an image which flashed on me and was gone, but which I remembered and resolved to obey. In the image, I saw myself sitting in the center of the la-ka. Behind me, round the fire pit, children were dancing. On every step of the la-ka sat the people of Ata, talking, all talking at once, a great chorus of insistent voices, telling hundreds of dreams. And I sat in the midst of it all, writing.
I began right after the first spring planting. I decided to use a modified Italian alphabet which is almost perfectly phonetic. In this alphabet I could signify nearly all the sounds of the Ata language. I invented five more consonants. There were differences in pitch in pronouncing a word that changed its meaning. These I divided into roughly seven levels which I signified by combinations of dots, dashes and accent marks above the appropriate syllable. I worked all this out by scratching it into the mud surrounding our ka, rubbing it out, changing signs, until finally I felt I had arrived at a written language which, though far from perfect, would serve.
My next problem was to find something more permanent to write on. There was little of any permanence in the village. Tunics and mats were woven and used until they were soiled and ragged, then used as kindling in the fire pit. Aside from the shells and bones (which were buried when they broke) everything was consumed or ploughed under. There was no waste, no pile of debris. I thought, if anything ever happened to Ata, no artifacts would be found, just a spiral stone wall leading to a hole in the ground, and even that hole would probably be filled by the time the archeologists got there.
I considered carving on the stone walls, but that would be tedious work, and slow, with only sharp rocks or bones to use as tools. Finally I decided that hides were the only answer, and asked for some. Chil-sing and Jamal got me some immediately.
After considerable experimentation I managed to make a somewhat rusty looking dye which, with the use of bone splinters, I could scratch into an animal hide.
Every morning I worked in the fields. When the sun was overhead, I lay in the grove by the river with Augustine, who was still nursing the baby, still dreamily confining her activities to the village. Sometimes the baby crawled over us as we lay and talked—or I talked about my plans for writing down all the dreams of Ata. Sometimes the baby napped or played while we made love. Often we were alone, one of the children having adopted the baby, carrying it on his back for a few days, showing up with it only at feeding time.
After my hour with Augustine, my real work, or what I saw as my real work, began. I sat near our ka scratching a story onto the skin while Augustine, like her butterflies, flitted back and forth, tending flowers and herbs. I worked at it until sunset every day, then joined the procession to the la-ka. Now I listened and watched avidly every night.
Half-way through my first attempt I heard, in the la-ka, a somewhat different version of the dream I was writing. “How many versions of that story are there?” I asked Salvatore.
“Many,” he answered. “Every dream has many, many versions. Some are very old; then there may be a newer version with a slight change, then a newer one.”
“Why don’t we just keep the most highly developed?”
“Which one is that?”
“The latest, I mean.”
He smiled and shrugged. “It is not so simple. Sometimes an old part of the dream is lost, then picked up again in a new version, fit into the new one, where it says something yet different. To discard anything …”
“You mean it’s impossible to choose the correct version.”
“There is no correct version. All are correct, all are changing.” For a few days, I was almost in despair, thinking I had wasted my time in imagining that anything permanent could be made of the complex and shifting mythology of Ata. Even if I managed to get down all versions of one dream, mightn’t someone dream a new version the next night, and make my work an incomplete fragment again?
I spent an afternoon in a hol-ka, numb and still, as if I had lost all purpose. But by the time I came out, my mood had changed. What if my task were impossible? Wasn’t all art impossible? Art was an attempt to capture the real, to pin it down, to keep it still, so that we can understand. It is impossible. But it is the noblest effort, I told myself. And, until now, I had never tried it. Until now I had merely written.
Suddenly I had something to create, a real art. A real purpose. What if it became a life’s work? What if the bare beginnings of the work became a life’s work which would have to be carried on by others? Wasn’t it enough, wasn’t it great to be the beginner of such a work? In all my searches for the orgasmic experience, hadn’t I perhaps found it now, in a task that had no end in my lifetime?
I plunged in with redoubled energy. “I am not a dreamer,” I told Augustine. “You people are the dreamers. I am to write down your dreams to preserve them. That is why I came here. And that is what I wanted when in my dream I called to you out of the ocean.”
I decided that I would start with the great dreams told in the ceremonial meetings of the la-ka. These seemed to be more permanent, dreams that had been dreamed and refined for so long as to reach a permanent state.
It took nearly two months to finish the first skin, the creation dream. First I sketched it out by smearing mud with my fingers on the stone wall. Children and old people gathered round to watch my work. I explained what I was doing and read aloud some of what I had written. The old people offered corrections and suggestions. I listened carefully to them, and began to call them to me to repeat the creation myth over and over again, while I corrected wordings or changed emphasis.
By this time all my notions of the poverty of the Ata language were gone. What I had first learned was the stripped down language of everyday life. The rest of the language, the words they saved for their dreams, was rich and varied, and I learned more and more of it as I sought the right word for each part of the myth.
After six weeks of revision, I simply refused to consider further alterations, and read aloud to Augustine what I now had. She made no criticisms. In two weeks, I had finished the skin, crude and splotchy, but readable.
> The reaction of the people was polite interest, almost the same interest they had shown in the ravings of the epileptic as he came out of his seizures. They were neither for nor against what I did. It was what my only dream of the past year had told me to do; so I must do it. I was a little disappointed at first, expecting praise, I suppose, still full of the pride of the intellectual in his feats of abstraction. When I explained how the marks I made were signs for words which told the dream, they nodded. I tried to teach them to read, but no one was interested, not even the children. I began to think the children were reluctant to oblige me because the last time they had followed me, my ideas had led to disaster.
“No, it is not that,” said Chil-sing.
“But if you do not learn to read and write, who will carry on my work?” I asked rather fretfully.
“If someone is to do it, his dream will tell him, as yours did. You will live a long time yet. Perhaps the one who will carry on your work is not yet born.” That answer satisfied me.
But then I was completely thrown off again. Just after I finished the first skin and had read it to many kin, we went to the la-ka for the evening story, which started, “In the beginning ….” I leaned back to relax, thinking this would be the story I had just written down, perhaps with some variations which I would be on the alert for, since I had, by now, memorized it.
But it was not, It was an entirely different story of the creation of Ata. My body snapped forward to listen hard. Old Doe chanted the story in a cracking voice. “And the great dream gathered all its forces together, and the forces twisted and collided and passed through one another and strained until all the forces merged for one instant into the word “space” and there was space. And the space stretched and bent and turned in upon itself until it split into earth and sky. And earth ….”
The chant had nearly fifty verses describing an evolutionary chain of one thing growing out of another. At first I thought this was a recent dream of Doe, but gradually I saw people begin to join in the last line of each verse, and children began to act out the “creations” in dance-like mimicry. The whole thing was obviously familiar, and was done in a happy, bouncy style reminiscent of knee-bone-connected-to-the-leg-bone songs.
On the way back to the ka I tried to question Doe about it, but she was too tired to talk. Doe was now one of the oldest kin on the island. I thought of Doe as an old granny; this was how I felt toward all the old, since they, with advanced age, softened into what I saw as a feminine look. As I dropped off to sleep I thought that Doe must be a very important resource for my work, and one not likely to survive long.
The next day, while Augustine and I lay near the river, I asked her about the story of the night before.
“Yes, it is the creation,” Augustine replied.
“But there is a different creation story. Which one is correct?”
“Both.”
“No, they are not different versions of the same story. They contradict each other.”
“Yet they are both true.”
I sat in silent exasperation for a few minutes. “How many creation stories are there?”
“Many. I am not sure.”
“And they are all true.”
“Yes.”
“Even if they contradict one another.”
“Yes.”
“Because somebody dreamed them.”
“Yes.”
“Augustine, if one of them is true, then another cannot be.”
“They are all true. And they are all untrue, as words are always untrue. Words are not dreams. Dreams are not reality. They are only dreams.”
“Then what is the reality?”
She smiled at me as if speaking to a child. “How can we know? We can only dream. In the dream, reality comes clothed in coverings we can recognize and describe. We are like children, trying to see the stories in the scratchings you make on the skins. We keep and describe what each of us sees on the skin, but we cannot read the true meanings of the marking there.”
“Then you should learn to read and …”
“I only use that as a story to explain, but I see I am not clear. When we learn to ‘read’ the dreams, then … then we will perceive and live and be the reality.”
“And when will that happen?”
“When all kin live for dreams and obey them.”
“All? Everyone in the world? That will never happen.”
“It must.”
I decided not to get into that argument again. “So you don’t literally believe any of the dreams.”
“Yes, yes, we believe them all, we keep them all …” She saw my confusion. “I can only explain by telling you another story. Let us say that I look at what you write on the skin. I know that the markings mean something that I cannot read. I try to learn to copy them, to preserve them, so that some day I may read them. Since I cannot see the true meaning of each mark you make, I describe the marks in ways I can understand. One mark looks to me like a bird in flight, another like a man bending over, but perhaps the man bending over looks to someone else like a bridge and the bird in flight, like waves of water. We are both right because that is what we see that helps us to remember the mark. And we are both wrong because the marks are not birds or men or bridges, but something else that we do not know how to read.”
“Yet, you are obedient to what you do not understand. ”
“Yes, we must be.”
“I don’t see how we can live this way.”
“But is there another way to live?” Then she laughed, kissed me, and aroused me to love again.
As always, at least temporarily, our lovemaking resolved everything. In the long half-doze afterward when we lay in each other’s arms, I told her what I thought I would never say to any woman. “As long as we have this, everything is all right.” She did not answer, and I could see that she had drifted away again. “Where are you?” I said, and she immediately focused her eyes on me and smiled. “Right here, whenever you want me.”
After a while, the thoughts of my task crept in again, and I began to wonder whether it was worth the trouble, the increasing complications, especially considering the lack of interest of everyone.
“But it is what your dream tells you to do,” Augustine answered my thoughts.
“Will I ever learn to read your mind as you do mine?” I asked her.
“That is nothing,” she said. “Everyone can do that.”
“I can’t.”
“Let yourself.”
“Everything is hard for me. I don’t even dream.”
“Perhaps you will not dream until you have finished what the last dream told you.”
“But that’s a life’s work!”
“Perhaps. You must let yourself.”
My pride balked. “I can’t practice this blind obedience as you do, this mindless …”
She kissed my cheek and held me as she would if I were crying in pain. “My poor dear, my darling, my love …”
When we went back to the village, I went to Doe, who, half-blind, was sitting and weaving a mat without seeing it, so used was she to the feel of the pattern of fibers. I asked her to repeat to me all the creation stories she had ever heard. I had decided that I would devote the rest of the year to collecting and writing down creation stories.
It took all of that. Doe, and some of the other old ones, were cooperative. In the long afternoons I sat outside our ka, listening to the endless creation of the universe. After weeks of listening, I saw a pattern and realized that instead of hundreds of stories I had many versions of twelve basic stories, including the one I had already written down. Now that I could see a clear direction, I felt sure I could condense the rest to eleven basic stories and complete the skins before the next winter fast.
I finished the last one on the day of a terrible rainstorm. And when it came time for the ceremony of lights, the children hung the skins on the Life Tree where they waved in the glow of the fire and the torches. It pleased me to see everyone dance around th
em, even though they couldn’t understand what was written on them. I carried Doe in my arms and wrapped her in the skins before I carried her back to our ka.
Doe never woke from her trance during the fast, and after the drinking of the herb broth on the first spring day, I carried her one last time, in the procession to the cliff. Naked, she was a man, with little flesh left for the birds to pick.
I was eager to begin my work again, deciding to devote myself this year to the history of Ata as told in the spring ceremonies. I had noticed some differences this year from the previous one, but there was still the main, rough chronology of ages which I have already described. I could, I decided, write a brief statement regarding each age on one of seven skins. There would be plenty of room on each skin for adding variations or details later as they appeared. I was more relaxed now about such additions and changes.
Our daughter was weaned now, running about the village like an amber elf. Augustine took up work in the fields again, and we worked silently side by side in the morning. At noon we lay in our grove near the river. The only change was that now Augustine refused me from time to time, when she was menstruating or when she felt fertile. In some ways, these times were better than our lovemaking days. We lay together in a deep rest that seemed no different from the rest that came after orgasm, and I began to notice that on those days I accomplished a great deal of writing in the afternoon.
Once I decided to try continence, but at the end of nine days I was irritable and unable to write. I made love to Augustine clumsily and quickly, like a boy, and then took deep breaths of relief. “So much for channeling sex into creative acts,” I said. She didn’t answer.
“I can’t give it up,” I said.
“Of course not. Not unless it gives you up.”
“But you could.” She didn’t answer. “Am I … are my demands, my needs, holding you back from …”
She shook her head. “You could not hold me back.”
“But if you …”
She hushed me, making the shrugging motion she often made when she did not want to fall into idle talk.
Soon after that, she stopped refusing me at any time. “Am I guessing at your fertile times now?” I asked, feeling happy that we were becoming that close.
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You Page 14