A year ago today it was Monday, and I wrote a pretty good post, which I subsequently forgot all about until just now, when I re-read it for the first time. (The “diva” I wrote about was actually Jennifer Lopez. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking about Google hits!)
Words on the street
Cibola 39
Esteban (2)
In the lengthening shadows Esteban
runs alone. His guides
have gone ahead to prepare
his welcome at the next town
while the others straggle behind,
still groggy from the midday rest.
And as he runs, his endless
interior dialogues play out
their spinerettes,
his thin fingers twitching
as if to trace some glyph
or arabesque in the flow of air
past his body.
Since he first learned
to talk with his hands
he can’t keep them still.
A ground squirrel freezes
at the entrance to its burrow
& he finds himself signing a brisk salutation.
Or a hawk on one of the high passes
gliding alongside & hanging
motionless for a moment–
so close he can hear the wind
riffling its feathers–might merit
the honorific gesture meaning
grandfather, grandmother as
the Jumano taught him,
paying homage to all creations
earlier than Man.
But he notes how well it works:
a deer appearing beside the trail
seems mesmerized by his salutation,
only breaks away when the greyhounds
lope into sight with their iron collars glinting,
their lolling tongues.
This must be how
the hunters take them: he’s heard
the greatest ones make no effort
to hide in ambush, wear no disguise,
build no traps, fire no arrows,
simply walk
up to their quarry
& suffocate it with a handful
of prayermeal.
(To be continued.)
__________
to talk with his hands: A highly sophisticated sign language was the language of trade and diplomacy for a large swath of Western North America. Cabeza de Vaca’s account makes it clear that they relied on sign language to communicate with numerous tribes on their epic trek, and that Esteban was their chief interpreter.
the Jumano: Buffalo hunters of the southern plains, encountered by Esteban, Cabeza de Vaca and the others in 1535, a couple weeks after their successful escape from slavery on the Texas coast. (For more on the Jumano and the mystery of their virtual disappearance from the historical record, see here.)
prayermeal: Cornmeal used for ritual purposes, usually ground with turquoise and white shell.
Wren
This morning the Carolina wren is singing his signature tune in a minor key. What’s different, I wonder? Or should I instead be asking: what’s the same?
*
Sleet rattles against the empty shell of the old nail factory, passes through the missing panes of once-gray windows that stretched the length of the block.
*
In every book its receipt, saved for a bookmark. One can tell at a glance which among the thousands of volumes he has read clear to the end, & in which ones after a night or two of perusal he planted the white flag of surrender. Two ranks deep, the books crowd the shelves, immigrants bristling with the evidence of far-flung births.
(Prompted by a remark in the comments to a post at languagehat.)
*
That last line deserves a page of its own, the printer thinks. How else to rescue these shopworn words from irrelevance? A ladybug beetle has just drowned in the half-inch of cold coffee in the mug at his elbow. An hour from now he will think to reach for it, & stop in mid-sip. Is it just him, or has it always been this bitter?
Words on the street
Cibola 38
Reader (5)
El negro les hablava siempre y se imformava de los caminos que queríamos
saber. Passamos por gran numero y diversidades de lenguas. Con todos ellas
Dios nuestro Señor nos favoresíió, porque siempre nos entendieron y les
entendimos. Y ansí preguntámos y respondían por señas como si ellos hablaran
nuestra lengue y nuestros la suya . . . Y desta manera dexamos toda la tierra [en
paz] y dixímosles por las señas, porque nos entendían, que en el cielo avía un
hombre llamávamos Dios . . . (The black man was always conversing with
them, gathering whichever information we wished to know concerning the
roads ahead. We passed though a great number and variety of languages. With
all of them our Lord God favored us, since we invariably understood them, and
they understood us. And thus we queried, and they replied, through signs, just
as if they’d spoken our tongue and we theirs . . . And in this manner we left the
whole land [in peace], and told them in signs–since they understood us so
well–that in the sky there was a man we called Dios . . . )
ALVAR NUÑEZ CABEZA DE VACA
Naufragios (Valladolid ms.)
Your lordship is to call to mind how this Negro which went with frier Marcos
was wont to weare bels, & feathers on his armes & legs, & that he caried plates
of divers colours . . .
FERNANDO DE ALARCON
Relación (translated by Richard Hakluyt in The Principal Navigations)
I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond, or of
a very clear crystal . . .
SAINT TERESA OF AVILA
Interior Castle
Via peregrinatia
Via Negativa has been getting a little extra exposure lately. At the beginning of the month, Slow Reads reprinted my post Therapy, along with some fresh content – a brief background essay on prose-poetry hybrids, which I tend to refer to indiscriminately by the Japanese term “haibun.”
For those who have never taken the time to explore Via Negativa‘s sidebar, Slow Reads is an interesting hybrid of web magazine and blog, dedicated to “reaching our hearts with our books.” Its editor, Peter, has a strong apophatic mystical streak. By all rights, he should be writing Via Negativa and I should be talking about Slow Reads! (I am, indeed, a very slow reader.)
Then today, another web magazine, Wild Thoughts, reprinted one of those Daoist short stories I wrote the other week under a new title: Newborn. Wild Thoughts is “an online journal of environmental writing” with “a commitment to art that will strengthen the more-than-human world.” Its editors are actively soliciting feedback and contributions.
It would be great if there were a lot more web magazines willing to reprint blog materials – to give them alternate and perhaps more permanent or accessible homes. This is something that Peter of Slow Reads has been ruminating on at his blog recently, as well. There is so much good stuff languishing in bloggers’ archives!
Just before I received the notice about the Wild Thoughts publication this afternoon, I had been browsing in Thomas Merton’s Mystics and Zen Masters (Noonday Press/FSG, 1988). In an essay called “From Pilgrimage to Crusade,” he wrote:
Peregrinatio, or “going forth into strange countries,” was a characteristically Irish form of asceticism. The Irish peregrinus, or pilgrim, set out on a journey, not in order to visit a sacred shrine, but in search of solitude and exile. His pilgrimage was an exercise in ascetic homelessness and wandering. He entrusted himself to Providence, setting out with no definite aim, abandoning himself to the Lord of the universe. Since Ireland is an island, this meant entrusting oneself to the hazards of sea travel, and there are records of Irish peregrini who simply floated off aimlessly into the sea, abandoning themselves to wind and current, in the hope of being led to the place of solitude that God Himself would pick for them.
Isn’t this almost what bloggers do, entrusting themselves to the frail coracles of their blogs, adrift in the placeless Internet with no firm notion of what shores they may ultimately reach? That’s how it feels to me much of the time.
*
The runcible spoonful
By guess & by golly we got there, by hook & by crook. The zigzag egg of our astonishment was weighted with silver, pura plata, and we passed the runcible spoonful back & forth, heaped high with frost. Ho ho honey, we sang, take a whiff on me. My guitar was small but serviceable. The blue light specials called to us from the far shore & we went, ah, over to Gatsby’s again. We were melancholy in the anticipation & melancholy in the aftermath & in between there were the dancing lithesome shadows that that busy little flame threw out. We dined, they say, on mincemeat with spiced quince jelly; I don’t recall. It could be a spoonful of coffee; it could be a spoonful of tea. But I do remember that our dealer healer feeler had a ring at the end of her nose, her nose! It was wild. I looked up at the stars: all that darkness, all those seeds of light. Oh lovely Pussy, oh Pussy my love . . . You know the rest.
*
Words on the street
Cibola 37
Shiwanna (1) (conclusion)
These swallowers of men plant prayer sticks
bereft of feather-tufts
fitted with crosspieces like plucked wings
the larger ones are stained white
& hung with twisted human limbs
a living cadaver
It bleeds from the scalp the side
its eyes turned inward leave little doubt it’s a witch
A medicine man rapt in his own power
One who denies death
As the boy draws back, his vision expands –
A line of these cross-boned prayer sticks
positioned like a raiding party along the main road north
arrowing toward Shiwanna
the sorcerer loads his reed
& here
the slow toneless voice of Datura halts.
The priests, watching intently, see
the boy’s eyes under his lids
float upward & lie motionless
like minnows in a poisoned spring.
His uncle shouts for the antidote,
blows it up his nostrils, pumps his chest.
At last they feel his heart flutter
& he coughs, once, twice, three times
& ends with a sigh. Time
to sing him back, to begin
four days & nights of healing.
Let the Twins mutter
in their six grottoes, in their seven caves.
Let them howl.
They’re war gods: they can wait.
__________
prayer sticks: As mentioned earlier, Zunis and other southwestern peoples use small effigies, fashioned by almost every adult male at set times and for set purposes, instead of sacrifices. These consist of willow wands from a hand span to half an arm’s length in height, tied with feathers of various birds and planted on the outskirts of the village with appropriate prayers.
In Zuni belief, someone practicing witchcraft will often employ corrupted versions of prayer sticks.
the sorcerer loads his reed: The witch or sorcerer (I use the terms interchangeably) uses a hollow reed as a sort of symbolic blowgun to fire “bullets” of disease-carrying contagion into the bodies of his victims (or their fields), often from a great distance.
war gods: this is in fact the term preferred by modern Zunis themselves when speaking in English about the carved wooden icons of the divine twins. They attribute the theft and subsequent misuse of many of these icons by museums and collectors as a primary cause for the world wars and other disasters of the 20th century.