‘So therefore,’ Dell said, coming up beside Norema, ‘you should try and learn the dedication and application from him and forgive the coldness.’
‘And you should learn the old values from him,’ Enin said, stepping up between her and Venn on her other side, ‘and understand and forgive him for being befuddled by the new ones.’
Both boys looked at Venn for approval.
‘There are certain thoughts,’ Venn said, dryly, ‘which, reflected by language in the mirror of speech, flatten out entirely, lose all depth, and though they may have begun as rich and complex feelings, become, when flattened by language, the most shallow and pompous self-righteousness. Tell me, why do all the boys on this island have such shallow, pompous, self-satisfied little minds—for, though I love him like a brother, Norema, your father suffers from that quite as much as he does from the situation we have been discussing. Yes, I suppose it does make one nostalgic for the silent, inland hunters. There at least one can imagine the depths … for a year or two.’
‘Venn?’ Norema felt relief enough from the uncomfortable things she’d felt at Venn’s turning her attention to the boys to ask for that attention back: ‘From what you say, in a society like ours, or the Rulvyn, money is only the first mirror, or the first telling of the sea monster tale. What is the second mirror, or the second telling, the one that doesn’t reverse, but changes it all into something else?’
‘Ah!’ Venn dropped the tip of her stick in more leaves. ‘Now that is something to speculate on.’ She laughed her old woman’s laugh. ‘Who knows what that would be now …? A method of exchange that would be a reflection of money and a model of money without being money. Well, perhaps you could get everybody to count what money each had, give each a sheet of reed paper and a piece of charcoal, then take all the money itself and collect it in a central money house, where it could be used for works the village really needed, and for dealings with foreign traders; and each person would conduct her or his business with the other members of the tribe on paper, subtracting six coins from this one’s paper and adding it on that one’s sheet, and the like …’ Venn fell to musing.
‘I see how that would cut out the middle person,’ Dell said. He was a boy forever fascinated by the impossible, and would no doubt be suggesting such a scheme to the class within the week, as if the idea were completely his. ‘But the reflection of the reflection is not supposed to reverse the values back; it’s supposed to change them into something completely new!’
‘But I can see how it would do that,’ said Enin. He was always taking clever ideas and running them into the ground. ‘People would have to trust each other even more than they did just trading goods. And that trust would probably be a new value in our tribe. And suppose you wanted to get together a business. You could go to a lot of people and get each one to pledge just a little bit of their money on paper, and then go right off and act just as though you had it. It’s like Venn said: money always is where goods and work aren’t. Well, this way, it’s not that you have your goods and work in the same place as the money, but you have a kind of money that can be in a lot of places at once, doing lots of different things. That’s got to make everything completely different. I mean, who knows how far the differences would go. Anything you could figure out how to make, if you could just tell people about it, you could probably get enough of this new kind of money to make it. Instead of boats that sailed from island to island, you could make boats—’
‘—that flew from land to land,’ suggested Dell, ‘by digging with their wings and tunneling under the floor of the sea. Instead of a woman having a turnip garden of her own, you could have one big turnip garden—’
‘—that floated on the ocean and was worked by specially trained fish that had been raised for the purpose,’ chimed in Enin, ‘trained the way one trains dogs or parrots.’
The two boys laughed.
Then Enin shouted and started running.
The stream had fanned; the first dock stood above its quivering reflection, and there was Dell’s cousin’s boat pulling in to it.
Dell was off after.
Then the two boys were out on the boards and halloing Fevin (who was hairy-shouldered, and with a touch of red in his beard that spoke of Rulvyn forebears), who halloed back. The boat’s prow cut into a splash of sun that left a black pearl pulsing in Norema’s eyes. The light had been a reflection from one or the other boy’s mirror.
‘The things that would come …’
Norema looked at the old woman beside her.
Leaves about them rustled, chattered, stilled.
‘… burrowing boats and floating turnip gardens—no, the things that would come would be far stranger than that, I’m sure. Far stranger. Perhaps your father does well to stay away from whatever he avoids by doing whatever he does.’
Norema laughed.
The boys were on the boat, rushing back and forth to aid Fevin with his unloading. Norema watched and wondered why she had not run out with them. She had yesterday; she probably would tomorrow. When her father’s business was slow, sometimes Fevin worked for her mother, and they would take a boat out to fish some of the nearer beds. Other times, if irregularly, the young man worked in her father’s yards—indeed, Snar had often said he would like to have him as a permanent woodcrafter; but Fevin liked to get out on the water. Norema had gone out with him on his boat a dozen times, as had most of the children in the village.
The boat-rim rocked above a reflected, rocking rim. The boys’ bellies flashed; here and there water flared.
Venn started walking again.
Norema came with her.
The water widened, ceased as estuary and became sea.
More docks now; and they were out of the trees and on to the waterfront. As they walked through tall masts’ shadows, raddled across the small stones, Norema asked: ‘Venn, would another example of this idea you’re talking about be men and women? I mean, suppose somewhere there was a plan—like a design for a boat—of the ideal human being: and this ideal human being was the true original of everybody? Suppose men were made first, in the image of this original. But because they were only an image, they reversed all its values—I mean men are petty, greedy, and they fight with each other. So then women were made, after men; and so they were an image of an image, and took on an entirely new pattern of values; they—’
‘Who?’ Venn asked.
‘They … the women.’
Venn leaned nearer to her. ‘“We,” girl. Not “they”—we are the women.’
‘Well,’ Norema said. ‘Of course. I meant “we.” Anyway. Of course it’s possible the women … eh, we were made first. And we reversed the values of the original ideal plan. And men, after us, embody those completely different values.’ She frowned, because this last idea felt distinctly uncomfortable.
Venn slowed her steps, her staff grinding among small stones more and more slowly. At last she stopped. ‘That is the most horrendous notion I’ve ever heard.’ Then she began to walk again, so quickly Norema had to ignore her own surprise to catch up—fortunate, because it did not give the surprise time to become hurt. ‘What I’ve observed—the pattern behind what I’ve observed—explains why what happens happens the way it does. It makes the whole process easier to see. Your idea is a possible explanation not of observations but of a set of speculations, which, if you accept them along with the explanation, would then only make you start seeing things and half-things where no things are. Suppose people with green eyes were the image of your ideal human plan, which completely reversed the plan’s value. And people with gray eyes were an image of the image, with a completely different value. Or people who liked to hunt, as opposed to people who liked to fish. Or people who were fat as opposed to people who were thin. Just consider how monstrous—’ Venn stopped talking, kept walking. Then she stopped walking, sighed, and said: ‘And of course that is the problem with all truly powerful ideas. And what we have been talking of is certainly that. What it produces is il
luminated by it. But applied where it does not pertain, it produces distortions as terrifying as the idea was powerful. And it doesn’t help that we cannot express the idea itself, but only give examples—situations which can evoke the idea in some strong way. Look, girl: Where is your “ideal” plan? Floating in the clouds somewhere? I start with a real thing, like barter, words written on reed paper, an experience at sea, and discuss what happens to their value when a series of reflections occur. You start with a value—an ideal human being—that is the result of so many real people and imagined people’s real and imagined actions, and then try to say the people are a result of this value … I mean … well: let me tell you another tale of my time with the Rulvyn. Oh yes, let me tell you this tale.’
2
There is no point in referring back to all of this unless it permits us to shed some light on what Freud must leave out.
—JACQUES LACAN
Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet
‘I was in the house cooking, with the children. It was raining—a light, warm rain. Ii, Ydit, and Acia were outside tying down hides over some of the farm equipment. Arkvid was inside, sitting on the bench and carving a rult. Two-year-old Kell was teaching my boy, who had just begun to walk at his first year, where to urinate. With one hand she would grasp her genitals and say proudly, “Gorgi!” and then she would pat the boy’s genitals and say, with an explanatory inflection, “Gorgi!” and he would do the same, and laugh. There was a latrine trough, that ran under the wall and out of the house, in the corner; Kell stood in front of it with her legs pressed together and peed at the plank on the back. She had just learned, as every little girl does, that the more you open your legs, the lower the angle of the water. At the same time, she was trying to demonstrate to my boy that he, less economically constructed than she, had best use his hands to guide himself, otherwise things tended to flap and splatter, and that he did not aim naturally straight forward as she did. He, of course, wanted to do it like his big sister. But if you’re a boy, simply standing with your legs together is no guarantee that your urine will spurt straight out. And the idea of using your hand to guide, rather than just to make yourself feel good, had not penetrated his one-and-a-half-year-old mind. At any rate, being a two-and-a-half-year-old of high originality and wide interest, Kell suddenly turned around, saw her father on the bench, dashed across the floor mat, flung herself between his knees, and, holding on to his thigh with one arm, seized his penis, lifted it up, and crowed, with a look of perfect delight, “Gorgi!” And of course the boy was there, right behind her, reaching over her shoulder to hold it too. Now Arkvid was a patient man. He glanced down, surprised, over his carving; then his surprise became a laugh. “If you two keep that up,” he announced to them, “you’ll have it as big as it is when I get up in the morning.” Which made me laugh, over where I was stirring a stew pot at the fire. Kell, however, had made her point; she released her father’s penis and now came over to where I was—Arkvid went back to picking his knife point at the rult—and put her arms around my knee and, as I had just started to put my apron on, said, “’Bye-’bye, gorgi,” which, that week, was what she had been saying when she saw any Rulvyn adult cover their genitals with an apron, penis sheath, or what have you. And of course, there was the boy, right at her shoulder, gazing at me, equally rapt.
‘“Hey, you,” Arkvid called to the boy, as he had just finished his carving. “I’ve something here for you, son.”
‘“’Bye-bye, gorgi.” My son waved at my vagina and turned to his father.
‘“Here now, boy. This is your rult.” And Arkvid took the leather thongs that threaded through the carving to tie it around the boy’s belly—just the way our boys have taken to wearing their mirrors … I am sure it is really just a form of the same custom, though what drew it down from the hills to the shore here I’m sure I don’t know. But you must know about the rults—you’ve seen the Rulvyn men wearing theirs when they come to our village. It is a special, wooden carving that Rulvyn fathers make and give to their infant sons. They are considered very strong hunting magic. Girls do not get them. Indeed, girls are not even supposed to touch them; and the part of the carving the boy wears against his flesh girls are not even supposed to see. Now the Rulvyn, besides being a proud people, are also a fairly sensible one, and except in very old, strict, formal families, don’t try to run the privileges of the rult into the ground. Mothers can loosen their sons’ rults, in order to wash beneath them, but the first thing you try to teach a boy is to wash under his own rult. And unless it’s absolutely necessary, you don’t refer to it in public—though the Rulvyn language abounds in euphemisms for the rult, especially among the men; and all of these euphemisms are considered more or less impolite. Naturally, as with any such taboo, within the home such strictures are relaxed in the face of practical considerations. Also, our family considered itself particularly forward thinking—indeed, I could never have married into them had they been in the least conservative. At any rate, there was Arkvid, tying the carving to the boy’s stomach. Suddenly Kell ran over to him to see what he was doing. Arkvid shifted his knee to shield her view. “No, no,” he said, in a perfectly affectionate way, “this is none of your affair, little girl.”
‘She tried to step around his knee to see.
‘“No,” he repeated, more firmly, and turned the boy away from her eyes.
‘And Kell, like any two-year-old denied access to a nut, or a stick, or a rock, or a shell, began to cry and pull at his knee.
‘“Come on,” Arkvid said, a bit testily. “Now I shouldn’t even be doing this with you in the house, but—here … hey, Venn. Come take her away, will you. She keeps trying to touch his” and here he laughed and used one of the more childish euphemisms for that most sacred object.
‘I came over and lifted her. She rose with an ear-piercing squeal and for the next two hours there was a battle—renewed every thirty seconds to five minutes—to touch, tug, or examine the carving now tied to her brother’s stomach, with Arkvid patiently getting between them when I began to lose patience, and sometimes saying, “I mean, I suppose there’s nothing really wrong with it, but suppose she were to do it outside.” Somewhere near the end of this, Kell made the connection that the carving tied to her father’s stomach, which she had till now never paid much attention to, was the same species of object now on her brother’s, and for minutes stood, her eyes going back and forth between them, looking perfectly forlorn. Finally she resolved the whole thing by taking a small, clay pot top, holding it to her stomach, and walking back and forth with it, giving both her father and me surly-eyed little glances; and of course she would have nothing to do with her brother, who, having gotten over the thrill of having something his sister didn’t, now wanted someone to play with. Arkvid stood by the door, tugging on his penis, which Rulvyn men tend to do when nervous, and finally said to me: “I just hope you women can break her of that, and not let it turn into a habit.” He sighed. To a Rulvyn of either sex, a girl wearing a rult is a perfectly incongruous image. And a girl pretending to wear one borders on the obscene. And as every Rulvyn knows, though most of them seldom talk about it, the giving of the rult from father to son can sometimes occasion months of such hostility in little girls, what with keeping the girls from touching it and not letting them examine it and generally inculcating the respect necessary for it to retain its magic. Indeed, discussions of the various ways the rult should be given in a family with girls—informally as an ordinary part of an ordinary day, as Arkvid had done, or formally before the whole clan with the little girls held safe in their mothers’ arms, or whether the father should take the boy off and make the exchange in private out in the forest—form a major subject of conversation on the porch of the Men’s House or across the border between turnip yards. Kell got by, I remember, with only a couple of weeks’ annoyance over the whole business before she found other things to absorb her. But it was a few nights later, when we were all getting ready to celebrate a n
aven on the completion of the house of a new young family across the road that Arkvid, after we had fed him, lingered squatting by the hearth till we had set up plates for our own meal. “I have been thinking,” he said as Ydit passed turnips to Ii, and I took barley from Acia’s bowl, “and I have an idea,” in that pontifical way Rulvyn men take on when they are talking to all their wives together. “An idea about why women’s ways are so different from men’s.”
‘“Are you still hungry?” Ii asked him. “You can take some nuts and butter wrapped in a fava leaf to the Men’s House and eat it while you dress for tonight.”
‘“Now that’s exactly what I mean,” Arkvid said. “Here I have a perfectly fascinating idea, and all you want to talk about is appeasing hunger, building houses, and tilling the soil,” which are considered the classical concerns of Rulvyn women. “Listen to me. I have discovered why women behave so differently from men. It has to do with rults.” Now there’s a very strange thing. If a grown boy or a man were to visit a friend or relative’s home without his rult, everyone would feel extremely uncomfortable. At the same time, rults are not a subject you talk about—especially at dinner. But Arkvid was our husband and hunter. “This is my idea: The little girl sees that her brother and her father have rults,” Arkvid explained in a clear, precise voice which let us know he had been thinking about this a long time, “and she is jealous and envious of the rult—as she does not possess one. It is right that she should be jealous, for the rult is strong, full of powerful magic, and a man would be hardpressed to kill a wild goat, or a mountain cat, or a rock turtle without one—that is certainly clear. Now even though in a week or a year the little girl seems to forget this jealousy, my idea is that she does not. My idea is that the little girl will put this jealousy down in the dark place below memory where things eat and gnaw at one all through a life, in silence, without ever saying their names. My idea is that the reason women like to have babies is that they think of the new child as a little rult growing inside them, and if the child is a male, they are particularly happy because they know that soon the little boy will be given a rult by his father and, in effect, while the boy is still a baby, they will now have one. My idea is that those women who fail to pay the proper respect to their hunters for bringing meat to add to their yams and millet and turnips and apricots and palm hearts are simply suffering from the jealousy over the rult, even stronger than most, though they do not realize it.” Arkvid folded his arms and looked extremely pleased with himself.
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