(Asked
how I -- outspokenly Marxian and assertively agnostic -- can also be a
Gaian Pagan, I answer that Paganism chose me, and did so in a way that
sustains the revolutionary skepticism in which I was raised. What
follows is the true and eerie story of how that choosing happened. It is
reprinted from Dispatches from Dystopia, which was slain and purged by its server's death.)
*****
I
BEGAN KEEPING a journal in my 16th summer, a few months before I got
my first newspaper job, and despite the discouragements inflicted by severe dyslexia, I have done so ever since. Though
nearly all
these annual collections of notes and letters and poetry fragments
and other such personal memorabilia were destroyed by arson in 1983,
the dynamic of memorization and recall that is a central part of
writing enables me to remember enough of a given event – what
occurred and how I felt about it – to be reasonably comfortable
applying the first-person form to anything that happened in my life
from mid-1956 onward.
But
my pre-journal years are notably different: though thanks to my
father's encouraging gifts of cameras I was already committed to a
lifetime of photography, I remained a boy who had yet to discover the
advantage of inked or typewritten paper mnemonics, a reality
underscored by the present-day fact that while my pre-journal
memories remain vivid, the emotional anesthesia that is both the
curse and blessing of nonverbal time has given them a curiously
once-removed quality akin to that of film footage or old sepia-toned
photographs, of events in which I was an observer rather than a
participant or – if reincarnation is more than just a comforting
fiction – perhaps of memories from other lifetimes.
Clearly
this is why whenever I try to write of my boyhood years before the
decisive moment I committed myself also to a lifetime of writing, it
seems gravely dishonest to do so in anything other than the third
person, presumably a recognition that these circumstances demand the
I (and eye) of the autobiographical present be replaced by the
visually reportorial he and him – an expression of necessity and
therefore not of some Norman Mailer affectation.
There
is also the fact that until my emotional and intellectual
vocabularies had expended to something approaching maturity –
another milestone I associate with journal-keeping and its origin in
my decision to study and practice accurate description – there was
much that happened during my pre-journal years I frankly found
impossible to verbalize until years later; I lacked both the words
and the vital sense of metaphorical relationships – for example the
clear image of Nature as a womanliness so huge and powerful and yes
seductive that even now I can find no adequate synonyms for her
timeless magnificence in any language beyond the visual arts or the
haunting virtuosity of music. It is especially evident in tribal
woodwinds, their summons like fire-blue Clyfford Still brush-strokes
against an umber cadence of drums; the heartbeat of a forest; some
clear and troutly river that yet murmurs in the Mother Tongue -- all
the reflections and emanations of pure wildness and wilderness so
beloved of Celtic or First Nations peoples.
The
following describes an event I as a boy never dared reveal, one of
those pre-journal episodes I can only relate in the third person, a
true story I could not write until I was a 70-year-old cripple and no
longer gave a damn if people thought me a liar or crazy or both.
Bear
in mind too that children of my generation yet enjoyed a freedom that
in the United States of today has become not only unthinkable but is
in many jurisdictions suppressed as an imaginary felony perpetrated
by parents falsely accused of criminal neglect.
*****
THE
BOY WALKED in conifer-dappled sunlight along a road so old and unused
it was scarcely more than an underbrush-obscured trace through the
forest. He had long wondered where the road might lead and what he
might find along the way, and now today he followed its hide-and-seek
ruts of pale yellow sand westward from the charred remnants of a
mysteriously destroyed bridge that in the late 19th Century had
briefly sought to span the South Branch of Michigan's Au Sable River.
Local
elders called the former bridge-site “The Abutments” and –
curiously, the boy thought – spoke of it with the same subtle
implied-capitals proper-noun reticence he observed in adult
conversations about graveyards and funerals or disasters, a fact the
boy had noted immediately. After the boy had seen the reality of the
place, the name had perplexed him even more, the quiet weight of its
syllables clearly unexplained by what was there: the bridge could
never have been anything but a crude structure built of hand-hewn
logs, and that scarcely a single lane wide. It had twice briefly
spanned a watercourse no more than 30 yards across even at maximum
flood. Now, decades later, its telltale relics were merely two pairs
of fire-blackened pilings, one pair on each side of the river in the
shallows just beyond its banks, each piling a tight cluster of three
or four maybe 12-inch diameter logs bound together by wraps of iron
cable that had long ago oxidized into bands of dull brown coagulation
now barely discernible from the underlying charcoal, each bank's pair
matched like gateposts perhaps 10 feet apart.
There
was mystery here also, another quality the boy sensed about the
place: the fact The Abutments was where his maternal grandfather dug
pale-gray clay from the otherwise mostly brightly pebbled riverbed
for the boy's aunt to use in her ceramic sculptures. Hence -- or so
the boy assumed (because he correctly recognized his mother's older
sister as his sole defender amongst maternal kin otherwise poisoned
to unrelenting hatefulness by the toxins of dysfunction and divorce)
– such a place, if only by its association with the sanctuary of
his aunt's studio, should therefore have emanated the same comforting
sense of home with which the rest of the river unfailingly welcomed
him, its murmur like the gentle voices of women conversing fondly in
some immediately adjacent room, voices that sometimes even seemed to
call one's name – an eerie but somehow comforting quality the river
guides and their adult-fisherman clients would acknowledge only after
several whiskeys and about which the boy thus knew to keep silent.
But uniquely the clear water that coursed past The Abutments offered
no such comfort; it gurgled ominously, and though the bottom beyond
its clay-bed shallows and ruined pilings plunged quickly to the
come-fish-me depths of big-trout habitat, the boy could not
comfortably cast into it or even look long into its cold green
shadows without involuntarily shuddering, as if someone had drowned
there or something deadly dangerous lurked just out of sight within
its strong currents.
As
a result everything about The Abutments aroused his curiosity, and he
repeatedly questioned his elders about what had happened there until
finally his persistence pried out of his maternal grandmother a
reluctant, obviously pared-to-the-bones story about bridge-builders
twice thwarted by fire that struck at night and did so
inexplicably, without apparent cause or motive, so that after the
second blaze had dropped the second span of timbers into the river
and for the second time left only monoliths of charred pilings, the
builders surrendered to whatever pyromaniacal namelessness seemed to
rule there and abandoned not just the bridge but the entire
road-building project, never mind it had been hailed as the shortest,
easiest-to-complete route from Luzerne to Grayling and back.
Again
in that oddly wordless childhood mode of reasoning, the boy soon
concluded the reality that echoed in his elders' voices was neither
explained by his grandmother's story nor by the fact a place so
seemingly innocuous – at least until you peered into its deeper
waters – would bear a name so subtly ominous.
Denied
all other sources, the boy's curiosity took the sort of quantum-leap
that would someday preface his investigative journalism: he began
wondering what the road itself might tell him – and now today he
intended to find out.
*****
YOU
GOT TO the Abutments by a seldom-traveled and severely potholed
two-rut road that followed the river maybe a half mile along its west
bank downstream from the self-consciously rustic cabins of the
sprawling George Mason Estate and ended in the sandy expanse of a
turnaround that sloped gently to the water's edge, an obvious if
curiously underutilized launching-site for canoes and the AuSable's
uniquely long and flat-bottomed riverboats.
Here
a Norway pine, the oblong vertical scales of its bark the color of
red rust, had sprung from the middle of the intended
Luzerne-to-Grayling roadway maybe a dozen yards beyond where
the west end of the bridge had been. The tree had since grown to a
towering height, as if it were adding its own exclamation point of
obstruction to the message of the fires.
On
the river's east bank the old road had long ago vanished, conquered
by an unlikely jungle of marsh grass that grew chest-high beneath a
grove of white-trunked paper-birch, but here on the west side of the
river the way had been preserved well into the 20th Century, probably
by hunters using it to access the deep woods beyond. What was now a
turnaround had until sometime in the '40s been a riverside junction
on the upstream side of the big pine, a 90-degree L-shaped
intersection that ended the north-south road from the Mason Estate by
connecting it to the remnant of the Luzerne-Grayling road that
continued westward toward Grayling to whatever point the roadbuilders
had reached when the project was terminated by the fires that twice
destroyed their bridge. But this passage too had finally been by
closed by winter windfalls that for some unknown reason no one had
troubled themselves to clear away and now it was dwindling to just
another of the innumerable forgotten tracks that thread northern
Lower Michigan's ruggedly mature second-growth forest: scrubby jack
pine and its less frequent but far more stately cousins, white pine,
blue spruce, other Norway pines like the one that seemed to stand
sentry here where the boy began his quest.
It
was 1952, near the end of that fondly remembered era when the
electric lines and telephone wires went no closer to the South Branch
country below Chase Bridge than Grayling, the Crawford County seat a
dozen crow-miles further west. Though the entire region had been
clear-cut to a biblical barren during the 1860s – raped for profit
and then burned to an ashy wasteland by the Great Michigan Fire of
1871 – in '52 its distance from modern utilities had preserved its
wildness and fostered the ecological healing that made it also a
place of healing for humans. It was middle August, hot and nearly
without wind; the sky that pure late-summer-and-early-autumn
back-country royal blue you never see much below 44 degrees North
latitude; the few clouds white and billowy as raw cotton; the late
morning air pungent with sweet fern, loud with birdsong.
The
boy's every step flushed huge coveys of those big brown Midwest
grasshoppers that always make you think of butterflies as they fly
away on purple-black wings edged in yellow or orange. Small for his
age, the boy nevertheless had already learned from his father how to
move with the watchfulness of a seasoned hunter, the quiet economy of
the boy's stride and his obvious comfort in woodland solitude a
rebuttal of both their urban origins, his receptivity to his father's
teachings probably bolstered by the fraction of First Nations blood
inherited from his maternal ancestors, genes that colored his hair
black as coal and gave his darkly greenish brown eyes their vaguely
Asiatic shape. He was dressed in khaki work clothes and a floppy-brim
khaki field hat of the type the Army had issued at the beginning of
World War II; he wore a razor-sharp six-inch-blade hunting knife in a
brown leather sheath belted on his right hip and carried a .22 rim
fire bolt-action Remington target rifle, its six-round clip charged
with high-velocity hollow-points, the weapon loaded and locked safe
and slung by an oiled leather sling diagonally across his back; the
area was infamous for its small but notably deadly Massassauga
rattlers, its packs of feral dogs and its occasional rabid animals,
but his distinguished-rifleman father had already taught him to shoot
so well he feared nothing in his environment, and he was supremely
confident of his ability to perceive any incipient risk in time to
defend himself against it, especially now in the state of
ultra-observant mindfulness his father had taught him during jaunts
in the woods and the marksmanship training begun shortly after the
boy's fourth birthday. It was an elemental version of paying
attention later proven professionally invaluable, eyes focused on
nothing yet somehow also on everything, scanning his surroundings
seeing whatever might thrust itself into his consciousness: perhaps a
snake on which he might otherwise have stepped; perhaps a quick
subtle whisk of tail revealing the presence of another mammal whether
belligerent or benign; perhaps a discarded tool or the rusted relics
of a logging camp from the 19th Century; perhaps a clear-water spring
otherwise hidden beneath sweet fern and bracken, its tiny brook
expanding to a swamp, a pond, even a new place to fish; perhaps
another vanishing passage through the woods; perhaps more of the
so-called "Indian Mounds" he sensed might explain the
mysteries suggested by the twice-burned bridge and this fading
remnant of road.
Songbird
morning gave way to cicada afternoon; a vast chorus of insects droned
in Gaian harmony; a Yellowhammer drilled a hollow snag for beetles.
The day basked in post-Lughnasadh summer fulfillment, at ease with
itself.
The
road curved slightly upward along a low knoll, dipped toward a
shallow basin – now bone dry but every spring a vernal pond – a
space shadowed to momentary cool by a dense grove of spruce; the boy
welcomed the quick respite from the heat, paused for just a moment to
relish it, then walked on.
When
he re-entered the dappled sunlight on the far side of the stand of
spruce, he remembered that time in Florida when he was six years old
and he had wandered away from his playmates and followed a white-sand
causeway road deep into the perpetual shade of a cypress swamp; a
year earlier on Summer Solstice Eve his mother had tried to murder
him and kill his father too, but his father had subdued her and a few
weeks after the violent aftermath of frantic adults and sirens and
cops his father and his new and obviously loving stepmother had
promised him his birthmother was safely locked away forever and that
she would never be able to hurt him and that he would never have to
see her again. Because it was easier to try to make sense of it when
he was alone, he began spending as much time in solitude as the
relatively unlimited childhood freedom of that era would allow, but
at last in the cypress swamp that afternoon he sensed he was going
too far and he stopped walking and looked out over the suddenly
ominous expanse of dark water on both sides of the road: the cypress
knees reminded him of the swollen ankles of a beggar he had seen on a
street corner in downtown Jacksonville and the Spanish moss looked
like witch hair on Hallowe'en and off in the distance something big
enough to eat him announced its presence with a swirl of disturbing
ripples and suddenly he was a little frightened. But he did not run;
somehow he already knew better. He merely turned back and walked in
the direction from which he had come and when he walked out into the
hot sunlight and then beneath the towering shade of a huge tulip
poplar growing to his left just outside the swamp a leaf spiraled
downward from the tree and touched his forehead and it felt like a
kiss, exactly the kind of kiss he had seen other mothers bestow on
their own children, and all at once he sensed he was being embraced
not by a woman but by something female he could not describe: a sense
of womanliness itself, womanliness big as nature that had just kissed
him as if to tell him not only that she would be his mother from now
on but that unlike his birthmother she would never betray him.
Remembering
those moments in Florida momentarily brought to mind his present
circumstances. A divorce court had voided the no-contact promise; the
boy was in Michigan only because of a judge's bad-luck mandate he
summer with his birthmother until he turned 18; he was in the
good-luck South Branch region of the Au Sable River wilderness --
which he would realize in old age was the one and only place in the
dry-land world he had ever truly felt spiritually at home -- only
because that was where his maternal grandparents, upon whom his
birthmother would be dependent until their deaths, maintained "the
cottage," the vacation home they built on the six remaining
acres of the much more vast acreage the state of Michigan had in 1866
awarded his maternal grandmother's father, Henry Heber Woodruff, a
Civil War hero and later a state circuit judge.
But
now the boy's fleeting and not entirely welcome contemplation of his
decidedly mixed fortune was abruptly ended by the raucous jeering of
a squadron of blue jays somewhere off to his left in the middle
distance. Vaguely startling, it instantly refocused his mind on his
quest; he wondered what might have disturbed the jays and remembered
a fight he had witnessed between jays and a nest-raiding red squirrel
who had climbed the branch-bare lower trunk of the
largest of the three
blue spruce that grew 10
yards beyond
the cottage-wide
screened front porch where
they ate their summer meals serenaded by the ever-audible
voice
of the river
as
it coursed through a cluster of boulders 20
more
yards beyond.
The
squirrel was searching for eggs to suck; the jays had flown at the
squirrel before it reached their nest amongst the tree's dense
branches and fiercely pecked its head until bright droplets of blood
appeared on its russet-colored fur and it abruptly turned and fled
down the tree.
But
the boy quickly dismissed the jays' warning as having no significance
to himself, and so he continued westward, his boot-heels lifting tiny
puffs of dust from the sandy spots where the abandoned ruts were not
yet overgrown.
Cicadas
buzzed and rasped; a woodland aviary of small birds twittered.
A
new bird warbled --
its voice clear and compelling as a minor-keyed flute-solo, a
brush-stroke of vibrant blue gliding like a caress across the beige
canvas of the August afternoon --
a seven-note
melody so indescribably exquisite the boy gasped at its beauty.
It
was birdsong he had never heard before – a startling but delightful
surprise to one who was sure he had already learned every bird and
bird call in that forest – and now the call was repeated, again and
again, each note drawn out with the same slow poignant sensuality,
every note pure as cleanest clearest water, a spirit-caress more
powerful than anything his flesh had ever known or imagined.
The
boy stopped amidst the dwindling road, gained a few inches of height
by stepping atop the weed-grown hump that divided its two faded ruts,
searched the surrounding trees, expected to see birds even
fractionally as lovely as their song, its compelling suddenness
suggesting a mental choreography of something he could not quite
remember, perhaps – because already he had begun to understand the
associations of sound and color and geometry – a recollection of
his aunt at work on one of her paintings while her own daughter
practiced the flute, an ephemeral construct of twilight blue and
lunar-white he could see in his mind but not verbalize; perhaps
though not his Aunt Alecia and his cousin Pamela at all; perhaps
(though how could that be?) some phantom echo of memories far older.
He
envisioned feathers of green and gold; the size of the song suggested
birds at least as big as ravens.
Perhaps
someone's parrots had escaped their cage.
He
watched, waited; he knew songbirds typically flitted from limb to
limb. Surely one of these
wondrous birds would soon move and the boy would spot them all by the
motion of one. But jackpine and blue spruce remained birdless. There
was nothing save the song – its notes so unfathomably lovely each
was its own microcosm of ecstasy.
No,
the boy thought, this couldn't be – birdsong so intense and yes
getting closer, louder – but no birds anywhere to be seen.
Perhaps
it was another human with a flute like that on which he had heard his
cousin sometimes practice modal scales curiously similar to the
obviously avian melody that now seemed to surrounded him. Perhaps it
was somebody with a flute hiding and playing a joke or trying to
frighten him.
He
thought of tramps, of grubby men said to prey on children.
The
boy unslung the Remington, thumb positioned to release its safety,
trigger finger resting in readiness on the edge of its blued steel
trigger guard: “I'm armed,” he warned; “I'll shoot.”
Yet
even as he spoke he sensed the Remington was somehow irrelevant and
he reslung it as he realized the forest had absorbed his shout as
completely as if he had whispered into a blanket or yelled into a
down pillow and he had a fleeting sense of being trapped in one of
those awful dreams in which your life depends on your ability to
scream but you cannot make your vocal cords produce even a tiny
squeak. Yet the boy knew he was not dreaming; he knew it was 1952 on
an August mid-afternoon and he was here in the Au Sable country, the
only place on earth that felt like it actually welcomed him, and he
was wide awake and all the lesser birds and now even all the insects
had fallen dead silent yet these birds of the strange indescribably
lovely song seemed to be circling directly above him and now yes
around him at no more than arm's length yet there were no birds to be
seen anywhere and now the color of the day was changing, the air
becoming somehow iridescent, darkening to a kind of greenish
stormlight though out beyond where he stood on the abandoned road,
the sky remained impossibly cloudless and the sun was bright as ever
but something inside the
darkening air that same arms-length from his face and eerily also of
the air itself was shaping itself into what appeared to be a phantom
image of an opening, the beginning of a passageway
no
more substantial than shadow…
Such
terror as the boy had never known or imagined engulfed him from head
to foot. He became terror personified, terror the verb, terror his
entire internal universe.
He
turned and fled. He ran east toward the river. He ran harder and
faster than he had ever run, probably harder and faster than he would
ever run again even under maximum duress. He leapt windfalls, dodged
saplings, his lungs painfully craving air, his heart seemingly loud
as thunder. He ran until he could no longer hear the strange birds
and the forest was again alive with bugsong and casual twittering and
there was just the very late August afternoon and the abandoned road
and its grasshoppers and the hot westering sun and the air tangy with
the cinnamon citrus scent of sweet fern and in the bracken off to his
right a whitetail doe with two spotted fawns standing motionless as
if amused by his retreat and now finally the Norway pine on guard by
the river.
He
shrugged out of the Remington's sling and sat himself down at the big
Norway pine's suddenly protective base and laid the rifle across his
legs and pulled off the hat that had been discarded in 1946 by
another maternal aunt's Army Air Corps husband and mopped his sweaty
face with the hat's coarse cotton floppiness and leaned back against
the tree's rough bark until he finally stopped panting and caught his
breath.
The
boy was surprised to discover the sun was nearly setting; somehow his
hike along the abandoned road and his frantic retreat to the place of
The Abutments had taken at least seven hours more than he had
realized.
He
stood; he unlatched the Remington's safety and lifted its bolt handle
so the rifle could not possibly fire and leaned the rifle against the
tree, grounding its butt securely enough in the sand it could not
slip sideways. Then he strode down to the river and knelt on the damp
sand between the western bank's abutments and dowsed his face with
double handfuls of the river's icy water. Even now nearly 70 years
after the final fire had destroyed the second bridge the close
proximity of the charred logs smelled subtly of wet charcoal.
The
current gurgled as if in warning. The boy stood again and dried his
hands on his pantlegs and fetched the Remington and restored it to
locked-safety readiness and slung it diagonally across his back and
picked up the sweat-darkened hat and put it on his head and began
walking the river road quickly upstream toward his grandparents'
vacation home.
Later
that night while he could still remember the melody he whistled it
for his grandmother, asking if she knew what species of bird it might
be.
“No,”
she said, focusing on the boy with a lingering glance so acutely
searching it seemed to him she looked not at him but more deeply into
him than anyone had ever looked, and for an instant he glimpsed in
the robin's-egg blue of her eyes a vastly older and more purely wild
female spirit somehow close kin to the powerful womanliness he had
sensed in the kiss of that falling poplar-leaf in Florida.
“No,”
the boy's grandmother repeated; “there's no bird alive in these
woods sings like that.”
*****
TWO
DECADES AFTERWARD, In what would become one of the most memorable
moments of the 24 years of evenings, weekends and vacations I worked
on my own time to document what I still regard as the 20th Century's
biggest unreported story – the beginning of anti-patriarchal global
revolution implicit in the old Counterculture's eerily spontaneous
resurrection of the breathtakingly ancient ethos of the Great Goddess
– I happened in my research to read of a phenomenon described in
pre-Christian Celtic myth as "the Birds of Rhiannon":
goddess-sent messengers feathered green and gold, avian couriers
dispatched by Rhiannon herself either as a dire warning or as a
summons that is fated and therefore cannot be refused, their song
said to be the most hauntingly exquisite music in the universe. They
are said to dwell in another dimension, which is why they remain
invisible even when they sound as if they are within reach.
Until
that reading I had never so much as imagined a connection between my
odd late-boyhood encounter in the Michigan woods and my growing
certainty the pagan-liturgy-resurrecting folk renaissance of the
later 1950s was the beginning of an event far greater than itself; I
assumed the compulsion that since my 19th year and my second quarter
at the University of Tennessee had nagged me to pursue the story
wherever it might lead was merely journalistic intuition on
overdrive. But having learned of the Birds of Rhiannon, I could only
begin to wonder if my efforts were far less self-assigned than I had
imagined them to be.
And
apropos that missing time, now (18 April 2024) in what by post-Covid
diagnosis is most likely at age 84 my penultimate year, I cannot but
wonder if I entered that passageway, and if that from which I fled in
such terror seven hours later was not the Goddess-centered blessedness
I like a latter-day Thomas Rhymer might have witnessed therein, but
the prophecy of endless wretchedness implicit in its mandate that I
spend the rest of my life (as indeed I have) struggling to convey its
species-preserving exquisiteness to mostly hostile audiences.
Wretchedness
indeed: for the remainder of my childhood and adolescence and nearly
all my adulthood, I was ruled by my left brain. I was outspokenly,
even caustically agnostic, and I was profoundly skeptical of all
so-called spiritual or religious experience including my own, but in
that instant of reading I was smitten by a gooseflesh chill so
powerfully indicative I knew what had shown itself to me in those
Michigan woods was nothing less than what Robert Graves calls “poetic
truth,” and I remembered the odd piercing look my grandmother had
given me when I whistled for her the song of those ineffable birds of
strange, her eyes with their almost surreptitious flash of
recognition an involuntary reflex that by 1972 I had learned is a
telling characteristic of women who are in touch with the
goddess-symbol even if they cannot (or dare not) speak her name –
women who, had my "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" not been
destroyed by arson just as it seemed on the brink of mainstream
publication, might themselves have said of it what my late friend
Helen Farias said to me after reading its earliest draft in the
spring of 1971: “you have given me the words to describe what I
have always known to be true but never had the vocabulary to express,
and I cannot thank you enough.”
Since
my 70s, I have recognized Helen's praise as among the finest, most
telling, most significant accolades of my life.
And
eventually Helen would express her gratitude in the best way
possible: in 1987, returned stateside with her intellectual prowess
confirmed by a Master of Fine Arts degree from the prestigious
University of London, she founded the quarterly Beltane
Papers and
its monthly supplement Octava,
journals of feminist spirituality that steadily gained credibility
and circulation until metastasized breast cancer -- eerily the fatal
plague of so many feminist activists -- killed her on the autumnal
equinox of 1994.
No
matter my “Dancer” had been burned to cinders 11 years earlier,
undoubtedly because the government and its owners regard any real
threat to patriarchy as dangerously subversive; no matter the
spare-time, 24-year reportorial investigation that was to have been
my bridge to prosperity and the crowning glory of my journalism
career died in flames with its irreplaceable research notes and its
forever lost photography and all the rest of my life's work, text and
pictures alike. No matter the fire was ignited at literally at the
same instant I
was meeting with a
well-known Manhattan book-editor1
who
was
assuring me she could mother "Dancer" to mainstream
publication, insisting it would be one of the 20th Century's most
influential volumes; no matter but for the fire I would have scooped
the world on this the first visible wave of our species'
survive-or-die revolution against patriarchal ecogenocide -- our
first obvious mustering against the Apocalypse the patriarchs and
their direct descendants the Capitalists are intentionally inflicting
on us all. No matter the indescribable pain of loss and defeat
remains the branding-iron on my psyche and the knife-blade in my
heart it has been since
the fire and
ever shall be for
as long as my consciousness survives.
The
odyssey that now in retrospect seems the irresistible mandate of that
long ago August afternoon in the Au Sable River country yet prevails
as my own solitary quest, its beginning a priceless gift I failed to
recognize until 18 years after the fact, now in the brutally honest
retrospection of terminal old age an almost-sacramental confirmation
that endures even amidst the ashes and inescapable poverty of my
post-fire existence. No matter there will never be for me any
professional laurels or material gain from it; in the emotional,
spiritual, purely aesthetic sense it remains as compelling as ever,
precisely as Robert Graves proclaims
in
the
poem entitled "To Juan at the Winter Solstice":
Her
sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not
performed.2
_______________________________
1The
late Cicely Nichols, a
longtime friend and one
of the primary facilitators of Sisterhood
is Powerful
(Vintage Books edition: 1970), acknowledged as "a sister in struggle" to whom
the anthology's editor Robin Morgan is "especially
grateful.."
2Graves,
Robert; The
Poems of Robert Graves,
Doubleday Anchor Books, New York: 1958 (pgs. 200-201)
*****
LB/May
2010-January 2011 (with
additional minor editing to improve accessibility and
eliminate typos,
2018-2019; 2022; 2024; 2025.)
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