The forest is beautiful, though, and I am glad it hasn’t been clearcut. I stare at the texture of the tree in front of me, the gray and black and green of the trunk, the maze of veins, each a home to tiny spiders and to others most humans never notice. I hear a voice again, “Don’t fight it.”
I ask Allison if she said anything.
“No.”
“Then who did?”
“I don’t know, Derrick. Who did?”
I don’t actually write what I write. I just write it down, then edit it. It’s written by my muse. I use the word my not to imply ownership, but relationship, as in my friend, my partner, my lover. She—my muse is a she, though I have no idea if all muses are female—is an actual being. She’s not a metaphor, a personification of my unconscious processes, or even some archetypal figure either bubbling up from my organs or the collective unconscious, or, as I’ve heard some new agers label it, descending from the superconscious. She’s a being, like you, like me, like a salmon, like a white pine, like a ghost spider, only different. She doesn’t live here, although talking about these things, it’s hard sometimes to know what here means. So maybe I should say: except in dreams, I’ve only seen her once, and that, as we’ll eventually get to, was because it was absolutely necessary for reasons I still don’t quite understand. When I’ve seen her in dreams her form sometimes changes. In one she had soft features and skin the color of sweet clover honey, and her scent contained the faintest traces of mint. In another she had dark skin that shone like obsidian and had features sharp to match. I’ve always presumed she takes on these forms because they’re easy for me to understand. I sometimes ask in dreams to see her as she is, but the dreams that follow are jumbles that make me feel as though I’m asking the wrong question.
I don’t know why she chose me. I know that at the very least I have thumbs and fingers: I have a physical body and can write down what she says. But I suspect there’s something more, something in my temperament. Perhaps she saw something in me the same way that even before they begin some sculptors can see their final creations in one piece of stone and not another, like I can sometimes see, with her help, the barest hints of the final shape of a book from its first sentences, or from even before, from the first inchoate ideas and chaotic thoughts and images.
Or maybe it’s all so much simpler. Maybe she liked me, loved me, fell in love with me the way I have fallen in love with her, the way any lovers choose each other, fall in love with each other.
I don’t know if other people—accountants, for example, or probate attorneys—have muses, although I suspect they do. I don’t even know if other writers do. For their sake I hope so, because otherwise writing would be very hard work. Learning how to listen to one’s lover is ever so much easier and more fun than trying to do all the work of creation by oneself. It’s also less lonely.
I know that Allison has a muse, and that her relationship with her muse is as central to her life as mine is to mine. It’s not too much to say that I’m married to my muse, or connected by some bond even tighter and more lasting, and that Allison is married to hers. Neither Allison nor I are jealous of the other’s marriage, nor could either of us be in a relationship with anyone who was.
I don’t know where these muses live. I sometimes call it the “other side,” but that’s a shorthand both inaccurate and inadequate in every possible way. This “other side” is both here and there. Where and what is the division? How many sides are there? Do Allison’s muse and mine necessarily come from the same place, the same side?
I know my muse has no body, at least here. I know she can go where I go. She may be other places at the same time, or she may not. I don’t know, and it’s kind of off the point. I know what she does for me, and what I do for her.
The relationship is deeply sexual. It has been from the beginning. It’s no coincidence that my sexuality and my writing burgeoned simultaneously. Never mind that my sexuality was at the time almost exclusively solo: not many people read my writing then either. The muse was simply teaching me to listen. Or perhaps helping me to remember how to listen. Or maybe teaching me to trust what I heard and what I already knew.
I don’t know, once again, if all relationships with muses are this imbued with sexuality. I once asked Allison if her relationship with her muse was this sexual.
She said, “Oh, yes.”
I found this especially interesting since Allison’s muse is also female, and Allison is neither lesbian, bisexual, nor even slightly bicurious. I asked her about this.
“That’s because this culture’s definitions of sexuality are way too small. Sex isn’t just limited to your genitals. How many times have you made love with a tree?”
“Sometimes that’s involved genitals.”
“And sometimes it hasn’t. And what about those times you’ve made love with the stars?”
“Those all involved—”
“Oh, good point. But you see what I’m saying.”
Of course I did.
I think one reason that making love makes me so receptive to the muse is that the muse enjoys making love as much as I do. Sometimes I think that just as the muse uses my fingers to write through me and my voice to give talks through me, that she uses my body to make love through me. It’s the same with Allison, so that in a very real way when we make love not only the two of us are present. When Allison is around me, pushing toward me, I sometimes feel not just her, but her muse as well. I feel her muse in the small of her back, and in the places deep inside. I feel her against my fingertips when I hold my hands so close to Allison’s chest I feel her warmth but not her skin. And as we get closer and closer, so closer too come our muses.
This is how it has always been with us.
Years ago I had the opportunity to sell out, and didn’t do it. I had only a couple of books out, but I had an agent at a prestigious literary agency. I sent her the first seventy pages of the manuscript that eventually became A Language Older Than Words. She hated the book, and told me to tone down my anger at the culture to make the book more palatable to fencesitters, and thus to allow me to reach a larger audience and to make more money. She told me that if I took out the family stuff and the social criticism then I would have a book. She would not be comfortable shopping the book, she said, unless I made it less radical, less militant. If I did, she said, she felt sure it would become a bestseller.
I fired her on the spot.
I’m certain that’s one reason my muse responds so quickly to me, and gives me so many words. I proved to her in action that the words and books she gives me—what she wants to communicate— are more important to me than fame, money, or any common measure of success. I proved to her that our relationship is more important to me than any of these. I proved to her that she is more important to me than any of these.
Another reason my muse works so quickly is that she is scared of the destructiveness of the dominant culture. That might be why she chose me: I feel the same fear, the same urgency. She knows she can ride me as hard and as fast as she herself can go, and I will do my best, give my life, to keep up.
I know she is scared because she tells me, and she shows me. And who wouldn’t be, faced with this culture?
I used to think my relationship with my muse was one-sided, in that she gives me words and I give her little more than gratitude. But now I know that this is not so. The relationship is mutual, like my relationship with the land where I live, like my relationship with Allison, like my relationships with others in my life. I know this because she tells me, and she shows me. She—like all these others—lets me know that non-mutual relationships aren’t relationships at all.
I am asleep.
Before sleeping I asked the muse what I do for her, what I give her more than gratitude.
I am asleep.
An indigenous man is teaching me how to pray. Then he turns into a woman who writes poems to me. After she writes these poems we make love again and again.
Soon, though, a homeles
s man starts attacking other homeless people, and then they all begin attacking people in this village. When villagers are attacked by these homeless ones, they too become homeless, they too begin to attack others. All of these people begin to take drugs.
I am asleep.
The remaining community members begin to look for the homeless person who started all of this. I join them. Many carry weapons. I carry water.
I am asleep.
The woman—my lover, my muse—begins to look for the cause of these troubles. But then she stops and complains to the gods that she no longer has a lover. She wants a lover. She has always had a lover. That is part of life. The gods tell her that they will point one out to her.
I am asleep.
We are all by now wearing prison uniforms. We are all by now using drugs to quench our pain. I find the person who began all this.
I am asleep.
But not for long. My cat jumps on the sill above the bed. Those who write of cats’ gracefulness have never had a cat knock books off a windowsill onto their head in the middle of the night. I wake up understanding what I give back to those on the other side. I am a willing student of their prayers. I am a willing intimate partner. I am a part of a community searching for what is destroying our lives. I help to point out the violent homeless person who started it all, which means we have at least the possibility of dropping our addictions and our prison garb, and going back to what we were doing before, back to making love.
The muse gives me the words, but I write them down.
I had a problem. It seemed clear to me from the dream and also from the muse’s urgency, that this culture is not only destroying life on this planet, but is also harming life on the “other side,” with the caveat as always that I don’t know what I mean when I say the “other side.” I asked some Indian elders if this culture is as catastrophic for the other side as it is for this one.
They said, “No, the dominant culture is not powerful enough to reach over there. Do not grant it more power than it actually has.”
I’m sure you can see my problem. I believed what these elders told me. And I believed my muse. How could I bring together these different truths into one overarching interpretation?
I got the answer from a piece of carved wood on an elder’s coffee table: an orca intertwined with a sea lion intertwined with a salmon. Each melded into the others until it wasn’t possible to tell where one became the other became the other. It represented, she said, the way none can be defined without the others, the way none can survive without the others.
It came clear to me that the same is true for the other sides as well. Yes, there are places the dominant culture cannot reach—the muse was appealing to the gods for a lover, which implies layers even further than hers from our everyday world of trees and spiders and soil and cats on our laps, and implies as well that these gods are beyond the reach of these homeless, rootless, attackers—but in no way is this geography as simple as here and there, one side and the other. There are layers, and there are spaces, and there are complex intertwinings so complex that sometimes we aren’t sure where one ends and another begins. Some places may be affected by this destructive culture, and some may not. And some may be affected in ways we could never predict, even if we were able to begin to understand.
The elder told me that the sculpture is not only about animals but also about time.
I told her I didn’t understand.
She didn’t say anything, but merely moved her hands in small circles, each around the other.
I want to speak to the director. I want to understand what that dream—that visitation—was about. Who are the vampires, the demons? Where are they from? Are they real, or are they symbols representing something else?
I ask for a dream. One comes. I’m standing in line to use a lavatory. Even while I sleep, even while I dream, this encourages me. I know the landscape of my dreams—the language used between us by those who give me these dreams—well enough to know that for us toilets mean a connection to the unconscious and a connection beyond that to places even deeper. You flush the toilet, and where does everything go? Down through pipes into a whole other world, a world of digestion and decomposition. A world of remaking and reconstitution. A world with dripping, flowing, moving water. A world most of us never see, most of us never think about.
The line is long, and slowly I make my way to the front. Finally I am first. I open the door, step through. I’m inside a bare room: concrete floor, brick walls, dark wood ceiling. There are no toilets. There is no plumbing. There is absolutely nothing in the room. I turn, open the door, and leave.
The message was clear. I do not ask to speak with the director. To do so is to face a brick wall. If the director has something to say, the director will contact me.
Sitting here against this tree I try to not fight it. It’s very hard. I feel the slender silver thread that is the only thing that connects me to everything I’ve known. I feel its delicacy, and I begin to know that if it snaps, I will never return.
“Don’t fight it,” the voice keeps saying.
I see Allison sitting beside me, looking at me intently. I look beyond her to the forest I know is no longer a forest, to the shadows and to the sunlight who never strike the ground and to the ground who never feels the sunlight, the ground who never wants to feel the sunlight. I see the green leaves, and I see the tan patches of normal disease or fungus: life feeding off life. I see the remains of old trees softening, crumbling. I see someone’s scat, and the mold growing on this scat. I see soft mosses at the base of trees. Despite my fear I see the beauty of all of this, and I see the bare movement of needles in a breeze I cannot feel, the scurrying of large-bodied, small-headed beetles with beautiful black backs. I see small brown birds who hop from place to place on two legs. I see tiny plants and fungi. I see ants and spiders going about their days. I see so many lives I would normally never notice.
I hear Allison say, “I’m right here.”
I take a deep breath, feel for that silver thread, and let myself fall just a little bit deeper.
six
Wétikos
I don’t know about you, but when I catch a cold, I get psychologically down. It sinks into my experience. I get a little bit crabby. I don’t deal with that stress very well. The virus infects my spirit as well as my body. I guess what I’m saying is that if my body is sick, my brain changes. So it would make sense that if I have a spiritual sickness, my brain and my body are apt to change as well.
Why are the only epidemics that we recognize physical? I think it’s because we take such great pains to keep our physical and spiritual selves apart. It’s crazy that people devastated by physical illness receive all kinds of support—or at least some of them do—while those who become desperately sick mentally or emotionally most often do not. In regular hospitals, patients get flowers and people come to visit. Mental hospital inmates are shamed.
Physical illness I can see and measure and diagnose. So because I feel I can understand it, I can respect it. But because we don’t know how to understand mental illness we pretend it doesn’t exist, and we shut the ill into mental hospitals far away. Even if they’re not physically far away, they are far away from our hearts and our minds.
How much moreso, then, do we fail to acknowledge any disease of the soul? There is a cannibal sickness, which is a sickness just like any other plague or epidemic, highly contagious, with physical vectors, spread by contact, by air, by water, by touch, even also by spoken or written word—spread till it now covers the earth and to a greater or lesser degree infects us all. There are no hospitals for this sickness. If we cannot acknowledge it, how can we attempt to cure it?
Of course I’d heard about rabies from when I was a small child: everyone who has ever bawled through the end of Old Yeller knows that any beloved pet who contracts the disease turns into a vicious monster frothing at the mouth and lunging at anyone who comes too near, and everyone who lives in the country knows that the f
ear of rabies is why you never pick up injured rodents.
But the implications of rabies didn’t hit me until my twelfth year, and to this day I remember where I was and what I was doing when the central question of rabies struck me. I was sitting on a wood bench on our deck on a hot summer day, holding an encyclopedia and thinking about the ground squirrel who had gotten stuck in our garage the day before. I’d caught her and put her in a cage, because that’s what I’d been taught you do with wild animals unfortunate enough to come in contact with you: you turn them into “pets,” whether they want that or not. Fortunately the cage was rickety, and overnight the ground squirrel escaped.
I wasn’t thinking about the ground squirrel’s bad fortune of encountering me or her good fortune of the cage being old. I wasn’t even feeling guilty or bad for caging her in the first place: the understanding that an other has a life of her own, and is not here solely for my use, didn’t come to me until a bit later:
I’m grateful it’s come at all, since the same cannot be said for most people in this culture. Instead I was thinking about the heavy gloves I’d worn to keep her teeth away from my skin, and I was thinking about how gentle ground squirrels seem most of the time, but how she had scratched and bit when I grabbed her. I understood her fighting back, and certainly respected it. But I didn’t, once again, yet take that understanding to the next level, that her fighting against being put in a cage was her telling me she didn’t want to be caged, and that for that reason alone I should let her be. I didn’t, in short, empathize with her. I know we’ve all been told that children naturally feel a connection to others, and I’m sure that’s true, but I know that by the time I was seven, eight, nine, and ten this connection had at the very least been deeply frayed, and it took years of seeing others suffer as a consequence of my actions—or more precisely seeing the external trappings of their suffering, but not actually seeing their suffering at all—before it even occurred to me what I was doing. At that point I began the slow process of reweaving the braided connection between me and others.
Songs of the Dead Page 4