A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 5
And Mouse Woman said to him,
<<
Be on your way.>>>
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He set out again on the trail.
[ 4.3 ]
After walking awhile,
he heard someone grunting and straining.
He went there.
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A woman was hoisting a pile of stones.
The cedar-limb line she was using kept slipping.
He watched her awhile
and then he went up to her.
<<
<<
The woman replied,
<<
of the Islands on the Boundary between Worlds.
That is what I am doing.>>>
Then he remembered his spruceroot cord
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and he said, <<
He made splices with the cord.
<<
and she hoisted it up on her back.
It did not slip off.
And she said to him,
<<
Here is the trail that leads to your wife.>>>
Then he went on.
After a time, he came to a hump in the muskeg.
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Something slender and red grew from the top of it.
[ 4.4 ]
He went up close to it.
All around the bottom of the tall, thin thing lay human bones.
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a story as sharp as a knife
He saw no way of going up.
Then he entered the mouse skin.
Pushing the salmon roe ahead of him, he climbed.
He went up after it.
When he came to the top,
he pulled himself onto the sky.
The trail stretched ahead of him there too.
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He walked along.
After travelling awhile,
he started to hear a babbling sound.
After travelling further,
he came to a river.
It was running high.
Near it perched an eagle.
A heron perched on the opposite bank.
A kingfisher perched upstream.
A black bear sat on the opposite bank,
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and he had no claws, they say.
Then, they say, the black bear said to the eagle,
<<
Then, they say, the eagle did as he asked.
Then and there the black bear got his claws.
When the young man had been sitting there awhile,
half of a person lurched by,
leaning himself on a fishing spear.
He had one leg and one arm,
and his head was half a head.
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He speared the coho that were swimming there
and put them into his basket.
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The man unrolled his coho skin and put it on
and swam in that direction.
When the half-man speared him,
he was unable to pull him in.
The young man cut the spearhead from the spear, they say.
And then the half-man said,
<<
The younger man went up to him then, they say.
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<<
<<
And the young man gave him the one he had.
That was Stickwalking Spirit-Being, they say.
When he went up further,
[ 4.5 ]
two men, old and fat, came out collecting firewood.
They chopped at the roots of windfall trees,
and they scattered the chips on the water.
The coho were coming from there.
He went back of the fallen tree,
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pushing stones in from behind,
and their wedges shattered, they say.
And one of them said,
<<
Then he went up to them.
He gave them the two wedges that he had.
And they stared at him and said,
<<
Then he went up to it, they say.
He stood waiting in front of the house.
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His wife came out to meet him.
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Then he went in with her.
She was happy to see him.
She was the village headman's daughter, they say.
In that village too, they were man and wife.
And everything they gathered,
he gathered as well.
After living there for a time,
[ 5 ]
he began to dislike the entire country.
Then his wife spoke to her father.
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And his father-in-law called the villagers in.
There in the house, he asked them, they say,
<<
And a loon said,
<<>>
<<
The loon said,
<<
and dive right in front here.
Then I'll come up again at the edge of his father's town
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and release him.>>>
They thought he was too weak to do it, they say.
His father-in-law asked the question again.
A grebe gave the same reply.
They thought she was also too weak.
And a raven said he would carry him back.
And they asked him, <<
<<
and fly with him from the edge of the village.
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When I am tired,
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I will let myself tumble and fall with him.>>> 12
They were pleased with his answer, they say,
and they all came down to the edge of the village to watch.
He did as he said.
When he grew tired,
he let himself fall
down through the clouds with him
and dropped him onto a shoal exposed by the tide.
<<
Becoming a gull, he squawked and went on squawking.
This is where it ends.
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*
If you are a storyteller yourself, or a student of European oral literature, you may say, "I know that story. That's the Swan Maiden tale !"
It is, more broadly, the universal story of the hunter who sees, as in
a vision, the beauty of his prey and falls in love with what he came
to kill. The two basic plots - man marries a bird who is a woman,
or a woman who is a bird, then loses her again ; and man climbs a
pole to visit the sky but cannot remain where he doesn't belong -
are part of the ancient stock of human stories. They could well be
100,000 years old. All around the world, people who can neither
read nor write still tell stories on these themes.13 And people who
can read and write still find them in fairytale books and venues
like the National Enquirer. But unless you know the work of this
particular Haida poet, you cannot have heard the story told in quite
this form before.
Lumping all the world's Swan Maiden tales together and saying
they're the same is like walking into the Uffizi or the Prado or the
Louvre, looking around at all those paintings of the Adoration or the
Crucifixion, and saying, "These are all the same !" They are indeed -
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Diego de Silva y Velazquez, Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, c. 1618. Oil on canvas, 55 x 118 cm. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
and when you see their similarity, you've taken one large step into the
rich and densely layered world of the European imagination. They're
the same, and that's an essential part of the truth. At the same time,
every one is different. Each is an individual human vision of a widely
shared idea. That too is an essential part of the truth.
The narrative tradition in European painting is very strong, yet
we understand that a painter, commissioned to produce an altarpiece,
panel painting or fresco, is not usually asked to invent a new story.
The story will come, as a rule, from the shared feast of Roman or
Greek or Jewish or Christian mythology, and the painter's task is to
see the story afresh : to make it live in his viewers' minds. This is one of the reasons why it is often more informative to compare Native
American oral poetry to European painting - especially Baroque
and Renaissance painting - than to European literature.
We can plot a possible route by which the Swan Maiden tale might
have reached Haida Gwaii from Europe or Asia - or, since its place
of origin is unknown, we could plot a route by which it might have
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reached Europe and Asia from Haida Gwaii. But even if we trace
the route correctly, that will not explain how Ghandl reenvisioned
the story as he did. We could also - with a greater chance of success - plot the route by which stories of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ made their way from Palestine to Spain, but that
will not explain how generations of Spanish painters reenvisioned
them as they did.
The gospel of Saint Luke, the patron saint of painters, depicts
the risen Christ wandering like a lost ghost on the road out of Jerusalem, where he meets two friends, walks with them to Emmaus
and joins them for dinner at an inn. But nothing in the gospel of
Luke explains how, in Seville, around 1618, Diego Velazquez saw
the story afresh through the eyes of a kitchen maid, and painted it
as no one had ever painted it before - and as no one except a few
copyists has ever painted it since. The originality and power of that
painting depend in part on the unoriginality of the story. We have
to know the story beforehand in order to grasp what Velazquez has
done with it - how he has pulled it back, tautly, into a corner, over
the woman's shoulder, and suddenly let it go, so we can see it rico—
cheting through her eyes. What dawns on us as we stand in front of
the painting is what is dawning on the woman in the kitchen : one of
the three men sitting in her restaurant died three days ago, yet there
he is, elbows on the table, talking with his friends. In that instant
of recognition, the real world and the mythworld collide, much as
they do in Ghandl's story when the woman goes out of the house at
midnight to eat eelgrass, dressed in the skin of a goose, and comes
back in to lie beside her husband in the form of a human being.
Both the meal and the story, strictly speaking, are invisible in
Velazquez's painting. There are plates, but they are washed, stacked
and drying. The place of honor in the central foreground is occupied by nothing but a wadded rag. The only food in sight is a single
bulb of garlic in the bottom righthand corner, as far away from the
table as it can get. But for those who know the story, the hints that
Velazquez provides are enough. For those who don't, there is no
single image or tableau, however literal or detailed, that could make
the action clear.
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A myth is a story, and it is a story that insistently recurs : a piece
of timelessness caught like an eddy in narrative time. Once the
story is known, a single image or even a single word can evoke it.
But only a linked sequence of images, words or gestures can tell it.
A story is not a solid object or a solitary entity but a transformative
relationship. In musical terms, it is not a note or a set of notes but
an episode : a large phrase made from other phrases, which are made
in turn of intervals - relationships between notes - more than from
notes themselves. In linguistic terms, it is a plot : a large sentence
made of other sentences. Once you know the verbs, bare names or
nouns will call them back to mind,14 though nouns alone can never
tell the story. And stories, whether mythical or historical, timeless
or temporal, never exist in isolation. They are linked to other stories,
forming a timeless or temporal web.
Velazquez's Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus has not been
dated exactly, but it comes from early in his career. He was probably
between 18 and 20 when he painted it. In 1623, the King of Spain,
Philip iv, appointed him court painter. Velazquez was then 24 years
old, and his infatuated patron was 18. From that moment on, while
he painted many portraits of the royal household, Velazquez's skills
as a mythteller in oils got very little exercise. Perhaps they got little
appreciation as well. Some time after it left his workshop, the Sup-
per at Emmaus was altered to suit the taste of someone other than
its maker. The tiny background scene, containing the real subject
of the painting, was covered over entirely ; the shape of the maid's
headdress was changed, and several centimeters of canvas were cut
from the left edge of the painting - evidently to make it fit an existing
frame or a handy spot on the owner's wall. By this simple procedure,
Velazquez's work was demoted from the realm of myth to the realm
of anecdote ; it was reduced from a vision to a picture.
In the original painting, mythtime and historical time intersect. The result gives depth, humanity and something more than
that - transhumanity, we could call it - both to the woman in the
painting and to those who stand in front of it, sharing her surprise.
Even for non-Christians (I am one) the young Velazquez's painting
opens a door ; it confirms what every mythteller, physicist, biolo—
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gist and hunter-gatherer knows : that man is not the manager and
measure of all things. The altered version of the painting differed
only at the margins. That was enough to reduce the whole to a skillful character sketch or snapshot of a servant in the kitchen, and to
confine the scale of value to an implied social hierarchy flattering
the European viewer.
If we cut the human element away, keeping only the upper left—
hand corner, the painting would become little more than a pious
allusion. It would also lose its power as a piece of material crafts—
manship, because that corner, where the myth is told, is only a
sketch. If we reverse this procedure and mask out the myth, as a
former owner did, the painting keeps its surface energy - but all of
it is trapped within the human-centered realm. When we see the
work in full, something comes from juxtaposing these two views.
The painting's power, like the power of Ghandl's story, comes in part
from its skillful execution, but also it comes from the juxtaposition
and interpenetration of timelessness and time.
Velazquez's painting gives less direct attention to the mythworld
than Ghandl's story does. It doesn't take us on a grand tour of the
universe. But it does, like Ghandl's story, bring the mythworld right
into the house. Whoever decided to paint out the background was
responding to its power in the same ungrateful way as the peevish
neighbor in Ghandl's story. A harsh word or a few strokes of the
brush is enough, in the myth or in the ordinary world, to drive the
myth away and cancel out the vision.
In its edited form, Velazquez's painting nevertheless had its admirers. It was copied at least once,15 and the masked original passed
from hand to hand among private collectors, mostly in England,
bearing titles such as "The Kitchen Maid" and "The Mulatta." The
real subject of the painting was finally rediscovered in 1933, when it
was given a thorough cleaning and the overpainting came away. Not
until 1987 did it pass into the care of a public museum, the National
Gallery of Ireland, to which it now belongs.
Ghandl's spoken poem, like an apple or a loaf of homemade bread
- or a coho skin or a cedar tree or Diego Velazquez's painting - is
both familiar and one-of-a-kind. It is something new and locally
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