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The Alligator Dream

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The following is a dream that poet Joy Harjo, a Creek/Mvskoke Indian, had when she was a child and it was feared that she had polio. The excerpt comes from her book Crazy Brave: A Memoir.

It was shortly after the polio scare that I began to dream the alligator dream.

I am a young girl, between four and five years old. It’s early in the morning. I delight in my feet touching the ground and in the plant beings who line the trail to the river. I breathe in playful energy from small, familiar winds as I walk to get water for the family. The winds appear to part the tall reeds through which I walk with my water jar.

An alligator whips me suddenly to the water and pulls me under. I struggle, and then I am gone. My passing from earth is a quick choke. To my mourning family, my life has been tragically ended. They did not see that I entered an underwater story to live with alligators and become one of them.

I believe now that I had the beginnings of polio. The alligators took it away. It is possible. The world is mysterious.

Amusing, But No Longer True

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H. L. Mencken knew how to write, but not everything he wrote holds up today. In Prejudices Second Series, he took a hatchet to the literary reputation of the American South in an essay entitled “The Sahara of the Bozart.” Since then, some of the best American writing has come from the South, including William Faulkner (at the top of the list), Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Penn Warren, and a host of others. Still, Mencken is fun to read:

Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer—
She never was much given to literature.

In the lamented J. Gordon Coogler, author of these elegaic lines, there was the insight of a true poet. He was the last bard of Dixie, at least in the legitimate line. Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave to-morrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.

Crônicas: Part of the Game

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Brazilian Writer Hélio Pellegrino

Yes, I am still reading Clarice Lispector’s Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which runs to almost 800 pages. Tody, I am quoting a writer that Lispector in turn quotes in her Jornal do Brasil column for September 4, 1971, namely Hélio Pellegrino:

Living—ah, that difficult delight. Living is a game, a risk. Whoever plays can win or lose. The beginning of wisdom consists in accepting that losing is also part of the game. When that happens, we gain something extremely precious: we gain the possibility of winning. If I know how to lose, then I know how to win. If I don’t know how to lose, I win nothing, and I will always go away empty-handed. The eyes of someone who doesn’t know how to lose eventually grow rusty and blind, blind with resentment. When we come to accept with true and deep humility the rules of the existential game, living becomes more than good: it becomes fascinating. To live well is to consume oneself; it is to burn the coals of time from which we are made. We are made up of time, and this means we are a passing thing, movement without respite, finitude. The quota of eternity allotted to us is embedded in time. We need to search it out with ceaseless courage so that the taste of gold may shine upon our lips. If this happens, then we are joyful and good, and our life has meaning.

Crônicas: The Terror

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I am continuing my reading of Clarice Lispector’s Cronicas: Too Much of Life. The following piece was published on October 5, 1968. It is an amazing description of the birth of a newborn.

THE TERROR

There was too much light for his eyes. There was a sudden push; they were maneuvering him, but he didn’t know that: there was only the terror of those faces bent over his. He didn’t know anything. And he couldn’t move freely. The voices sounded to him like thunder, only one voice sang to him: he basked in it. Immediately afterward, he was put down again, and then came the terror, and he was screaming from behind the bars and saw colors, which, only later, he understood were blue. The blue bothered him, and he cried. And then there was the terror of colic. They opened his mouth and put horrible things in it, which he swallowed. When the voice that sang put horrible things in his mouth, he could bear it more easily. But he was immediately placed behind the bars again. Gigantic shadows surrounded him. And then he would scream. The one glimmer of light in all this was that he had just been born. He was five days old.

When he was older, he heard someone say, although without understanding what they meant: “He’s easy enough now, but when he was first born he kept crying and screaming. Now, fortunately, he’s much easier to manage.” No, it wasn’t easy, it never would be. Birth was the death of a single being splitting into two solitary beings It seemed easy now because he had learned to cope with the secret terror he had felt, a terror that would last until he died. A terror of being on the Earth, like a nostalgia for the sky.

Crônicas: How To Deal With What One Has

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Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

Clarice. I love her name. I love her high cheekbones and penetrating gaze. And most of all, I love the beauty of her thoughts and writings. She wrote in Portuguese, but she was born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector in Chechelnyk, Ukraine. To escape the horrors of the Civil War between the Red and White Russians, her Jewish parents fled with their infant daughter to Recife in northeastern Brazil. At an early age, it was discovered that she could write well enough to be published. And she became one of the great women novelists and short story writers of the 20th century.

I am reading short pieces she wrote for Brazilian publications. They are called Crônicas and were recently published in a volume called Too Much of Life, which I am slowly reading with great pleasure.

This is the first of several posts in which I will present one of her Crônicas. I hope you enjoy them.

HOW TO DEAL WITH WHAT ONE HAS

A being lives inside me as if he were entirely at home, and he is. He is a glossy black horse who, despite being entirely wild—for he has never lived inside anyone else and no one has ever put reins or a saddle on him—despite being entirely wild, he has, for that very reason, the primitive gentleness of one who knows no fear: he sometimes eats from my hand. His muzzle is moist and cool. I kiss his muzzle. When I die, the black horse will be left homeless and will suffer greatly. Unless he chooses another house that is not afraid of him being simultaneously both wild and gentle. I should say that he has no name: you just have to call him and that is his name. Or perhaps not, but summon him in a gently authoritative voice, and he will come. If he senses and feels that a body is vacant, he will trot silently in. I should also warn you not to be afraid of his neighing: we mistakenly think that we are the ones neighing with pleasure or rage.

Vidyādhara

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A Vidyādhara Couple

I am currently reading a book of Kashmiri tales that go back a thousand years or more. The book is Somadeva’s Tales from the Kathāsaritsāgara, written around AD 1050, but retelling from an earlier source. To understand the quote below, you must realize that Vidyādharas are celestial beings very much like angels—but angels who can mate with humans without losing their supernatural abilities.

The tale in question is called “Alaṅkāravatī,” which tells the tale of the promiscuous Anaṅgaprabhā, who has just jilted her lover, King Harivara:

When Harivara found out that Anaṅgaprabhā had left, he wanted to die of grief. But the minister Sumantra consoled him and said, “Why don’t you understand this? Think it over yourself. Anaṅgaprabhā left her husband, who had obtained the powers of a vidyādhara by means of a [magical] sword, the moment she saw you. Why would a woman like that stay with you? She has left for something trivial because she does not desire the good, like someone who is enamored of a blade of grass believing it to be a heap of jewels. She has definitely gone with the dancing teacher for he is nowhere to be seen and I heard they were in the dance hall together in the morning. Since you know all this, why are you so attached to her? A promiscuous woman is like the sunset which has a moment of glory every evening.”

Clarity and Emptiness

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Lute Player (After Frans Hals)

From time to time, I love to read books of original source material on Eastern Religions. The following is taken from the Visuddhi Maga as quoted in a collection edited by Anne Bancroft entitled The Pocket Buddha Reader (Boston: Shambhala, 2001):

When a lute is played, there is no previous store of playing that it comes from. When the music stops, it does not go anywhere else. It came into existence by way of the structure of the lute and the playing of the performer. When the playing ceases, the music goes out of existence.

In the same way all the components of being, both material and nonmaterial, come into existence, play their part, and pass away.

That which we call a person is the bringing together of components and their actions with one another. It is impossible to find a permanent self there. And yet there is a paradox. For there is a path to follow and there is walking to be done, and yet there is no walker. There are actions but there is no actor. The air moves, but there is no wind. The idea of a specific self is a mistake. Existence is clarity and emptiness.

“That Terrible Dusty Brilliance”

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I have been reading a fascinating book of stories by Gavin Lambert about Hollywood as it was in the 1960s. The book is called The Slide Area, after the crumbling cliffs overlooking the ocean from Santa Monica north to Pacific Palisades. It is some of the best writing about Los Angeles as it was then. Lambert, by the way, was also the author of Inside Daisy Clover, which was made into a Robert Mulligan film starring Natalie Wood. Oh, and Lambert also wrote a biography of Natalie.

Following is an excerpt from near the beginning of The Slide Area:

It is only a few miles’ drive to the ocean, but before reaching it I shall be nowhere. Hard to describe the impression of unreality, because it is intangible; almost supernatural; something in the air. (The air … Last night on the weather telecast the commentator, mentioning electric storms near Palm Springs and heavy smog in Los Angeles, described the behaviour of the air as ‘neurotic’. Of course. Like everything else the air must be imported and displaced, like the water driven along huge aqueducts from distant reservoirs, like the palm trees tilting above mortuary signs and laundromats along Sunset Boulevard.) Nothing belongs. Nothing belongs except the desert soil and the gruff eroded-looking mountains to the north. Because the earth is desert, its surface always has that terrible dusty brilliance. Sometimes it looks like the Riviera with a film of neglect over villas and gardens, a veil of fine invisible sand drawn across tropical colours. It is hard to be reminded of any single thing for long. The houses are real because they exist and people use them for eating and sleeping and making love, but they have no style of their own and look as if they had been imported from half a dozen different countries. They are imitation ‘French Provincial’ or ‘new’ Regency or Tudor or Spanish hacienda or Cape Cod, and except for a few crazy mansions seem to have sprung up overnight….

Los Angeles is not a city, but a series of suburban approaches to a city that never materializes.

Mister Care Wack Dreams About Girls

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New York Bathing Beauties Circa 1960

I am enjoying a collection of the miscellaneous writings by Jack Kerouac during his 63 days atop Desolation Peak in Washington State’s Northern Cascades. I have particularly enjoyed the chapters he wrote for a projected (but never completed) novel called Ozone Park in the “Duluoz Legend” series of slightly fictionalized autobiography. Here is a quote from a deleted chapter from a work that Kerouac (called Mister Care Wack by a hobo friend named Slim) abandoned.

O Kerouac, you poor fool, wandering the streets of night in search of romance in the golden nothingness of existence! Foolish as men are, they’re never more foolish than when they’re 21 years old and actually think that they do exist to be loved somehow either by a personal God who bends over them like a Guardian Angel with those wings of a loving destiny (mayhap I still believe that) or by a woman and women He sends to soul-soothe their sad predestined hugeness of being (“I am Jack Kerouac, there’s something about me that never happened before, she will notice it”) and so they sit at the windows of night smoking Frank Sinatra cigarettes, vain as veritable d’Annunzios, beautiful as the sea, mistaken as lost angels, lovable as God, misunderstood as secret saints, yearny as young girls, masculine as rocks and immovable as self-faith. And this is the reason why they eventually do get loved, but not for the reason they imagine to be foremost, their melancholy which they take to be the penalty is really the reward and is gained. A woman sees a man wrapped in self-torture, and when he smiles there’s already no need for smiles and come-ons.

Thoughts of a lonely young man stuck on a mountaintop.

Is the Emperor Happy?

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Solidus of the Emperor Petronius Maximus (Mar-May455)

I am greatly enjoying the second volume of The Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire, written by Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866). This is the volume that tells of the Huns and the Vandals. More and more, I am fascinated by classic 19th century British and American historians.

The following excerpt is from Apollinaris Sidonius, a fifth century Roman poet, diplomat, and bishop. He is writing about the emperor that followed Valentinian III, who was assassinated for his part in the murder of Aetius, the last great Roman general, who defeated Attila and the Huns at Chalons in CE 451.

I received your letter … dedicated to the praises of your patron the emperor Petronius Maximus. I think, however, that either affection or a determination to support a foregone conclusion has carried you away from the strict truth when you call him most happy because he passed through the highest offices of the state and died an emperor. I can never agree with the opinion that those men should be called happy who cling to the steep and slippery summits of the state. For words cannot describe how many miseries are hourly endured in the lives of men who, like [the Roman dictator] Sulla, claim to be called Felix [fortunate] because they have clambered over the limits of law and right assigned to the rest of their fellow citizens. They think that supreme power must be supreme happiness, and do not perceive that they have, by the very act of grasping dominion, sold themselves to the most wearisome of all servitudes; for, as kings lord it over their fellow men, so the anxiety to retain power lords it over kings.