Living in a Time of Monsters
"...But Porcupine said, 'Do you really want me to go to the Man yonder, who eats bushes? He will come and swallow all the sheep, as they stand in the kraal. You need not think that even these bushes will be left, for we shall be swallowed with the sheep. A Man who devours things as he does- walks along eating the very bushes among which he walks!'" - 'Mantis and the All-Devourer'; Zu'twasi story, trans. Paul Radin
- Welcome the ugly animal... Most places I've heard about or been, there've been old stories about older times when the world wasn't all the way formed and monsters walked and hid on the earth. Old women with hair like snakes and apetites for children, great toads in secret caverns, serpents that crawled and flew, ten-thousand-eyed bulls and asses, giants, Tiamat, Lilith, Yngir, the Titans, Terrible-Lizard-Who-Lost-All-His-Children, the All-Devourer, and countless others. These individuals are different from the fauns and fees, those who the Lakota call 'common spirits,' different from Nagas and Tengu, different from the Baba Yaga, Humbaba, and other notable heroes of the wood, and different still from the Protectors of the Children, lake guardians, black dogs, or any 'cryptozoological' mystery you'd care to name. These old time monsters had nothing to do with the Trickster, in any of his guises. The old time monsters were insatiable eaters, or wanton destroyers- killers, land-flatteners, bellowers, and nuisances of the greatest degree. Teachers, too, by example if not in their words, decayed or consciously ignored over the years. Every hero twin or trickster who vanquished, banished, or transformed one of these old time monsters took from the encounter a lesson, which was subsequently passed down in story and song. We remember those stories when we hear them, even if we've been cut off from our ancestors' land, I think because we recognize some element of truth deeper than the watered-down accounts laid out in textbooks of how the past ought to have been. But most of us have forgotten so much, and have buried the old understandings under a barrage of scientific superstition and dead-end rationalism, that the substance of the lessons of the monsters has slipped apart.
Every day, moving through the city from one irrelevant point to another, I pass by this one area where all of these people are walking without looking at each other, or trying to sleep, or selling pot, or moaning, or talking at nobody, sometimes into machines. There are a couple of street trees that are old enough they're straining at the sidewalk above their roots there. I see rusted marquees and fresh ads for movies. There is no ground visible, but the asphalt smells like urine. It's loud there in the morning, hardly any people around, just clacking sounds and engine sounds and far-off boat sounds. There's an old holy hill I can only see when the fog's burned off earlier than usual, towering over that part of the city. It's too steep to build roads on, but whoever does these things put a science museum on the top, to kill whoever was still managing to live there, I guess.
This Indian thing I've been on, I think I've been more of a colonist about it than I realize. I mean, my intention is to do right by the land, whatever land I happen to be on, and my sad, lonely, confused human self's trying to find a village of people who'll love me for my crazy ideas, and who I'll love for theirs. The way I reckon it, folks with extant roots to a piece of land, and who heard stories about the way it was when humans were people there, are liable to know a heck of a lot more about how to do this living thing well than us disconnected idiots living on dead ground and pretending that words and actions are the same thing. On this continent, that means people who look up, or tired, when you say the word 'Indians'. But I ask too many questions without really thinking about the answers I've been given, and I trust books too much, and I fear, for all I'd genuinely love to see the Maidu language as the dominant tongue in Maidu country, I am excessively proud of my currently unique ability to barely speak it. I am concerned not enough about my co-option of 'Indian' cultural identity. My mother's grandmother was Cherokee, so the family says, and with the Keetoowah band's no-blood-quantum rule for membership, I reckon the geneologies could fix me up with some official paperwork, but that would be cheating. I was raised White, was educated White, was told all my life I was White; I'm a White man, with all of the disgusting implications that label brings up in me. Though I've allied my understandings with the stated aims of the American Indian Movement, and bawled my eyes out over first-hand accounts of the genocide, I don't live my life any differently, in an activist way, than I did when I was an asshole scientist. I'm not exactly busting dams or firebombing the BIA, here. I mean, I've taught anti-colonial attitudes to any students of mine who'll listen, but that's pretty minimal; words are empty if there isn't experience behind 'em. At the moment, I am hurting this place more than I am helping it, just by living the way everyone else here is living.
I see my feet that crush continents, and my hands that wring mountains into slivers of tin. My eyes turn to stone what I see, deadening birds and plants into Latin names. My veins are tar and asphalt, my blood petroleum. When I speak, I speak out of a hundred angry mouths, and where I defecate no plants will grow. I am eating up the forests. I am drinking up the seas. I am flattening the earth. I am killing the world.
We are living in a time of monsters again, and we are the monsters. I wonder what stories the grandchildren will tell about these days. I don't think I'll ever be an indigenous person, but perhaps my descendents will be. What's a skin-held body anyway, if you don't have a three-verb-tense linguistic system? In our lair in the desert places of the earth, we are waiting for the heroes. The monster's loose...
"Tiny darling ghost holder
Tiny darling ghost holder
You our soft spirit breather and
You our bark skinned weaver
Remember you could weep fire
Remember you could weep fire with wild eyes
With wild eyes, oh those wild eyes
If you ring your cells like bells in a garden that
You plant your burdens way deep down in
And water them daily from wells of salty
Guilt for sons who pollinate the deadly
That wild eye, oh that wild eye
Papa my pine whistler sparrow-eyed sun misser
Papa my pine whistler sparrow-eyed moon blisser
Mama my jaw clincher spirit mouthed ghost dancer
Mama my vein braider thousand year bone burner
Mama my tongue twister thousand pronged antlers
Mama my tongue twister thousand pronged antlers
Mama my vein braider thousand pronged antlers, antlers
And oh her wild eyes, oh her wild eyes
So I will ring my cells like bells as you
Bind your father's molecules with roots of silver
Pierce him cedars with eyes like fingers
Picking bloody flowers
His wild eyes, oh his wild eyes
Papa my pine whistler sparrow-eyed sun misser
Papa my pine whistler sparrow-eyed moon blisser
Mama my jaw clincher spirit mouthed ghost dancer
Mama my vein braider thousand year bone burner
Mama my tongue twister thousand pronged antlers
Mama my tongue twister thousand pronged antlers
Mama my vein braider thousand pronged antlers, antlers
And oh her wild eyes, oh her wild eyes
Tiny green moss collector
Sweet tiny green moss collector
Remember you could catch fire
Remember you could catch fire with wild eyes
With wild eyes, oh with those wild eyes
And once the river is rolling lower
We'll gather lichen from the boulders
We'll keep it dry inside our lockets
We'll put this town down into our pockets
We'll try.
To leave these branch arms behind
The swaying hands of pines
Their needles tugging at your skin
Trying to pull you back deep in their wooden womb
Of a hundred hearts hanging suspended, moth-eaten
Those muscles the size of your fist
All floating around your head
Not knowing who they're a loving
Not knowing how fast they're a pumping
Not knowing how hard they're a beating
Not knowing who they're a punching
Those muscles the size of your fist
All floating around your head
And throwing punches like we throw the stones to
The bottom of river beds
Who knows whose next
To watch from under the currents
The rapids rapidly raging while rapid
While we're rapidly blinking our wild
Our wild eyes." - Mariee Sioux
- Welcome the ugly animal... Most places I've heard about or been, there've been old stories about older times when the world wasn't all the way formed and monsters walked and hid on the earth. Old women with hair like snakes and apetites for children, great toads in secret caverns, serpents that crawled and flew, ten-thousand-eyed bulls and asses, giants, Tiamat, Lilith, Yngir, the Titans, Terrible-Lizard-Who-Lost-All-His-Children, the All-Devourer, and countless others. These individuals are different from the fauns and fees, those who the Lakota call 'common spirits,' different from Nagas and Tengu, different from the Baba Yaga, Humbaba, and other notable heroes of the wood, and different still from the Protectors of the Children, lake guardians, black dogs, or any 'cryptozoological' mystery you'd care to name. These old time monsters had nothing to do with the Trickster, in any of his guises. The old time monsters were insatiable eaters, or wanton destroyers- killers, land-flatteners, bellowers, and nuisances of the greatest degree. Teachers, too, by example if not in their words, decayed or consciously ignored over the years. Every hero twin or trickster who vanquished, banished, or transformed one of these old time monsters took from the encounter a lesson, which was subsequently passed down in story and song. We remember those stories when we hear them, even if we've been cut off from our ancestors' land, I think because we recognize some element of truth deeper than the watered-down accounts laid out in textbooks of how the past ought to have been. But most of us have forgotten so much, and have buried the old understandings under a barrage of scientific superstition and dead-end rationalism, that the substance of the lessons of the monsters has slipped apart.
Every day, moving through the city from one irrelevant point to another, I pass by this one area where all of these people are walking without looking at each other, or trying to sleep, or selling pot, or moaning, or talking at nobody, sometimes into machines. There are a couple of street trees that are old enough they're straining at the sidewalk above their roots there. I see rusted marquees and fresh ads for movies. There is no ground visible, but the asphalt smells like urine. It's loud there in the morning, hardly any people around, just clacking sounds and engine sounds and far-off boat sounds. There's an old holy hill I can only see when the fog's burned off earlier than usual, towering over that part of the city. It's too steep to build roads on, but whoever does these things put a science museum on the top, to kill whoever was still managing to live there, I guess.
This Indian thing I've been on, I think I've been more of a colonist about it than I realize. I mean, my intention is to do right by the land, whatever land I happen to be on, and my sad, lonely, confused human self's trying to find a village of people who'll love me for my crazy ideas, and who I'll love for theirs. The way I reckon it, folks with extant roots to a piece of land, and who heard stories about the way it was when humans were people there, are liable to know a heck of a lot more about how to do this living thing well than us disconnected idiots living on dead ground and pretending that words and actions are the same thing. On this continent, that means people who look up, or tired, when you say the word 'Indians'. But I ask too many questions without really thinking about the answers I've been given, and I trust books too much, and I fear, for all I'd genuinely love to see the Maidu language as the dominant tongue in Maidu country, I am excessively proud of my currently unique ability to barely speak it. I am concerned not enough about my co-option of 'Indian' cultural identity. My mother's grandmother was Cherokee, so the family says, and with the Keetoowah band's no-blood-quantum rule for membership, I reckon the geneologies could fix me up with some official paperwork, but that would be cheating. I was raised White, was educated White, was told all my life I was White; I'm a White man, with all of the disgusting implications that label brings up in me. Though I've allied my understandings with the stated aims of the American Indian Movement, and bawled my eyes out over first-hand accounts of the genocide, I don't live my life any differently, in an activist way, than I did when I was an asshole scientist. I'm not exactly busting dams or firebombing the BIA, here. I mean, I've taught anti-colonial attitudes to any students of mine who'll listen, but that's pretty minimal; words are empty if there isn't experience behind 'em. At the moment, I am hurting this place more than I am helping it, just by living the way everyone else here is living.
I see my feet that crush continents, and my hands that wring mountains into slivers of tin. My eyes turn to stone what I see, deadening birds and plants into Latin names. My veins are tar and asphalt, my blood petroleum. When I speak, I speak out of a hundred angry mouths, and where I defecate no plants will grow. I am eating up the forests. I am drinking up the seas. I am flattening the earth. I am killing the world.
We are living in a time of monsters again, and we are the monsters. I wonder what stories the grandchildren will tell about these days. I don't think I'll ever be an indigenous person, but perhaps my descendents will be. What's a skin-held body anyway, if you don't have a three-verb-tense linguistic system? In our lair in the desert places of the earth, we are waiting for the heroes. The monster's loose...
"Tiny darling ghost holder
Tiny darling ghost holder
You our soft spirit breather and
You our bark skinned weaver
Remember you could weep fire
Remember you could weep fire with wild eyes
With wild eyes, oh those wild eyes
If you ring your cells like bells in a garden that
You plant your burdens way deep down in
And water them daily from wells of salty
Guilt for sons who pollinate the deadly
That wild eye, oh that wild eye
Papa my pine whistler sparrow-eyed sun misser
Papa my pine whistler sparrow-eyed moon blisser
Mama my jaw clincher spirit mouthed ghost dancer
Mama my vein braider thousand year bone burner
Mama my tongue twister thousand pronged antlers
Mama my tongue twister thousand pronged antlers
Mama my vein braider thousand pronged antlers, antlers
And oh her wild eyes, oh her wild eyes
So I will ring my cells like bells as you
Bind your father's molecules with roots of silver
Pierce him cedars with eyes like fingers
Picking bloody flowers
His wild eyes, oh his wild eyes
Papa my pine whistler sparrow-eyed sun misser
Papa my pine whistler sparrow-eyed moon blisser
Mama my jaw clincher spirit mouthed ghost dancer
Mama my vein braider thousand year bone burner
Mama my tongue twister thousand pronged antlers
Mama my tongue twister thousand pronged antlers
Mama my vein braider thousand pronged antlers, antlers
And oh her wild eyes, oh her wild eyes
Tiny green moss collector
Sweet tiny green moss collector
Remember you could catch fire
Remember you could catch fire with wild eyes
With wild eyes, oh with those wild eyes
And once the river is rolling lower
We'll gather lichen from the boulders
We'll keep it dry inside our lockets
We'll put this town down into our pockets
We'll try.
To leave these branch arms behind
The swaying hands of pines
Their needles tugging at your skin
Trying to pull you back deep in their wooden womb
Of a hundred hearts hanging suspended, moth-eaten
Those muscles the size of your fist
All floating around your head
Not knowing who they're a loving
Not knowing how fast they're a pumping
Not knowing how hard they're a beating
Not knowing who they're a punching
Those muscles the size of your fist
All floating around your head
And throwing punches like we throw the stones to
The bottom of river beds
Who knows whose next
To watch from under the currents
The rapids rapidly raging while rapid
While we're rapidly blinking our wild
Our wild eyes." - Mariee Sioux