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Kali read from the works of an obscure Kanadian poet:
There is no chart of his movement through the borrowed
INDENTforest,
A place so alien that all he could do
with it
INDENTwas pretend it was his own
And turn himself into an Indian, savage and lean,
A hunter of the forest's
excellent green secret.
For all his movement through the forest was
In search of himself,
in search of Archie Belaney,
INDENTa lone
predator in London
Telling the very king: I come in peace, brother,
The princess thinking how alien he was, how fine.
Stranger and stranger to return to the forest
With the beaver all
laughing at him, baring
INDENTtheir crazy
orange teeth
And the savage secret - if there ever was one -
Never revealed to him. Stranger and stranger to return to
The female
forest, the fickle wind erasing his tracks,
The receding beeline, and the
snowbanks moving and
INDENTmoving.
(Anahareo fed the fire with sweet smelling branches. It was the end of
summer and loons cried out over the dark lake.
They spoke of how the first man in the world had emerged from the water
covered with shining scales which later fell off, leaving only the vestiges
which were toenails and fingernails.
They spoke of how the Indians had no opposite of God, how good and evil
were not separate forces, but two aspects of one spirit, one reality. He liked
that.
They sought themselves in each other's eyes like all the world's lovers
since the beginning of time. But they couldn't discover their histories in one
another, for when she looked into his eyes she saw only the lost lands of her
fathers, and in her eyes he saw the desolate country which was his soul. He
claimed that only the natives had a memory, that the white man suffered from a
permanent amnesia brought about by his first glimpse of vast and horrifying
expanses of snow. She did not know that he was speaking of himself, nor did she
know that he was jealous of her; he could see them out on the lake - her
ancestors - rippling over the water in their delicate ghostly canoes all
silver around the edges. He wanted to claim these ancestors for his own. He said
that the white man was always trying to steal the Indian's myths. Wasn't it
enough that he could steal their names?
When he looked inside himself, he discovered an imposter.)
We want to pretend that you are our ancestors -
INDENTyou who are called
Wolf in the Water, Blue
Flash of Lightning, Heaven Fire,
Black Sleep -
You who have no devil, no opposite of Manitou.
You who are hiding
behind your names, behind
INDENTclosed doors
of thunder
And will not let us in.
(Backlit by blue lightning, the silhouette of the wolf
INDENTdrinks the midnight river; fire from heaven
Falls on our sleep and invents morning; the air is thick
INDENTwith feathers from surreal birds.)
You who never knew the evil in us, you who have
INDENTno
opposite of Manitou,
Come out from behind the thunder and embrace us -
All we long to become, all we have never known of ourselves.
Before you are gone from our eyes forever -
INDENT(you who are certainly not our ancestors)
Teach us our names, the names of our cities.
No one ever welcomed us when
we came to this land.
(Archie Belaney thought of winter. 'Surely this is the most silent country
on the face of the globe,' he said. 'Silent as death except for the booming of
the ice on the big lake.' He looked into the darkness and added, 'I must write
that down.'
Anahareo put more branches on the fire, Anahareo who was dark and
beautiful, Anahareo who had taught him to love the animals.
The spoke of how at puberty Indian boys would enter the manitou world by
fasting, and how this journey inward was a journey into the real world,
not away from it. In dreams they would discover their personal manitou, their
protector, and an elder might discover a boy's secret name in one of his own
dreams, in the mighty reality of the spirit world. Some might call this the
unconscious, but in truth it was the kingdom of consciousness. Within the tree
was the Tree, within the world, the World.
Grey Owl prayed for his immortal soul.)
So I must stand away from the stone to enter the stone,
To dream
the idea of the stone, the stone which is all stones,
INDENTthe
first and final stone,
Its source being, its manitou.
As in puberty I dreamed my lifelong protector, who
INDENTshowed me
How to navigate impossible rivers,
who made me as the
INDENTworld's
INDENTfirst person, breathing
Fire and poetry.
The strangers who divided the world into good and evil
INDENTwere wrong.
The Great Lynx Misshipeshu who
dwells beneath ambivalent
INDENTwater
INDENTis both benevolent
Lord, and devil.
And I am become the powerful dreamer who dreams his way
INDENTthrough
To reality, to enter and ignite the
stone, to illumine
INDENTfrom within
Its
perfect paradox, its name.
Kali got up and kicked dirt over the ashes of the fire. This was their last
night of camping out at Algonquin Park.
'I had this bizarre dream,' Noman said. 'I dreamed that a band of Indians
broke into my room and took all my possessions - my books, my clothes, my
toaster, everything. And when I asked them what they were doing they paraded
down the street and said they were just taking back what was theirs, nothing
more.'
'It's time to go,' said Kali.
'No more poetry?' he asked sleepily.
'No,' she said. 'Another time I'll read to you from the book Anahareo
wrote about her life with Grey Owl. She says, "When, finally, I was
convinced that Archie was English, I had the awful feeling that for all those
years I had been married to a ghost - that Archie never really existed."'
'How unfair of her,' Noman muttered. 'How awfully unfair. Of course he
existed. As surely as you or I. He was only looking for his soul, or for God, or
whatever.'
Then he thought of winter and the white expanse of the lake, a whiteness
so vast it was almost claustrophic.
Now it was the end of summer and the loons were crying into the night. The
dying fire smoldered beneath its blanket of grey ashes, sending up occasional
smoke signals which he could not decipher. He thought that there was nothing to
worship in this country but the magnificent indifference of Nature, its broken
silences.
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