Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  My head seared with their reverberations, and my chest did too, until I wondered if my heart was also a bell, eagerly clinking and echoing. When I could bear it no longer, I slipped out of Lyoobov and saw what had happened.

  The Rivers were coming all at once. Welling up, breaking the asphalt, sending up clouds of dust, then swallowing them. I climbed to the top of Lyoobov’s back, which vibrated like she was all one bell, and then the waters came and engulfed us. I screamed. I did not want to drown. Lyoobov, she looked at me gently, and bobbed upward.

  We floated.

  Before my eyes, like some oceanic tide, the Valley filled with those two rivers called the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. Sacrament and Saint. As they came up from the ground, I thought for a moment that I saw two figures, a man and a woman, pulling the Rivers behind them, tearing open the ground, each wreathed in sedges and tules, mud-smeared, blue. Then, nothing, just that great flooding. Dams, I think, were shattering everywhere all through the foothills, and they made a din too. It was an angry and an eager flooding, and we floated on that great lake, that inland ocean. The very dirt below seemed to groan and croon with pleasure.

  This is the part you will believe the least. The water, well, it wasn’t water at first, but milk. I swear to you upon my fox-swallowed and Molly-made heart, it was milk. The milk of every mammal come and gone. The milk that is the dust between stars. The milky sap of plants.

  I looked back at the mountains from where we’d come and saw that the peak Anja had called Beatrice Mother of Waters was no longer a white cap on top of a ridge, with granite sharp and dark below it; the glacier was streaming, turning the hole mountain white. Not melting, it seemed to me, but erupting.

  Swarms of honeybees materialized with the dawn and hummed around us, everywhere, lapping at the river-milk, dropping the yellow pollen from their legs. By midday the milk was golden with pollen. Lyoobov and I floated in a daze, drinking the milk dusted with pollen, which tasted sweet and sour and buttery at once.

  For months, Lyoobov and I floated through that Valley full of milk. Miles and miles we floated with the currents, heading west. We left Sare and her People in early winter, and floated for a whole season in milk. By late spring it was all gone, beneath us only normal river water, murky green-brown with sediment and those centuries underground. Maybe it all got lapped up by the dry land below, or maybe just mixed in with the water as it began to run clear. Like a wound, cleaning itself. We floated, dreaming. Not thinking much at all because, you see, we felt such calm, though we didn’t know, really, if this meant the world had ended again, or was just beginning.

  After those months drinking milk and honey, we reached the delta that opens through the Strait and into the Bay. By then all the waters had lowered and we floated on a normal river, no milk, no inland sea. The water flowed by with pieces of broken cement, block after block, getting rid of it all.

  We climbed onto the shore, reluctantly, like getting out of bed after a long dream. Cold feet to the dirt. But it was good like that too—the feeling of stretching, taking in gulps of air, feeling the sunlight as if brand new.

  As we began the last bit, rolling up and down, up and down, the three ridges and three valleys, toward home, here among the meadows and the alders near the ocean, we looked back once. A woman was coming behind us. Far behind, a mile or two, but in that flat expanse of delta and empty hills, we could see her and hear the clatter of hooves, the padding of paws, the flapping of wings, behind her. She had a huge dark coil of green hair, and the wind blowing from the east brought us the smell of rosemary. Behind her walked flocks of pronghorn antelope and tule elk, yellow legged frogs, grizzly bears and golden beavers, in some kind of peaceable truce together. Above flew spotted owls, night herons, a bald eagle, tiny brown wrens. A single barn owl with big yellow eyes, the one who is with us still—she flew right toward us, and landed like home on Lyoobov’s back.

  The woman with green coils of hair walked beside a big tawny cow with black eyes who wore a bell on her neck that clanked. Milk dripped from hooves and talons and paws as they mounted one of the old roads that led west, the same one we used, a wide highway grown thick with dandelions. They dripped milk like they’d waded knee-deep in the stuff. She waved at me like she knew me, then shooed me on with her hands.

  So here I am. Before you. This is all I Know.

  POPPY WAS FINISHED. HE SHUT LYOOBOV’S BOOK. THE RAVENS HAD flown close, because they knew a good thing when they heard it. Everyone was so deep-fallen into Poppy’s words, they did not notice the multitudes of antelope, of tule elk, the myriad yellow legged frogs, the quiet clans of grizzly bears, and behind Molly, the most beautiful woman you could imagine, dark hair a fragrant coil, a green fringe at the backs of her hands, holding a Jersey cow on a nettle rope, amidst them all, listening.

  Slowly, Poppy walked to Lyoobov’s belly and climbed inside. The barn owl with great yellow eyes followed. They both came out bearing armloads and talons-full of big bells. Poppy carried the single buckeye seed in his shirt. Then he began to ring the bells, one by one, while the barn owl circled, and everybody’s heart broke right in two, like nuts split in half to let their tendriled stalks begin to grow.

  SINCE BEFORE I COULD UTTER WORDS, I THINK I HAVE ALWAYS SEEN around the corners of things. As a child this could sometimes be unsettling, but over the years of becoming the artist that I had no choice but to be, I learned that I could paint these folk I saw or dreamed or felt, these otherwhere places which seemed at once familiar and strange, and that painting was a kind of language in which I could sing invisible threads between things. These days I describe my paintings as Waymarkers to the Otherworlds because I am fascinated by the shamanic process inherent in creating art, and the way a powerfully wrought image really can take you to another place, and cause tangible change.

  My work conjures a kind of folktale world, though the paintings are mostly not illustrations of actual stories. The people and landscapes and objects and atmospheres I create are from some kind of peasant-fable, situated perhaps somewhere between Russia, Finland and Northern Germany/Poland; it’s a timeless place that I think corresponds to a kind of Old Europe, but really cannot be pinned on a map or historical timeline. People often comment that my paintings are sad, which I suppose in a way they are, though to me it is a beautiful melancholy, a yearning ache: I am painting in a minor key. But most of all, people ask me to tell them the stories behind my paintings, and I can never give them an answer because the stories woven inside my works are different for every person who steps toward them, and often I do not know how they begin or end myself.

  So, imagine my delight when I received stories written for my paintings by someone else! Sylvia Linsteadt began at first using my images as inspirations, as starting blocks to initiate pieces of writing, but upon embarking on this creative journey, found that the union of our worlds opened up a whole new one and that the words just tumbled out. I nervously read her first piece, written for Lyoobov—a piece I painted aged 18—and was totally shaken by the wonder and quality of her storytelling. She began writing more pieces to other paintings of mine and sent them to me, one by one. It was a strange and beautiful experience, getting to walk the forest glades of my own imagination and see them through the eyes of another; it was like being taken by the hand to a place you know well but which has changed since you were last there, and told all about it in words that ring familiar and yet new in your ears. Sylvia and I share many loves—for wilderness and otherness and for the odd and ragged characters and creatures that populate the edges of things, as well as an anger at the loss and destruction of land and old ways that we endure in this Twenty First Century. And so it makes perfect sense that we should combine our arts; but reading the tales of characters born from my own inner world was intimate and moving in a strange and unfamiliar way, and utterly delightful.

  Gradually, as the stories grew in number, threads began to be woven between them, and the semblance of a mosaic story-cloth took shape. The
tales ended up spanning many lifetimes, and are set in a mythic version of Northern California. The cycle of stories make up a post-apocalyptic folktale peopled with fools and wheeled creatures and storytellers and vagabonds and wise animal-women; how could I fail to be enchanted (in its truest sense—to be sung in by bewitchment)? These are the Otherworlds I spend most of my time in, painted in jewelled language, embroidered, re-mapped, lit up by Sylvia’s exquisite and unique art, and I am honoured beyond words.

  It is illustration turned on its head: in an appropriate upturning of the linear right-/left-brain order of things, the writing comes after the image, not before. In such a revolution, we are enabled once again to re-track those old once-known paths to the worlds beyond this one; this story has its roots in the magical earth of intuition because it came from the art. I believe this lends Tatterdemalion an unusual power: it is a story created by women in an upside-down way, celebrating the oddest and most marginal of characters and ways, and is utterly unhesitant about re-imagining an uncivilisation—ancient, wild and once more acquainted with the Dreaming.

  May the integrity and true magic woven into these storied tatters sing open for you the vagabonding tracks to a new kind of wonder and bless your eyes and ears and hearts with the ointments of bewilderment.

  RIMA

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW ONE OF RIMA’S PAINTINGS, I EXPERIENCED A feeling of deep, animal resonance somewhere near my solar plexus. It was a startling bloom of recognition that felt like the opening of a brambled door I’d always carried in me, but had yet to discover until that moment. It was a feeling of utter joy. But it had about it a tremble of the uncanny too, the sort of tremble that makes you pause and wonder if there are places of pilgrimage to which many human imaginations may journey—common ground, like the ancestral spawning pools of Chinook salmon, the ancient calving thickets of caribou, the primordial nesting tundras of the wayfaring arctic tern. Seeing Rima’s work opened the brambled door to an old footpath I’d been looking for in all my life’s word-makings, probably since the age of seven when I one day lifted my pencil and decided I wanted to write tales. Until I glimpsed Rima’s artwork, all the dusky-footed woodrat nests and gray fox dens I’d wandered through, the elk trails and bumble-bee flight paths, could never quite lead me there, to that particular door of thorn and dusty old sun and a doorknob of hedgehog vertebrae. Reaching it some two and a half years ago made me want to cry.

  I can’t remember now which painting I first glimpsed in Rima’s Hermitage, which creation it was that flapped its strange, bloodred wings and revealed, on the undersides, the map to that storied place in my own mind which had been waiting, twiddling its thumbs, for me to find it. Maybe this is more illustrative than being able to point to a single one of Rima’s works as some kind of sourcepoint in my memory—all of her creations, it feels to me, emerge from the same vast, strange, fierce landscape at once utterly wild and utterly tender, a place east of the moon, west of the present, and rooted deep in some fiddle-sung, bear-danced, rug-woven, mountain-path-caravan-trundled dirt. The eyes of her edgewalking people, her edgewalking animals and weeds and musical instruments, are lonesome, loving and wise, and they looked right into my bones and sang a song there that left me literally reeling and giddy for days.

  As for Tatterdemalion, this ragged-kind creation with its skirts on backwards, a tophat of woodrat-palace sticks and a heart all milk and honey and tooth—it is, to date, the most joyous piece of writing I’ve made with these two hands (the one that holds the fountain pen, the one that steadies and smoothes the page). It was more like setting off on a strange new footpath in old, trusted boots, and seeing who next I met around the corner, than the usual feeling of coaxing people and animal and story from the mysterious soil (or sky) of the mind-heart-hand, where tales, for me, are normally found. With Tatterdemalion, I walked a while; I stopped for a cup of smoky tea on a piece of driftwood; I watched Ffion emerge from a bottle in the middle of a sea lion and introduce herself; I carried on. I met Anja at a crossroads, juggling buckeyes; she told me her tale and pointed the way to Lyoobov. And on it went, from a feral future San Francisco Bay (and more specifically West Marin) to the Sierra Nevada mountains and back, tracing the snow melt rivers to the ocean again by foot and paw and wheel. This is a strange patchwork cape of a tale told tattered, told true.

  Literally, Tatterdemalion was born one day in the autumn of 2012, while sitting in my studio at the time (the old laundry-room-turned-back-door-landing of my brother’s house in Berkeley, which smelled of some ancient detergent and flooded with the winter rains), staring at the wall and feeling that black doom of writer’s block. Idly, I thought I might loosen up my imagination by writing something inspired by one of Rima’s paintings. “Lyoobov” trundled through, and hitched my hands to his wheels and strange trunk. The woman and man on his back broke my heart, and the first piece in this book came pouring out. I sent it to Rima, thinking she might enjoy this front-to-back creation—a tale illustrating her painting with words. I wrote another (“Hark, Hark!”) and another (“A Girl Mad as Birds”), and sent them all, rather surprised at what was coming out, at the wild familiarity of it all within myself. Rima suggested they’d make a nice book, and perhaps I should keep going? Why, yes! Suddenly, the characters were not disparate folk, but players in the same tale, startling me with the ways they wandered in, already knowing one another. But of course they did, didn’t they, for they had all wandered into Rima’s wildly fecund mind and hands first, calling out their greetings. She is the original alchemist who sang them down from the strangest of stars and up from the sweetest of root-tangles under the ground.

  Tatterdemalion is thus a series of Rima’s paintings that birthed a series of my own stories illustrating those paintings with words, back-to-front of the usual order of things. Rima’s creations are whole worlds unto themselves, which brings me to my last and most important point of all—if these paintings are like the axles at the centers of myriad wheels (all bone and sinew and oak and metal flute scrap), then the stories I have written are single spokes. This is what makes Rima’s work so especially beautiful: each painting is an endless world, a rainstorm of possible tales, a moment in time that might lead backward or forward in millions of possible directions. My tales are merely single drops. There is room for all of our stories inside the weedy seams of Rima’s work. Bless her a hundred times over for this, and for the doorway she hitches open in every wild heart.

  SYLVIA

  THE COFFEEPOT

  A GIRL MAD AS BIRDS

  LYOOBOV

  HARK HARK

  THE BELLS

  SLOVA SOVA

  LEG WHEEL AND JAW HARP

  THE FISH EGG

  WITCH BOTTLE

  ANJA IN THE HORSE CHESTNUT

  THE VISITORS

  KAKUARSHUK

  WAYFARER’S NATIVITY

  SNOWFLIGHT UNDER THE SEASKY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MANY THANKS TO RIMA, OF COURSE, FOR HER ENDLESS, WISE INSPIRATION and pathmaking as an artist and friend; to my wonderful agent Jessica Woollard for her dedication, belief and vision and her support every step of the way; to the brilliant Jay Griffiths for first winging this book out into the world; to John Mitchinson for remembering and believing, and for breathing it all to life; to my editor Liz Garner, for her love of true old magic and her care and skill with words and myths and language-spells; to the wonderful team at Unbound, whose support and care and kindness made Tatterdemalion’s birth a thing of ease and bounty; to every person whose name is listed in the back of this book, for literally bringing it into the world, for making Tatterdemalion a community; to my family, for believing in my love of words and old worlds and strange enchantments from the very beginning; to my love, for always; and to the land of California and the stories in my blood, for saying tell.

  SYLVIA

  MY BIGGEST THANKS GO TO THE BEINGS WHO TOOK MY HAND EARLY on and bade me paint. But without the humans who came after, I wouldn’t still be doing so. So, deep
gratitude to my parents Pamela and James Staines who raised me surrounded by beautiful art-making, and instilled in me a belief that this soul-work was a valid path to take in life. Ongoing, wide-reaching gratitude to my beloved Tom Hirons who is pen to my paintbrush, supports me endlessly to create more, and who weaves with me the art and stories to come, not least of these—our beloved Orin, who scintillated my world a thousand-thousandfold when he came through and to whom it will all be passed on.

  For seeing the stories in my art I must also thank the incredible Jay Griffiths whose belief in my work means a great deal indeed. I thank and salute John Mitchinson, Unbound’s team and wide community of supporters for enabling such unusual and strange work to be published.

  And most of all I must thank Sylvia—for she alone of all the people who look at my paintings and ask “What is the story behind it?” went behind to look, and came back with the most truthfully-enchanted story I have ever read.

  RIMA

  SUPPORTERS

  UNBOUND IS A NEW KIND OF PUBLISHING HOUSE. OUR BOOKS ARE funded directly by readers. This was a very popular idea during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Now we have revived it for the internet age. It allows authors to write the books they really want to write and readers to support the books they would most like to see published.

  The names listed below are of readers who have pledged their support and made this book happen. If you’d like to join them, visit www.unbound.com.

  David Abram

  Debby Accuardi

  Peter Adams

  Caspar Addyman

  Paul Agricola

  Melanie Ainsbury-Dovey

  Buket Akgün

  Adrienne Alanis