Day-log
The Virtue of Belonging To Rain Herds
-Stephanie Pope
Bob Peters BLACK MESA
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I belong to a story that I remember from the time I was a little girl. The memory is a horrible one and the story is a story of extreme humiliation. For most of my life I have refused to tell this story. I am going to tell you this story now, but I want you to keep in mind that this story is not mine. It does not belong to me as much as I belong to it. And, it belongs to the rain herds. I’m not ever going to tell you what that is. You will have to be good at imagining, to understand what I mean.
I cannot really tell you my entire fantasy of origin. It comes in a shroud of wordless things, things that exist in the world and in the images of marriage and in the ancestral nature of times in timeless things shaping the family and the marriage and the two people who became the parents of me. Such a thing behind words does not always find its way into actual words. It remains part of a silence out of which my own flesh is forming deep in the darkness of my mother’s flesh and is part of what will announce to her my belonging there, as does the fluid telling in this story’s telling which unite me still.
From the very beginning of my memories, I remember belonging to a trauma in the flesh. I cannot even tell you what I mean by this. But, saying it this way, is somehow saying what it means to the story I have inherited and to which I still belong.
Somewhere in the story of origin, the story itself decides to leak. This desire of the silence toward expressing itself by leaking becomes confused in my flesh and I begin to leak, too, mostly at night, during sleep. This is also how I start school. I begin bed wetting like I begin school, not understanding either and not liking either much, but having to accept them the way each really appears.
I know there are deeply wrong ways. One of them happened to me. One morning when I was in 4th grade I found myself getting dressed for school after having wet the bed during the night. My mother, a woman who still had too many little babies at home, had six school-aged children to make ready to catch the school bus at 8:00 am.
Since I wet the bed (again) I was getting dressed in the bathroom, so I could wash at the sink. I had just finished washing with five minutes to spare. It was then my mother came into the bathroom with my wet bedding and closed the door behind her. She grabbed me by the hair which caused my head to tilt upward and backward. Then she washed my face in my own urine.
I can still hear the bus grinding to a halt inside her voice inside my head. The two things bead together like a single dream caught in droplets on the surface of skin. Even now, it is an animal skin that will have taken on and re in-formed what that day I never took on myself. The animal skin dreams. It did that day. And, this is what happened when it did.
Somewhere, way down inside the animal hide, a heaved-up thing begins to happen, begins to blow. And
the wind comes from the north and from the south. And the wind comes from the east and the west. And the
wind brings with it a new order to the ugliness in coming. For where the animal grew new versions of herself,
she does to this day. I know there are deeply wrong ways. But these don’t always result in wrong things.
A god washes a face in animal urine…face after face after face. Each animal slips over another and under
the water skin dreaming down inside. In-sides are tiny bits made of water and light and sound. In-sides
wail in attraction toward each other and, once unto each other, flow and grow and bud. No one can destroy
such things nor make such things happen. But, no one can deny such things happen.
The scent of animal urine promised another to me that day in the bud and the wind in the hide where the animal
‘he(a)rd’ stampedes my ear in modal exposition of proximate tone. Yet, the urine burns. So, the acrid incense also brands the in-sensed sensation deeply into that inner animal life in me and into what shames in the all-too-human, animal-yellow flesh. “There!” say the horrific wheels of metallic yellow flash grinding to a halt down at the corner of the bus-stop. “There!” growls the animal master inside the yellow woman inside of me. “Go to school and let your classmates smell you!” said my mother.
A Magic Dwells: The Artful Memory
At each life’s call, the heart must be prepared, to take its leave and to commence afresh,
courageously and with no hint of grief, submit itself to other, newer ties. A magic dwells
in each beginning, and protecting us, tells us how to live.
-Herman Hesse, “Steps”, The Glass Bead Game
For a long time in my life I did not want to belong to this story. You see, I cannot take the pain of its remembrance. I cannot forget it either. Between the two ways there is a mirror. In this mirror a poetic magic dwells. Protecting me, the poetic impulse has taught me how to live.
It may seem strange to you that my sense for belonging is something I am calling “a virtue” and that it comes from the poetry of this story. Since when is humiliation a virtue? Well, I have discovered the energies that live behind humiliations, not unlike other negative and highly charged emotions in the unconscious, also belong to a supra-sensuous order of imagination. By re-imagining these energies in motion the way this larger life wishes to retell the story, one may remain another kind of story of belonging. I can think of emotions, you see, as e-motions, as energies in motion. The art of remembering teaches me that the tearing down and the remaking happen together and at once. You can be torn apart and still find, what is a-part, walks with you and belongs with you. In me, it always looks like a poem.
My sense and terms tell me I have been taking my literal memory, a humiliation, and I have been, over the course of my life, mythologizing it. When you take an image of being (like my 4th grader) and its ‘soul’ or energies back into a re-imagining of itself through its origin principle, you are allowing the image to function in the story no longer through its literalism and materialized occurrence, but rather, you are inviting the image to function in the story as a mythic motif. James Hillman notes the import and power of this gesture
As Owen Barfield and Norman O Brown have written: ‘Literalism is the enemy’. I would add: ‘Literalism is the sickness’. Whenever we are caught in a literal view, a literal belief, a literal statement, we have lost the imaginative metaphorical perspective to ourselves and to our world. Story is prophylactic in that it presents itself always as ‘once upon a time’, as an ‘as if’, ‘make-believe’ reality. It is the only mode of accounting or telling about that does not posit itself as real, true, factual, revealed, i.e., literal. (3)
Hillman also considers the question of content. Which stories need told? He responds by revealing the need to tell the great stories of one’s own peoples and culture. (3) The great stories are what we call the myths.
You see, as a motif, mythic energy energizes images of story another way, the way of myth-making. Myth-making renders visible mythopoeic movement. The image in the mind is now a motif of myth. Its reoccurrence throughout the story process is a mythologem. The mythologem expresses and (e)X-presses specific, yet unknown patterns of movement into story. A mythologem is like a wind of restoration operating. The "wind's" storying power will take on and move these energy patterns, changing them in the manner of depth perspective. Restoration of the story happens from the in-sides' points of view. In movement the whole thing is moving together like a single thing moves even though these are many ones/patterns/kinds traveling together (and not all that together) in belonging—makes me think of the planet Earth rotating on its axis and swirling through space.
Chief Seattle was supposed to have said it a little differently:
This we know. The earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth. This we know. All things are connected
like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. We did not weave the web of life. We are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the
web, we do to ourselves. (see end note)
Whether the Chief really said these words or not is not germaine to my story. What does count in this space of recounting, however, says that I belong in that space of this story because I belong to the story. I do not belong partially. I am not impartial to the story. Why? Because it is this web-space to which I belong. I belong to it and I belong fully. And, the image, in this case, is one of two fundaments in color-patterns that exist before existences and arise together to participate in making, although not necessarily from the same source of origin in making.
Although the Chief's speech will go on to recognize the two kinds, he also recognizes the two kinds, the red man and the white man, will neither be able to belong too well nor too together in their belonging-space. But, also you and I might become aware just here, that by his saying yes on behalf of all his people and all the ancestors, the gesture of selling Indian land to the U.S. government, opens another space to develop the belonging that includes new patterning kinds. No matter how we try to destroy our kind-nesses, this will not have been what happens to the story. Our kind-nesses will recede, disappear and reappear in another form because we each belong to the story of us all.
My web-story is not mine, you see? I do not possess it. It has come and now possesses me. It's depths are dark pockets of origin in principles that are so deep they form the deep source of psyche-making itself. They are those same principles of dark and light, night-world and day-world to which I must return and you must return every time we need to re-turn the story. The one story returning over and over is the story of ones in their belonging-together.
In his “recollected” essays (1965-1980), Wendell Barry says as much
A man might own a whole country and be a stranger in it. I saw that if I belonged here, which I felt I did, it was not because anything here belonged to me. If I belonged in this place it was because I belonged to this place. And I began to understand that so long as I did not know the place fully, or even adequately, I belonged to it only partially. That summer I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here. That is still my ambition. But now I have come to see that it proposes an enormous labor. It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness. The wild creatures belong to the place by nature, but as a man I can belong to it only by understanding and by virtue. It is an ambition I cannot hope to succeed in wholly, but I have come to believe that it is the most worthy of all.
Like Wendell Berry, to understand my belonging is of paramount importance. It is a spiritual ambition, like his goodness. And I come to it, consciously and through mystery; a mysterious and imaginal participation, because whatever befalls the image of my story, befalls me. To have a say in destiny, I am choosing to participate a certain way. It is Wendell Berry’s way of understanding. It proposes an enormous labor: to understand how virtue underlies a humiliation in psyche-making. What I discover tells me where humiliation shames, shame attacks pride; to have been made humble establishes my belonging metaphorically to the low ranks, the realm below or Beyond, an inferior realm of interiority and otherness where feeling as abject soul collects in the pockets of the world. Belonging to the story does not make me less in belonging. And, here’s why.
I am imaginally, in belonging, belonging an underworld. My rank is marked in humus; a soiled and humiliating experience lived over and over and very much alive just below the lines staining these pages of remembering. In terms of images, humus amplifies a soulful being. The image gives to me my sense of feeling the humiliation and humility, each and at once, in the same moment. Humus is that substantiality metaphorical of my turning power, i.e. that capability for re-turning the literal event over into psyche. The memory is a boundary where the breach of a primal trust occurs and where a difference happens in soul-making. When you look at me and really see me, and when I am conscious of you doing that, the humiliation and the humility are what I always feel. Through them, I am more fully present to the language of what means to share its ‘self’ in what you and I will share and experience together because I can differentiate between the virtue and the humiliating experience of the actual moment.
We Belong To The Moon’s Language of Belonging
The word, humus belongs to the lowing soul of felt senses. Animals low, at least they did at Christ’s birth! The word, humus means “ground” and resides in words like humble, human, homunculus, humility and humiliation. Its root is in an even older form, “dhghem” whose Greek equivalent, “khthn,” means chthonic earth and becoming and also carries the image of bridegroom. In the religious imagination divinity has been imagined like a bridegroom. Whereas you can think of Mr. Wonderful, the bridegroom as coming from that marvelous dwelling place of god(s), Earth, the bride, who is very much "earthling", is no reference to the literal Earth. She is an Earthly Other. You can think of this “Other” image of earth as “earthling”, but it is an “Earth” and “chthonic” making, a becoming that is not quite of this world, but, rather like something of divinity itself. This other Earth expresses supra-sensuous presence. And, the wedding? How could there be a "wedding" without prior formation of this wetting boundary experience of great upheaval?
To see and imagine all this in this way is to experience an "earth" from its own point of view and that is like seeing the way the moon sees an image of the Earth from space. I think of it as moon-language in the sense that this language is mythopoeic. This means there is a remembering and inclusion of the image of the other in memory itself. The image that remembers the wedding of Earth to Heaven is the Earth-in-heaven, and so, it will strike this tone. Yet, its likeness can be found neither in the material heavens nor on the surfaces of story.
The literal image of the Earth Rise (the name for this 1969 photo) resurfaces once more and with it, the old pattern of suggestion toward wedding comes into play. Some part of me knows a language in which wetting and wedding words haunt the same space, one in which the image of and the soul in the word urine marks as sacred and conjoins. Heaved-up things belong to expanding dimensions, are of the heights and their depths. May I suggest now, my image is a mythologem that allows the divine nature (the bridgroom of theological imagination) subjective expression; allows divinity itself to become the subject of further dispersal into an even greater dimension of depth (the "Earth" + chthon of an interior and earthling reality) upon closer scrutiny and through the remaking power of this story?
The photograph of the Earth taken from behind the moon in space by a satellite back in 1969 was a new way of seeing, since we grew over time, unconscious of the old pattern operating in the unconscious. The psyche itself announces and reveals what patterns matter to our lives and planet and peopling. Our other eyes are always opened by SURPRISE!
In my surprise, I use this image to illustrate a poem, “While Looking At My Hands” when responding to a particular myth, the Myth of Handlessness. When I put the poem on-line a few years ago, I place the Earth Rise in the palm of my female hands, the whole world…in humus hands!
The photograph, the picture, a blue and white Earth against the deep black of space, shared the way the moon saw the Earth. That blackness in the photo belongs to a moon sky. She will always have her sky here...and, a slippery eye of surprise, where the image appears, as if out of the blue-black fundament! This kind of re-visioning is a moon’s gift to earthlings and weddings.
Now as I said earlier in this essay, for the first time back in 1969 we were privileged to see our whole planet, in its entirety, as it appears from space. It is, I imagine, like Lacan’s mirror stage exemplified in the development of a human child; this moment reflects what it is like to see the or our reflection in a mirror for the first time—startling, even disorienting. What has before been seen only in fragments is now seen in an entirety and also in a highly differentiated belonging-together. Not a representation or a bit of artful imagination, this photo is the real thing. It looks so small, so fragile and so delicately beautiful.
That one picture has the power to instantly change our perception of what “the world” is. It is as if we can now see ourselves belonging to the earth; the whole earth and us together in a glance, with this caveat: we are belonging to it with another moon-way of seeing. When we see this way we are seeing the autochthonous psyche, since the word, chthon refers to the soul of the other earth, the soul no one can photograph. So that finally one understands this image of the dark earth-in-heaven reveals a suprasensuous realm of knowing that both remembers and re-members a suprasconscious identity of cosmos. If the depths of our mind were cleansed, we would see our world as it truly is.
This image of the Earth-in-Space is a blue ball caught in a dark pocket of pooling heaven’s humus. From Seas of Abera no doubt! In my own imagination (like it did in my own bed-wetting story) the story of handedness takes over " …and," the story of handedness authors, "when the handless one plunged her hands into the swirling waters, they instantly grew back!
The magical moon’s way of seeing reveals that the heavenly vision opens both expansively and into a peace of wilderness without hint of grief. A vision of paradise it seems. How can it be so, when a reflection humiliates; when the distortion in the mirror shames? If this is not so, there are only our literal, daily facts and our own beliefs about them.
The Earth is a swirling sphere, a bit tilted and off its rocker, an orb with a hobble, moving through space way out there in a certain and detectable way. Like a 4th grader who wets the bed, the earth-in-heaven is a literal fact. It is also metaphorical of something, something words cannot quite tell. It seems odd our psyches should require the metaphor; require this boundary between these ideas and their images in a leaping to and fro; that our psyches should require the face of its limitations to see the possible in infinite boundlessness. Just now, such metaphor tells of the Other, supra-sensuous design whose powers of creation story each of us toward our own belonging-together just like that divine bridegroom toward the bride. One recognizes one’s grief. And, one rests upon it, belonging fully to the story.
Wendell Berry writes elsewhere
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down
where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water and I feel above me the
day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Whatever happens in the wed-space of our belonging-together in the grace of the world, happens for real to you and me because we do not make the web of life. The web of life makes us. This, finally, is the truth of mythopoeic movement in the myth and making of belonging-together.
What mythopoeia does is point us toward what fantasy we are to reorient our lives. We are to reorient our lives to mythopoetic fantasies! The term mythopoetic puts the accent on the poetic impulse of our language of myth-making, and subjects the divine nature of this psyche’s otherness to a further dispersal into depth complexity.
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. The Hands of the Handless Maiden are handed with cadabra, no doubt. So that finally, one wonders in the manner of the Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti
What are you doing, O Earth in Heaven
What are you doing, Silent Earth?
Perhaps we each will ask ourselves more deeply and finely, to what adventure and to what wonder shall we be/come at last. And, with what wonder in belonging-together shall we seek to live here and now that trajectory toward which our own mythopoetries point.
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(end note) The controversy surrounding these lines and the Chief's speech suggest the lines quoted in this essay belong to an article written and published in the newspaper, “The Seattle Star”, Sunday Edition, 1887 and belong to the memories of one Henry A. Smith recorded in his diary as fragments of Chief Seattle’s original speech. Chief Seattle, chief in 1854 of the Suquamash Tribe, Port Madison Indian Reservation, Washington, gives a speech when approached by congressional representatives about the U.S. government’s wish to buy Native American land. Further, another white man, Ted Parry may have used Smith’s remembrance to innovatively insert into the design the “web of life” image, a mythic motif of Greco-Roman import. In this essay I am using one variation of the mythopoetic version of the speech—one Chief Seattle, many contend, never said. The Suquamash version of Chief Seattle’s speech can be found on-line at http://www.suquamish.nsn.us/. The speech notes what the Chief did say realizes the white man and the red man belong to two fundamentally different ways, two fundamental principles, like night and day. Where the one is, the other recedes. Like the sun and the moon, they are two. Like sun and moon these are different kinds of consciousness. Both exist. And, though one will recede and disappear in the presence of the other, both need continue to exist or it is the end to one’s living and the beginning of survival. What the Chief’s speech reveals is what happens to the story when what belongs, belongs to a partial god.
Work Cited
Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems: “The Peace of Wild Things.” San Fransico: North Point Press, 1985.
-Recollected Essays, 1965-1980. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
Hesse, Herman. The Glass Bead Game, the poem, “Steps.” New York: Holt, 1990.
Hillman, James. Loose Ends. Dallas: Spring, 1975.
Suquamish Indian Tribe, Port Madison Indian Reservation. Suquamish Tribal Center
Port Madison Indian Reservation 15838 Sandy Hook Road Poulsbo, P.O. Box 498, Suquamish, WA 98392-0498 (360) 598-3311. “Chief Seattle’s 1854 Speech”, http://www.suquamish.nsn.us/. January 30, 2006.
Ungaretti, Giuseppe. “Poem To The Earth”. Epoca XX. 983, July 27, 1969.
Poetry :
Rain Herds
While Looking At My Hands
Essay:
Seeking The Hands of The Handless Maiden
Extended Reading:
Poetry As Protest
