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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555918255 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/04/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
SHELTER 1
There ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and — ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Amen, Huck. Mark Twain, my all-time favorite atheist, had a healthy distaste for religion, but in writing that great novel, and in choosing to conclude it with those words, he was, unconsciously, drawing from the mythic waters that run beneath all religious striving. At the other end of the story, Huck is getting fidgety and lonesome, feeling walled in by the "sivilizing" schemes of Miss Watson, the old maid of the moment. She brings on the spelling books, the table manners, and, worst of all, the religion, until he longs for his liberty. It finally comes when he gets to the river, but first he has to escape his origins as the son of the town drunk.
This distancing from family and the orthodoxy of the day in an adventure in the wilderness follows the ancient pattern set down by the prophets, teachers, and saints who have marked each advance of our religious evolution. Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Saint Benedict, Muhammad, Saint Francis of Assisi — all found their way by losing it, by turning their backs on civilization and lighting out for the Territory.
It's the same impulse that sends us out of doors when the world of Miss Watson is too much with us. Something in the heart recognizes that, just as religious truth springs forth beneath the Bodhi tree, in the desert, on the mountaintop, or at the riverside, our own salvation, our hope for personal transformation and understanding, requires a certain willingness to lose our way in uncharted terrain. The straight lines surveyed by others are of little use here. We've been there before, and it generally leads to more civilization, less of the Territory.
The stories I have written down in these pages come from a period of being lost in the boundary land where religion, Christianity in particular, has from time to time made contact with wildness. Writing in this vagrant way — led by instinct, pattern recognition, and other spirits — suited the terrain and subject. It was a bit like the long walks with my father hunting for grouse years ago, which I still regard as my first way into wildness. On an October afternoon we'd set off along the edges of something, a stand of poplar, a ravine, a railway easement. We'd walk for hours, quiet and alert for the flushing birds, yet surprised nonetheless at the sudden thwirr of wings just ahead.
The margins of myth, nature, and history that drew me onward, as indistinct as they were at times, marking boundaries between the civilized and the wild, the orthodox and the pagan, allowed plenty of room for speculation. There was little to constrain me from imagining the intricacies of Creation and its particular unfolding here and now on these plains — not the biologist's standards of scientific rigor nor the theologian's fear of heresy.
Once or twice the impulse to make the most of this latitude caught me with my guard down. There was the afternoon, late in the summer, when I found myself naked and alone in a large tipi staring up at the smoke hole trying to understand what I'd seen there at midnight, what it is about a little less shelter that can shift a lens in the spirit.
*
The tipi did not belong to me, though for that summer it rested on our meadow just north of the cabin. For the land I will, with reservations, admit ownership, though Karen and I and the children call it just that — "the Land" — in part because of those reservations. "Our land" sounds presumptuous, and terms such as "acreage" have come to imply a level of subjugation and comfort that we aspire to eschew. For a while we considered inventing a name for the place, but everything that came to mind sounded pretentious, bearing either the bathos of a ruined estate or the vulgarity of a condominium project. When we began to hear our youngest children tell their friends "we're going to the Land," we knew it had been named well and good.
We purchased the property, seventy acres of Qu'Appelle Valley hillside, meadow, and coulee, ten years ago. The first two years we came here to camp in summer and began searching for abandoned and moveable farmhouses in the vicinity. My father and I spent a good piece of the second summer getting to know one another better as we built a foundation for a small, one-and-a-half-story house a friend had located just north of the valley.
The day we surveyed the building site and drove in the stakes, a male mountain bluebird landed atop the transit. It remained with us, visiting the work site almost daily as we contoured the excavation, hauled sand, hammered together forms, and poured concrete. When the house finally lurched down our road and groaned its way onto the new moorings, the bluebird perched on the west gable for a moment. That year I put up a dozen bluebird houses on the property.
*
Not unlike bluebirds, we spend time in houses to create a zone of comfort, to raise a barrier between ourselves and the biting, prickling, digging, cooling, heating, blowing world outside. Nature, for its part, no sooner encounters one of our barriers than it sets about finding ways to get through it. Even as I write this in my cabin bedroom, three flies are using me as a salt lick and landing pad. We have had skunks dig into the cellar, raccoons tear into the attic, crickets serenade us from beneath our beds, and moths dive-bomb us from above. What's more, we have good reason to believe that our cabin's presence on this meadow has granted the local deer mouse population an evolutionary leg up in their ascent toward the zenith of rodentia, whatever that turns out to be. Though we have had no luck in getting the old pond at the base of our hillside to retain its share of spring runoff, I spend a weekend every April siphoning another pond that would make perfectly adequate frog and duck habitat were it located anywhere other than my cellar. I will leave you to imagine our gardening efforts.
This, I know, sounds like complaint, but it is this life within a broader margin of intercourse between ourselves and nature that keeps us coming out here whenever we can. Here there is always something hidden in the grass just ahead, waiting to leap into the air and stir our blood memory of a time before injury and exile.
As someone who has been contemptuous of white people who put on Indian ways, I was reluctant at first to use the tipi, a little embarrassed and uneasy about the whole thing. Soon after it was up, though, the kids wanted to try sleeping in it. That first night, I awoke to a loud shriek I could not place as owl, coyote, house cat, or bear. Curious, I slipped outside into the moonlit meadow for a look, silence all around, nothing moving but the northern lights rippling across the sky in great scarves of orange and red. That was when I remembered the recent sightings of cougars up the valley. Back in my sleeping bag, I stared up at the wheeling heavens through the smoke hole, and for a moment somewhere between waking and sleep I was in a womb looking out upon hills ablaze with holy fire.
CHAPTER 2
EL MARAHKA I
I saw a play once in which a grieving woman dreams nightly of her dead lover. In the end, after coming to terms with his life and her regrets, she has one last dialogue with him in her dreams. "But I'm afraid I will forget," she cries, holding on to him. "Don't forget," he answers, "just let go."
It was a cliché, something you'd hear from a therapist on afternoon television perhaps, but, voiced by actors onstage, it suggested a deeper remembrance, a wider disengagement. Watching the two lovers in a last embrace of their spirits, I thought again about how this culture — North America in general and my own prairie culture in particular — clings to distorted memories, nursing a burden of nostalgia and regret even as we blunder forward in ways disrespectful of all that might yet offer blessings and wisdom from the past. The Untouched Wilderness, the Heroic Pioneer, and the Vanquished Savage all persist in our contemporary encounters with the wild, the rural, and the aboriginal. Their resilience is a tribute to roots deep in Old World soil.
In idle moments I find myself wondering about those roots and that soil, asking unanswerable questions, imagining pathways back to a time when and a place where we were ourselves native in wildness. Archaeology, in unearthing physical evidence, marks the coordinates well enough but leaves us to guess at the exact forces that prompted each adaptation in our emergence as spiritual creatures. Myth and metaphor take up the slack. A long walk out of Eden is one way we have carried it in the imagination, but I have come to think of it as an ascent on the Mountain of the Lord — one that we embarked upon when the sacred myths of hunters gave way to the sacred texts of shepherds and farmers.
Exile, it has been suggested, happens in that signal shift from tongue to script. That sounds right to me. Writing posits a measure of distance between self and world. Even so, it is the familiar arm's reach of our reality, and while words on a page will never rescue us from Babylon, they make for a serviceable home away from home. Songs of longing and redemption, stories of loss, abandonment, consolation, and reconciliation still speak to us from some of the oldest writing we have thought holy. That may still be the best we can hope for when we resort to text: to relocate ourselves in hymns that console, stories that reconcile.
In trying to write my own way toward a more graceful encounter with the wild, the rural, and the aboriginal, I realized early on that I would need a running start. I would have to begin by retracing our wanderings away from wildness and back again. With no exact entry into the mind and heart of the hunter, I took refuge in the old texts, the Bible in particular, as a rough archive of the human spirit at certain critical horizons in our evolution as the primates who got religion. Don't worry. As I rummage through those verses, I do not look for their value or meaning in their small residue of documentary fact, nor in their imputed Providence. For my purposes, and for the narrative at hand, the great truths in myth, poetry, and prophecy — those that have accompanied us for good or ill to this present moment — are more than enough.
*
After comparing his lover's breasts to the twins of a gazelle, the bridegroom in Song of Songs praises her profile with a reference to the heights of Carmel. In the Hebrew scriptures, the Mountain of the Lord is known as Hakkarmel, roughly "the garden land," an actual place in Palestine long renowned for its beauty. Christians call it Mount Carmel, and local Palestinians know it today as either Kurmul or Jebel Mar Elias, the Mountain of Saint Elias. Some say Elias, the prophet Elijah, lived somewhere on the mountaintop, which rises from six hundred feet above the Mediterranean in a ridge running ten miles southeast to where the altars of El Marahka stand against the seventeen-hundred-foot-high summit.
El Marahka, "the burning" or "the sacrifice," was there long before Elijah, and long before El Marahka there were other burnings on the mountain. For sixty thousand years, human beings have been, accidentally or intentionally, setting Mount Carmel's pine forests alight. So say the forest ecologists who study the Aleppo pine forests of Carmel National Park and Nature Reserve. Abraham Haim and Gidi Ne'eman of the University of Haifa have found that the flora and fauna of the mountain's east Mediterranean pine forests require a half century to recover fully from a fire. With burns of varying ages and sizes, the fire history of the forest landscapes creates a succession and diversity of vegetation communities, which in turn are reflected in local animal distribution and density.
Likewise, the fire history of humankind in this region is bound up with a succession and diversity of religions. Jewish, Christian, Druze, and Baha'i believers have come to this place to lift their prayers to the one God. And before them, pagan hunters and herdsmen came here to make their lives sacred in the eyes of a multiplicity of spirits and gods. All, appealing to one or many gods, climbed to the southeast point of Hakkarmel to burn sacrifices on altars. Now and then, when the grass was dry, the fire would have jumped the pyre and burned a path uphill to the pines. At El Marahka, in the shadow of the pine forests, the Druzes of neighboring villages still come to perform a yearly sacrifice, participating in the ritual that gave life to our religions, that mimicked and abetted the rhythms of fiery transformation present in nature.
The difference seems to be that in nature an underlying unity persists within diversity, whereas in our religions we choose to ignore and even do violence to the bonds that could hold our spiritual yearnings together in a rich and healthy community of differentness. If the Creator cannot be happy with one kind of beetle, why would one religion be enough?
The common ground is here at El Marahka, where tumbled stones remember the times of shared sacrifice. Elijah is claimed as a prophet by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic believers, and in the eighteenth century, local leaders from all three faiths would join together to celebrate a feast in his name. How extraordinary those celebrations must have been. What was said? What was not said? Did anyone think of inviting the pagans?
CHAPTER 3
SHELTER 2
To light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of earth say, Let there be light.
— Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native
The first time we talked about the possibility of raising a tipi at the Land it was early November, one last night at the cabin before the snow would block our road. Friends drove out to stay the weekend with us on the valley rim: Mike and Lorran with their two little ones, Megan with her two. We sat around the woodstove that evening and Lorran told ancient Chinese tales by the light of our gas lamp. There was one about a brocade that became a castle and another about a garlic farmer whose crop was stolen while he slept. We listened, Megan nursed her youngest boy to sleep, and later the adults went out to look at the stars. The constellations of late fall appeared at our bidding: Pleiades, Taurus, Cygnus, Ursa Minor, Draco, all in turn. We mapped the skies from brim to brim, as duck wings whistled overhead in dark passage — a sound with a chill in it. On the horizon, just beneath the half moon, the milt of the winter's first clouds appeared. As we went back inside to the fire, Mike said he'd like to raise a tipi on the meadow the next summer.
Heading for the outhouse at dawn the next day, I caught a few snowflakes on my shoulders. Two jays screamed; an owl cried softly across the coulee. By that evening, people in Weyburn were using snowmobiles to rescue travelers trapped in cars half buried in snow.
The snows came deep in the following days and weeks, and with them the bittersweet sensation that we had joined in the passing of one season into another and measured the heat and light of our spirits against the coming darkness. That winter, reading the bonfire scene in the opening chapters of Hardy's Return of the Native, I flipped back through our desk calendar to check the date of that last night at the Land. It was the fifth of November, Guy Fawkes Day, or Bonfire Night as it is still known and celebrated in England. In the novel, Hardy's peasant "heath-folk" of mid-nineteenth-century Wessex are telling ghost stories and exchanging gossip around a towering bonfire they have built to mark the fifth of November. Their fire was on top of the Rainbarrow, an ancient ceremonial and burial mound on Hardy's fictional Egdon Heath where first Druids and later Saxons gathered to light fires "at the ingress of winter." The novel's bonfire-makers, mostly furze- and heath-cutters and their sons, look out over the dark face of the heath and see thirty other fires on near and distant hilltops, blazing "like wounds in a black hide," each representing a specific locality to the Rainbarrow men though they could see nothing of the landscape to aid their recognition.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Jacob's Wound"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Trevor Herriot.
Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1. Search for the Spirit of Wildness,
2. Introduction: Birds of Pentecost,
3. Part One: Ascending Hakkarmel,
4. Shelter 1,
5. El Marahka I,
6. Shelter 2,
7. El Marahka II,
8. Shelter 3,
9. El Marahkha III,
10. Shelter 4,
11. El Marahkha IV,
12. Shelter 5,
13. El Marahka V,
14. Shelter 6,
15. El Marahka VI,
16. Shelter 7,
17. El Marahka VII,
18. Shelter 8,
19. El Marahka VIII,
20. Shelter 9,
21. El Marahka IX,
22. Shelter 10,
23. El Marahka X,
24. Shelter 11,
25. Part Two: From Mount Carmel,
26. Wild Grace,
27. Pilgrims,
28. At the Riverside,
29. Fresh Wounds,
30. Songs,
31. Scapular I,
32. Scapular II,
33. Leaven I,
34. Leaven II,
35. Leaven III,
36. A New Small-Rented Lease,
37. Into the Presence of God,
38. An Evening Prayer,
39. Postscript: Wind Birds,
40. Notes,
41. Bibliography,
Landmarks,
1. Cover,