(corresponding to “Granny Goody’s Hairy Lips”)

If my tale of “Granny Goody’s Hairy Lips” may be off-putting by some of its imagery, the tale of “Panther and Lynx,” upon which it is based, shall seem grotesque. A lynx and panther lose the fire they keep and Lynx goes out to steal some. He finds an old woman with fire. He steals a firebrand from her. When he does, the old woman notices it and spreading her legs, she looks at her vulva and accuses it of taking the firebrand, and strikes her vulva with another firebrand. This is very strange. In the end a series of grizzly bears, who are the old woman’s sons, seek out the lynx to punish him for taking the firebrand.

By our understanding of the normal grammar of myth, some of this is not difficult to address. Animals in fables are a motif we have heard, and in the first instance this seems a classic tale, the theme of the taking and making of fire. This much we can make out. But the old woman striking her vulva with a firebrand and accusing it of taking fire is so bizarre, if not to say in our aesthetics obscene, that we can make no sense of it.

We turn to the study of the semiotics of mythology and folklore to explicate it. We trust in scholars such as Campbell, Jung, Fraser, and Eliade, and in books such as the Encyclopedia of Symbols, and the Archetypes of the Body. Here we learn that fire has several associations, but foremost it represents the triumph of culture, the preferment upon the human animal of its gift makes us capable of keeping fire for so much that advances us, cooking and metallurgy and simply warmth and light. Fire symbolizes what makes us human, and also has psychological associations to the body, to the warmth of the body and the energies of the body.

In his study The Forge and the Crucible, concerning metallurgy and alchemy in anthropological history, Mircea Eliade tells us that to keep embers is to keep the life of the body. This life-giving aspect is generative, just as a woman is naturally generative, and so fire suggests sexuality, for the generation of life is sexual. Thus, Eliade found:

“According to the myths of certain primitive people, the aged women of the tribe naturally possessed fire in their genital organs and made use of it to do their cooking, but kept it hidden from men who were able to get possession of it by trickery. These myths reflect the ideology of a matriarchal society and remind us, also, of the fact that fire, being produced by the friction of two pieces of wood (that is, by their sexual union), was regarded as existing naturally in the piece which represented the female.”

Thus the disconcerting motif of the old woman, fire and her vulva makes sense in the context, not in our aesthetics, but in the naturalism and explicit truth of Mrs. Wilson’s Tales.

The translation of the Kathlamet text by Boas speaks of the old woman’s vulva, that is, the female genitals outwardly, but it seems by the way in which the matter is told that the exact usage should be the cavity of the vagina itself, the portal to the womb. In any case the explicit reference to women’s genitalia will be striking as a motif to us, because in our Western art the genitals of women is erased from view, unless it is intentionally pornographic. But this has not always been so. In Celtic stone artifacts found in England a strange fetish is portrayed, the Sheela-na-Gig, a squatting naked woman who holds open her vulva with both her hands to reveal her gaping vagina. The only survival of this pagan image, ironically, is stone carvings upon early Gothic churches, where sometimes other pagan artifacts, such as the Green Man, gargoyles and some other sexually explicit images, also survive in decorations to doors, eaves, and cornices. The interpretation of these by early European Christians is ambig

Ferdnand Thieman, 10 years old, jumped into a cistern and drowned himself because his sister wanted him to go on an errand. The mother conducts a home for aged Germans at Wauwatosa, and was away at the time.

Badger State Banner

26 January 1899

Musical excerpt: “Music Box” by Philip Glass from the movie Candyman

(corresponding to “Cecelia and Crab”)

It shall be apparent on the reading that my rendition has only passing similarity to that which was originally told by Mrs. Wilson, “The Seal and the Crab.”

My tale—which I have named “Cecelia and Crab”—is a vignette of mystery. It evokes the uncertainty of human society, featuring two innocents, who have been cast into a world which is naturally good and beautiful but where human nature may be cruel and ugly. Nothing is more sinister than an evil child, as encountered here, for it is certain then that evil is not merely acquired but shall be innate and compulsive.

Mrs. Wilson’s tale is a fable of animals in the common tradition. It is little more than chatter about their animal habits and manners. But there are presumptive intimations in the tale concerning human nature and how humans are perceived and experienced by animals such as these.

Some of the events, especially the quirky mingy behavior of Blue Jay at the end of the Mrs. Wilson’s tale, is told in phrasing so spare, seemingly so indirect, that it is difficult to grasp what is intended. I have therefore edited her telling with some clarifying phrases, so that it will make more sense to we who cannot hear it with the ear that Mrs. Wilson was speaking to

In which we learn of the origin of Mr. Minx, who was not known by any other name than this surname or given name, as it may have happened to be, and how Minx met P (eldest brother of Lynch) and how that saved him

(corresponding to “Adventures in a Wobbling World”)

This tale is typical of the characteristic disjunctiveness of oral storytelling, what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss likened to bricolage. Most often this characteristic is evident in the concatenation of commonplace motifs or recurrent techniques—how things often happen in threes, for example—or in the artificial incorporation of popular vignettes, which the storyteller has retold for new, although borrowed and old (howsoever artfully adapted). In this tale the disjunctiveness is featured with a fractured episodic plot; as if the whole tale were actually a collation of several unrelated tales. Its nominal characters sustain its continuity, but only barely, the tale as a whole lacks coherence in theme or logic and integrity to its plot. Its incoherent transitions will seem contrived, gratuitous, and inadequate to our aesthetics.

Conceivably, these several episodes were traditionally related about the Mink and simply grouped for the occasion, as a compendium. Just as conceivably, the episodes were related on other occasions concerning different characters with other circumstantial justifications.

To bright-line the disjunctive feature of this tale, I have isolated its episodes by parenthesis.

This disjunctiveness, by the way, reminds me of how Buddhist teaching, the Dhammapada, or sayings of the Buddha—and for that matter, those of Jesus—are broken pieces that have been tossed into one box, glassy shards of wisdom, disjointed, catching light thereby, and when we pick one up we are meant to hold it and ponder it by itself, even though we sense that they have come from a larger complete object. These pieces of wisdom, these parables, these episodes feature their broken edges and their fragmentary expression purposefully; those misfit mysteries are what we must contemplate so that we can guess the larger complete object to which they fit, and yet we shall come to realize each piece is a whole unto itself. Wisdom is bricolage.

In the coveting guidance of the seasons, as it is taught by sacred literature, the turning of moldering and fertility embraces us, her celebrants, and we are taken by suddenness, by adventure, by intentions that we feel must overwhelm. The man who must wander, the woman who must escape, the child who must hide, the flower that grows or dies, the rain falling, the snows melting—all the shriveling and burgeoning, the lush or desiccated, the frail or lustful, bursts and breathless goes, and goes on….

Music excerpt is the song “Somebody’s Gone...” from the album Hand-Me-Down Music: Old Songs, Old Friends - Vol. 1 Traditional Music of Union County, North Carolina

(corresponding to “The Berry Girls....”)

Once again, we are presented with a story that is told with presumptions and intimations that are beyond our aesthetic or our common experience, and so we may not understand what is being said. Once again, I have interjected clarifications to state some presumptions and intimations explicitly.

There are always such presumptions and intimations in art. These are often derived from the norms of society or our accustomed conceptions of reality, which are so implicit or logical that we do not explain them. These are also sometimes technical conventions in the art. In film art, for example, the sequence of shots exploits implicit ideas of the storytelling. A cut to another scene is presumed to be simultaneous parallel action, if it is abrupt and cues the logic of the plot; but a slow dissolve from one to another scene, where another set of subtle intimations suggest to the viewer a significant change in time and place, makes for different logic—the flash-back. When crosscuts of different scenes were introduced to movies as a sequence of shots, the technique was not immediately accepted. The audience needed to learn its “grammar.” Now children who grow up in front of television, their brains daily steeped with frenetic sound and imagery, will have mastered visual grammar of film edits without instruction. But I remember how confusing my Grandmother found these frenetic sounds and imagery; there were many movies and TV shows that she simply could not make sense of; she preferred the slow-pace and staid stagecraft of soap operas.

In the narrative of written and oral storytelling, the essential participation of the audience exploits presumptions and intimations as a matter of craft; for the telling of a tale is an exchange of understandings between the teller and the told. Who listens puts in her mind her own imaginings of what the author implies; imagination completes the tale; the teller and the told acknowledge this completion implicitly; it is a private understanding between them of matter intimately shared.

In the case of this tale much that is told shall be too alien for intimate sharing of imagination. Presumably the meaning of strange relationship of Robin and Salmonberry was understood by Mrs. Wilson’s own people; the bizarre sequence of murders and mutilations bespeaks matters of the world that were self-evident to them, but are not so to us. Instead the matter of the story seems largely incomprehensible. I am afraid I am going to have to leave you to take this tale in your imaginings howsoever you may conceive it. I have no explanation for it myself.

(corresponding to “Boss Boil....”)

In an exception to the rule, Mrs. Wilson’s tale shall in this case precede my own rendition of it, partly so that my rendition may conclude this collection, but more importantly so that the distinctive parallels between this tale and my rendition may be known to you before you read it.

This tale is a love story of a kind, not sentimental, but its passions are strong. During the life and times of Mrs. Wilson a woman was a commodity of the tribe, not perhaps more than any other person, whose value as a person is principally social, but we see that a woman shall be given as a wife in transactions that are not matters of love, and that she is not diminished therefore, nor necessarily unhappy for it.

Nonetheless erotic compulsions matter too. The relations of men and women are not only practical. Men will compete jealously for women; they will kill one another for the possession of them. Women in turn will play men for their own desires and advantages.

In which, the last tale told, we learn how P travels to Peshtigo to find work and finds terror and passion in a meld he did not want, circumstance and consequence fused, and the molten amalgam of Fate.

The tale continues.

The image from Edward Burne Jones, “Perseus and Andromeda.”

Music is “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads, found on this album.