Blue Ravens: Historical Novel

by Gerald Vizenor

  I was heartened by the courage and humor of the veterans, and moved by the spirit and generosity of the stories. Most of the stories were ironic, the chance encounters with the enemy. The stories of the wounded veterans at the square would have inspired an audience of natives on the reservation. The sounds of the war, the rumble, crash, and shatter of explosions were hard to describe, and every veteran created original metaphors of sound. One veteran used the specific sounds of the river, the screech of steam whistles, the bump and shudder of heavy barges on the wooden docks.

  The sounds of the Great War were over, and should have been forgotten, but the visual scenes and necessary metaphors continued in ordinary peaceful places and the River Seine. I had imagined the sound of enemy machine guns in the dry leaves that scraped across the river stones.

  Pierre was one of the best storiers, and he declared that our stories as veterans were the only trustworthy memories and histories of the war. Our stories were reliable histories, he repeated at every lunch, because our stories were inspired by visual memories. The stories were original, and not mere recitations, so the storier never told exactly the same version of the story. Liturgy was a religious and political recipe of authority, and not creative or reliable as the visual memories of stories.

  Pierre was a native teaser, and a clever storier, but the wounds of war were never the secure sources of taunts or ironic decoys. The veterans practiced the tease of manners, gestures, and clothes, service chance and regrets, the wave of a middle finger, threadbare trousers, saintly socks, a pink shirt, mismatched colors, but never scars or war wounds. No one ever commented on scars, burns, broken faces, or severed limbs.

  The commune of river veterans became our native sanctuary, and we were the only native veterans of the Great War. Granger Gross was the only other river veteran from America. Naturally, my reservation accent was mocked, and the veterans teased me about my notebook, and my brother about blue ravens. I never directly wrote in the presence of anyone. My notes were discreet, and yet the mere practice of private records was a separation, a pose of authority. So, on the third river meal with the veterans my private notes were translated into French and read out loud by a wounded veteran from a farm near Château-Thierry.

  Granger translated and then my notebook was passed around several times over lunch. My imagistic entries, notes, and selected descriptive comments were read openly with constant teases, shouts, critical overstatements, and astonishment in a particular tone of voice. Three weeks later the notebook scenes were no longer a source of ironic humiliation, or even communal mockery. The native tease on the reservation was mostly a trial by chagrin, and the mockery by wounded veterans was the same. The ordeal ended and the veterans actually started to dictate notes and heartfelt stories to me, and those notes became another source of my stories about wounded veterans of the First World War.

  Aloysius painted every day and completed thirty-six original paintings in the series Thirty-Six Scenes of Blue Ravens and Bridges on the River Seine for the special exhibition that early summer at the Galerie Crémieux.

  Nathan had widely advertised the exhibition, and he posted notices at museums, bookstores, and in public places. The notices described the series as visionary native portraits of the River Seine. The portrayals were creative scenes of more than twenty individual bridges, and some were painted several times. My brother painted the Pont Neuf and Pont Mirabeau several times, and each portrait in the series was an original abstract perception of the bridges.

  ÉCOLE INDIENNE DES CORBEAUX BLEUS

  Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu

  White Earth Reservation

  State of Minnesota

  Trente-Six Scènes des Corbeaux Bleus

  Thirty-Six Native Scenes of Blue Ravens

  Bridges over the River Seine

  Saturday, June 14, 1924

  GALERIE CRÉMIEUX

  Nathan framed the entire series, thirty-six scenes of the river, and displayed the paintings on three walls of the gallery. He placed four scenes of the Pont Neuf on separate easels near the entrance to the gallery. The crowd of artists, art collectors, students, and some veterans from the café and river commune were naturally drawn to the four easels and portraits of blue ravens and the glorious bastions and stone arches of the Pont Neuf.

  The Pont Neuf was built with twelve bastions over the river on one side of the Square du Vert-Galant, and eight more bastions on the other side of Île de la Cité. Aloysius painted twenty stone bastions afloat with great blue ravens on enormous crests of white and blue waves on the River Seine. The bastions floated with uneven cants in the faint rouge shadows, the broken shadows of the Pont Neuf. The waves in the portrait of the bridge were traced by inspiration to The Great Wave, a woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai.

  The second abstract portrait of the bridge was a fractured scene, cracked and crooked in the hues of a muted sunrise on the River Seine. Great blue ravens were perched at the seams to steady the bridge. The third portrait thrust the sections of the bridge out of the dark blue river in the claws of blue ravens. The waves reached to the sky with the sections. The fourth abstract portrait of the bridge was in natural flight over the huge muted blue leaves on eddies in the river, and the billows of clouds were the wings of the blue ravens.

  Aloysius painted the faint rise of the sun, only a trace of rouge on the horizon, and created the slight rouge reflections of the sun in wavy tiers on the River Seine. The reflections of the bridges in the series were broken by waves, and the fractured, erratic, breach of the watery reflection became the portrait of the bridge and blue ravens.

  Native visionary artists created a sense of presence with the perceptions of motion, a native presence in the waves of memory, and in the transience of shadows. Birds and animals perceive motion in water, rain, the waves on lakes and rivers, the shimmer of light and fugitive reflections on the water, as an artist might with contour and colors, and breach the image and custom of the seasons and the perceptions of the ordinary.

  Misaabe, the native healer, taught me to create stories with the perception of motion and the belted kingfisher, and with vigilance breach the surface of reflections to catch a fish. My brother painted to fracture the obvious reflections of the bridge with images of great blue ravens. Native perception and imagination can easily reverse the course of waves, and the familiar images and reflections of faces and monuments. The Pont Neuf and other bridges were always more beautiful in the natural motion of waves and in the fractured reflection of a sunrise.

  The Pont Neuf abstract portraits were compared to river scenes painted by Camille Pissaro and Claude Monet. Pissaro painted the original impressions of ephemeral winter lights on the River Seine. Monet painted Soleil Levant, an inspired bloody sunrise with muted water blues and greens, and the incredible reflection of the sun on the harbor at Le Havre. Pissaro, Monet, and other serious and original visionary painters were not comparable to my brother. Yet the casual resemblance to the water scenes created by Pissaro, Monet, and Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu revealed a natural obligation to create motion with hues of color and an abstract sense of presence with fractured or cubist reflections.

  The art collectors crowded in silence around the four portraits of the Pont Neuf. Nathan stood nearby and listened to the comments about the blue raven portrayals. I observed that most visitors to the gallery expected a native artist to represent some traditional scene, or at least depict a trace of native culture or inheritance in the portrayal of the river scenes.

  The Great War fractured the ordinary stay, wily scenes, native reflections, ethnographic warrants, and empire cultures, and nothing has ever been the same on the White Earth Reservation, Montbréhain, Rue Mouffetard, or the River Seine.

  I moved closer to the four portraits on the easels, introduced myself as a native veteran and writer, and explained to the visitors that blue ravens were native visions, and the historical name of the Pont Neuf was not always a representation of the real bridge. The name was figurative, and the me
aning of the bridge was discovered or perceived in the traces of natural motion in stories, but not in the cultural liturgies or structural expositions.

  I pointed at each of the four scenes and told the visitors that the presence of the bridge was imagined, and not the mere copy of an image or reflection. The abstract scenes of the bridge were visionary, and that was a common native practice in stories and art, similar to native visionary scenes of blue horses painted in magical flight on ledger paper.

  Franz Marc came to mind in the conversation at the gallery because he had painted great blue horses, and was plainly inspired by native artists and by Marc Chagall. Natives had painted abstract horses in bold colors long before the portrayals of blue horses and red cows by other painters. Only the mere mention of a German, Franz Marc, a member of Der Blaue Reiter, was a serious detraction to some of the visitors at the gallery, but that awkward reaction was allayed when the visitors learned that the artist had died in the First World War.

  Seven years later the hatred of the enemy had become an obsession. The sentiments of vengeance had reached into the very heart and authenticity of avant-garde art, and the marrow of popular culture. Cubism was once denounced as a German perversion, and the censure was so persuasive that some cubist and avant-garde painters changed styles during the war. Pablo Picasso, who did not serve in the military, shunned cubism and turned back during the war to classical themes and portraiture.

  Aloysius painted the Pont de Passy as a blue skeleton under the gauzy waves of the River Seine. The scene was horizontal, just below the reflection on the water, and revealed enormous concrete piers and ominous spiny creatures. Three blue ravens floated on the mirage of the river with wings spread widely between the cutwaters and elegant metal arches.

  Four great blue ravens were perched on the stone pillars at the entrances to the ornate Pont Alexandre III. The bridge was built for the Paris Exposition Universelle, World Fair in 1900. The blue ravens had unseated four elaborate golden statues on the pillars, the statues that represented the symbolic history of France. Aloysius had painted traces of rouge on the claws

  of the ravens. Some artists at the gallery were rather amused by the tease of aesthetics and ironic conversions of national narratives, but other visitors were sidetracked by the creative arrogance. The French were rightly protective of state art and monuments.

  The Pont au Change was curved under water, and envisioned in a current of blue raven feathers. Sections of the bridge emerged, and the shadowy buildings were afloat on the river. The Palais de Justice and La Conciergerie at the Île de la Cité were portrayed as reflections in the water, and marbled blue.

  The hazy images of the buildings were buoyant, the towers wavered, the windows were wispy hues of blue on the river, and the stone statues were daubed with traces of rouge and faint black. The medallions of Emperor Napoleon were bent and creased as pendants in the huge claws of two blue ravens. Gauzy shadows of the blue ravens were spread over the broken surface images of the Palais de Justice.

  Aloysius painted with a trace of rouge the abstract silhouettes of a guillotine on the windows of La Conciergerie. Only the most perceptive viewers of the Pont au Change might have noticed the slight silhouettes of guillotines. Marie Antoinette was imprisoned there, and later executed by guillotine.

  I told the visitors at the exhibition that native painters were visionary artists and had always created scenes of visual memories, and native visual scenes were never based on the liturgy of names or institutions. The visitors easily recognized the recent innovations of impressionistic, fauvist, and cubist art, the original abstract scenes and elusive hues of form and structure. The bright colors conveyed the heart, passion, and creative perceptions of instinct and natural motion.

  Some visitors at the gallery that night compared the blue ravens and bridges painted by my brother to the particular abstract, fauvist, and cubist styles of paintings by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, André Derain, and Marc Chagall.

  Aloysius was inspired by other original painters, of course, but never directly influenced by impressionism, fauvism, or cubism. He honored the great avant-garde painters, but not the mere ideologies of artistic styles. My brother painted ravens with natural wild blues, but never painted political ideas or competed with any other artists in the world. He created visionary native scenes in natural motion, a style that was original, untutored, and conceived on the White Earth Reservation.

  The Pont Mirabeau was the most sensational blue ravenesque portrait in the series of the thirty-six blue bridges at the exhibition. The scene was mounted separately on the back wall of the gallery. Aloysius had painted an unsteady and awkward totemic tower of four bronze statues, and with the same number of blue ravens. The actual green statues on the two piers of the bridge were painted hues of blue on the totemic tower.

  The abstract totemic statues only slightly resembled the four majestic bronze figures on the arches of the glorious Pont Mirabeau. Two actual statues, allegories of navigation and commerce on the prow and stern of a symbolic boat, were mounted in downstream positions. The statue at the prow carried a francisque, a hatchet or tomahawk, and the other statue at the stern carried the gear for the symbolic boat. The two bronze statues on the second symbolic boat, a nude woman with a golden horn at the prow, and a figure with a torch at the stern, were mounted on the bridge pier in the upstream positions on the River Seine.

  Aloysius created the abstract totems of four blue ravenesque figures with tomahawks, torches, boat gear, and temple trumpets. Several blue ravens were intertwined over the tower. The cones of the blue temple trumpets were touched with rouge.

  Sections of the metal bridge were curved and stacked at the bottom of the totemic tower. The abstract images of blue feathers, temple horns, and torches were afloat on the River Seine.

  The Pont Mirabeau portrait was more than a reflection, but rather an intrinsic perception of the abstract reflection of the bridge on the water. The ravenesque portraits in the entire series were the mythic presence of color and motion in the reflection of the River Seine.

  Nathan Crémieux stood near the sensational portrait of the Pont Mirabeau and read out loud the poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” by Guillaume Apollinaire. More than forty visitors gathered around to hear my favorite poem read in French. “Le Pont Mirabeau” was published in Alcools, a selection of his recent poetry. Nathan read slowly, and with a resonant voice. The audience was moved by the visual images of each word of the poem.

  Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

  Et nos amours

  Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne

  La joie venait toujours après la peine

  Olivier Black Elk, Coyote Standing Bear, and other natives in our commune at the Café du Dôme arrived later at the exhibition. No one was surprised that the two prominent pretenders were more interested in the ethnographic representations of native traditions and cultures. Predictably the most uncertain and anxious pretenders were the negotiators of native conventions and authenticity.

  The abstract visionary scenes of blue ravens and the broken images of bridges on the river were not easily poached or earmarked as customary. The pretense of native ancestry withered with abstract images and native irony. Olivier and Coyote were never critical of natives, and wisely used elusive

  praise, grand, bright, brilliant, to comment on the blue ravenesque portraits.

  The wounded veterans of the commune at the Square du Vert-Galant on the River Seine were truly transformed by the totemic presence of blue ravens and the fractures of the obvious. The veterans had discovered in the abstract portraits of the bridges the creative rage and passion of blue ravens, and the cracks and marbled scenes of mirrors. Once the natural scenes were changed by the creative turns of reflections and breaks of the ordinary, the wounds of the body, the mutilés de guerre, became only ephemeral reflections on the surface, and easily transmuted by imagination and the natural tease of aesthetics and disability.

  Pierre Chaisson was
inspired by the portraits of the blue ravens and declared at the exhibition that the wounds of the veterans were the very first cubist perceptions. Wounded veterans were the artists of their body images and reflections, and the natural motion of the river forever created a new aesthetic face in the water.

  The common and familiar body was only a cultural reflection, he announced, and the amputations, scars, creases, burns, patchwork pare and skin, cracked features, and cockeyed ears, arms, and more, were abstract creations of wounds and original scenes and reflections in the new aesthetics of humane cubist portraiture.

  Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler closely studied each of the blue raven portraits. He returned to peruse the Pont Mirabeau and Pont Alexandre III several times, but never gestured or commented on the composition or style. Silence, and no obvious gestures, discussions or descriptive observation of paintings was his signature manner as a gallery owner.

  Kahnweiler remembered our conversation several months earlier, rather the translation of our conversation, at Shakespeare and Company. I presumed he was impressed with at least one portrait, but he was resolute and avoided even the invitation of a general comment.

  I mentioned Ulysses by James Joyce, but the art collector evaded any comments about literature in the same manner as art. We talked awkwardly about the mutilés de guerre and forsaken wounded veterans in France and Germany. I was moved by the lonesome gestures of his eyes, the ordinary consequence of a wise and perceptive outsider. Kahnweiler was a German more at home in the liberty of France.

  Kahnweiler and Georges Braque were engaged in a serious conversation later about the portraits of the Pont au Change and Pont Mirabeau. I only heard the words guillotine and poteau de totem, but the gestures of the cubist artist and the art collector were animated and favorable. Naturally, the hierarchy of the blue ravens was much higher on the totemic towers than the bronze statues on the Pont Mirabeau. Kahnweiler was the first gallery owner to exhibit the cubist paintings of Braque.