| london volume 8 part 1 - 1974 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[letter] 20 July 1974 Just a liddle note to say thanks for your long truthful letter. It needs a long truthful answer, which I can't write at the moment being blissfully - I mean full-of-blissfully - preoccupied - so I'll just say hello and I think you're very special indeed and don't you know that? I'm sorry about your sad rebuff from Darlene, it's hard to understand why she's scared of you. I'm still cross when I think of your superintendents. But you do realize they wouldn't patronize you like that if you were a man? There are things to be angry and militant about. And then there are other ways of defense, like yours, which are just quietly prevailing, keeping your roots fed in your private, true, self, and prevailing. Stay green, dear lady, and original as you are. Love from Luke and me and this garden humming with pink roses, geraniums, tomato plants, jasmine, just budding, and the two cats, and all of north Wales, where we've just been. [undated journal] Hello Friday. All those plants on the brick wall, my fullness of days. This morning the barefoot man, white teeshirt, pile of hair, beautiful beautiful eyes, sitting in my garden making songs.
Who can you be, sweet man tossing bricks tied to his limbs, in my restless dreams last night; this morning heals everything by patience and light; I look onto the pillow and see Ian's pointed eyes with their deep black holes. A new sort of knowledge that makes me hard to capsize; ready to be gay; mistrustful and sweet. You. The way gradually I'm rotated to look at you quite steadily and love what I see, that familiar silent love that sees - arms white down from the white sleeve, a jutting elbow, hands holding the steering wheel by its centre spokes (getting familiar with your unfamiliar skills, getting tolerant of your lacks); austere profile, the nose's convex curve finishing under the lip, thin and long, hung with hair, spectacles, remote dry-looking schoolmasterish person, so sparse and light, severe. Fixated at the chocolate biscuit stage. But then there you are wearing a face this morning that I've never seen, wonder if I'd see it at all if I hadn't seen it in your boy pictures I was too enraged to look at. Surprises. Something's happened. [Andy and I are just back from driving Luke to Roy who is on holiday in Wales.] Luke in the back seat, wrapped in the eiderdown, sleeping, or absorbed in a game with his fire engine, in the motorway restaurant running away to ask for "a change" of 5p, to ride the fire engine in the corridor. Playing the harmonica with one hand. I was resistant, skeptical, angry, thinking about Tony. Trefeglwyth, the girl on the verandah, the thirteen ducklings on the pond, Luke upstairs stubbornly saying goodbye. Sitting next to Roy eating soup, fat-faced, puffy. Sitting next to Andy to look at the map. Rain. The cascade at the stream. Away toward. The sea, sound and smell, the scraping zone at the edge of the dune, where sand made land formations with a grain. Shelter of the reeds, fine sand on our skin. Going different ways. The two birds heading for Ireland. The wind visible on the water-skinned sand, running diagonally toward us. The village of Corris - street up the back and dodging into woods, a slate quarry with a marsh, and a pool, then a cascade. The millhouse and its stream, atoms pouring through a shape we said, we saw. Pine forest. The gate where we hesitated, fine rain like mist, through to a farm spread in a clearing like an alpine pasture, up through, jokes about the ranger's hut, four black cows, the log house at the head of a pass. Stopping to smell the sawmill smell. [A and I camp overnight in a Forestry Department shed where we light the stove with what we believe is petrol.] Backed up to a slate mountain covered with pines, drizzling; our fire - sanitary fluid - the rain - clouds in curls coming up from the mountain tops. A low roof, our bed, silence between us, he plays his funky harmonica, Crow Jane and something with a clean single-note line that's pure music, makes me shiver, bends me. Warmed myself at the fire, took his shoes off to say I was back. Held each other. The sight of the ranger in the morning, his little dog on a lead. Andy taking charge of the defense. Breakfast at egg and chip place, the Rendezvouse. Ugly bicyclers steaming. Valley, meeting the steers, forest rangers at the quarry. Toward the coast, the rainy mountains, river, horse, tea, and that river's muscular tea-coloured water, its three waves on the opposite shore, weird hard surface so glassily brilliant in the brown water. When the sun came out sitting on a warm stone. The wide river at the stable, grassy banks with a dyke, three children one a girl playing a hymn on a recorder, blue hills, taking my shirt off feeling Andy shocked. Presence of the river on which blue flat streams moved among choppier green. Wide valley. The stairwell and upstairs room in the stable, details of how it was constructed. The steam railway with red cars. Andy present and absent. Getting to the Nant through white cloud. Luminous sea. The farmhouse with the sheep lying in front of the diagrammed steps and splatter of gold paint. Gorges, the view backward to a cliff wall with water dropping down it. Windy, the delight of the passages in front and behind the cottages, climbing fast and steaming. Mrs Jones' house. Fish and chips. Pink room, he threshed most of the night, I was full of tension, his. Breakfast, the sea, my stones, and his, road back to the Nant. Blueberries, cold wind, privacy in the houses. He carefully took pictures. Down at the edge of the sea, sitting to eat on stones over the running water. The perilous jetty, our fright, red flywheels, inching out over the water with the camera. Light. Going up alone to make photographs, he vanished. Came and saw him from far away. Stood in sea water waiting. Then he played me the engine's life. Climbing straight up. The delicious water, delicious tea, the farmer's wife who said she was short of space, the farmer, his tilted load of bales, his fine clean farmyard, our room with the barley, the lovely farmer's daughter shouting that we could use the water in the milkhouse. The red doors with their latches. Morning, brilliant light on Andy's sleeping bag. Up the coast to Aberavaon, the hotel breakfast, the beach, the church in hummocky grass, plain strong stone with a plain belfry and finely set door and windows, crooked tombstones backing up the hill behind it and seaward to the wall against which sunbathing families staked up their windbreaks. Back east through Rhayader, the high land, bilberries, the river of sheep, trying to learn Inchworm. Sudden disturbed talk about homosexual relationships, hitchhikers, the man asking a lift to Pontipool, sunburnt face. The house [Andy's parents' house, they away], Auntie Annie, seeing, from his mother's garden, slight Andy as a middle-class pampered son. Then motorway sloping back to London like a toboggan run. It was too soon. This morning its lovely end. Worry about not being able to work. Worry about balancing it with Tony. Coming back to my garden, the light from the window, brilliance on the mirror. [travel notebook from Nant Gwytherin] Houses without doors, windows, stairs, floorboards. There are walls, the views through a house from front door to back door. Red and blue grey tiles broken where they are, paved floor. Shape of the village, the strong walls; how it is different from a living village; it collects me as its inhabitant, I make my choice of its houses, imagine who could live there so that it would be as it is, inhabited. The yellow chimney crowns, floor to a house. The trees growing there. No signs of people, no old boots, tins. Like that other wonder, the stable with its yard, the light on its miraculous stairwell, its room like inside a block of stone, colors, like light, one low window and a fireplace. The touching room, its bed of bracken, boarded up door, a crate with foxgloves in a milk bottle. Outside, buried milk bottles and a fireplace. White geese in a field. Fish-flesh river. Two rivers. Valleys. Pine forests. That place where the stone fence came down crooked like the waterfall on either side. The young black steers, their gentle faces, soft mouths; yesterday's horse and the river where he was, in the rain. Pink. The Nant. Cottage's structure, a beam torn down seen in its intricacy [sketch]. No domestic plants left; sheep's smooth thick clover lawn. Stone facades, windows and doors seen cut out in such fine sharp lines - the lintels are undressed except for the bottom edge, it is a long wall with holes. Trees grown thick and water stained like stones, growing on the little platform each house has. Completely darkens its own house and reaches windows of the house next to it. The stone wall with each house its steps, tall steps down to the grassy aisle, which has another stone wall on the other side, was there a common in the middle gardens? No sign. Then the floor, which continued throughout the two rooms, red and black tiles, texture like polished slate, flat out the back door to the little yard with its stone privy, open back yard another, wide, corridor, channel. A wall where the bare, grainy plaster is printed with brown flowers - from wallpaper that's gone? The big house at the end, the grand house, a round stone wall higher than my head, the house is on a round sort of tumulus, the rocks set on the wall are slanted to roof-pitch, two apple trees trained as cordons but old now, color of stone, with their dry crown of leaves (rustling) at the height of the pitch; a rim of blue sky, 2. high above the wall, then clouds, one apple tree broken, without leaf crown; another further down the wall in a grove of bracken fern, the texture of the wall changing as it turns. Lovely feel of the curved enclosure around the square solitary grand house, faced on the outside as well as plastered inside; sheep lawn with small yellow dandelions, random stones, sheep dropped black berries in piles. From the bow window, half ripped out, a strip of sea kept from landing by the apple trees, wild grove of stiff trees, brittle leaves, bent landward. The two spartan pines on the drive - not a drive surely - a long wider corridor between walls, the garden-sea wall curves into it and is lower, but another high wall separates it on the other side from the common. The roof-stones have got a defining function, they send back light like mirrors, in a curved line. Walls, how important that they connect with each other to make a net without holes, laid on the contours very lightly. What is it about these open houses - the inside walls weathered, so that in the beam's shelter a permanent shadow is formed slanting away from the prevailing wind, corners and ceiling borders protected in the grand house a cream paint with yellow spots painted on it to make a stipple wall paper - underneath it is pink and under that intense brick red. Oh the color compacting itself as the sun appears. Inner doorways born out, names and dates scratched deep or shallow, blue green like Pompeii. Foundations in this house make pits 3' deep under what was a wooden floor. The sheltered drawing room even more protected, the strip of white moulding that defines the chimney wall and its meeting with the plastered ceiling, where the plastered wall is yellow that's lightened lighted with a strange splashed white, in relief, whitewash probably, makes it look like brocade; on the north wall water's washed down leaving only streaks of it. At this moment the harmonica comes in very quiet, by itself. [undated journal] Another life opens itself, I look down into someone else's history, the unfamiliar things I resist, mannerisms; remember that what's important for me is to be both clear and true, and not to give myself away. The uncertainties of a connection which is untested and a little exaggerated, and not quite interesting - I mean, I can't talk in a way that interests me: nothing to remember in the talking - feel I have to teach the man some things before I can really be interested in him; maybe I never will be. The other things: I listen to his breath and am grateful that he cries a little, gasps, rocks, makes poems, makes songs. I know things about him he doesn't know. I'm grateful for his feelings, haven't many of my own. Momentary lovingness that passes usually straight into looking or hugging. Yesterday - no, it isn't not feeling, it's a blankness of feeling, I said, amazement, as if saying to myself, "So this is what he is like, how amazing." Familiar double sense that these honeymoons are really work for me too; acceptable work, work with the whole intelligence and body; and so I needn't be ashamed to let myself go in it, and counterposition, that once more I'm giving, lending, my time and imagination to the needs and being, the pleasure, of Man, not myself, and not women. Solution - really to work at it and let none of it take itself for granted - also to use the pleasure, power, of it for my own other work. Ie to manage it in right relationship of generosity and cunning. Ie to be very truthful. Just try to say what's hardest to say. The garden charging itself with light, strawberries quietly getting redder hour by hour. - Joan's party. [Joan ran the informal women's poetry class Sarah and I were going to once a week] Strong impressions of everybody, in the attic rooms: Joan, Geoff, Sonia of Chile, most of all the beautiful Vicky, who has a son about to be 15 and three other children, prosperous, tall and thin, with a beautiful face, fine eyes like Mafalda, neither fleshy nor haggard, very tight and brown and fierce, a witch she was, lots of authority simply taking over a good story if her husband began it. Squashing the men as best I could. Except for the womanly ones, Jeff and Brian; they in the end talked about balance of payments. - Andy likes my body because it looks strong and broad. I like his because it's fine and light. I tell him his worst fault is being so tight; he says inside he isn't like that at all. One of the pleasures of him is the way he's got clear outside and inside: "You fill me up so full." And cries when he says so. Hard mouth is getting softer. - Aware. Beware. That in their beginnings our intimacies are free from the mechanisms that make us mean, disappointed, later: the record is clear. But look well - who are you. - Dorothy Livesay: raising daydreams about a woodframe house in Vancouver. I'm so beautiful too, arms, haunches, hair; the room and garden are my secondary sexual characteristics: sex appeal. Your mouth. Auntie Annie, a surprising wide mushy face, blue-coated eyes like the steers', and out of it comes the sharp real woman, flirting with her favorite boy ("Isn't he gorgeous?" looking at him smiling in his red shirt), cross with her infirmities - "Chop them off!" she says, holding her hands out to him - "Shoot me! What am I good for?" "You're good for a laugh" he says, and she laughs, her face widens and smiles - her old photographs, she looks out of her broad face with warm intelligence, eyes and mouth, she's radiant with intelligence. She'd had her hair bobbed; and her mother went out, without saying a word, and had hers bobbed too, "'Then we'll both be street girls,' she said. I'll never forget what she did." In the garden picking black currents. She waved from the top of the steps. The sky on the motorway before we got to the Severn Bridge, high spray of cloud shaped so I really flew into them for a moment. Space flight. Watching what I want to tell: flattering things (try not to), moving things (sometimes the same): the way he flung himself across me in the pink B&B (fullness: oh I know). Separate things - like sometimes disliking the tightness of his voice, and the things he lets himself say - things that offend me - because I need them to keep my cool. Curious things. The motorway café 10 miles from London, parked with lorries like sleeping beasts, coming out of the motorway stupor, slowly crossing the pavement. Andy in his black plastic jacket like a spaceman, and I in my sneakers like space shoes without gravity. The rumpled people in their magical space station, and going to the wrong door an Indian man on night duty motioning us to use the other. Two women with two little children peering around them, wrapped in blankets, completely silent. Your jokes are much better than mine.
Outbreaks of hilarity. Imagining the fairground film very slow with little leakages of sound as if brought by gusts of wind from a great distance. Isn't it. At the far end of the counter was an old Sikh man, white bearded, with a white turban, king of that moonland. In the car near Heathrow - looking at the side window past his face, the light falling on my reflection, falling and obliterating it like a shade, and it appearing again, other things behind. IMAGE! And the dialectic of carefulness of his delicate feelings - and crispness, toward his skillful ease. The flattery of female relatives toward best-hope 'only' son. Resist it! Sometimes he melts completely into Ian. I have to insist to myself who he is. Have to go back and say: how tender you are. Maybe it's temporary, brakes breaks released just for a moment, but how tender (er ist zart wie ein Kirschen Baum) you are sitting on the white driftlog playing the engine's life story on the harmonica, neck straining like (asthma) fighting for breath, creature, I feel your frame shake, I shake. But I watch carefully, too, to find out whether you indulge yourself in exaggerated feelings, whether you're romanticizing yourself, or whether you're careful to be true. "I can't look at you for long, it makes me feel weak." I can look at you endlessly, it makes me feel round, resonant, dreamy as a stone, makes me silent. Am I allowed to be that - not quite. I sat in the garden, looked at the geraniums, empty of thoughts, slow, full, present in great calm joy which is present equally to garden snails as to you, and to remembered friends; but near right, retribution, how many honeymoons am I allowed before the gods crack my spine? Before I'm too old, before no one will travel with me. Before one of my little crimes catches me. Magical organization: in gardens, the little backroom, which now has a gate on either side (new stone), approaches it. Those bottles too. Don't know why. The mirror especially. From throwing venetian blind shadows onto the new baby crying in the cliff. The presence of the cats: one came yesterday and lay down next to Andy on the grass, parallel to him and me; flat, when it lay down, like a person, had the same weight of presence. Couldn't see them while Jane lived here. - Margaret on the phone, talking about how when she falls in love she feels like those city pigeons who still go through a little mating routine, even though it's redundant. Tony on the telephone, I was loving him, I could speak my mind, he's my brother; he said, "At least if you're holding something back, you know there's something more there. I don't know that." I said I wished I didn't have only two choices with him, freezing or starving; feeling that starving was really quite good. - This morning I lay next to Andy for five hours while it rained outside, and then later stopped and when we'd eaten breakfast at two, the sun came out. What I want to say: we lay next to each other, all our clothes on, cold rainy air on the outsides of our bodies, and where we touched along our bellies, focused on the hard knob between us, we seemed to be fucking by our breath. He said I was setting off bombs in his stomach, and I, that mine was like a hollow - cavern, he said - hollow, yes, I said, right to the spine, into which 'our' breath radiated like radio waves, like circles on water, the fine brilliant perception of my belly, I thought with my body I thee worship, the body is an instrument for adoration, that's what it does. Mysteries, in which I join even you Andrew Wyman, in something holy, as your talk, as your everyday person, is unholy and unbearable. How holy you are in your privacy: "I've always been like that, things fill me up, full-up. If somebody full-fills me, I don't want anybody else. If they don't -." I'm loving Tony, in simple truth: telling him why I won't sleep with him: to let myself find out whether this is a chance to let out my child for a while - if not, there's no question. "There's an indifference in you, I have to be careful not to want what I can't have, I have to always make sure I think about the limits there are." "What about your indifference?" he said. - Alarm clock poems. The snapshot idea. - Poetics of Space Connections - things meeting in me-crossroads: Pilgrimage, hard-working intelligence fed with light; my own complete exact beauty when I look from the corner of the bed to that silver mirror in the corner opposite (when I look: a glimmering beast, a demon, werewolf, without gender, a wizard) (focus differently, and there's the smooth cheek of a beautiful woman, as conventional as - it's as if I focus through it and see a superimposed face - for a moment I seem ready to enter that other dimension, it feels like being flooded, so I pull focus and then try again to let go - it's the eyes - there's a skull with unhuman eyes); Bachelard talking about his two consciences being clear; Nathalie Granger; going with Andy into impersonal love, fumbled on all the easy levels, as they are never fumbled with Tony, but certain and real in his privacy, which I enter. Beauty of July, the easy living of it, things come alive, snails, cats, plants, cliffs of lights, wind, I cut through them like a knife-edged razor-edged fan turning, and feel balanced, really balanced on the edge of death that's not oblivion, but worse - image of the big central fan turning superimposed over the diamond-shaped garden island. [undated notebook] When we eat meat do we literally ingest animal memory? eg Masai and blood and milk? If I ate Roy? Zoo animals given high protein low fat diet developed all sorts of more acute ailments, difficulty with lactation, ovulation and sperm making disrupted, combat injuries, enlarged adrenal and thyroid glands, more atherosclerosis. Suggested that, given more energy, the animals and birds were more frustrated in their territorial ambitions. Given pressures of environment, the "physiological processes that were triggered by territorial stress proceeded to their deadly conclusion" when animals were taken to a safe place. "Shock disease," fatty degeneration and atrophy of the liver with a coincidental striking decrease in liver glycogen (animal starch produced by liver, energy) and hypoglycemia (sugar in blood). Brain hemorrhages and congestion, lethargy and coma. Calhoun's experiment with overcrowded rats - difficulty in bearing young: "Another apparently full-term female was autopsied shortly after death and found to contain several partially resorbed full term embryos." Also decomposing "prurient" embryos. Many mammalian tumors. Many people getting cysts. Care of young completely disrupted. - Intense, complex social organization among amebas: 'founder' cells varied in appearance from ordinary cells - attracts other cells which compete to group around in contact with its surface - in most animal groups (?) different roles can be taken on - but "in the slime molds the individual members of the community that form the leadership group are non-reproductive." Pecking order: "chickens in the course of their long evolutionary adaptation to domesticity were forced to evolve stringent behavioral mechanisms." - Zen art: work of art not only represents nature but is itself a work of nature. Do - a craft, a 'mystery,' a way. - Life in common, books, memories, babies - Forced out Toxic and nourishing people You can use your role to bring your essence across, supported by genuine feelings. - Perls Erection of the person Self is a locus, not a thing - it's 'where' as opposed to another there Boredom/frustration Creative indifference - zero centre, not to be caught in opposites, one or the other Korzybski Satori - coming to one's senses Cure for stage fright - let go the future Russian therapists call "sick point" the 'incurable centre' of a neurosis. Perls says any metaphor is a mini-dream. - The self is largely a verbal edifice - Sullivan - 'mine,' 'me,' and then 'I'. We learn the full significance of our acts from those around us; and as we build up this knowledge we acquire a 'mind.' Child: "his very first identity is a social product. His habitation of his own body is built from the outside in; not from the inside out. He doesn't unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him." Organismic (energetic movement, perception, excitement) identity vs symbolic one. Memory? Women's lib! - Primal horde theory - females are booty, MALE sexuality Heroism and blind goals Problem of identifying our idols, automatic conditioning of learning, some model of power The question of finding one's talent The problem of centring self esteem in self, social world inevitably frustrates us. Admission that we're afraid - "religious ideal is potentially the most liberating for man" - holds both despair and miracle "He resolves the paradox of his existence by seeing and accepting the truth of it." - Dreams and Nightmares Infantile terrors reproduced as nightmares The message that's always turning up is respect for everybody's individual experiences. - Study 1967 - creative girls have variety of styles of rejection of conventional femininity. Games with problems to solve Blake the marriage of heaven and hell [undated journal] Tony saying, when I said I'd come visit him, because I can speak the truth to him better than anyone, "No, even that can only happen because we know that later on we will be in another way." - Among dreams: in the entry to a funeral chapel, bookcases full of dried bouquets of roses; hanging about seeming to make off with one. - Travels. With my mother underground, looking for stamps. A man in girl's clothing going to hitchhike, watching the hopping way he ran across the road. A man sleeping with me - that's very dim. - Andy when he wakes and his narrow face is drained. The other times when it is full of light and makes me shy. How, last night, we couldn't quite meet, and I was so sad and angry about it that first I flounced off to fantasies about going to Tony; and then, as he went to sleep, in a murk of resentment masturbated more and less furtively to knock myself out, and finally getting out of bed, sat on the cat, soft pile of fur, and stepped on his foot. Didn't want to be in bed next to him, more troubled than I knew. The lovely cliff [terraces across the garden walls] completely black and I was unable to sink up into it. The shock I have sometimes, realizing I'm myself rather than somebody else. - Miriam Henderson, Martha Quest, Dorothea. - Just in time, I'm baptized into a ca-reer: money from the Arts Council. Wanting to tell, and knowing how I despise the difference it makes to all of you - Prosper [Devas - my neighbour] saying, quickly, "Well, the Arts Council works in mysterious ways" - just in time, because of how you patronize me - the only defense against your ignorance and patronage is to be stamped with official interest and so diminished - Don [Carmichael], when I got the philosophy medal, saying how lucky I was to be a girl; they poison everything, like she says, with their envy and ignorance. Dangers. Warrior. Be ware. Rejoice, but not quite: it's too hedged. Use it. But know what you're doing, keep your privacy. - But it isn't only ca-reer: it is, as I'm telling Mary just now, the possibility of giving something back: she's given us, she gives lots of people, yeah, it seemed clearer - [undated letter] Monday morning, Luke in Wales on holiday and coming home tomorrow, the garden shining in the rain, tomatoes against the brick wall, jasmine, geraniums, the house plants set outside for the summer, and growing crisp in the real weather. Do you know Margaret Atwood's writing? Surfacing is a nice book. My good news is that the Arts Council of Great Britain has given me £300 to finish Natural Light. That's good news because - beyond the money, which is good news too - it is my first and most difficult Official Recognition, ie it means other bodies will be willing to buy films too. My ca-reer has really at last begun. And oh madam forgive me for bragging - you will know - but the competition for Arts Council money (so prestigious as it is) is very strong. I'm so happy! So many projects brewing. (A little in love too.) Your Heidi is expected here today or tomorrow. My dreams of an own house in BC have revived with such an intensity that I may be in North America by Christmas. Am a little frightened to take Luke away from all the good and solid arrangements he has here; also don't know where the money will come from, but I really long to live in Canada for a while again. I hope being a little in love doesn't make that impossible. It's being a really high happy summer, mostly. I've just been here, in books and the garden, working on films or for money (masonry and gardening), writing, playing the piano, playing with Andrew, daydreaming. A few important books have happened upon me. The Poetics of Space by Bachelard, and (this is one for you too) Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage series. Also our women's poetry classes, gossip and mockery with Sarah, my best loved people all seeming very close, many letters. September still to come, the best month in London. Just eyes is enough. Being able to see. There was a tomato on the window sill, in the sun, yesterday. The number of colours in its so-called red! Oh me! What a tomato! [undated journal] "Your mouth, and your baggy jeans and your voice and your cut hands." - Dorothy Richardson tells me that - has been telling me all day - that my thoughts are interesting because I have them. - Everything that shines can see. - Imagine the Eskimo song makers, Inuit, who have no writing, form and keep it only in their memory. They are performed, with drumming, singing and leading the chorus. Anerca: breath, poetry. We do not know how songs arrive with our breath . Something like a softening of the weather will keep him thawed . When the words that we need shoot up of themselves . The Uncertain Life (a charm) by Padloq (Iglulik) To be spoken when suddenly in mortal danger
Tom Lowenstein, Knud Rasmussen Everyone works on their language. Charms and hymns, invocations: "It is considered that they act by the very force of their fantasy and mysteriousness." Families in their igloos sing, in the evening, in the dark season. Departed and departing, same word, inerlrait - their songs prized. Dead often interred in their snow huts, simply sealed with a block of snow. Songs from the Land of the Dead, like the collective unconscious. Drum calls up the spirit. Moved - by Uvavnuk (Iglulik woman shaman) (A song that would always send her into a trance.)
(And moves my inward parts with joy.) Sing it with eyes closed, swaying from the hips and knees, beating the drum, it requires great concentration because these are not done on the beat, but by very precise rules. The chorus comes in worked up ecstatically. Song cousins: rivalry, wife exchange, contest of every kind of skill, including metrical abuse. Or else song contests of real enemies, which often end in friendship, expose each other's weakness with all sharpness, but to make the audience laugh. Angakók, shaman - a lighting, enlightenment. Angakok consists of a mysterious light which the shaman suddenly feels in his body, inside his head, within his brain, in inexplicable searchlight, a luminous fire, which enables him to see in the dark, both literally and metaphorically speaking, for he can now, even with closed eyes, see through darkness and perceive things and coming events which are hidden from others . The first time a young shaman experiences this light, while sitting up on the bench, invoking his helping spirits, it is as if the house in which he is suddenly rises; he sees far ahead of him, through the mountains, exactly as if the earth were one great plain, and his eyes could reach to the end of the earth . Faculty the old shamans procure for their pupils. first thing is to withdraw the soul from the pupil's eyes, brain and entrails. The angakok can be obtained from the Spirit of the Moon, from a dead person who is especially fond of the pupil, from bears in human form, or from the Mother of the Cariboo who lives inland. Padloq characterized his father as a man who liked loneliness, a description which - in Eskimo language - is no doubt equivalent to the man's being a poet or angakok. The greatest peril in life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls. "The great animals would be offended and go away from our shores if they were hunted by women" - strict taboos also in relation to the uncleanness of menstruating and pre- and post-natal women. Makes me so sad still - feel the weight and amazement at what women have got to win against, by themselves. Makes me feel there have to be corps of Amazons who actually train. The secret words we owned in fellowship almost made us brothers. The spirits of life would regard us as one, as it were, and treat us the same if only we observed all the taboos that life required. Orpingalik taught me one of his wife's songs. He never called her by name, but always "my little sister." He called his songs "comrades in solitude."
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