A story as sharp as a kn.., p.39
A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 39
either accentual, alliterative, or quantitative ; but [it] is not." One
reason we frequently misjudge these simple facts, Eliot tells us, is
our poverty of terminology : "we have three terms where we need
four : we have 'verse' and 'poetry' on the one side, and only 'prose'
on the other. ..." 9
Verse and its associated conventions - alliteration, rhyme and
other patterned forms of artful wordplay - are very old conventions
in Indo-European languages and cultures, reaching back to the early
Vedas and beyond.10 But verse in the strictly acoustic sense of the
word does not play the same role in preagricultural societies. Humans, as a rule, do not begin to farm their language until they have
begun to till the earth and to manipulate the growth of plants and
animals. Songs are sung throughout the world, by many species in
addition to our own. But in hunter-gatherer cultures the larger forms
of poetry lack musical accompaniment, both overt (harp or lyre, for
example) or covert (in the form of embedded metrical pattern). The
reason is quite simple : poetry and music in such cultures are not
two separate arts with separate outer forms. Both are at home in
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chapter nineteen: The Prosody of Meaning
the speaking of myth. Myth is that form of language in which poetry
and music have not as yet diverged. 11
This does not mean that hunters have no poetry ; it means that
following the poetry they make is more like moving through a forest or a canyon, or waiting in a blind, than like moving through an
orchard or a field. The language is often highly ordered, rich, compact - but it is not arranged in neat, symmetrical rows.
Prose in the equally strict sense is a later development still : the
linguistic equivalent not of gardening, herding and farming but of
roadbuilding, surveying and systematic mapping. It is limited, on
the whole, to cultures that possess not only agriculture but metallurgy and writing.
There is a reason, nonetheless, why verse and poetry so often
coexist - and the thinness of our critical vocabulary is not the only
reason why the terms are easily confused. Verse is language set part
way to music. It is language that is gesturing or reaching - unsuccessfully as a rule - back toward myth, where poetry and music are
one and the same.
Boas's second problem with terminology - his belief that every
instance of literary language must be either verse or prose - may
be equally endemic to the European tradition, but poets and some
critics have seen through this false hypothesis as well. It is the literary counterpart of the stalwart Newtonian view that all matter
must be solid, liquid or gas. Present-day physicists agree that the
vast majority of the matter in the universe is actually in none of
these three states, and a few recent literary critics - Northrop Frye
among them - have admitted that much literary language is neither
verse nor prose. Frye recognized a third important state of language
whose principal component "is neither the prose sentence nor the
metrical line, but a kind of thought-breath or phrase." 12
Frye's ideas were not available to Boas, but Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound and others could have helped him with the problem. Hopkins, in some lecture notes he wrote in the 1870s, also
distinguishes three states of literary language. These are (1) prose ;
(2) "figure of spoken sound, which in the narrower sense is verse";
and (3) "beyond verse... , figure of grammar." 13
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a story as sharp as a knife
Poetry is a kind of content, or a quality of content, and verse is a
kind of form. In India, where the mnemonic value of verse has long
been recognized, even lawbooks have been versified. In nineteenth-century France, where the social acceptability and the orderly beauty
of verse became a positive disadvantage to poets such as Baudelaire
and Rimbaud (and to a different kind of poet named Flaubert), poetry
was taught to dress as prose. In aboriginal North America, neither
verse nor prose, in the narrow sense, played any major role, but neither poetry nor talk was hampered by the absence of these modes.
Thematic or visionary coherence is prominent in myth, acoustic
coherence in verse, discursive and syntactical coherence in prose.
Thematic patterns, like syntactic and acoustic ones, can be microscopic, macroscopic or both.14 But the patterns are primarily composed of things like predicates and images, not of things like syllables, pitches and stresses. In classical Haida poetry, as in the poetry
of most preagricultural peoples, what there is to count is almost
always what there is to think about, not what there is to hear. 15 This is poetry in which noetic prosody underlies - and far outreaches, as a rule - the prosody of sound. (And so it ought to underlie the
visual prosody - typography in other words - inevitably added in
transcription and translation.)
In works such as the Kyaanusili peace poem, what there is to think
about fuses very nicely with what there is to hear. The prosody of
meaning leaves its imprint in the prosody of sound, but the prosody
of sound does not come loose from the prosody of meaning - as
it must before a repertoire of meters or of verse forms can arise in
any literary culture.
Hopkins's notes contain another very useful piece of advice, which
is that "We must not insist on knowing where verse ends and prose
(or verseless composition) begins, for they pass into one another."
The states of literary language - verse, prose, and however many
others there may be - are not mutually exclusive. Matthew Arnold
was not wrong (nor even cruel) to call Alexander Pope's verse a
splendid example of prose. A composition in verse calls attention
to its own acoustic pattern, and a composition in prose to its own
syntactic and logical flow. This does not prohibit any work from do—
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chapter nineteen: The Prosody of Meaning
ing both at the same time, nor from being thematically patterned as
well. Many if not most works of literature partake in some degree
of the nature of vision, verse and prose. To say that a work is one or
the other of these is as a rule only to point to its most conspicuous
or highly developed feature. From the discursive point of view, the
poems of Skaay and Ghandl can be described as associative prose.
They are also, if you like, free verse - unmetered rhythmical phrases
- from the metrist's point of view ; and they are well-paced, shapely
periods when studied with the ears of the rhetorician. But to sense
their true dimensions, we must grasp another aspect of these poems : the one from which we start to hear the silent music of their
images and themes.
To understand the songs, we need to hear them sung. To understand the myths, we need to hear them told. We also need to think
them through, and to think them in conjunction with each other.
If we also insist on the perspective of the connoisseur of language,
we will not go altogether unrewarded. The songs, the myths, the
family traditions, and the histories as well, contain the sorts of literary jewels that are coveted where poetry is memorized and read
as well as listened to. The Kyaanusili poem is one superb example. pages The riddle Skilantlinda poses to Gitkuna is another. A third closes 168-169, 303 & 311
the first story in Skaay's Large Poem :
Diidaxwaa llanaa gi at qqaadaxwaa llanaa gi
page 100:
ttl qiixhagangdal qawdi gu dluu,
lines
651-653
qyanggagaay dluu,
lla ttl ghastlgayang wansuuga.
To the landward towns and the seaward towns
it was equally far,
they could see that it was,
when they put him over the side, they say.
Another sumptuous example is a stanza about birdsong that
occurs near the beginning of Ghandl's "Those Who Wear Headdresses at Sea" :
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a story as sharp as a knife
page 345:
Gyaanhaw sta lla gandaxitghawang wansuuga.
lines
Ll gandaaldighu qawdihaw
31-35
dattsi ll dagwulgi hlkyaaghwas.
Gaayguusta nang dldajiyas kkuugha gu
ll ghuuhlghahl xhiihlsuu
lla qingghawang wansuuga.
Then they set off, they say.
After they'd travelled a ways,
a wren sang to one side of them.
They could see that it punctured
a blue hole through the heart
of the one who had passed closest to it, they say.
I cite these passages for pleasure. I also cite them to show that
poetry, even by the narrowest, most hidebound definition of the
term, is a quintessential part of aboriginal American tradition. It
would not be hard to gather an anthology of passages like this in
fifty other Native American languages. But an anthology like that
would still misrepresent Native American oral poetry by cutting it
to fit colonial, literate expectations. Until we start to hear and see
the kind of poetry inherent in the larger works from which these
excerpts come, we stand little chance of understanding Native American intellectual and literary traditions - or of understanding poetry
itself in more than ethnocentric terms.
*
Liu Xie, a Chinese critic writing fifteen hundred years before our
time, saw literature as landscape and the other way around. Sun
and moon and mountains and rivers, he says, are the wen (Wen ) of
dao (Dao ).16 They are, that is, the literature and culture of the Tao, the message-bearing legacy and wisdom of what-is.
The myths exist, most mythtellers say, independently of any
human culture. We learn them from the others : other animals, the
trees, the creeks, the ground. But wherever they are told in the words
that humans use, they are told by individual human beings. Learning
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chapter nineteen: The Prosody of Meaning
how to hear the telling of a myth means learning how to hear the
myth itself and how to hear the one who tells it. Myth, like music,
speaks when someone with the skill is willing to perform. It also
speaks, like music, on behalf of the performer. For that to happen,
the performer must step back instead of forward, and let the myth
itself say what it can about the world. Rarely, but once in a while, a
mythteller speaks of this process directly.
One day in March 1928, in the village of Husum, Washington,
close to where the White Salmon River empties into the Columbia,
a Sahaptin-speaking shaman known as Shlawtx_an17 began to tell a
story. Aw iwacha tiin, he said : "Now there were people." Iwacha tiin chaw ilkwash, "There were people without fire." As Shlawtx_an soon
explained, the people without fire were the people of the earth. Led
by their headman-in-waiting, the Beaver, they went to steal fire
from the people of the sky.
Two human beings were listening intently as the tale continued
to unfold. One of the two was a young anthropologist, Melville Jacobs. He had studied, like John Swanton, with Franz Boas, and he
was busy, just as Swanton would have been, writing down what the
mythteller said. When the story reached what was plainly a conclusion, Shlawtx_an pronounced the conventional formula, Ikunik iwa
wat'it'aash, "So goes the myth," which certified its close. Then he
kept right on talking to Jacobs, and Jacobs kept on writing. What
Shlawtx_an said that day sheds light, I think, on all the indigenous
literatures of western North America, and in its way on literature
worldwide :
Mi-niknash aniya ink wat' it' aash ?
Chaw ink.
Anamun itx_anana tiicham,
mun itx_anana tiin,
kuuk pa' anakwa tiinan tiichamnan.
5
Kuuk itx_anana k' pi-nk anak' pi-nk iwacha tiin
k' pi-nk itx_anana kakya,
itx_anana waykaanash,
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itx_anana i-winat,
itx_anana tmaanit,
10
itx_anana xnit.
Tl' aaxw k' pi-nk kwninkat ittawax_na wat' it' aash.
Chaw ichlaksim tiichampa,
anakulk iwsha tiicham.
Kwnak tl' aax_w ti-nx_ti-nx_ tiin,
15
kuushx_i si-nwit,
kuushx_i tkwatat.
Anami-l ichi iwacha tiin.
Chaw quyx_ tamanwit,
tiin itx_anana tamanwitki.
20
Ittawax_na { ink } tiin ichi ikuuk,
kuuk ikwitamsh kumank,
anak' pi-nk shin kumank ittawax_shamta.
Kuuk k' pi-nk iyikshana wat' it' aashnan,
ku k' pi-nk ipx_wisha ichi ikuuk.
25
Ikunik ittawax_ni-ma tiicham ku wat' it' aash
kumank ichi ikuuk.
Aw chaw*wiyat tl' aax_w k' pi-nk i-watsha wat' it' aash.
Aw ink x_wi-saat,
kumash watisha tl' aax_wsimk' a,
wiyaanakwanisha wat' it' aash.
30
Ix_winam payikshata ink shiix_.
Awmash ni chaw*wiyat tl' aax_w wat' it' aash
ichnak tiichampa,
X
walxwaypam tiicham.
Kunam aw payksha. 18
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chapter nineteen: The Prosody of Meaning
How did i make the myths ?
I didn't.
After places came to be,
after people came to be,
the people and the places were destroyed.
5
Those who were previously people
turned into birds and furred animals,
turned into fish,
turned into elk and deer,
turned into fruit trees and berry bushes,
10
turned into root plants.
Those are the ones from whom the myths come.
Not just here in this place,
but in every place there is :
all the different kinds of people,
15
differing languages,
differing foods.
There were that many kinds of people here.
Rather than the white man's law,
people lived by their own law.
20
People came to be here then,
and they have been here since,
the ones who will continue being born here.
They were listening to myths back then,
and they are thinking of them still.
25
The land and the myths have grown together this way
from then until now.
Now almost all those myths are disappearing.
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I am old now,
telling you the whole of it,
leaving the myths behind.
30
Even so, you will keep on hearing me clearly.
Now I have given you almost all the myths
of this country,
the Klikitat country.
That is what you hear now.
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20 * Shellheap of the Spirit-Beings
There is a Proverb widely known on the Northwest
Coast, and evidently ancient, though you'll hear it much more often now in English than in Haida or Tlingit or Nisgha. In southern Haida it is this : Tlgaay higha ttlabju' waaga ; 1 in English : " The world is as sharp as a knife." That, at any rate, is now the standard English form, which came by way of a German translation from
Tlingit, made in the early 1890s by Franz Boas.2 If we translate the
Haida literally, the saying seems a little less dramatic but a little
more precise. Tlgaay, "the earth" (or the ground, or the place); higha, "straight up"; ttlabju' waaga, "is shaped like a woodcutter's wedge or the head of an axe."
There is also a story - or a folktale, you could say, because no
literary version has come down to us - that enshrines and elucidates the proverb :
A man once said to his careless son : The world is as sharp as a knife.
If you don't watch out, you'll fall right off. His son replied that the
earth was wide and flat ; no one could fall off. And as he kicked at the
ground to show how solid and reliable it was, he ran a splinter into
his foot and died soon after. 3
Other Haida proverbs are preserved in the literary amber of Swanton's Haida texts. I am fond, myself, of this one : Gam nang qqangas
gidaayga kkuuxu gutgwiiga qanaatgangghanggang :4 "A pauper does
not wear his marten skins fur-side out."
The status of such proverbs in the context of mythology is something like the status of cliches in conversation and of well-tried formulae in science and mathematics. The rule a = p r 2 for finding the area of a circle, as an example, is useful and evidently true, but it is
