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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781550968156 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Exile Editions |
| Publication date: | 08/24/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 183 |
| File size: | 258 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
SPOOKY
An Essay
"Spooky"?
Yes. That's the word.
Spooky.
It was last year, May, and we were rehearsing my play, Coyote City, soon to open at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto. And it must have been a Tuesday well into the rehearsal period, a first day back at work after our Sunday and Monday off. And one of the actresses came to me and told me that over the weekend she had gone home to the reserve and to Longhouse and that afterwards she had had a vision and that it was because of my play.
Rings of fire burning dry fields of grain is the image I remember, but I could be mistaken. I wasn't giving her vision my entire attention. Part of my mind was already at the table inside the rehearsal hall, wondering how we would get the car and bus scene to work. Another was focusing on my actress' face, on her wide and beautiful eyes, her excitement. And one part of me was standing still, thrilled and pleased to be privy to these personal experiences of the supernatural.
Which, of course, meant that one further part of my mind was in panic, retreat, covering its ears, not wanting any more of this spooky stuff. My actress' story was only the most recent in a series of spiritual experiences that the more traditionally minded members of my cast and crew had been bringing into rehearsal, bringing that energy to the play and, of course, to me.
Coyote City can be described most simply as a ghost story. It's structured as a journey and a chase from a reserve into a city. Its impetus is the love Lena, a young woman, has for a young man she doesn't know is dead. The play begins with a monologue from the young man, the character Johnny, whom we, the audience, only later discover is already a ghost.
In developing the story for the play, the subtext, the world that the words should imply from the stage or the page, I was surprised to find that I was afraid to make that simple decision. My progress came to a halt as I tried to develop a psychological explanation, tried to say that the character was a figment of Lena's imagination, that she was mad. In my fear, I had stumbled into Romantic cliché and it was getting me nowhere.
Why was I afraid to decide that the ghost was as much a character as the rest? My intuition told me I had to make that proverbial imaginative leap if the play was to work. I had to believe in the ghost as much as I did in the girl or her mother if I was to do justice to the story, the play and the audience.
I have seen girls. I have seen mothers. I have a mother. They're part of my existence and easy to believe in. But I have never seen a ghost. And I don't mean a ghost like my character Johnny or Casper or like in Ghostbusters or The Holy Ghost. And I don't mean, at least at this point in my story, a ghost in a dream. I mean wide-awake experience of a spirit, what those so-called scientists working at the fringes of our knowledge have labelled paranormal.
I grew up on a farm on the Six Nations lands along the Grand River near Brantford in southern Ontario. I grew up nominally Anglican in a community of various Christian sects and of the Longhouse, the Iroquoian traditional religious and political system. These form the largely unarticulated base of my understanding of the world.
I grew up on occasion hearing ghost stories rooted in that community, stories I only paid small attention to, because I was being educated to have — let's call it — a western mind, to balance being a good Judaeo-Christian with being scientific. Ghost stories may be thrilling and amusing, art may be thrilling and amusing and sometimes prestigious, but we only really believe in what we can see with our own eyes and measure with our own hands.
How could I possibly believe in a character, write a character who was a ghost? We're advised to write about what we know and at that point I was quite sure I didn't know anyone who was, well, dead.
What I did at the time was sidestep the existential issue. I had to have the ghost character or the play would be dead. That I knew. What I did was try to use my so-called western mind. I argued with myself: Art is, after all, artificial and not a question of believing but of doing. So go ahead and do the ghost. Construct it. What's metaphor for, after all? This death stuff is only symbolic. Come on, you coward. It's only a story, only words.
Only words.
My ghost character Johnny did come alive eventually, when I started to treat his deadness as ordinary, which, of course, despite pomp and circumstance, it is. Everyone has problems, especially in drama, and Johnny's was that he simply didn't know that he no longer belonged in the material world. I came to believe in Johnny, as I had to, since the concerns of the play Coyote City are the conflict between the material and the spiritual, and Johnny, as a ghost, focused that conflict.
The play progressed, although I still had to deal in as forthright a manner as I could with this epistemological prejudice when I work shopped the piece. I had to steer my director away from psychological explanations of the ghost, warning her that it would oversimplify parts of the play and make the rest of it absurd. Johnny's a real ghost, I insisted, feeling, despite my intuition, oxymoronic even as I said it. Okay, my director replied deliberately. I admit that she came with me as far as she could, though I did have to put up with ironic renditions of the theme music from The Twilight Zone the first few times we came to work on any scene with the ghost.
As a balance to this and a support to my intuition were the Native performers in the cast, who had no trouble at all accepting that one character was a ghost. The idea was as familiar to them as the sun.
(A parallel example is a story I heard about one production of the Linda Griffiths/Maria Campbell play Jessica which presents a number of animal spirits as characters. It took some extra doing for the non-Native actors to enter into, to believe in the Bear, the Unicorn characters. Meanwhile, the Native actors simply assumed them, second nature.)
Why did I remember the idea of spirits so vaguely?
My years at York and UBC had taught me many things about the techniques of writing. But I had also absorbed a number of what I now see as prejudices about the nature of literature. The trepidation I felt about the haunting of my play Coyote City is indicative of the sort of contemporary literary ideas that got stuck in my student head. I'm sure part of me wanted to be too hip to tell anything as old fashioned as a ghost story. University was when I stopped reading science fiction, which had been a staple of my reading life since my teens. Suddenly, it was obviously too popular, too accessible, too far-out to be good literature. Instead, I read the modern, the near postmoderns and, of course, Canadians, who were pointed out to me as examples of the literary ideal. And I was often moved by the beauty and imagination of the writing and in awe of its obvious intelligence and its superb technique. And I felt stretched, educated, edified. I knew what was going on inside those proverbial ivory towers, me, a farm-raised Indian boy. I was dizzy. I tried to learn the lessons these writers offered me.
I tried.
I had a crisis of literary faith and, like most such crises, it hinged upon an almost absurd distinction. I got into a knot over the difference between the real and the true. I thought that good writing should be true and my western mind told me that the real world of facts was true. My poetry collapsed into bare description, looked like documentary haiku, if you can imagine, but without the tradition to inform it. I know I suspected the work was inaccessible, but I didn't know why or how to make it less so. And since I work so intuitively, largely inarticulate, there was no way I knew to ask for help, and no one had the sense to help me. And, as I look back now, I doubt I knew I needed help. I had probably convinced myself I was writing the way I ought to, the way I had been taught to, as I understood it.
I saw a film called Fake, a seeming documentary, directed by Orson Welles, about a forger of great works of art. It was also about the ideas of truth and reality and art and, as I remember it now, quoted Picasso declaring that "Art is not Truth: it is the lie that reminds you of the Truth." This idea also stuck in my student head. Suddenly I knew, or was reminded, that literature, art, wasn't about being factual, material (despite the tales I'd heard from my American friends about The New Yorker's meticulous fact checkers), but about spiritual truths, ideals and ideas. Even the film itself, I realized, might really be a fake documentary. I was thrilled. What a playful, tricky guy this Welles was. Writing was suddenly fun again, as far as it went.
As far as it went when I finally got out of university was lyric poetry. Despite the fact that I had studied many genres of writing — plays, poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose (apparently the latter is now called creative documentary), screenplays, essays — I felt (and now believe I was wise to feel) that lyric poetry was the only form in which I could combine the techniques of writing with the only thing I could claim to know as truth, my own experience. I told myself in poetry would I perfect my technique while I gave myself time to grow up. I documented my life in poems about my family, the countryside, those particular lives and deaths. As far as this went, it was good. I had a definite and clear voice. Where it did not go, what it did not express, except, of course, obliquely, was some sense of my understanding of the wider world, the world of ideas and ideals, history, culture, a world I was facing daily.
Working at last independently, with no institutionalized threat of failure and no constant contact with current academic and literary fashions, I began to work haltingly toward a way of writing that could express more of what I felt.
My first choice, a choice I had already made intuitively and only now really articulated to myself, was technical. Taking as my guide the numerous traditional Native cultures that revere dreams as a way of understanding the world, I tried to make poems of dreams, or to incorporate dream images or to just create dreamlike feelings in poems. I started out thinking of this practice as surrealism, but the results, at best, were more like stories or rituals. I stopped naming and just kept doing.
One unexpected bonus of this half-understood aesthetic practice was poetry of irony and humour. Other results were dramatic monologues, implied dialogues, the half-heard discussions of several voices. This was exciting and intriguing.
Now a friend helped me see where I'd arrived on my journey to and from the ivory towers.
I had been part of a workshop for Native writers that started out in a room at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto and ended up in the living room of one of the other participants, Lenore Keeshig-Tobias. Lenore had done university, consciously looking for ways to write about being a Native person. While I was off, wandering among a confusion of contemporary styles and English courses, she had been studying storytelling, folklore and presentation. While I was being awed, moved and, more often than not, dispirited by the great works of contemporary literature, she was being encouraged by Native literatures. Seeing her recite one poem to a rapt audience crowded into the Trojan Horse coffee house on Danforth Avenue, a poem by "Mohawk Poetess" E. Pauline Johnson, reconfirmed my taste for the oral. (It was perhaps an original taste since Johnson had been the one poet I had heard talked of beyond the schoolyards of my childhood.)
In our workshop sessions, Lenore reminded me of my own knowledge of the extent of Native literature. I had been lucky enough, as a reasonably articulate young Indian man, to land a summer job back when I was attending university, with the Education Branch of the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. We were compiling an annotated bibliography of books by or about Indians. Over three summers, I read and wrote a short review of, on average, a book a day. By the time I left the post I felt over-full with information about the sad history of my own people. The picture of honourable people being lied to, cheated, murdered, and finally despised and ignored is neither human nor pretty. Maybe that's why I retreated into the technical concerns of a graduate student.
One of the staples of our workshop circle was the sharing of recent literary discoveries, from both the Native and non-Native worlds. We would talk about poems, rituals, songs, stories, novels. We would talk about techniques, always emphasizing the oral.
Among the stories we began paying more attention to were cycles of stories called Trickster tales. "Trickster" is the generic name anthropologists have given to a type of character who shows up in the tales of most of the world's oral literatures. People experiencing these tales as parts of their everyday life are not so consciously aware of that essential part of the character's nature. They know him or, in some cultures, her, by name, names like Raven, Nanabozo, Weesageechak, Old Man or Coyote. They know the Trickster is a figure of great contradictions, an every man or woman or animal and a nobody in one body, a hero who is also a fool, a fool who is heroic too. They know that if they listen to the stories about the Trickster, they will be entertained while being both instructed and admonished. Being didactic is an honoured function of these tales. They embody concepts about the nature of being human, about the humanity of nature. They deal with the details of oversized pride, great stinking farts, insatiable lust or hunger, and happy accidents. They may tell us how light was brought to humankind or why the anus is wrinkled. They are about the errors of our ways. They deal in extreme situations to comment on and warn about the dilemmas of ordinary ones.
The Trickster is not absent from contemporary Western culture. He shows up with some regularity in the less respected genres like fantasy, musical and science fiction, though usually in forms that show only one of his aspects — often the nastier side, like the Joker in Batman, the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, Bugs Bunny, Peer Gynt.
The good versus evil dichotomy that frames our understanding of the world in contemporary culture cannot, with ease, accept a figure of contradictions and, so, relegates such literary characters to the fringes of our respect with the clowns, the devils and the Indians.
In the animistic understanding of reality that traditionally characterized Native cultures, the extremes of the Trickster are an accepted part of his artificiality, and the contradictions, evidence of his humanity. He is capable of doing good and evil and like any such person should be approached with caution, with suspicious respect.
Mainstream society presents us with heroes, role models, whose strengths we are encouraged to emulate. When a hero shows weakness and fails (remember Ben Johnson?), the entire society fails and is dispirited and we are forced to wallow in the failure. This is identified in literary circles as tragic catharsis, and the best thing about it is we feel so much better when it stops. Native societies present us with Tricksters, examples of behaviour it would do us good not to follow. When a Trickster shows weakness and fails (an example will follow), we are together opened, often in laughter, and reminded of our own humanity. Our laughter is not untouched by sadness, but the experience is more sweet than sour, more encouraging than not.
To me, this seems a better way to create literature, to write in a world that for my entire lifetime has been under threat of more or less instantaneous destruction from atomic weapons and stays under the threat of corruption and extinction by the detritus of the neurotically materialistic ways we live here in the western world.
I want to encourage people. In writing workshops, in everyday life, I meet people who have been spiritually, often physically wounded by the life they live in this society. They hesitate to act for fear of failure, for fear of appearing the fool. "You Can't Beat City Hall" would be their banner, if they were confident enough to organize. The useful thing about the Trickster is that he or she is easily a far greater fool than any of us can ever fear to be, and yet s/he gets up and goes onto further foolishness and/or creativity. Certainly we Native people in our particular historical bind can use this sort of encouragement. Our sense of humour has certainly got us this far. And we are not the only ones who need it.
I see, as you can see, a lot of potential in the Trickster, not simply because of the clarity s/he gives to my life, my view of the world. Although I didn't recognize it at the time, the Trickster was there too in Coyote City for me as the writer, the artist.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Pursued by a Bear"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Daniel David Moses.
Excerpted by permission of Exile Editions Ltd.
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
Pursued by a Bear • An Introduction,
Spooky • An Essay,
Three Sisters • A Story about Writing and/or Telling,
Silence (?)(!)(.),
The Other's Situation? • An Apology,
Words and Entropy • A Trickster-ish Memoir,
How My Ghosts Got Pale Faces,
Loving Ceremony,
A Bridge Across Time • About Ben Cardinal's No Name Indians and Generic Warriors,
Flaming Nativity • About Billy Merasty's Fireweed,
Of the Essence • About Tomson Highway's The Sage, the Dancer and the Fool,
Queer for a Day • Writing the Status Queer: Reading Beyond Breeding,
The Lady I Saw You With Last Night • About Floyd Favel Starr's Lady of Silences,
Tricky Rabbit • About Beatrice Mosionier's Night of the Trickster,
"Adam" Means "Red Man",
Truth or Friction,
The "Or" Question • A Meditation,
Poor Judd Fry and I • About Oklahoma!,
The Trickster's Laugh • My Meeting with Tomson and Lenore,
"A Syphilitic Western" • Making The ... Medicine Shows,
Acknowledgements,