The Xenofiles

Best of my old blog #9 Bus Goddess

2007-02-01T15:15:00.002-08:00

So I'm sitting on the preternaturally (don't really know if its the right word, but who the hell cares?) late bus last night, riding home after a long and insane day as an Increased Income Facilitator, and this girl gets on a few stops after. We're talking about a complete knockout here, utterly breath-takingly gorgeous, and not in the boozy "I see big boobs" sort of way. Like a painting, like a sculpture, like a song. That kind of beautiful.

She sits down in front of me, and as she gracefully slides into the seat, she flips this insanely thick, shiny chestnut hair to one side, revealing the nape of her neck (much like the Japanese, I consider the nape of the neck as an erogenous zone) and this tiny shell-like ear, complete with perhaps five piercings along the top curve.

I swear to you, I was so focused on her that I heard the rings tinkling as she tucked one loose strand behind her ear.

Without meaning to, I found myself imagining lying next to this girl (who in all likelihood is way to young. Icelandic girls tend to mature way to early for their own good, leaving the male population stuck between biology screaming "IMPREGNATE HER NOW!!!" and society bitchslapping them back into line with "SHE'S ONLY 17!!!!") on cool sheets and tickling the rings, listening to them tinkle together as we drift off to sleep.

This incident illustrates two things:

One, while I'm doing my damnedest to get over my romance crutch, I'm not out of the woods yet.

It's not that I'm against romance, or even that I disbelieve in it, it's just that I tend to focus on it too much, especially when I shouldn't. Thanks to some helpful talks with a good friend, I've begun to understand that I was using the romantic urge, and the "I want more than just sex" as an excuse to not even try to get sex, or flirting, or whatever. So now, I'm trying not to look for love, just for friendship and sex (which are not mutually exclusive, at least not always...but that's another blog) and I'll see what happens in the romance department later. But little romantic flashes like with Bus Goddess #14, not to confused with Bus Goddess #3 the incredibly sexy Korean/Icelandic women I see every now and then on my way up to Breiðholt, are proof that I'm still at least a little hooked on the romance.

And two, this illustrates that I am a dirty old perverted bus-riding ear-fetishist who wants to tickle the ears of a sculpture, a painting, or a song.

Ugh.

Best of my old blog #8 Poetry

2007-02-01T15:15:00.001-08:00

Just read over yesterday's blog. That just sucked. Going to try to do better today, but don't hold your breathe.

Like most of my blogs, this one starts with me sitting on my couch in comfy clothes. I'm not terribly hung-over, surprise surprise considering how heavily I hit the bola (that's spiked punch to you English-speaking folks, and spody to you Cascadians) at Sindri's 25^th last night. That went ok, some decent joking, a little flirting, but not too much, and right in the middle of the party, IT SNOWED!!!!!

Big-time fluffy whiteness abounds! Joy!

So I went out in many layers of warm stuff and played in it on my way to the market to pick up dinner stuff. I've started making a habit of cooking something very yummy on Sundays, inviting whoever happens to come to mind to eat it with me. Makes up for the lack of family in a way, not to mention greases the wheels of karma. Sadly my guest of (dis)honor wasn't able to make it. I invited Helga to make up for yet another drunken proposition! I seriously don't get this. I lived with the girl for the better part of a year and a half, and kept my cool (generally) the whole time. She moves out, and suddenly, my drunken ass can't stop trying to get in her pants. I suck. I just need to figure out why I'm doing this so I can knock it the fuck off.

So here I sit, food roasting away in the oven, Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the stereo, chillin. I just don't have much to say today, or, more truthfully, all the things I can think of writing about would require a level of effort that I just can't be assed to rise to.

Therefore, as certain friends have been pushing me to, and as I have nothing better to do, I shall expose the world to more of my pathetic attempts at poetry, just because some people (you know who you are and you are to blame!) seem to like it.

Start things off with something I wrote when I was only 16, traveling through Cali for the first time…

Mojave

In the hard
drought of winter
Immobile Joshua
stands witness
to my wilted heart
my dry-leaf voice
(dead leaves rustling on sand)
rolling across this old man's land.

Immobile Joshua
standing sentinel
guarding the land of the sun.
I am an interloper here
(with my withered old soul)
falling ever and ever into the desert.

And how these
crowded whisper clutch
(in my traveling mind)
known only to a child of dust,
and the arid god's disciple.

Joshua standing in ecstasy…

Wrote this one about an ex, when I got back from Iceland the first time…

For "Curls"

This morning I found three brown hairs
nestled in the pocket of an old leather coat
long unworn.
And I remember how they had lain against my chest
on that rainy night when we huddled at the bus-stop
my hands too shy to brave the passing headlights and
stay, cupping your cool breast.

Later, I remember how it felt when the waters came,
your gasps and pants and shy invulnerable shudders,
that night we played at Genesis.
How I pressed inside you, shaking as the tide rose to my ragged breathe.
That glory will not leave me, and I will not renounce it,

but for your asking…

And just to be absolutely sure to bore the crap out of you, dear perturbed reader…

Protection

I will hold you beloved
wrap the iron wings of a
mother's shawl about your thin shoulders,
the adamantine love of the unshattered home
and no king shall stand against you
and never a blade shall bite,
and Death shall have no dominion here.

There it is dear reader, I shall provide generous shots of insulin to counteract the vaemi (not really translatable, but has to do with sickeningly sweet and/or maudlin things) and promise to keep my crap poems away from the blog for a while now.

Sorry.

Best of my old blog #7 My career as a lust object

2007-02-01T15:12:00.000-08:00

Interesting day today.

I started things off by not going to work. After yesterday's tummy-aches, headaches, twitches and stomach flips, I decided that I better off taking a little me time, even if it meant dealing with my self-inflicted home-from-work guilt.

Despite guilt, despite the nigh-overwhelming urge to clean the kitchen and do laundry, run to the bank, run to the Social Services offices (which are always closed whenever I have any free time) and generally appease the guilt by making productive use of the day, I persevered and managed to spend the hours between waking up and now doing absolutely nothing but chatting on MSN.

(I know, I know, I recently vowed to cut down on that, and I have after work and such, but I figured a sick/lazy day means I can do as I like.)

The chatting was not only entertaining but rather enlightening. Entertaining because it was an old and dear friend I was chatting with, one that will shortly be coming to the Lava Lump (aka Iceland), and she is always fun to chat with. Enlightening because it led to the realization that if I was an even remotely attractive woman, I'd probably be working in the "porn" industry.

What's that I hear out there? Gasps and groans and general "wtf"-ness from my legions of adoring sweaty blogodytes?*

Well, see, she is planning on staying here for a bit, but, thanks to her rather international life style, she'll have a bitch of time getting a work permit for any "normal" job. SO I mentioned, in all seriousness, the option that she try to find some modeling work.

Now, my sweet little friend does not look like a "model". She's tiny, for starters, even by Asian standards. But she also happens to be the single most photogenic person I have ever met. There has, quite simply, never been a bad picture taken of her. Basically, she's perfect for photographic modeling.

She liked this idea, so we began to try hitting Icelandic web-sites to find her a gig.

No luck. None at all. There is simply not an agency in all of Iceland looking for models that are not taller than, say, me. And I'm 180cm/5'11", meaning that they are looking for stick thin (which my friend is, admittedly, although she comes by it naturally, sans enemas, puking, or starvation) Amazons.

Until we came across ">this .

For those of you who don't speak Icelandic, it's an ad from a local adult entertainment business looking for models for short erotic videos. They go on and on about it not being "porn" so I'm inclined to take their word for it.

Anyway, if you get hired, you go in, roll around a set for a bit, either scantily clad or full-on nekkid, whichever floats your proverbial boat, then consult with the film-crew over the editing (no shots you don't approve) and then four hours later, BAMM! 100,000ISK in your pocket and 50% of the take on the pay-for-play video on the website.

My friend kinda laughed it off. Not her cup of kink, apparently. I, on the other hand, was just jealous. I can't even begin to imagine getting paid that much money for that little effort! I'd jump at that opportunity so fast there'd be sonic boom.

This same company routinely pays women 20,000ISK to make recordings of themselves reading prepared scripts. Yet another opportunity I would jump at, but to my knowledge, only one of my perpetually broke-ass friends has ever taken advantage of the phone-sex gravy train.

I don't get it. I really don't. I'm jealous as hell of people who could make a quick buck (I'm not talking about making a career of it, mind) off something like this.

I've bought this up with friends before, and the general response, from those not of the "Sex makes the baby Jesus cry" persuasion is that they'd be too embarrassed. "Oh God! What if someone went on there and heard/saw me!" seems to sum it up.

Which I don't get. I mean, which is more embarrassing, the fact that you were ballsy enough to put yourself out there (even in quasi-anonymity like with the readings) or the fact that you're paying money to listen to women read stories about sex you're obviously not having?

So I'm jealous of people who have these opportunities, but don't take them. I mean, I can't do that sort of thing. Not because I'm shy. I'm not. Nor because I have some sort of moral objection to it. Simply because the only facets of the adult entertainment industry that would hire me would be something along the lines of "Middle Aged Bear Monthly" or "Hairy Beast". In other words, something that's less than likely to pay well, and very likely run by some guy with a sack full of roofies and a can of Crisco© in his van.

If I wanted that, then I'd just go to one of the bars down by the harbor.

Other than despairing at my thwarted career as a soft-core porn star, the only other thing I've gotten up to today is walking a few blocks through the sadly melting snow to make soup for and generally coddle the Eidles, who has recently had the Evil Tonsils of Infected Doom removed. She seems to be recovering nicely, and as television has stopped hating us, I think I'll take this opportunity to end this silly thing for the time being. See y'all tomorrow…

*I know there are actually no more than two or three of you, but humor me, my ego is in ruins after I realized that no one will pay to look at me nekkid.

Best of my old blog #6 No Gods/No Master Cards

2007-02-01T15:10:00.000-08:00

Gas mask-$50 at an army surplus store

Second hand motor cross armor- $50 dollars at a second hand store

Can of black spray-paint- shoplifted

Can of red spray-paint- shoplifted

4'x2.5' piece of 1.5 inch plywood- dumpster dived

Duct-tape, screws and webbing to complete shield- shoplifted

First aid kit- $25

Empty Thunderbird bottles- $1.50 in deposits

3' length of rubber hose to siphon gasoline from the tanks of SUVs- shoplifted

Torn lengths of crappy Gap© clothing- looted

Disturbing the peace, use of an incendiary device, and "political disruption"-$3000 fine and 1 year in jail.

Taking to the streets to defend your liberty by any means necessary- PRICELESS!

There are some things money can't buy, for everything else there's the No Gods!/No Masters! Card.

Best of my old blog #5

2007-02-01T15:07:00.000-08:00

Been thinking, obsessing more like on material things, work and money.

See, I've always been rather proud of the fact that almost all the furnishings, appliances, hell, even the majority of the clothes I own are gifts, or second-hand, or salvaged. I still am. But lately I've found myself getting all obsessed about a new kitchen, a dryer, new bed, all that some kind of stuff.

Just a few years ago, I was content to live in a single room, with a hot-plate for cooking, no phone (not even a cell), no TV, no nothing.

Add to that my constant obsessing about money, or more to the point, my lack of it, and you have me turning into something I don't like.

Thankfully, every now and again, you get a wake up call. Mine came tonight, when I went to see my Social Services client. He's a sweet guy, mid forties, paranoid schizophrenic, and I've worked with him for going on 7 years now.

He has nicer stuff than me. He has a brand new bike I'd kill for, nice antique or just plain expensively comfortable furniture, and a computer that is just about the most astounding thing ever, even though it's a Mac. He owns his apartment, which could be quite nice if he ever gets around to finishing the "remodel" he's been working on for the last 7 years.

He has most of the things I think I want, but he can't stop there. Hell, he's never ridden the bike; he hasn't even taken it out. He has no clue how to use the massive computer he bought, mostly it sits gathering dust. He has like five old-fashioned wooden radios, because they "give better sound". It goes on and on and on.

He just keeps buying stuff because he's convinced that only the best is good enough, and that if he has the best, he'll somehow be able to accomplish things he can't seem to do on his own. He bought a 100,000 ISK gold plated Mont Blanc pen because he though it would allow him to write a book he's been trying to write forever.

He honestly believes that having the right stuff will fix all his problems.

He's in debt up to his eyebrows.

"So what? He's crazy!" you say?

True, but in this regard no more crazy than a lot of us, including me of late. One of the weirdest things about this so-called life is that we've been taught to look for our salvation in line to the cash register. Well, no more. I'll find non-monetary solutions to my needs, as much as can. I'm done; get me off this hamster wheel.

As for work, apparently after my ultimatum yesterday, my boss's boss is talking to her boss about whether or not I'll get my way.

My boss's boss talking to her boss. Yes, hierarchal structures are so much more efficient, that's why there everywhere. Sure.

Smell my sarcasm!

Either way, after this month or the next, I'll be done paying off my existence bill (otherwise known as taxes) and can therefore at least drop a few mornings of work. Anything to keep me sane (ish), to hell with the added poverty. I'm not ashamed of being poor; I'm not ashamed of being working class. I'm ashamed I started thinking like a yuppie. Solidarity forever, comrades!

We're not fighting the man, we're just into fisting!

Best of my old blog #4 Rvk Bar Guide 1.0

2007-02-01T15:05:00.000-08:00

Hang out with freinds and chat: Belly's or Cafe Vin

Hang out with friends and sing along to silly troubadors: Celtic Cross

Try to hook up while looking like Indy Royalty: Sirkus or Kaffibarinn

Rock out in a sardine can: Bar 11

Dance: Cafe Kultura, Kofan Tomasar Fraendi, (depends on who's DJing, and neither of them are as good as the old Spotlight, 22, or Thompson.)

Rock out to live music: Kaffi Amsterdam

Chill to live music: Kaffi Rosenburg

Cougar hunt*: Viktor

Take your life into your own hands: Langibarrin**

Try to look "hip og kul" while swilling over-priced cocktails and searching the crowd for a "celebrity" to attempt to seduce in hopes that fame is infectious: Oliver

Be annoyed by yuppies who couldn't get in to Oliver: Barinn

Pick up random drunk people for sex: Glaumbar or Kaffi Kosy (if you swing that way).

Be picked up on by late-middle-aged shit-faced men and women: The Dubliner

Snort coke and feel superior to poor people: Q-barinn, Rex, Thorvaldsen

Act like a diva while caging drinks off drunk businessmen/servicemen/non-Indy foriegners/FM-hnakkar: Pravda, Hresso, Angelo's, Olstofan, and Vegamot.

Discuss literature, politics, or art with the Icelandic art mafia: Naestibar.

Watch teenage girls get hammered and try to act "grown-up": Prikid, Solon, Nelly's, Pravda, Glaumbar.

Have a great meal and a beer in the least pretentious bar in town: Vitabarinn

Get hammered with other alchoholics, and possible play darts: Grandrokk

Have 15 year-olds offer to blow you for a large beer: Hverfisbarinn

Have 14 year olds drunk off their asses on landi and vanilla drops offer to blow you for a pack of cigarettes: Hlemmur.

Have Thai men treat you with great hostility and suspicion because white guys keep coming in and offering their girlfreinds/sisters/cousins money for sex while spoiling the kareoke by being drunken asses: Kaffisettrid.

*For those unfamiliar with this term, it means to go out and find reasonably attractive older women, hopefully on the rather desperate side, for sex and free drinks.
**Or whatever its currently called...

Best of my old blog #3 Punk Pride and Prejudice

2007-02-01T15:03:00.000-08:00

I swear, with a little work, maybe some meditation, a couple of brain teasers, some weird South American psychotropic herb, and I could be a psychic.

I was thinking about what I would discuss in the blog today, as I trudged down to the bus-stop, only to have inspiration jump up and bite me on my punk-rock booty.

There's a disabled woman, Down's syndrome I think, who is nearly always on the perpetually early #19 bus with me in the mornings. Generally, we hardly notice each other. But today, thanks in no small part to the newly trimmed and magnificent mohawk of me, she stood there gaping at me, chin down to the sidewalk, utterly baffled by my haircut.

It continued like this. I stopped to pick up smokes and a juice at the gas-station on my way to work. The cashier looked at me as if I was covered in freshly-skinned puppies, and the old guy who pumps the gas, washes the windows, and generally does all the grunt work, gave me a bewildered look that defies my skills at description.

Now, I don't find my mohawk all that shocking. It's rather short, is back to my natural mousy-brown hair-color, and is neatly trimmed and styled. Not at all hard-core, but enough to let me feel like myself. I just don't see it as any sort of big deal.

But apparently to some people it is. Like the Arts and Crafts teacher I share a room with when I'm helping the kids out in the computer lab.

As soon as she arrived, she very politely, with the sort of courtesy usually encountered when dealing with cops who know a supervisor is watching, informed me that she found my haircut "ugly" and that "people like us, who are role-models, should be more presentable". I proceeded to inform her that I thought I was being a role model, by showing kids that it's ok to be themselves, and also that people who don't look like typical "role-models" can still be a positive force in the lives of others.

Of course, that was the diplomatic, polite response.

This is what I was really thinking:

What the holy Jeebus fuck? Here I am, in a nice pair of black jeans, fitted T-shirt, nicely trimmed hair and beard, and YOU are giving me shit? You? In your seven layers of frumpy woolen old-lady clothing swathing your fat-assed complacent form? You with the crumbs of your breakfast still clustering around the corner of your mouth, with VISIBLE FUMES of your cheap-ass French hooker perfume rising from you in waves? You who seem to think it perfectly expectable to refer to another person as "ugly", when you yourself look a bit like the Wicked Witch of the West's fat older sister? You are a "role model"? You who cannot be assed to shut the fuck up but instead prattle on and on even once it becomes clear that NO ONE can be buggered to listen to you anymore? You who shove your face into other people's personal space, reeking of cheap scent and covered in crumbs with a mouthful of biscuit still half-masticated in your gullet? You who disrupt and interrupt classes so you can pull kids away from class for your pet projects? You who show considerably less "professional courtesy" towards others, constantly making snide comments about the other teachers and staff behind their backs, SOMETIMES TO THE KIDS, than my Anarchist ass? Just what the fuck are you thinking?

Of course, she wasn't thinking. Just like the grandmother of one of our after-school kiddies, who, when walking into the place for the first time and encountering Jason washing up in the kitchen and my mohawked self vacuuming exclaimed into her cell-phone that she couldn't be at the right place there was some kólsvartur rísí (coal-black giant) washing dishes and a dópistí (drug-addict, junky) cleaning the floors.

The nice thing about working these sorts of shit jobs is that generally, those with any say in the matter are just so thrilled with the fact that they have a competent employee that they could care less what said employee looks like. Now if only that enlightened self-interest would find its way into other corners of the sadly narrow-minded populace…

Best of my old blog #2 Evil Upstairs

2007-02-01T15:01:00.000-08:00

Remember what I said about life being dull?

Spoke too soon.

Way too soon.

Woke thirsty this morning, stumbled out to the kitchen to get a drink, only to be confronted by the sight of my pantless upstairs neighbor stumbling around the hall, after he came home drunk of his fucking ass, walked into our apartment and started to try to climb in bed with the roomy and Eidles!

As I write, he's passed out in front of his door on the second floor landing.

Now, as weird as it may have been for my roomy to have to kick some drunk assholes head to get his attention and get him out of his room, the really weird thing is that my reaction to this smacked of "Not again!?"

I mean, back when the Frenchy was sharing the apartment with me, and I slept in the room Ragnar's in now, I was once awakened to pounding Norwegian death metal being played at the highest volume possible directly through the fucking floor, and the sight of strawberry skyr (a kind of Icelandic yoghurt) spilled all over the hallway and filling the shoes of Frenchy's current gentleman caller.

The reason for this you ask?

Well, The Upstairs Neighbor of Doom and Frenchy had had a thing, which she had broken off. He comes home shitfaced, stumbles upon the fact that someone forgot to lock the door (a sadly common occurrence, as we smoke outside) walks uninvited into the apartment, sees them getting it on, and takes the most childish revenge ever.

After the cussing out I gave him, he had to be really drunk to pull that shit this morning. I'm seriously considering throwing a bucket of water over his drunken ass, or coating embarrassing bits of him in hair-removal lotion, or possible handcuffing him to a tree and leaving him pantless in the front yard with a sign that says "Do Me!" around his neck.

The stupid fucking prick.

I mean, if its not his drunk-ass friends throwing pebbles at his windows and shouting for him to wake up from the garden at all hours of the night, not his wild midweek parties that always include both loud obnoxious electronica at 2am and a "jam session" on his assorted instruments, not party debris littering the yard which he never fucking cleans up, then its either him, or in one very awkward case, his naked fling, invading my apartment.

Yup, you read that right. Shortly after the Skyr –Puntur- Incident, his lady-friend-for-the-evening apparently got lost on her way to the bathroom, walked down the stairs, into my apartment, into my room, and crawled, butt-naked, into my bed, where she proceeded to steal all the covers and snore loudly, leaving me to spending the night on the couch in my own apartment while she slept it off.

It was almost worth it to see the look on her face the next day.

Almost.

So as I am found of making declarations about my future behavior on this blog (no more drunken big-mouthedness of me, no more drunk blogging, etc…) I hereby make another: REMEMBER TO LOCK THE FUCKING DOOR!

The Infamous "Yule-Log" Post

2007-02-01T14:57:00.000-08:00

(To those easily offended by juvenile toilet humor, please read on, as I will so enjoy the shock and outrage you vent on my comments…you've been warned!)

So, I'm slowly becoming aware of a new holiday tradition. It starts roughly 3-4 days after I come back to the E.S.H. in December. Never other times, like the last time I was back for my sister's wedding. Just in December.

I've taken to referring to this tradition as "The Yule Logs".

Basically, couple of days after I get home, I start dropping tree-trucks in the can. I mean huge! HUGE! Coiled in the bowl like the rare Corn-backed Constrictor. Shits so unimaginably big that one is afraid to flush them for fear of making them angry, let alone fear of causing an unbelievably horrific plumbing fiasco. Poop of such prodigious size that one performs a little involuntary hop when standing up from the throne because you suddenly weigh so much less your leg muscles overcompensate!

What the exactafuck is going on here? I mean, it's not like Yankee Chow is renowned for its high fiber content and ease of digestion!

I have my theories of course. One is that whenever I come back, I start scarfing Altoids© The Curiously Strong Mints, which apparently contain Sorbitol, which apparently causes excessive poop.

So I have my sparkling fresh breathe to blame for my overactive ass.

Ain't life odd?

Best of my old blog #1

2007-02-01T14:56:00.000-08:00

My only little survey
Current mood: geeky
Category: Quiz/Survey

So I've seen and filled out dozens of these "scene" surveys over the past months, but the "scenes" are always the same. You get your Goth, your Emo, your "Punk", Hip-hop/Rap, Redneck, Rock, Pop, Prep, Jock…all the same ol' stuff. So here's a survey for people not quite so easily categorized:..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Folkster:

[x] You loved "Oh Brother Where Art Thou"

[x] You knew the lyrics to all the songs in "Oh Brother"

[ ] You could play all the songs in "Oh Brother"

[x] You play at least two musical instruments

[x] You know what a bandolin is.

[x] You know that there are two kinds of dulcimers

[x] Autoharps are cool

[ ] You can your own fruits and vegetables

[x] You own at least one pair of bib overalls

[ ] You're still a bit pissed at Dylan for "going electric"

[ ] You'll never forgive Nirvana for messing with "In the Pines"

[x] Banjo and fiddle players steal the limelight from everyone else

[x] Banjo and fiddle players are kinda hot though

[x] More people should yodel

[ ] Square dancers are the hottest!

Total:10

SCA-Geek:

[x] You know what SCA stands for

[ ] You totally look down on those Renaissance Fair losers

[x] You think swords are cool

[x] You'd really like to learn to play the lute

[ ] You dream of being royalty

[ ] The History Channel is your favorite

[x] You could live on turkey legs and mead

[x] Hose and tunics are very flattering on men

[x] You made your own chain-mail

[x] You've had to explain to the emergency-room doctor that "We were sword-fighting and it got out of hand."

[ ] You've used the term "m'lady" or "m'lord" in bed

[ ] You've been hit on by a jester or a serving wench

[ ] You own at least three pieces of Celtic jewelry

[x] You'd love to speak Gaelic

[ ] Belly dancers are the hottest!

Total:8

Hillbilly:

[x] You object to being called a redneck

[x] You call a creek a "crick"

[x] Anything in the distance is "over yonder"

[x] Ain't nothing wrong with moonshine

[x] The banks are out to getcha

[x] The EPA is out to getcha

[x] The New World Order is out to getcha

[x] You wear bib overalls, and like it

[ ] Ain't nothing wrong with pickled eggs

[ ] Who needs eelectricidy?

[ ] You don't have dogs, ya got some hounds though

[ ] Shoes are for winter

[ ] You ain't prejudiced, ya just wanna be left alone

[ ] That girl over in the next holler is the hottest!

Total:8

Science-geek:

[x] You hate it when people forget about the Second Law of Thermodynamics!

[x] You've made model rockets before

[x] Bonus points for making your own engines

[x] Various activities involving vinegar and baking soda where your favorite games as a kid

[x] You've competed in Science Bowl

[x] Discovery Channel is your favorite

[x] You like to make passionate love to a cast-member on "Mythbusters"

[x] You get upset at the results on "Mythbusters" because the experiments are set up wrong

[x] You tried to invent things as a kid

[ xxx] Bonus points if you ever tried to put wings on your bike, caused an electrical fire, or forced the evacuation of a classroom thanks to chemistry.

[x] You owned/own a microscope

[x] You're parents bought you a subscription to National Geographic, Popular Science/Mechanics, or Smithsonian

[x] Explosions are cool

[x] Carry from "Mythbusters" is the hottest!

Total:16

Now, because we aren't cookies, and hence do not fit cookie-cutter definitions, post your top two results in descending order!

My Nifty Online Resume

2007-01-24T12:53:00.000-08:00

So in lieu of the standard boring list of jobs and such, I've decided to make some sort of blog page out of my work history. Hopefully this will entertain as well as get me hired to a position of wealth and power.

Or not.

Here goes.

The Long Saga of Sam's Employment and Education:

I started working pretty early in life, my first job being that of an all-purpose laborer at a ranch just outside of my puny little home town of South Prairie, WA which I landed at the ripe old age of 12. I worked there throughout my academic career at White River High School (where I graduated with honors) and Pierce College (where I maintained a 4.0 grade average, out of a possible 4.0),most often in the summer. I picked up a lot of useful skills, mostly carpentry and machine operation, although I must say that being taught how to use dynamite and bulldozers by an intoxicated retired military engineer should be illegal. Come to think of it, it probably is.

Be that as it may, I emerged from the Hidden Valley Ranch (no, honestly, that was the name of the place) at least physically unscathed, with enough money to pay for my 1994-1995 AFS exchange trip to Iceland. Where I attended Kvennaskólinn í Reykjavik. Where I didn't work and didn't really show up to classes to any real degree. Best year of my life.

My next job, the summer I turned 19, was likewise in the idyllic confines of South Prairie. After my return from my exchange trip, I wound up working 16 hours a day, 6 days a week for the fire-trap/limb-removal service known as Hilstrom's Cabinets Inc. This lasted just long enough for my wrist to be broken by a wood-chipper with most of its safety devices removed to improve efficiency, at which point I was "let go" to save them the money of paying for my medical bills.

The next job was a particular low-point in my employment history. I got a job at a Burger King. ' 'Nuff said.

Things started to look up when I began to attend Green River Community College (3.8 GPA, graduated with Highest Honors) where I got a job tutoring in the Student Help Center (English, English as a Foreign Language, French, Spanish, Biology, Geology, and Philosophy) as well as teaching informal classes in International English as a Foreign Language for the International Program, and helping out with some remedial classes. This is to date one of my favorite jobs of all time, as the work was challenging, varied, down right fun, and utterly free of high-explosives, dangerous machinery, and the nigh-mandatory consumption of trans-fatty acids. I also spent a great deal of time hunched over a tired old Mac writing stories and editorials for the Green River Current, in between editing and arguing with the professor about lay-out and too many feel-good articles.

After I graduated Green River with credits far in excess of the necessary 90, I returned to Iceland to study Icelandic at Haskóli Íslands. Sadly, my previous slackage as an AFSer seemed to stick, and I didn't finish my first year of studies. I did, however, work as a security-guard/handy-man for The Reykjavík Botanical Garden, one of the easiest gigs I've ever had, as well as teaching the occasional class at Enskuskólinn.

I then returned to the States in order to discover that I absolutely loathed attending The Evergreen State College, which did not last long at all. I wound up doing a lot of security work, both for The Puyallup Fair and for an outfit called Star Management Services where the fact that I lack the oh-my-god-you're-famous gene landed me work as backstage security and I got to meet interesting people like Johnny Rotten and Isaac Hays. A bit later I started working for Tully's, an espresso chain that fought a brave, but ultimately doomed battle against the Evil Empire of Starbucks, as a barrista and taster, as well as writing some of their ad copy.

Eventually, I got bored with the US and returned to Iceland in 1999, in order to work for the family of a good friend, providing home-care and support for the family during a very trying time. This wound up sequewaying into a full-time position at Reykjavik Social Services, where I worked both in "home help" and as a social counselor. The pay might have left something to be desired, but in the two plus years I worked there, I learned far more Icelandic than I ever picked up as an AFSer or in HÍ, so that made up for a lot.

After another overlong stay in the States, I worked briefly for Kaffitár, before landing a teaching gig in January of 2003 at Mimir-simenntun, where I continued to teach until 2006. I also began working with Vinnuskóli Reykjavíkur during the summers, as I had by this point reentered HÍ in order to finish my long-postponed BA in English Lit. My college years saw me working a variety of other jobs as well, including editing/translating the now-defunct design magazine aVs (an job that paid off, if only in experience), private tutoring gigs, assistant managing for the deservedly defunct Mama's Tacos, and finally working for one of my current three employers, ÍTR, or the Reykjavík Department of Youth and Recreation.

After graduating HÍ, with a GPA of 8,8 (Damn that last class and its annoying group work! It should have been a 9!) I continued working for ÍTR at Vogasel where I was recently promoted to "Frístundaráðgjafi" as well as working as a substitute English teacher/tutor and assistant librarian at Vogaskóli, and continuing to see one client for the Social Services. The plan was, and still is, to return to HÍ and finish an M.Ped, granting me the right to teach at Icelandic secondary schools/junior colleges.

But that's just the plan.

Volunteerism and Such:

Over the years I've done my share of volunteer and non-paid work. I've "volunteered" for the Town of South Prairie, including writing and editing memos and other Town publications, helping to design the town logo, and installing equipment in and maintaining the two town parks.

If you're wondering why "volunteered" is in quotes, it's because my mother is the mayor.

I've also volunteered for Second Harvest, an organization that gleams fresh produce from harvested fields for local food banks, as well as The Foothills Rails to Trails Project, which converts abandoned rail lines into pedestrian and biking paths. In my teens I volunteered as a camp counselor for my school district's outdoor education program, where I got to teach sixth graders archery and canoeing and other fun stuff, as well as volunteer English tutoring/mentoring for exchange students in my old school district. I'd love to volunteer at The Intercultural Center, or get involved in local politics, but who has the time?

Hobbies and Other Creative Wastes of Time:
I used to have a lot more of these. Seriously. Once upon a time I made jewelry and musical instruments for pocket money and fun, played music with a revolving collection of friends, held informal fencing sessions, worked out a lot, hiked, biked, and home-brewed.
These days its been whittled down to blogging, remodeling my apartment, reading, and watching geeky movies with my friends.
I've got to change that.

The Job I Want:

While I am relatively happily employed at the moment, I really don't see my current jobs as adding up to a long-term career. Ideally, I'd like to work as a professional blogger, writer, editor, English instructor (junior college or higher), fashion maven, rock star, or Salma Hayak's pool boy.

Hire me?

Apples and Oranges

2007-01-22T13:58:00.000-08:00

Comic Apples and Tragic Oranges:

Comparing, but mostly contrasting, the writings of David Arnarson and Kristjana Gunnars.

“...As far as I can understand it, tragedy, and the ability to understand tragedy, is essentially a narrow, elitist sensibility of the upper classes that allows them to feel superior to the people in the pit. I’ll cast my lot with the people in the pit.”

(David Arnarson, “Story Forming.”)

Introduction: Dead Authors and Liberated Students

One of the most difficult essays I have ever been forced to read was Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author”. I spent the better part of a week puzzling through a badly-photocopied collection of obtuse and seemingly purposely incomprehensible text, only to find a single diamond in all the dust. “There is nothing outside the Text”, writes Barthes, and therefore to attempt to discover what the “author-god” really means is an exercise in futility. The entire liberal-humanist approach to literature is annihilated in that essay. The reader is liberated to interpret writings as he or she sees fit, without regard to the desires or aims of the author or any other authority.

Sadly, this good news has yet to reach the hallowed halls of academia. In approaching this essay, I was confronted with the dubious task of amassing the necessary secondary sources to somehow legitimize my reading of David Anarson’s The Happiest Man in the World and Kristjana Gunnars Any Day but This. I found very little useful, aside from an interview with Arnason. Add to that the difficulty of writing a short paper on two collections of short-stories, which has the effect of multiplying the number of characters and possible themes to the point at which one would need to write a book as long as the collection to adequately examine them in detail and you get one daunting prospect.

So I’m taking a leap. I’m hoping my own writing will make up for the lack of regurgitated academic sources. Hope I don’t break something when I land.

Upper-class, educated, Canadian, middle-aged, and different altogether

In both these collections, there is an overwhelming majority of well-educated, professional, and upper-class (or at least previously upper-class) Canadian characters in their middle-age, with a smattering of children, teens and twenty-something’s, and elderly characters rounding out the mix. The voice of the stories, especially in the case of Gunnars, is almost entirely in this mode, with the other voices slipping in as dialogue. Given this, and the similar backgrounds of both authors, one would think that the voices would sound similar, would pontificate on similar troubles or move through similar situations, and to an extent this is true. Both collections contain a wide variety of similar people dealing with the post-modern angst of middle age and retirement, but here the two authors divide quite sharply. While Gunnars’ characters wallow in a seemingly unending series of tragedies, large and small, and grapple with their angst and long for escape, Arnarson’s clownish protagonists serve as entertaining parables on modern life, alternately bemused and reveling in a world they can’t understand, and have given up trying to.

Escaping Any Day but This

An overriding theme in Any Day But This is a longing for escape, the urge to cast off the hubbub world of professions and modernity, and escape to someplace somewhere where one can lead a content, slow existence. The “Sunshine Coast” of British Columbia, a warm, tranquil spot without extremes of weather, serves as a convenient symbol of this longing for escape. Other places serve this function as well, such as Svelvik, Norway, and a village in southern Sweden “where there is magic...Where life is magical”. Gunnars’ characters seem always on the verge of leaving something, be it a marriage, a home, a career, or life itself. The majority of these voices are far from content with their lot, touched by tragedies large and small, ridden with anxiety about relationships, the past, the future, or even the dark.

Yet even when they leave, they do not truly escape. The female protagonist in Code Pink and Denim plans her escape, going so far as to quit her job and pack up her apartment, but we never see her go. Arne Ibsen, in Directions in Which We Travel, escapes to Canada only to find his new home a prison of his own making. Nancy Hedgecroft seeks solace and a way out in the form of her pastor, only to be subject to his unwelcome advances in Dancing in the Market Place. The list goes on and on.

This lends a distinctly nihilistic feeling to some of the stories. Gunnars’ characters inhabit a world without meta-narratives, without God, without “Progress”, without permanence. Without a source of over-arching meaning in their lives, they wander about in a kind of existential fog looking for whatever lantern they can find, be it a grandchild (The Secret Source of Tears), the security of an older lover (Pleasures Liberty Cannot Know), or the illusionary comfort of controlling one’s small domestic sphere (The Road Between Wind and Water). And yet the author chooses to leave it to the reader whether or not these lanterns in the foggy Sunshine Coast of her creation are really lighting the way, or just illusions in and of themselves.

There in a certain pretension to these stories which troubles the reader. There is no humor as such and precious little joy. The focus is so purely on the tragic that one gets the sense the author is trying too hard to be taken seriously. Add to that such “literary” devices as quotes and references to authors and works, most of which obscure, that serve to weed out those not intellectually prepared. The author’s attempt at creating a feeling of coherency by having characters from previous stories appear briefly in later ones feels forced and fails at its aim. Finally, the purposeful elimination of “endings” in the traditional short-story style results in the tales simply stopping, without achieving any catharsis at all, and leaving the reader in an uncomfortable limbo.

My closest friend and I have this ongoing joke. Whenever we’re faced with a work of fiction that “tries too hard”, or is exclusionary, or pretentious, we sentence the author to imaginary torments for “committing Literature”. After reading Any Day But This, I felt forced to decide that the author is “committing Literature” in the first degree. My sentence is more humane than usual. I think she should read some David Arnarson.

Laughing at the po-mo condition

The gulf in tone, style, and content between Arnarson’s work and that of Gunnars’ is like a canyon. This is interesting. Both authors come from similar backgrounds. They are of Icelandic descent, both are academics, both live or lived in Canada, and both have chosen to write mainly short stories. But while Gunnars peoples her work with figures of tragedy, Arnarson peoples his The Happiest Man in the World with another sort of character altogether. While still educated, upper-class, Canadian, and middle-aged, Arnarson’s mid-life-crisis ineffectual male protagonists are very much a foil to Gunnar’s angst-ridden menagerie of voices. Also interesting is that Arnason includes a great deal of “Icelandic” material in his works, be it references to folk tales, names, or simply the location of the story. Gunnars, on the other hand, would appear to be Norwegian if one were to only read Any Day But This.

Arnarson’s characters, even when not taking part in an obvious comedy, are none-the-less laughable. They are victims of their own pretense, as in The Boys and The Naiads, or more-or-less ordinary folk presented with extraordinary circumstances (The Sunfish, The Washing Machine, The Marriage Inspector) who respond with varying degrees of comic effectiveness. Unlike Any Day But This, The Happiest Man in the World is not encumbered by the weight of tragedy. Rather, Arnarson transforms potential tragedies (the twice abandoned husband in Over and Over, or the widowed father in The Event) into moments of rueful comedy or transcendental wonder. His stories seem to say to the reader, “It’s not so bad, nothing can kill you that you can laugh at.” Arnarson’s stories are enhanced by a magical realism, which the author admits to reading a lot of, completely lacking in Gunnars’ work. The laws of space, time, and probability, along with the long established patterns of plot and literary voice are null and void in his stories. The utterly irrational can take place, a man can appear on your doorstep and announce that he is a marriage inspector; a rather effete middle-aged scholar can sail into an erotically charged nude camping myth, bed three beauties, and survive a shipwreck. A trip to a marriage counselor ends with smiles all around as all three involved part ways, bound for the life they truly want to live. Yet the reader believes, not because of the realism, or symbolism, or emotional weight, but because they are good stories.

The short story form is particularly punishing to writers unwilling to give the reader what they want, which in the case of the short story is, as Arnason himself states “the good parts”, with “the dull parts” left out. “The reader has to be entertained and there are ways of doing that. The thing about reading is, as soon as they close the book, that’s it. You’re not there and they don’t have to be polite. They’re sitting in their own living rooms and when you bore them, they close the book.” (Arnason,” Story Forming”)

In order to keep his readers entertained, Arnarson resorts to an interesting method. He rejects any ending he comes up with before he has finished the story. This would seem an odd choice for a short-story writer, as most short stories, especially the gothic ones, almost always have a twist ending. Poe, for example, is said to have written the endings for several of his tales before the body of the tale itself. (Cite)

By refusing to do this, Arnarson creates endings that do not necessarily “twist”, but none-the-less surprise. No story ends entirely happily, no story ends in pure tragedy, but all the stories have an ending at once satisfying and intriguing. A Girls Story, in which Arnarson as author keeps breaking into his own parody of a Harlequin Romance, ends with the young lovers just about to kiss, frozen in that moment by the author-god. This leaves the reader to wonder just how much the two characters would care for that situation, which, like much of Arnarson’s work, seems to contain heavenly bliss and tormenting disappointment in equal measure. At the end of Fathers and Sons, Sons and Fathers, the rather effete father/narrator is surprised to find that in the process of retelling the story of his tragi-comic hunting trip with this own father and young son, that he has become the center of the story, not the father he always felt over-shadowed by, and the reader is almost as surprised as he.

With his emphasis on humor and humanity, and his interest in hooking the reader in, Arnason’s prose stands in stark contrast to Gunnars’. There is next to no reference to literary works, with the possible exception on A Field Guide to Birds East of The Rockies, or obscure poets. Rather, Arnarson includes his references within the body of the story itself, calling on almost archtypal and widely know stories, which he then presents in his own comic way. Hence, Little Red Riding Hood becomes a coy seductress and the wolf her prey in Girl and Wolf. The Marriage Inspector has a recognizably Bradberrian flavor, with its topsy-turvy inversions of gender roles and public versus private issues, which makes for laughter and shivers in equal measure.

All in all, despite their myriad similarities in background and field, the dense, tragic, and rather exclusionary writing of Kristjana Gunnars has precious little in common with the lightly meaningful comedic writing of David Arnason. It’s a case of apples from Gimli and oranges from the Sunshine Cost. Frankly, I’ll take the apples.

Arnason, David. “Story Forming.” Interview by Robert Enright. Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing. Birk Sproxton, ed. Winnipeg Turnstone, 1986. 101-09

Arnason, David. The Happiest Man in the World. Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1989

Gunnars, Kristjana. Any Day But This. Red Deer Press, Calgary, 2004

Dream of the Rood

2007-01-22T13:49:00.000-08:00

Ruminating on The Rood:

Anglo-Saxon Culture and the “Warrior” Christ.

Samuel Levesque Háskólí Íslands Haust 2005

Medieval Literature in Translation

Málstofuverkefni

Introduction: How I became an atheist and why there are so few Japanese Christians.

Religion has always held a certain fascination for me, which ironically led to my becoming an atheist. After studying most of the major world religions, I realized that none of them really fit my view of the world. Christianity was too passive, Judaism and Islam too dogmatic, Hinduism too complex, and Buddhism too simplistic. So I rejected them. Which is unusual I think. Most people tend to stretch and alter their religion to fit their world-view. Not only people, but whole cultures as well.

In the Americas, there are a multitude of different “Catholicisms” many that bear only superficial resemblance to the Church of Rome. In these cultural offshoots, saints stand in for pre-Christian pagan gods and goddess, offerings are made to altars, and traditions long pre-dating the Catholic Church are given a Christian veneer. Yet the people who pray to these altars and make offerings to these saints see themselves as good Catholics, despite the fact that the religion they practice is often at odds with the teachings of the church, if not with that of the Bible itself.

Other times, a religion introduced to a society from outside can fail to adapt to it, especially when the pre-existing culture has values very much at odds with it. Japan has one of the smallest Christian populations in Asia, due to, among other things, the crucifix. As theologian Jack Miles says in the introduction to his book Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God:

The Crucifixion, the primal scene of Western religion and Western art, has lost much of its power to shock. At this date, perhaps only a non-Western eye can truly see it. A Japanese artist now living in Los Angeles once recalled the horror most Japanese feel at seeing a corpse displayed as a religious icon, and of their further revulsion when icon is explained to them. They ask, she said, “If he was so good, why did he die like that?” In Japanese culture, “good people end their lives with a good death, even a beautiful death, like the Buddha. Someone dying in such a hideous way- for us, he could only be a criminal” (Pg.3)

The Anglo-Saxons shared many cultural traits with the Japanese. Their society was semi-feudal, based on a code of honor that demanded absolute loyalty to one’s leader, even unto death. “The Battle of Maldon” and “Akouroushi”[1] would be mutually acceptable. Both Anglo-Saxon England and medieval Japan shared a belief in “fate”, the idea that one cannot change the course of one’s life, and therefore to fear the future, meaning death, is foolish. In both places warfare was chiefly an economic activity, bringing tribute, vassals, slaves, and prestige to the victors. Defeat was so shameful it could only be avoided by death. Pre-Christian, and to an extent Christian Anglo-Saxon culture placed, as do the Japanese, a great deal of emphasis in dying well. Beowulf goes fearlessly and heroically to his death. Countless saints smile and recite poetry on their deathbeds.

So how is it that the Japanese reject the crucifixion, while the Anglo-Saxons not only accepted it, but also wrote moving poetry in its praise? I think this is due to the fact that the Anglo-Saxons managed to adapt some aspects of Christianity to their culture, while changing or ignoring those that were distasteful to the Anglo-Saxon mind. If ever there was an example of this, if ever there was a poem to tempt the Japanese to Christ, “The Dream of the Rood” is it.

“The Dream of the Rood” manages with great aplomb to transform the story of a pacifist political and religious dissenter being tortured and sent to the gallows into the story of a “proud warrior” boldly climbing onto the cross to win victory. It is both a quintessential Christian poem, in that it deals with the defining moment of the New Testament, and a rather un-Christian poem. For, when one looks at the highly Anglo-Saxon heroic elements in the poem from a biblical perspective, it often contradicts the very story it was inspired by.

The First Stanza: Wealth and Judgement

On beginning to read “The Dream of the Rood” one is immediately struck by the archaic nature of the imagery, even if one is reading a modern translation. There are two elements in this stanza that, on deeper reflection, rather stand out.

The first of these is the description of the cross: “that emblem was entirely cased in gold; beautiful jewels/ were strewn around its foot, just as five/ studded the cross-beam.” This is a far cry from “The Old Rugged Cross” of the Protestant hymn. While it can be argued that by the time Christianity reached the hearts of Anglo-Saxon England the Church was a wealthy emperial power, given to adornment and display, most of its holy orders still believed in a life of material poverty. Poverty as a means to salvation is a cornerstone of Christ’s teachings. Throughout the New Testament there are admonishments against wealth and ostentatious displays. As Christ said, “A camel has a better chance passing through the eye of a needle than a rich man of entering heaven.” So why this gem-studded cross?

Put simply, in Anglo-Saxon culture wealth equaled virtue. If one was wealthy, it was due to one being valiant and cunning in battle, winning material gains along with military victory. A culture with values such as that would have difficulty accepting poverty as something noble. Therefore, even though it is demonstratively un-Christian, the poem contains many references to wealth as a sign of virtue. In the third stanza the voice of the Rood depicts being girded “with gold and shimmering silver.” In the final stanza, the narrator speaks of a heaven where one “feasts” and “dwells in splendor”, which sounds more like the Norse Valhalla than Augustine’s City of God.

Then comes the line “that was no cross of a criminal…” Here, as with the Japanese, we see the tendency to think of anyone put to such a shameful death as criminal. The poet obviously felt the need to make very sure that his audience would not make this mistake. At the same time, it sounds very judgmental. Which is fine if one is a proud Anglo-Saxon chieftain. Passing judgement was a large part of the role after all. But Christ tells us not to judge, “lest [we] be judged in heaven.” An oft-overlooked but very poignant moment in the story of the crucifixion is the conversion of the thief on the cross beside Jesus. Here we have an “actual” criminal, crucified beside Son of God, and yet still worthy of his forgiveness. This point seems lost on the author.

Second Stanza: Martial not martyred.

The business of any heroic poem is war, and the Anglo-Saxons loved their heroic poems, among which “The Dream of the Rood” could be counted. The problem is that in trying to turn the story of the crucifixion into a heroic praise-poem, the author had to stray a great deal from the scripture.

“The Dream of the Rood” is not the only example of this phenomenon from the early Middle Ages. The so-called Hildebrandslied takes the martialization of the Gospel to almost ridiculous lengths, resulting in a poem that Richard Fletcher in his book The Barbarian Conversion describes as “not Christian at all”:

The author of the Heliand used stock phrases drawn from secular epic to render the gospel narrative accessible to his audience. Jesus is the landes uuard, “guardian of the land”, the thiodo drohtin, “lord of the peoples”. The Virgin Mary is an adalcnosles uuif, a “woman of noble lineage”, and King Herod a boggebo, a “giver of rings”…The infant Christ is decked with jewels and the shepherds are transformed into grooms looking after horses. Jesus gathers about him “youths for disciples, young men and good, word-wise warriors”, just as a Saxon lord would seek sword-wise warriors for his retainers…At the entry to Jerusalem the ass is omitted: the Lord enters on foot rather than on an ignoble beast unfitted to his royal dignity. (Pg.266)

While not straying as far as Hildebrandslied, “The Dream of the Rood” contains many phrases that seem strange to a modern Christian, just as they would to an early believer. Early Christianity was very pacifist, so it comes as a shock when Jesus, he who counseled men to “turn the other cheek” is described as “the young warrior, God Almighty…firm and unflinching”. “The Dream of the Rood” transforms the crucifixion into a test of strength and manhood. Rather than sacrificing himself to redeem mankind, Jesus is portrayed as bravely climbing onto the cross to win victory. There is no mention of his cry “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” Later, in the third stanza, Jesus is said to have “rested for a while/ worn-out after battle”. The fourth stanza praises his “great strength”, just as with any other Anglo-Saxon hero. Even the cross, the Rood itself speaks in a martial tone, saying that “strong enemies seized me” and that “Many enemies fastened me there”. In this stanza the “Prince of Peace”, the “Lamb of God” is portrayed as a war-leader, a lion. This emphasis on warriorism is patently un-Christian, at least according to scripture. As Owen Chadwick points out in his A History of Christianity:

Clement of Alexandria called Christians ‘the peaceful race’. They looked for an age to come when wars would be no more, and states would not make arms, and swords would be turned into ploughshares. They were sure that nothing could do more to end war than for all people to follow Christ. They seriously believed-and may be forgiven the illusion- that when the Gospel was accepted war would end. (Pg.44)

Fifth stanza: Valhalla or Heaven?

The fifth stanza contains a very telling line: “[They] live in heaven with the High Father, dwell in splendour.” The phrase “High Father” is highly reminiscent of the Norse/Germanic “All-Father”, used to describe the chief god Oðinn or Wodan. The portrayal of souls dwelling in “splendour” is telling as well. Heaven, in Christian terms, is a paradise where souls sing eternal praise to God. There is little mention of wealth, aside from the oft-quoted “streets of gold”. This sounds much more like a Valhalla, a glorious hall of warriors than a place of peace.

Another interesting line is “May the Lord be a friend to me,” which brings to mind the relationship between a warrior and his earthly lord. As in Hildebrandslied, the Germanic mind seems to have fit heaven into a pre-existing mold.

Anglo-Saxon Christianity to Protestantism.

The Anglo-Saxons adapted Christianity to their culture in more than just poetry. King Edwin is said to have promised to convert to Christianity on the condition that his campaign against his enemies was successful. This is not a terribly Christian way of thinking. It more closely resembles the sort of “bargaining with the gods” that took place in pagan Germanic rituals (Rosenberg, pg.219).

There are other interesting ways in which Anglo-Saxon culture influenced Mediaeval Christianity. “The Fortunes of Men” shows us how the Germanic idea of fate adapted itself to Christianity and vice versa. It is tempting to link this belief in unchangeable fate with the Protestant doctrine of predestination, whereby God’s elect where chosen at birth, and only those elect would enter the Kingdom on their death.

This is not the only aspect of Anglo-Saxon Christianity that seems to foretell aspects of Protestantism. After reading other poems and stories from this era one eventually gets a feeling that the Anglo-Saxon were more interested in loyalty to god, rather than the more conventional obedience. This is an important, but subtle difference. Loyalty implies a measure of reciprocation, a personal interaction with God, which is exactly the primary argument made by Luther hundreds of years later. The “militant” characteristics of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, as well as its equation of success and worldly wealth with virtue are likewise themes that become central to the Reformation. The Protestant work ethic, militant Christianity (in the form of organizations like the Salvation Army), and the personal, almost friendly relationship with God espoused by many modern Protestant churches, are all lurking between the lines of Anglo-Saxon Christian writing.

Perhaps then it should not come as a surprise that the Germanic regions of Europe were among the first to take up Protestantism, and remain so to this day. There is something very similar in “The Dream of the Rood” to later Protestant religious poetry, this time in the form of song.

Just think about the lyrics to two well-known English hymns in this context and the parallels become rather striking. First, there is the classic Anglican hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers”:

Onward Christian Soldiers

Marching as to war,

With the Cross of Jesus,

Going on before.

(Anderson. Pg.45)

Here, as in “The Dream of the Rood”, we see martial themes integrated into religious texts, with the cross playing a central role. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, an iconic American hymn from the Civil War era (which once nearly replaced “The Star Spangled Banner” as the national anthem) is even more striking:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of

The coming of the Lord,

He has trampled out the vineyards

Where the grapes of wrath are stored.

He has loosed the fateful lighting

Of his terrible swift sword.

His truth is marching on.

(Anderson. Pg.56)

I think that a medieval Anglo-Saxon audience would find both these hymns very familiar in spirit if not in language. There is something of “The Dream of the Rood” in both these, and many other, latter-day hymns.

Conclusion: Culturally Adaptive Religion

If there is any lesson to be learned from “The Dream of the Rood”, other than that one should pray to the cross as a means of salvation, I think it rests in the very elements that make this poem vaguely un-Christian. Just as the Anglo-Saxons stretched and adapted religion to suit their culture, so do we today. In some cultures the majority of churches make no judgements on homosexuals, while in others this is an issue of hot and often divisive debate. One must be careful to avoid falling into the trap of judging religious belief in a vacuum, without taking into account the culture where said belief is practiced. But the variety of religious cultural expression continues to provide us with works of fine and fascinating art like “The Dream of the Rood”, and by that standard alone, it must be judged a positive thing.

Works Cited:

“The Dream of the Rood”, The Anglo-Saxon World, An Anthology.

Crossley-Holland, Kevin. New York, Oxford University Press, 1984

Chadwick, Owen. A History of Christianity. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995

Fletcher, Richard. The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity. Los Angeles, University of California Press. 1997

Miles, Jack. Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. London, Arrow Books. 2002

Anderson, John G. Songs. San Anselmo, Songs & Creations, 1972

Rosenberg, Donna. World Mythology. Lincolnwood, NTC Publishing, 1993

[1] A medieval Japanese poem recounting the story of a group of roninn, samurai whose leader, or shogun has been killed in battle. Rather than live with the shame of defeat they launch a suicide attack against the enemy who killed their leader. This poem is considered to be a masterpiece of the boshido code, which governed the actions of samurai, and is very similar to that of the Anglo-Saxons as portrayed in “The Battle of Maldon”.

Walking Northwards Into Darkness

2007-01-22T13:41:00.000-08:00

Figure 1: "Wendigo Altar" by Walter Bruneel

Walking Northward into Darkness:

Wilderness, Wendigos, and Wastelands in the Writings of W. D. Valgardsson

Samuel Levesque

Icelandic-Canadian Short Stories Háskólí Íslands Haust 2005

Foreword: Wandering out of the world

I have my mother to thank for more than a few of my eccentricities. Growing up in the rapidly emptying Northeast corner of Oregon, she was all but raised in a ghost town, a weather beaten bit of hilly land east of Pendleton, which as of three years ago now lies completely devoid of habitation. Her youth was spent playing and exploring around empty farmsteads, aging grain elevators, and overgrown schoolhouses.

I spent my childhood in a town that was well on its way to becoming a ghost town. Throughout the late 70’s and 80’s, South Prairie, Washington was slowly sinking into economic desolation. There were abandoned homes scattered throughout town, ringed in protective thickets of black-berry and vine maple, while out in the woods the remains of railroad works, saw-mills, coal mines, and farms reclaimed by the forest provided a wealth of exciting, if rather dangerous, playgrounds. Mom loved it. So did I.

There is something particularly evocative about abandoned places, where the works of man stand visible, but conquered by the slow tide of Nature. There is also something thrilling, even downright scary about such places. The world is full of stories of haunted houses, abandoned mental hospitals that house maniacs with axes, and hidden ghost towns populated by inbred clans of cannibals. Exploring a newly discovered site was always a nerve-racking event for my friends and I, often with good reason, though we never encountered a horde of inbred man-eaters.

While the reality may not be so harsh, the wastelands we create nevertheless serve as a reservoir for our fears, real or imagined. No one was afraid of ghosts when they burnt down the old South Prairie School, but they were afraid of the teenage drinking and promiscuity that sheltered in its weathered walls. That alone was enough. Later on, in my teens, I had friends who were thrown out of usual society, more often than not due to their parents’ prejudices. Many of these friends squatted in the older neighborhoods and forgotten outskirts of surrounding towns. Being outside of societal norms, they not only had to fear the bugaboos of normal society such as murderers, rapists, and thugs, but also had to fear elements that society usually looks on as good, policemen, social workers, and missionaries, who often were as bad as the criminals. There are frightening things enough in the forgotten places of our world, but the imagination takes it further. It seems that these days, it is not the wide open untouched spaces that scare us, but rather the man-made, man-forgotten wilds in our own backyards. We want to put up signs bearing the legend “Here there be Dragons” under every urban bridge and around every sub-urban greenbelt. W.D. Valgardsson understands this fear. It is at the heart of much of his writing.

Introduction: Wendigos, Wilderness, and Wasteland, Oh My!

W.D. Valgardsson’s short stories are packed with allusions, metaphors, and themes that are so well integrated into the text that they often slip under the reader’s radar at first. The myth of the Wendigo, or its non-mythical sociological ramifications, pops up throughout his writing, even if never mentioned by name. Instead, the Wendigo myth is expressed through the actions, inaction, and motivations of his characters. Wilderness, that is the land and life of the land, appears in a Janus mask, at once the essence of home and the terrifying face of the unknown. Most striking of all, wasteland, a place both physical and physiological permeates the bulk of his stories in a myriad of forms. These three elements are worth examining in detail, as they are in large part the essential elements of Valgardsson’s prose.

Figure 2: Wendigo Costume by Comtemporary Artist Ken Warren

Walking with Wendigos

In the mythology of many North American tribes, especially those around the Great Lakes and northern plains, the Wendigo is truly fearsome and malevolent being, a disheveled brute with a chunk of ice for a heart, blackened fingers and lips, and terrible strength. Often the Wendigo is depicted as hugely tall, but also emaciated, and it is said that these creatures emit a terrifying combination of groans, snarls and whistles, being devoid of human speech.

But it is not this aspect of the Wendigo that Valgardsson makes use of, rather other, less graphic aspects of the myth. According to some of the legends, one can become a Wendigo, either by consuming human flesh, or by simply looking upon one. Once one has “gone Wendigo”, all food except for human flesh and unhealthy, often poisonous matter, such as frogs, moss, and toadstools, becomes unappetizing, and one is driven to kill and eat others, often starting with one’s own family. There have been cases throughout northern and central Canada of “Wendigo Psychosis” whereby an individual, most often a native, believes they have “gone Wendigo” and begin to crave human flesh.

It has been argued that the Wendigo myth was an important mechanism in Native societies to prevent widespread cannibalism during the long northern winters, but in Valgardsson’s hands, it becomes something else. When Valgardsson subtly and skillfully evokes the Wendigo he uses it as a symbol for the cyclical nature of violence, where victim becomes victimizer in an ever-expanding downward spiral.

The most effective examples, in my opinion, are in Valgardsson’s What Can’t Be Changed Shouldn’t Be Mourned, as well as in “An Act of Mercy” in Bloodflowers.

Starting with “A Matter of Balance”, and continuing through “Wrinkles” and “Identity”, the Wendigo keeps appearing in a rather subtle form in What Can’t Be Changed… In “A Matter of Balance”, the unnamed protagonist gazes upon the face of two men-turned-predators, bikers who live by symbolically feeding on others in the “wilderness” outside normal society. The protagonist has entered that world, both through the loss of his wife to a murderer, and by his harmless, but nonetheless illegal prospecting on public land. Once out in the wild, having seen the two “Wendigos” he begins to take on some of their characteristics. They plot with cool efficiency (hearts of ice) to head him off at the trail, and he plots with equally frigid heart to lure them onto a slope that only he is prepared to descend safely. Once the Wendigo bikers have slid down the slope and are hanging by their fingertips from certain death, the protagonist again coolly and methodically decides to leave them to die, rather than giving them a chance and thereby restoring his own humanity. As in the myth, he has looked at the face of a Wendigo, and himself become one.

This cyclical violence appears again in “Wrinkles”. The two young men Duke and Albert are already Wendigo. They wait in the woods, and are already in the “wild” outside of normal society. They both seem to have a drug problem, or in Wendigo terms, they subsist on poison when not preying on humans. Duke seems to be the originator of this Wendigo cycle, as it was he who bludgeoned “Wrinkles”, an elderly woman, to death with a hammer in a botched robbery. Having seen the face of the monster, Albert becomes one himself, selling his friend out to the victim’s vengeful fiancé, who has himself gone Wendigo because of the violence brought into his life by Duke and Albert.

But not all those who witness the Wendigo become the Wendigo. Many die before they have that chance. In “Identities” the unnamed protagonist wanders unprepared into the “wild” outside of his normal middle-class existence, where he encounters a Wendigo in the form of a police officer. The officer, who through the course of his job must have looked on violence and its perpetrators, kills the protagonist due to his own lack of humanity. His doubt and trust have been trained out of him, and his experience in the “wilds” of the urban ghetto forced him to go Wendigo.

Finally, there is the tale of two brothers, Niels and Helgi, in “An Act of Mercy” from Valgardsson’s Bloodflowers. The brothers share a fishing camp with their abusive drunken father, who foolishly attempts to bring in his nets in the face of a sudden early winter storm and is caught out on the water overnight. Despite their obvious dislike for their father, the brothers head out to rescue him as soon as the storm has cleared. After a long search, they find him frozen in place in a narrow cove, horribly frostbitten. This is one of the few instances where Valgardsson’s use of the Wendigo myth includes allusions to the actual beast. The father is described as having frozen black lips and a chattering, wheezing voice. His limbs have been frostbitten so badly that he is likely to lose an arm and both legs, and he begs his sons to push him into the water end his suffering. While the brothers disagree on what to do, one wishing to end his father’s suffering and the other unwilling to have it on his conscious, they are both acting out of human decency. When Helgi falls to his death, however, Niels decides to let his father live, rather than push him in, as he originally planned, as punishment for his brother’s death. As it says in the story: “All mercy in him died”. He has become Wendigo.

The Wendigo appears in Valgardsson’s work subtly, sneaking around the undergrowth of the stories, never calling itself by name. Rather than use the myth to provide an actual creature, Valgardsson keeps to a more modern interpretation; one expressed in films such as “Wendigo” and “Ravenous” wherein the Wendigo is not a physical presence, but rather a kind of contagious psychosis. Valgardsson’s Wendigos are the products of unresolved or unresolvable violence, and their propagation continues in a vicious cycle.

While many of these tales take place in the wilderness, many of them have an element of urbanity as well. The Wendigo, a spirit of the frozen woods, seems to have crept down into the cities and suburbs of Valgardsson’s world. This begs the question, why? Why would a creature of the vast wilderness confront modern characters? To Answer that question, we have to take a look at the next related theme in Valgardsson’s work, wilderness.

Wilderness: Romance or Rapine?

These days most people recognize, or at least pay lip service to the idea that wilderness is a good and valuable thing in and of itself. Beginning with Wordsworth and the other Romantics, and crystallizing with the American Transcendentalists, nature in wild and untamed form has been seen as a source of healing, spiritual renewal, and authenticity.

This is the wilderness that Valgardsson’s fellow Icelandic-Canadian author, Kristjana Gunnars, points to in her essay “Poetry and the Idea of Home”. Wilderness in this view is the unobtainable “home” that manifests itself in memory, evoked by sensual elements of the natural world. The poet longs for a home that never was and will likely never be, which, according to Gunnars, is where much of the emotional power of poetry resides. In simple terms, one could define this viewpoint as claiming that we all want to return to a natural state, to reenter the Garden of Eden and reclaim our unspoiled innocence.

This ideal of wilderness has been the most pervasive in recent years, but it has never managed to block out or silence and older, darker vision of wilderness that pre-dates the prevailing Romantic notion.

Beginning with Beowulf, (who himself encountered a “Wendigo” in the shape of Grendel) the very first written English fiction, and continuing unchallenged until the birth of the Romantics, wilderness was not a source of healing, spiritual renewal or sanctuary, but rather the visible darkness that lurked at the edge of the everyday world, the abode of monsters, beasts, and witches. The wilderness was a devouring thing that had to be kept at bay, and was only entered by the very brave, or the very foolish. This vision has continued to this day, but not in the “legitimate” literary forms. Rather, it has found a home in the horror and macabre genres, where wilderness still serves as the breeding ground of monsters, and in the adventure tale, where the harsh land challenges the hero and destroys the unprepared.

This is the wilderness most often encountered in Valdgardsson’s work. His characters are tested by wilderness, frighten by wilderness, and often killed by wilderness, but they are rarely comforted by it.

Which is not to say that the Romantic wilderness is completely lacking in Valgardsson’s work. In “The Man from Snaefellsnes”, Valgardsson-as-character is symbolically healed of his traumatic past and obtains a measure of peace with his immigrant up-bringing by baptizing himself in a hot spring on a trip to the Icelandic countryside. In “The Cave”, Valgardsson evokes the pastoral joys of a bright Winnipeg summer, replete with rose petals and lovemaking in haystacks to add an element of poignancy to the section of the tale dealing with his love interest. But even in that pastoral bliss, there is a creeping darkness. Early in the story, he mentions that Sigga is plagued with mosquito bites, which seems to affect Icelanders worse than others. Then, as the story progresses, the reader is pulled into the tale of Sigga’s father and grandfather, both of whom go mad upon entering the wilderness, symbolized by a cave on the shores of Lake Winnipeg.

In other stories, there is even less of the pleasant wilderness. In “Seiche” and “An Act of Mercy,” we see the harsh northern landscape taking a toll on the men who enter it, often ending in their deaths. Even the darkly comic “The Couch” pits its main characters against an absurdly malevolent wilderness that seems almost conscious. “The Couch” presents us with a wilderness that is actively trying to thwart the desires of the main character. While comic, this vision of wilderness as something antagonistic and dangerous, pervades many Valgardsson’s stories, whether it is the brutal weather of "An Act of Mercy,” the unpredictable danger of “The Seiche,” or the subtle slide into madness of “The Cave.”

In this, Valgardsson keeps to a common thread in Canadian literature, as Margaret Atwood points out in her lecture on wilderness in Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. There is a long history of Canadian story telling dealing with the madness of the northern wilderness, where men “go bush,” catch “cabin fever,” or “go Wendigo,” or are simply swallowed up by the harsh landscape. Discussing a poem based on the doomed Franklin Expedition, and its representation of the wilderness, Atwood states, “[It’s] noteworthy that the figure conjured up is giant, female, icy, connected to madness, and destructive: a sort of Nature white in tooth and claw.” (26) This is not the safe, tranquil and idyllic wilderness of the British, or even American mind, this is wilderness unbared, Nature as a bitch goddess and devourer of men.

Interestingly, this unbared wild “white in tooth and claw” is neither remote, nor untouched by the works of man. Like the wild in which his characters encounter their Wendigo fates, Valgardsson’s wilderness is at once removed from us, and lurking just beside us. The characters in “Seiche” are not a long way from help, but the just as well might be. “Waiting” gives us a man so at home with the wilderness that he is forgotten in it, even by his family. They move on to urban life, yet he cannot make that transition, even though such a move would be simple, at least in practical terms. The wilderness is a world away and right next-door. In “Snow,” the young couple is only a short walk from their home, but for all the husband is aware, he could be miles away. Lacking his wife’s keen sense of direction and instinct (she is the more successful hunter of the two), he has entered the wilderness unprepared, and the reader is left with the uncomfortable feeling that he will pay a steep price. The wife, however, is comfortable in the wilderness; she has been tested and proven herself.

This is the other main use Valgardsson makes of wilderness. It is the testing ground, the place that challenges and changes. “Saturday Climbing” is a perfect example. It is only by being tested on the cliff-face he is climbing that the father in the story can come to grips with his daughter’s newfound maturity. Loathe as he is to admit it, the wilderness forces him to accept it in very real and physical terms, when he must rely on his daughter to belay him, to literally hold him up. Faced with this hard physical fact, he can no longer entertain his illusions of paternal control and superiority.

Valgardsson’s wilderness is neither remote, nor static. It challenges his characters, and through them, the reader, in very dynamic ways. It lurks, for as dark a thing as Valgardsson creates can only lurk, just outside the everyday. It is a wilderness more mental than physical, and in that vast North of the mind, anything is possible.

Wasteland

The final element in Valgardsson’s work that frankly fascinates me is his occasional forays into what I have come to term “wasteland.” My use of this term takes a bit of explaining, and even then, I wonder if it is not simply an aspect of my own internal mythos rather than a literary concept.

Wasteland as a concept is perhaps best explained by T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name. I have always interpreted it as a lament for the world lost in the fires of the First World War. The poem seems to say that the world has ended, and we are all living in the ruins of the world that was; the wastes of our own creation.

Wasteland can be a physiological, geological, or mythological place. It is that place outside of the illusion of normality, and it is wasteland that encompasses both the wilderness and the Wendigo in Valgardsson’s writing.

Wasteland contains wilderness. Even in the most densely packed urban areas; one finds pockets of the wild in forgotten, unnoticed places. These places are not, however, unpopulated. They are the home of the ghosts and monsters of the post-modern age: the homeless, the forgotten, the murderer, the criminal, and the poor.

It seems that Canadian authors are more aware of this world than their American and British counterparts. Charles DeLint, a best-selling Canadian fantasy writer, has made a career for himself writing about the strangeness that lurks just beneath the surface and around the corner of everyday life. Valgardsson’s fellow Icelandic-Canadian short story author, David Arnasson, sets many of his stories in places abandoned by or outside of what most people would think of as normality. It is this lurking wasteland that lends an aura of menace and uncertainty to Valgardsson’s writing. I think that Canada, with its multi-cultural ethos, tends to create more of this liminal wasteland than other nations. Instead of pockets of sub-cultures welded together by one over arching nationalism, Canada is much more an amalgamation of separate societies, making it easier for one to feel cast out.

“The Man from Snaefellsnes” gives us an especially clear example of this socio-phychological wasteland. Valgardsson-as –character in this story feels separated from Canadian society, remembering slights at the hands of “English” schoolteachers among others. His Canadian wife annoys him with her good-natured, but rather shallow attempts to connect with his, or anyone else’s for that matter, ethnicity. Yet he also feels separated from his Icelandic heritage, both due to the slights of fellow Icelandic-Canadians (he mentions being called útlendingur by his peers) and due to the historical injustices that drove his grandfather to Canada in the first place. He is in the waiting place, the wasteland between two worlds, and though this story ends with his reconciliation to both worlds, many of his characters do not reach such a happy ending. Rather, they are abandoned, or preyed upon in the wastes.

Abandonment appears time and again in Valgardsson’s stories. In “A Matter of Balance,” the action takes place along an abandoned stretch of railway converted to pedestrian trails. Duke and Albert in “Wrinkles” squat in abandoned buildings and Duke meets his end in an abandoned cistern. The young couple in “Snow” moves into an abandoned railway station on the outskirts of a country town. Another Albert, this time in “Waiting” is himself abandoned on his island by a family caught up in the rush of modernity. Jack and Dana Andrews drive into an actual wasteland, a place stuck between the developed and the wilderness in “An Afternoon’s Drive” and are nearly trapped there. Danny Thorson is trapped when he arrives on a bleak island wasteland seemingly forgotten by the rest of the world in “Bloodflowers.”

Yet it is not abandonment alone that makes a wasteland. People also drift into it of their own accord. Duke and Albert in “Wrinkles” are a good example, but the best example I can find are Norman Thomas and his family in Bloodflower’s “Brothers.” Thomas has married a Native woman and taken to the wilderness. In doing so, despite his protests to the “British” fish-camp owner Alex, he has stepped outside of the norm and into the wasteland, where nothing is certain. Alex, in comparison, holds tight to the ideals of civilization and normality. He flies the Union Jack above his camp, hangs the Queen’s portrait in the mess hall, and prides himself on keeping his operation both physically and morally “clean.” In this way he stays out of the wasteland that Thomas inhabits.

Another good example is the peddler in “A Place of One’s Own.” Separated from the narrow-minded mainstream because of his tattoos and wandering nature, the peddler exists outside of society in a myriad of ways. “Neither Fedorchuk nor his wife approved of people not brought up in the area. Of the peddler, they were particularly contemptuous because he had no place of his own and, therefore, no trustworthy identity. Like all people who live on the very edge of having nothing, a place one’s own was very important to them. Divorced from the land, constantly travelling, appearing and disappearing without explanation, the peddler was no better than a gypsy.” (53) This lack of permanence is one of the essential elements of the wasteland, but it is not just his unusual appearance or nomadic lifestyle that alienate the peddler, but even the manner in which he makes his living. Buying cast-off and fire-damaged goods and then re-selling them tie him to the wasteland. Storing these goods in an “abandoned church” which he rents out distances him even further. Even though he makes an attempt at re-entering the mainstream by buying a local store and taking a wife, he is nonetheless abandoned in the end, and goes right back to his nomadic ways. A sad ending, but it could be worse.

The wasteland, Valgardsson makes very clear, is a dangerous place where assorted creatures prey on the unwary. There are the bikers from “A Matter of Balance,” out to prey on the unwitting, and the policeman in “Identities”, trigger-happy and blinded by his prejudices. There are sweet-talking predators like Jack Spitzer and Henry Smith in “On Lake Therese,” plying with bottles what they cannot take by force. Even denizens of the “normal” world can be fearful to those living beside them in the wastes. Alex the fish-camp owner attempts to rape Thomas’s teenage daughter, precisely because she doesn’t fit into his narrow view of propriety. Orville in “Red Dust” prostitutes his niece to pay for a hunting dog, stating that “Everybody’s got to earn their keep.” One wonders if he would have done this if the niece were not already in the wasteland, separated from normality by her mental deficiency. “First Flight,” offers the reader another character wandering the wastelands of their own mind. Simple-minded Gregory Jorganson’s fateful amble through the empty streets of Middleton ends when the very men he idolizes, NATO pilots and personnel, turn on him, driving him out into the cold despairing night to end his life on the railroad tracks.

The wasteland is the unknown, the out-of-bounds, the between space where what we think we know may not be so. While it is tempting to say that it is the post-modern condition, this is not the case. Rather, it is a facet of the post-modern state that troubles and haunts us, and one that Valgardsson makes artful use of in his tales. Valgardsson returns again and again to the wasteland in order to makes us uncomfortably aware of it. By guiding his reader to look into the abyss, he makes sure that we acknowledge it, and in so doing, avoid it.

Walking back into the world

In the end, most of my squatter friends got places of their own, landed a job, moved on with their lives. But the time they spent out in the wasteland, amongst the Wendigos and wilderness left its mark. Many of them bare scars, physical and mental, and many will hurt for the rest of their lives. But the tragedy has a brighter side as well. As a group, they are less complacent, less materialistic, and consume less. They are also more willing than most others I know to reach out and offer aid and comfort to their fellows. Sadly though, some of them were lost. One of them even “went Wendigo”.

It is this danger and redemption, the state of being tested by the world that is at the core of Valgardsson’s writing. He seems to say to his readers, “This is the world you think you know, but look at all the strangeness and danger underneath it all. Look out for yourselves and others, lest you become one of the monsters.” Valgardsson presents us with tales that are dark and foreboding as a haunted forest, but he does so to warn, not simply to frighten or disgust. When one is wandering around the wilds of the wasteland, it is good to know about Wendigos, if only to avoid them.

Works Cited:

Valgardsson, W.D. Bloodflowers. Oberon Press, 1973

Red Dust. Oberon Press, 1978

What Can’t Be Changed Shouldn’t Be Mourned

Vancouver, Douglas & McIntyre, 1990

Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995

Gunnars, Kristjana. “Poetry and the Idea of Home”, Stranger at the Door.

Online search: Encyclopedia Mythica: “Wendigo” 20.11.05 http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/americas/native_american/articles.html

Online Search: Wikipedia: “Wendigo” 18.11.05 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendigo

Online Search: Native Online: “Wendigo” http://www.nativeonline.com/wendigo.htm 18.11.05

“Ravenous” Fox Pictures Inc. Antonia Bird, Director 1999

“Wendigo” Magnolia Films. Larry Fessenden, Director 2001

Sisters in the Struggle

2007-01-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

Sisters in the Struggle:

Feminine Dualities in Native American Literature

The literature and art of ethnic minorities has long been a subversive force in the sense that it challenges the often-unjustified norms and values of the ruling class. By writing, singing, painting, or performing works that stand in contrast, whether subtly or blatantly to the established norms, these works subvert, mock, and challenge the perceived reality of the majority, forcing them to confront the troubling possibility that their world-view may not be the only valid one, or worse yet, that it is as flawed as that of those they feel superior to.

Native American literature has challenged Anglo-European notions since it’s earliest publication, just as Native American customs, cultures, and commodities challenged Anglo-European explorers and colonizers during the colonization of North and South America. There is an almost universal political element to Native fiction, whether the subtle barbs of Lucy Tapahonso, the stereotype shattering of D’Arcy McNickle, the tongue-in-cheek revolutionary rants of David Seals, the homey wisdom of Louise Erdrich, or the outright assault on Anglo-European norms employed by Leslie Marmon Silko. While Silko’s work is not the focus of this particular paper, it is worth keeping in mind her oft-repeated remark, to the effect that she was writing in English to “use the enemy’s language against him”.

This is exactly what D’Arcy McNickle and Louise Erdrich’s female characters do, especially in regards to the “good sister” and the “bad sister” which both employ in their novels. These pairs challenge, both by their actions and attitudes, Anglo-European ideals of the feminine and the roles women are assumed to take, as well as Western notions of morality in general. By their refusal to sit comfortably in the box Western literature has built to hold female characters, even feminist ones, these sisters struggle to make know to their Western readers a world-view that is as challenging as it is refreshing, and a threatening as it is timely.

Two Sisters

A traditional Ojibwa story cycle relates the tale of Matchikeis, the “good sister” and Oshikiwe, the “bad sister”[1]. Matchikeis follows the customs and norms of her society, and is considered reliable, hard working, trustworthy, and moral. Oshikiwe is the opposite side of this coin, flighty, lazy, tricky, and loose. In an Anglo-European story, one would expect that the “good sister” would be praised, while the “bad sister” is vilified, just as the dutiful Cinderella is praised at the expense of her “wicked stepsisters”. However, in the Ojibwa stories, this is patently not the case. Both sisters are equally loved, and both are equally heroines in the tale. More than that, they share a husband, quite happily in fact, which in many ways is an affront to Anglo-European notions of family and of female sexuality.

The Ojibwa seem to recognize in these stories an idea, which, despite its obvious logic, has never been popular in Anglo-European thought. In Western culture, the idea that in order to have good, one must necessarily have bad, and that to remove one would make the other meaningless, has always been considered subversive. Western cultures have long propounded the notion that there are both “pure” good and bad, and that one or the other can exist alone. Most monotheistic religions are in fact based on this very principle, and Anglo-European culture is still, at its core, based on these religions.

This, to my mind, is why Erdrich chooses to parallel this ancient story in Love Medicine. By making the two matriarchs of the families portrayed such seeming opposites, and yet having them share the love of one man, Erdrich issues a challenge to the white world’s ideas about the nature of love, female sexuality, and morality.

Marie, the good sister, is everything a respectable wife should be, a good homemaker, loyal to her husband, pious, and very caring towards not only her own children but also those that she has taken in from extended family. She tries to keep her husband from drinking, tries to keep him “respectable”, and strives for a sort of pious peace both for herself and within her community. In this way she is a stark contrast to Lulu, who freely sleeps with whatever man she desires, regardless of marital vows or public censure, whose home seems at first a pocket of chaos, and who seems not to care at all what others in the community think of her.

Yet neither Marie, nor Lulu is as clear-cut as they first seem. While Marie is pious, even aspiring to be a nun, she enters the convent not because she hears the call, but because she dreams of being a saint. Marie’s conception of sainthood is flawed by her pride however. She sees her piety as a way of proving herself superior to whites in general, and to the authoritative nuns who run her school in particular:

“...No reservation girl ever prayed so hard. There was no use trying to ignore me any longer. I was going up there on the hill with the black robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I was going up there to pray as good as they could.... And they never thought they’d have a girl from this reservation as a saint they’d have to kneel to. But they’d have me...”

Her excessive pride is evident elsewhere as well. She brags about her husband’s leadership in the tribe, takes great pride in the accomplishments of her children, and looks down on Lulu and her relations as less respectable. Despite her “goodness”, she is tainted by a kind of feverish pride, which makes her at times makes her seem harsh and unforgiving such as when she uses gossip to punish her friends for nosiness.

Lulu, on the other hand, has many positive qualities that are masked by her bad girl image. She is extremely fond of her sons, no matter who their fathers might be, and runs her home with a firm but loving hand, she “...managed to make the younger boys obey perfectly...while the older ones adored her to the point that they did not tolerate anything less from anyone else.” Her sexuality, the cause of much of her “badness”, is nevertheless also a source of immense power for her, shown to perfect example when she threatens to “hit the tribe with a fistful of paternity suits that would make their heads spin” unless her demands are met by the tribal council, or when Beverly Lamartine is pulled helplessly into her arms, unable to resist her.

Both women share a love in common, that of Nector, Marie’s husband and Lulu’s long-time lover. Both bare him children, and both provide something very much needed in his imperfect life. At the end of the novel, the two do something almost unheard of in a Western story, becoming fast friends after his death, taking care of each other throughout their twilight years. As Lipsha Morrissey recounts:

“ Only Grandma Kashpaw [Marie] wasn’t one trifle current at the insight Lulu showed. She and Lulu are thick as thieves now...”

These paired “sisters” serve as more than just allusions to and ancient Ojibwa story, they subtly challenge the stereotypes of women that are all-too-prevalent in Western writing. Neither Marie nor Lulu really needs Nector; rather, they both want him. They act on their sexual desire, subtly in Marie’s case, and blatantly in Lulu’s, which is an anathema for traditional Western female characters, who are usually acted upon. They are also extremely strong women, the center of their respective families. One gets the impression that Marie would have no problems if Nector left, save that of her own thwarted desire, just as Lulu gets by quite well despite having no male “bread-winner” to support her. Neither woman needs a man, but both want one. The only characters exhibiting such behavior in most Western novels are either whores or libertines. Erdrich’s “sisters” are neither, making their very existence in print a subversion of Anglo-European values.

Catherine the Faithful vs. Elise the Libertine

D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded contains two female characters that in many ways foreshadow Erdrich’s Marie and Lulu. Catherine the Faithful, mother of the protagonist Archilde, and Archilde’s love interest, Elise La Rose. The Salish people, of whom McNickle writes so passionately, shared many cultural elements with their northern neighbors, Erdrich’s Ojibwa, and one can find parallels to the story of Good Sister and Bad Sister in The Surrounded. Catherine is a highly regarded member of the tribe, educated by the Catholic missionaries and daughter of a chief. She is in many ways the epitome of a good Indian woman, whereas Elise, also the daughter of a chief, Old Modeste, is neither pious, nor traditional. She drinks, dances with white men, and is very sexually assertive. Unlike Marie and Lulu, these two women do not share a lover in common, but they both love Archilde, one maternally and one romantically.

However, whereas in Love Medicine Lulu as the Bad Sister is by far the more subversive, in The Surrounded it is Catherine as the Good Sister who most strongly challenges Anglo-European ideas of progress, civilization, and morality.

Elise may be a bit of a libertine, but she is almost expected to be. In the rural West especially, Indian women are often thought of as “easy” and promiscuous, alcoholics and barflies. Elise to some extent fulfills these expectations, and therefore doesn’t challenge Anglo stereotypes to any great degree.

On the other hand, Catherine is educated by priests, married to a successful European farmer, held in high regard by her tribe and in as high regard as an Indian woman might be by the Anglo community. Despite this, or rather because of it, hers is the most subversive role played in the novel. Her rejection of English, her disdain for modern conveniences, and eventual renunciation of Catholic faith make of her life a direct challenge to the ruling ideals of Anglo-European culture.

Despite her marriage to the prickly and proud Max, Catherine chooses not to live in the fine house at the center of the family’s ranch, instead spending her days in the smoky comfort of an old log cabin. She refuses to speak any language but Salish, despite being educated in English and possibly in Spanish as well. Her husband Max is forced to use Salish to speak to his wife:

“When he talked to her he had to use her tongue, since if he tried to use English, which she knew perfectly, she would pretend not to understand”

It is this focus on her language, which slowly leads her away from the white world. The language of one’s thought and dream-life colors one’s social interaction and daily life, and by choosing to live in Salish, Catherine is defying the white world, if only subtly.

This defiance comes out in other ways as well. Catherine’s cabin is littered with “modern” contraptions, all gone to waste and ruin:

“The stove had been worn away by rust but not by use, because she went on cooking over a camp fire. With every new thing it was the same. The Sisters had taught her many arts, but they had not quite taught her to be interested in using them. Possibly there was a deeper reason for her neglect, but on the surface that was what she felt”

Her rejection of white materialism is a striking critique of the differences between the two cultures. While trained in the domestic arts of the white world, she has a nomad’s disdain for bulky possessions and complicated practices that lead to evermore work and an individual being “owned” by their possessions. To Catherine, “it seemed that you could not live in a house as you lived outdoors or in a tepee. The outdoors cleansed itself and so did a tepee. You moved it and the dirt fell out. Besides, you did not mind a little dirt.”

Catherine’s desire to go hunting is another subtle challenge to Anglo-European culture, one that Leslie Marmon Silko uses in as well, both in Ceremony and Storyteller. In Anglo-European culture, hunting is an exclusively male endeavor. White writers speak of “Man the Hunter”, and traditionally regulate women to the role of gatherers, handy-craft workers, and domestics. There are several falsehoods in this perception; most notably that hunting was the main source of food for “hunter-gatherers”. In fact, the gathering done mainly, but not exclusively, by women provided the majority of subsistence for such cultures, making women the center of such tribal economies and as such extremely powerful. Additionally, women in such cultures often hunted as well as the men, particularly when they did not have young children or after their children were grown. (Mander) One rarely hears mention a huntress in Western literature, with the possible exception of Greek myth, with Diana the virgin huntress as an archetypal figure.

Furthermore the crisis of the novel, Catherine’s killing of the game warden, came about largely due to a conflict between two radically different views of the nature and purpose of hunting. For Anglo-Europeans, hunting is often thought of as a recreation, a hobby of the rich and idle, particularly in the early days of North American settlement. (Mander). As such, only certain animals were to be hunted, usually males, which made good trophies. Louise killing a doe, because the meat would be more tender, and Catherine’s acceptance of this, are therefore affronts to the ruling class’s idea of proper hunting, but make perfect sense from the point of view of a subsistence culture. As Louis says to Archilde, “I suppose you shot a fifteen-year old buck like a God-damned white man. That’s tender meat, that, a yearling doe.” Unlike the Natives, the Game Warden sees this as a breach of the law. “You’ve got a doe here. You know there’s a law against killing female deer, don’t you?” This difference in world-view, and the warden’s rejection of the family’s claims to being exempt from game laws leads directly to the death of both Louis and the warden.

Ultimately, it is Catherine’s rejection of Catholicism and it’s faith in authority that makes the strongest statement in the novel. In attempting to ease her guilt over the killing, she first goes to the priest to seek absolution through confession, but leaves the church without achieving peace of mind. It is only after she goes to the elders and asks to be whipped that she achieves a measure of peace.

This is perhaps one of the most radical ideas proposed in the novel. The idea that absolution, and the authority to absolve rest in the individual, and not in an authority above the individual is a challenge not only to the rule of law and of organized religion, but to one of the basic tenants of Western culture itself.

Amongst the Salish, one must go and ask to be punished, and hence absolved, of a wrongdoing. No one has the authority to force punishment or repentance on another without they themselves being guilty of wrongdoing. The Salish were a society without police, without organized structures of coercion and permanent laws that applied without regard to situation. Yet even the Jesuits found them to be “instilled with a sense of Moral Law”. The tradition of the whip negates much of what is thought necessary and right in Western society. No authority, be it God or the penal system, can absolve a person of a wrong unless they choose to be absolved. As Modeste says, “When we were told to give this [whipping] up, they said they would give us new laws. Well, they gave us those new laws and now nobody is straight. Nobody will confess and nobody will go to the white judge...” Such logic renders a thousand years of Western political thought and jurisprudence null and void, making anathemas of these perceived saviors of society. In effect the Salish are saying that the judge who sentences and the jailor who imprisons are as guilty of crimes as the criminals they incarcerate or execute.

This ethos is to be found in only one school of European thought, which was itself largely inspired by the “discovery” of Native American societies, namely Anarchism. Not the anarchism of everyday parlance, the idea of no order or responsibility, but rather the idea that authority begins and ends at the individual, and that the use of coercion for any means is an affront to free will and therefore a kind of criminal act, a theft of choice. As Proudhon, one of the most influential anarchist writers put it:

“To be governed is to watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, not wisdom, nor virtue [to do so.]”

In her rejection of the authority both of Church and Law, Catherine loses her faith, but finds a peace in her last days, having lived a life that, while smeared with tragedy, nonetheless served as a wonderful critique of the contradictions and injustices that underlie the culture that has come to dominate her homeland. As she says after under going her whipping:

“If any of you think I’ve done wrong, it will do no good to say so. To me it is clear and I won’t go back. Only consider. For years I saw how the world was going. You knew my sons and how I prayed to keep them from going to hell. It would have been better if they had been given the whip. Praying was not what was needed for them, and it does me no good. You have made this promise [to forgo the whip in favor of confession] but tonight you ought to forget about it. If you get in trouble over it, it will be nothing new. We have trouble no matter what we do, and we ought to just forget about it and live as it seems best.”[2]

Elise and Catherine, Marie and Lulu. Both pairs challenge Anglo-European thought in ways both subtle and sublime. Whereas it is Bad Sister Lulu in Love Medicine that makes the challenge most clearly, it is the Good Sister Catherine that most challenges the white world in The Surrounded. The reader is forced to recognize the idea that not only are the Good Sister and the Bad Sister equally loved, they are equally important. They are not polarized opposites, but the connected ends of the same circle, with the wealth and variety of human behavior and action stretching between them even as they stand back to back, sisters in the struggle to keep their traditions alive and adapt their people to a new and hopefully better world they will help bring about.

Works Cited:

Edwards, Stuart. Selected Writings of P-J. Proudhon. New York, 1969.

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992

McKnickle, D’Arcy. The Surrounded. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1981./

Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

[1] From Nina Bjornson’s lecture, The University of Iceland, 15.02.2005

[2] Italics added.

Another Native Lit Response

2007-01-22T13:31:00.000-08:00

Samuel Levesque

NA Lit

Response to The Surrounded

At first glance, Storyteller and The Surrounded seem to be very different books. Storyteller is a radical attempt to challenge the conventional novel, incorporating myth, poetry, photography, and short story forms. McNickle’s The Surrounded is, as far as structure goes, a rather standard novel. It has a main plotline beginning with Archilde’s return to his childhood home, moving through a series of events and crisises ending with his arrest. Behind and interwoven into this overall story are the back-stories of many of the characters (such as the story of Max and Catherine’s estrangement) and “side” plots (such as Mike’s torment in the Jesuit school and subsequent cure) that have bearing on the main plot line, but exist as somewhat distinct sections.

It is probably safe to say that The Surrounded had some effect on Storyteller, as it was one of the first novels about Native Americans published by a Native American, but I see Storyteller as more of a response to, rather than an echo of, The Surrounded. McNickle was very “American” in his style and his life, in some ways an example of an “assimilated Indian”, whereas Silko, despite her accomplishments in the “white” world, seems to identify much more with her “Indianness” and defy European-American literary traditions. The difference is that The Surrounded tells a story about Indians in the white man’s language using standard literary forms, while Storyteller tells an Indian story in the white man’s language, without regard to white traditions or form. Storyteller seems to be saying to The Surrounded, “Why don’t you be more Indian? If you’re going to tell stories about us, why tell them like a white man?”

Nevertheless, there are echoes of The Surrounded in Silko’s work. Story and history are central themes and catalysts in both books. Old Modeste’s story at the feast opens Archilde’s eyes to his people and his history, just as Silko’s aunt’s stories kept her tied to her tribe and birthplace. Also interesting is the fact that both books deal with mixed families, Archilde’s Salish-Spanish, and Silko’s American-Laguna. Both involve European people who live and work amongst the Indians, although in McNickle’s character Max, such a life is both uneasy and somewhat lonely.

As far as the women in both books go, there is a noticeable difference. The majority of Silko’s protagonists are women, and many of the most important actors in her tales are mothers, daughters, grandmothers, or other female relations. In contrast, McNickle’s female characters, though important to the plot, serve mainly as catalysts and are not terribly well fleshed out. Both authors write strong female characters, both independent and capable, but Silko’s characters are more fully realized, and more numerous.

Throughout this course, as well as in my outside reading of Native American writing, I have found it interesting how the gender of the author almost always mirrors the gender of the majority of the characters. There are characters of both sexes in both books, but a preponderance of women inhabit Storyteller, whereas it is mostly men who play out the story of The Surrounded. I do not think this has much to do with any chauvinism or blatant feminism on the part of either author, but more with the fact that most writers write what they know. Whether this is also due to some cultural differences, the pueblo peoples matriarchy, or a more separate gender dynamic within NA cultures is more perhaps in the hands of an ethnographer than a lit major.

One motif I see in common between the two books is the idea that what was brought to the Natives by the whites was far more harmful than beneficial, often in subtle ways. Aside from the obvious germs, guns, and alcohol, whites brought with them a material culture and spirituality very much at odds with that of the Salish and Laguna peoples.

It is this cultural/spiritual conflict that lies at the heart of The Surrounded, the imposition of a hierarchal, materialist worldview onto a decentralized, nomadic people. This same conflict comes out in “Storyteller”, and both The Surrounded and “Storyteller” end with someone being punished for a crime, however just or unjust the case may be. Both the protagonist in “Storyteller” and Archilde run into a system of law that will either punish them for something they did not do, or refuse to punish them for something they did do.

The other common motif is the story of the harm done by the Indian Schools, although both books also show some small good coming from them as well. Both Silko and McNickle got their education from mission schools, and whatever their retrospective regrets, it is true that their stories wouldn’t be the same without this intervention, unjustified as it was. Archilde’s time in the schools was unpleasant, but he came away with a useful skill and an ability to function more in the white world than his brother Louis. Silko’s aunt, introduced early in Storyteller, is another example of an Indian educated away from home and returning to her people. This in no way justifies the harm done to Indian children like those in “Lullaby” and Mike and Narcise, but it shows the kind of liminal space these people were forced into by the conflict between their traditional cultures and their western education.

Early Days...Goddamn I'm preachy!

2007-01-22T13:20:00.000-08:00

Work and Wealth on the Border:

Representations of Ethnic Economics in the Works of Simon Ortiz and Dagoberto Gilb.

As human beings, we, as personal and social cultural entities, are conscience beings because of story, no other reason. (Ortiz,viii)

As any reader knows, what is left unsaid and unmentioned in a story is often as important as that which is stated. One can call attention to an issue by naming it, or by one’s refusal to speak its name. As often as our words help create the world, so do our silences. Much of what is meaningful and powerful in the world is rarely spoken of, rather it is left unnamed to grow in a void of silence.

Dagoberto Gilb is not one for silences. His The Magic of Blood is a calling forth of the lives, loves, fears and passions of an often-silenced segment of American society. He and Ortiz speak for their people and their selves, weaving tales of poverty and near-poverty, of the duties and failings of fathers, of the disempowerment of men and women (but mostly men) whose lives are forever at the mercy of policies and institutions that they have little or no say in. Gilb and Ortiz look at the oblivion of drink, the complex web of multi-lingual and multi-cultural interactions, and the loss of innocence and coming of age universal to human life. They chose mainly masculine voices to tell the tales, chose short, carefully crafted tales to tell, and chose the voices of the poor, the lower-class, and the struggling.

But for all their similarities, there is a gulf of silence between Gilb and Ortiz in regard to one central theme. While Gilb’s work abounds with references to work and wages, payments, rent, bills, and all the paraphernalia of a currency driven economy, Ortiz barely whispers these words, instead letting his silence speak for him.

Why this glaring disparity between two authors whose stories otherwise seem to have so much in common? Why does one speak with his silence and the other shout? I believe the answer lies in the differing concepts of wealth and work held, and the differing values placed on these seemly central issues by Native Americans and Latinos. But how do these ethnic economics compare to each other, and to mainstream Anglo-American economics, and what can we learn from them?

Dagoberto Gilb and the Latino Work Ethic

“You remember the days when we were not rich, but when poverty was different, not a thing to be ashamed of, and we got along okay. You remember when we had a certain freedom, and you know we don’t have it anymore….”

--John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War (145-146)

Whenever one discusses an ethnic group in a general sense, one has to be careful to make sure that the stereotype is employed as a useful fiction, that while the general state of things might be a certain way, there are always exceptions to the rule. This holds true of an author’s work as well. While Gilb gives us an insight into a world inhabited by many Latinos, it is not the only world they live in. The borders of ethnicity and class are not fixed, but it is often easier to view themes and issues from a generalized view than to attempt to paint an exact portrait of the lives of any group.

The central theme in The Magic of Blood is the struggles of the laboring class in a society where there exist no guarantees to the basic necessities of life. The men and women who make up this class are constantly on the border of poverty. An injury or illness, changing economic trends, the whims of employers or social services, all these can push an individual to one side of the border or the other. This disempowerment is strongly felt by Gilb’s characters. As Frank Lopez, a supporting character in “FDR Was a Democrat” explains as he holds up a finger mangled in a work accident:

“Five months ago I smashed it…They took off my fingernail and bled it and said I crushed the bone. Then, to top it off, the very next day the company had problems and shut down the job. I got one days work.” (249)

One way Gilb’s laborers combat this disempowerment is through a work ethic that accepts lay-offs and unemployment as an inevitable part of working life, but nevertheless takes considerable pride in and places considerable emphasis on skill and perseverance. Gilb’s characters are often multi-talented, able to do a wide variety of work and willing to take whatever work is on offer. The important point is to be working, making a living for oneself and ones family.

Another strategy is a sort of voluntary lowering of material standards. Most of Gilb’s characters take pride in their possessions, even though they are few and far from new. As in the quote from The Milagro Beanfield War, Gilb’s protagonists are not ashamed of their poverty, so long as they have pride in their work and their basic needs are met. A good example is Juan Romero, the title character of “Romero’s Shirt” who “hangs wall paper and doors, he paints, he lays carpet, does just about anything someone will call and ask him to do.” This same character had a car which “he’d kept up since his early twenties…and he worked on it so devotedly that even now it was in as good a condition as almost any car could be.” (94-95) There is a rather stoic, Spartan character to these men, they do whatever they need to get what they need. However, unlike the rural characters in The Milagro Beanfield War, Gilb’s are generally urbanites, to far removed from the land to make a living from it.

The Latino work ethic is strongly related to the idea of machismo, not the Anglicized version of the word, implying chauvinism, violence, and misogyny, but in the Spanish sense, implying a code of honor whereby a man must provide for his dependents regardless of the personal sacrifice involved so long as one’s pride is intact.

While not ashamed of their poverty, Gilb’s creations are acutely aware of it, and it shows in their constant discussion and fixation on finances. There is hardly a story in the book where no mention is made of money. Prices, payments, wages, rent, unemployment benefits, and winnings are a constant theme, restraining or liberating the characters according to the seemingly random fluctuations of the economy. This does not mean that money in and of itself is of primary importance. As the unnamed narrator of “Look on the Bright Side” says at the opening of the book:

The way I see it, a man can have all the money in the world but if he can’t keep his self respect, he don’t have shit. A man has to stand up for things even when it may not be very practical. A man can’t have his pride and give up his rights. (3)

Rather than a prime motivator, money is used as a yardstick by which success is measured, but one gets the impression that despite his emphasis on money, most of Gilb’s characters would sooner give up material success than their own pride.

Simon Ortiz and the Socio-Economics of Native America

“Flat broke, not one sawbuck left.”

Nobody seemed to care much, including Paymaster Philbert. I mean, what’s money? It leaves Traditionals cold. It’s nothing. They had full gas tanks, full stomachs, good friends and family all around…who needs those green frog skins of the whitemen? If it might have made an American a little sick to his stomach to have blown two grand on handouts to strangers…it didn’t bother old-time Indians. Generosity was one of the great virtues of the old-timers, along with endurance and wisdom. They felt good. They weren’t worried. Something would turn up…

--David Seals, Sweet Medicine (54-55)

To understand why the virtual silence on the issues of wealth and work in Simon Ortiz’s Men on the Moon speaks volumes about the Native American worldview, one must examine and understand a system of economics so diametrically opposed to that of the industrialized west that it is rarely if ever discussed in the modern world.

In the Industrialized West, the foundation of the economy is surplus production, that is, producing more than what one needs in order to sell it at a profit. Profit implies competition, and in an equal exchange such as traditional barter systems, no profit is made.

Native Americans continue to be by far the poorest ethnic group in North America, with higher rates of infant mortality, shorter life expectancy, and higher rates of substance abuse than other ethnic groups. However, as Jerry Mander argues in In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations, much of this poverty is caused more by the interruption of traditional lifestyles than by any inherent flaw in their traditional modes of survival.

Until roughly 400 years ago, most Native American societies were entirely self-sufficient in food, clothing, shelter, and most other material needs. Trade, in the form of barter, was reserved almost solely for luxury goods. According to Stone Age Economics, by Marshall Salhins, most pre-industrial aboriginal cultures also made of point of “deliberate under-production”.(20)

There is a conscience and consistent disregard for the notion of ‘maximum effort from the maximum number of people’…Labor power is underused, technological means are not fully engaged, natural resources are left untapped…production is low relative to existing possibilities. The work day is short. The number of days off exceeds the number of work days. Dancing, fishing, games, sleep, and ritual seem to occupy the greater part of one’s time. (Salhins, 25)

Salhins goes on to point out that in hunter-gatherer societies the average workday amounted to roughly four hours a day, and that in non-feudal, pre-industrial societies the work day was no more than an hour or so more on average. Many individuals did not do “productive work” at all. All this points to a culture more interested in rest than production, very unlike the Industrial West. (12-150)

Furthermore, most tribes had a combination of traditions and social sanctions that prevented individuals from amassing a disruptive amount of wealth. Reciprocal gift giving, communal food storage, and “potlatch”, the practice of giving away or destroying excessive wealth in order to gain social prestige, were all common practices, and in many tribes they remain so (Mander, 221-224).

These factors lead to an economy so unlike that of the industrialized west as to be almost unrecognizable as such. Rather than measuring wealth in material terms, subsistence economies measure wealth in leisure, communal harmony, and sustainability (Mander, 247-262). In fact, many tribes continue to practice traditional industries in order to feed themselves, and until recently there were many that still lived largely off the land. Examples of this abound in Ortiz’s text, in “Kaiser and the War”, with its recurrent talk of cornfields and sheep-camps, or Jimmo’s father making his own crutches from native wood in “Something’s Going On”. (59-60) As Suzy Erliche of Kotezbue, Alaska put it:

I came from a subsistence family. I grew up that way. I am very proud of it. I want my children to grow up that way. It brings strength to us as Inupiats. It is something different than going to the store. Our grocery store is millions of acres wide, and it brings us pride.

--Thomas R. Berger, Village Journey (165)

It therefore comes as no surprise that Ortiz, a member of the oldest continuously inhabited pueblo in North America would not place a great deal of emphasis on money, or on wage-work. To a traditional, or even quasi-traditional Native American, such things are not only foreign, but also somewhat distasteful. As another Alaskan Native, Antoinette Helmer put it:

Profit to non-natives means money. Profit to natives means a good life derived from the land and the sea…This land we hold in trust is our wealth. It is the only wealth we could possible pass on to our children…

--Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred (301)

Wealth and Work on the Border: The Anglo-American Reality

The differing views of wealth and work, detailed in Gilb’s work and hinted at in Ortiz’s, serve to illustrate that while the different ethnic groups of the Border Southwest may share some characteristics, other telling differences lie just beneath the surface. When compared with mainstream Anglo culture, these distinctive “ethnic economies” shed a harsh light on the norms and values associated with work and wealth in America’s consumer culture.

Summing up the most basic and general facets of the mainstream consumer culture, one quickly sees the contrasts. Success and economic health are measured almost solely in terms of currency. Nowhere is this more telling than when one examines the Gross National Product (GNP), the primary measurement of economic health according to standard Western economics. The GNP measures the vibrancy of an economy by how much money changes hands, either in earnings or payments, and how often these exchanges take place. The problem is that this system is inherently flawed, as detrimental social costs, such as increased crime rates and hence crime prevention costs or increased rates of disease and hence medical costs, serve to push up the numbers in the very same way that social gains (increased home ownership, for example) do. When viewed from the point of view of either of the two ethnic economic theories previously discussed, this is not only strange, but also downright distasteful. (Mander, 25-30)

The same could be said for the issue of work. Despite growing concern over the nature of work in Anglo-American culture, there is still a common prejudice against manual labor of the sort that Gilb’s character engage in, and against the “lazy” subsistence economy of traditional Native groups. Jobs are ranked according to their rate of pay, and the level of specialization required, not according to their social impact or needfulness. That is to say that a professional athlete, whose work is highly paid and highly specialized, despite the fact that it does little to serve the community, is more highly respected than the multi-skilled handy man employed to repair public parks or the subsistence farmer supporting his family and community.

Finally, the concept of “newness” and its supposed desirability over “old” or “traditional” is not only the foundation of consumerist culture, but also a direct contradiction of both the pragmatism of Latino economic thinking, where one cares for possessions and purchases long-lasting products, and the immaterialist ethos of traditional Native America.

Reaching Across Borders

The hard-working, hard-drinking toughness of the Latino labor class is just one facet of a culture that also places a high premium on family, pride, craftsmanship, and tends to disdain crass materialism in favor of economic prudence. While there is danger in a life lived on the border of poverty, there is also great pride and accomplishments, which are often overlooked by the standard Anglo emphasis on material wealth and “white collar” prestige jobs.

The radically different economic thought behind Native America’s traditional and resilient cultures show by its stark contrast with Anglo-America’s that they are other ways of life possible. In our increasingly money-driven, money-oriented, and money-soaked world the existence of a time-proven and currency-free system offers a refreshingly different vision of a life that is slower, more stable, more relaxed, and free of much of the more egregious aspects of modern life.

Both Men on the Moon and The Magic of Blood are more than just collections of superbly written stories, they are cross-border views into cultures all too often ignored by “mainstream America”, with lessons to teach should the Anglo world wish to sit still and listen.

Works Cited:

Berger, Thomas R. Village Journey: The Report of the Alaskan Native Review Commission. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

Gilb, Dagoberto. The Magic of Blood. New York: Grove Press, 1993.

Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992.

Nichols, John. The Milagro Beanfield War. London: Arrow Books, 1974.

Ortiz, Simon J. Men on the Moon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1972.

Seals, David. Sweet Medicine. New York: Orion Books, 1992.

Response to "Storyteller"

2007-01-22T13:14:00.000-08:00

Samuel Levesque

20th Century Native American Literature

Response #1: Storyteller

My response to this reading is very mixed. While I enjoyed many of the individual tales and poems, and found the pictures appealing, the structure of the book (or perhaps it’s willful un-structure) simply confused me. Most of the response questions dealing with Silko’s oral-to-literate strategies have been well discussed in class, but on the issue of authorship, I think there’s a lot more to say.

The question of authorship was perhaps the most interesting to me. In an oral culture, stories are rarely properties. Although a culture might have a taboo against men telling “women’s stories” or telling “winter stories” in the summer, there is rarely if ever the notion that an individual owns the tale. Anyone can retell a good story, adapt it to their own style, change plot elements to make a different point, and not be judged to be “debasing” or even “stealing” a story. What matters is the story-teller’s talent, his or her performance. Story is not a commodity, but rather a common store of knowledge and lore that serves as a communal bond. Story, by incorporating education (cautionary tales, like “Storyteller”, or histories like “A Geronimo Story”) and entertainment, linked with it’s participatory nature, is a sort of cultural glue that binds a community together.

This contrasts starkly with modern Western notions of authorship and literature. In the Western tradition, the person who first writes the story down owns the story, and anyone else using it, or parts of it, must pay the author (either in money or, in the case of citation, homage). Further, due to the fact that the story has a material existence as a written book, one is forbidden to change the story from it’s original form. One would be hard pressed in literary circles, or in the courts for that matter, to get away with writing a story called Jane Eyre, a romping sex-comedy set in pre-industrial England, which mirrors the “original” but takes the plot off on a different tangent for a different audience. Stories, being a form of property in Western thought, must be “original” (which is in and of itself a fiction) and should be kept in their “original” form.

The nature of the experience is also different. Western works are generally read alone, neither performed nor shared. After the reader has finished the book, with it open to the appropriate page, they might discuss it. But they must always be ready to cite the author’s text with a fetishistic zeal to “stick to the story”.

This ownership of story, and even of ideas (witness the hullabaloo that would result from anyone claiming to have “discovered” the Second Law of Thermodynamics, even if said person had never read a physics book...) is utterly foreign to a non-literate oral tradition. Idea’s and stories simply are. They exist to be told, and the telling is what matters.

Silko confronts the reader with this contradiction by telling many different versions of what are in essence the same story. Rather than being inviolate things to be repeated by rote, stories are adapted to audience, teller, and lesson to be imparted. This turns the western idea on its head. Imagine someone telling you the story of The Catcher in the Rye, but altered to be a cautionary tale on the importance of obeying your elders.

There is a distinct contradiction, however, when one looks outside of the stories and at the book itself. While Silko consistently confronts and batters the idea of story as a fixed and permanent thing, in direct opposition to the western ideal of “literature”, the book itself bears a copyright stamp, and anyone using the stories or ideas put forward in it is hereafter required to cite the author as the “owner” of this information. I find myself disappointed that Silko shied away from the truly revolutionary step of refusing to copyright the book and publishing it anyways, making the stories free and adaptable to anyone who wished to use them.

In some ways one could say that in the very act of publishing this book, Silko, rather than using an oral tradition to challenge the “linear, individualistic, Eurocentric, literary tradition” simply converts one to the other. All her other stratagems; her purposeful avoidance of chronological order, the multi-medial aspect of including family photographs, the italic asides in almost every poem, and the formulation of the book as a whole to imply that maybe the stories authored Leslie Marmon Silko and not the other way around, all these fail in the light of the fact that she, and of course her publishing company, now own these stories. Rather than liberating the white man’s language and using it against the oppressor, she has done to her stories what was done to so many reservation plots, namely lost them to the legalities of the white world, whether she wanted to or not.

Perhaps I am taking this to far. But an ongoing theme in Silko’s work is the importance of story as a real thing, an aspect of existence that does not exist only in the airy realms of myth or the ivory towers of academia, but something that continually creates both our dreamscapes and our everyday lives. This is where that tiny little copyright stamp brings the whole thing down. If her aim is to use story, written or unwritten, to break the bonds of Western thought, that little witch-stamp has undone her work in a fundamental way. You can be as revolutionary, break as many “rules” of literature, decency, common-sense**, or whatnot as you like. As long as that stamp is there, you have not broken free. To wed the physical reality of the book with the ideas expressed therein would, to my sideways thinking mind, be a much more powerful statement on what really matters when it comes to stories.

*See what I mean about whoever writes it down first?

** Neither all that common nor sensible, if examined closely. ©Samuel Levesque, 2005

Distances and Foolish Crows

2007-01-22T13:11:00.000-08:00

Samuel Levesque

Contemporary Native American Literature

Háskólí Íslands, Vor, 2005

Amerindian Armageddon:

Sherman Alexie, James Welch, and the End of the World as We Know It.

Introduction: A Road Trip to the End of the World.

Back in 1999, on the eve of the millennium, I took a solo road trip up the west coast of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Midway on my trip, I got lost looking for Ruby Beach, and wound up driving into the Quinault Indian Reservation.

It stuck with me. A village of some three to four hundred people, tucked into a small, narrow valley leading out into a vast expanse of sand dunes. The surrounding hills were a thicket of over-grown clear-cut. The only sizable buildings were an abandoned wood-chip plant and a tribal office that looked about ready to sink into the sandy soil and disappear. There wasn’t a single house I saw that could have held more than three rooms, and most seemed to have outhouses tacked up out back. Nearly every house had a chimney, a stack of driftwood by the door, an outboard boat that had seen better days, and about three dogs running in the yard. The roads were dirt, not a shop to be seen, and the west end of town was only connected to the local electric system by a jerry-rigged system of extension cords filling the gap that a winter storm had made in the power lines. There were small gardens around the houses, planted with food crops, not a decorative flower in sight, and the nets, crab-pots, and piles of antlers spoke of people still drawing some sustenance from the hills, shores and sea.

A few weeks later I watched a truly awful movie, “The Postman”, yet another of Kevin “Friend to all Indians” Costner’s revolting post-apocalyptic romps, and that village reappeared on the screen. Sure, it wasn’t actually the Quinault Rez, but close enough. The only difference was that this town was full of white people, had its own electric power, and seemed sadly more prosperous than the Rez. Odd.

Then a few weeks back, I reread Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and it all fell into place. This collection of stories and the story “Distances” in particular, all take place within a culture that has weathered what today would be called an apocalypse. Where white sci-fi writers dream up endings for their civilization, many Native American authors are writing post-apocalyptic fiction of their own, based on their lives.

Some, like James Welch in Fools Crow write of the world before and during the fall of Native America, of the smallpox and other plagues that wiped out whole tribes, the systematic slaughter of bands by the cavalry, or individual murders by angry whites. Others, like D’Arcy McNickle, write of the slower, but equally destructive war waged on the Native way of life, on languages, customs, economies and traditions. Still others, like Leslie Marmon Silko in Ceremony seem to say that the world has already ended, when the witchery of European society was let loose on the world. Even the comedic, sarcastic tricksters of Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water have their all-important story of creation interrupted time and again by the backwards dog of white civilization.

The Middle is the Beginning of the End:

Then there are the rest of the stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, stories that share many elements with the post-apocalyptic genre. Its all there, the canned food, the empty cupboards, houses falling apart, jerry-rigged and cold, the ennui, and the isolation. The story titles alone give a feeling of millennialism and the echoes of holocaust: “Every Little Hurricane” calls to mind disasters, “Crazy Horse Dreams” hints at defeat, “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore” gives a sense of entropy, “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix Arizona” implies the mythical bird reborn in its own ashes, “Jesus Christ’s Half Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation” hints at the Second Coming, and “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” calls forth images of inevitable death and radiation. But it is “Distances” with its enigmatic title that truly plunges into Armageddon.

Dancing with Distant Ghosts at the Beginning of Time:

It’s interesting to note that almost (but not quite) all science fiction dealing with life after a holocaust shares some common features. One of the most common is that of people moving back to an agrarian, if not nomadic hunter-gather life style, and the idea that civilization needs to be rebuilt. Interesting because when one thinks about it, as this is the exact opposite of what the Native peoples of the Americas experienced. They were agrarian or hunter-gatherers and their world was destroyed, or at least altered beyond all recognition, by the very civilization that so many sci-fi writers leave their characters pinning for after WWIII, a global pandemic, meteor strike, alien invasion, or solar flare.

This is what makes “Distances”, a mere six pages, recounting life on the Spokane Rez after a nuclear holocaust, so fascinating. A post-post-apocalyptic short story, if you will. One wonders if two “post’s” like two negatives, make their own positive.

The story opens, appropriately enough, with a quote from Wovoka, the messianic prophet of the Ghost Dance, a sort of millennialist religious movement that swept through many tribes towards the end of the 1800’s. The Ghost Dance movement resembles in many ways the fundamentalist Christian belief in a global cataclysm that will wipe out the unbeliever and leave the Earth a utopia for those remaining. Throughout his fiction, Alexie touches on the Ghost Dance, making of it a symbol of rebirth and revolution, but in “Distances” he touches on a darker side of the myth. Whereas Wovoka preaches a promised land after the destruction of the white world, Alexie shows us a world so thoroughly destroyed that the Promised Land itself is consumed in nuclear fire. While Alexie places the blame squarely on the shoulders of white men, in the form of Custer, who “must have pressed the button, cut down all the trees, opened up the holes in the ozone, flooded the earth. Since most of the white men died and most of the Indians lived, I decided only Custer could have done something that backward.” (104) This makes logical sense, as most reservations are well away from urban and strategic centers, placed out of the way and often forgotten. In “Distances”, those made meek really do inherit the earth. His narrator nevertheless dreams of television and wakes up crying.

The story parallels the Ghost Dance, but only so far. The narrator is not rejoicing in the brave new world that has thrust itself into being, he is at most surviving, still fearfully attached to relics of the world past, like the transistor radio he rescues from the pyre of the “white” tribal council house the Spokanes are busily burning to the ground. This is another common feature in post-apocalyptic fiction, the idea that the artifacts and knowledge of the pre-cataclysm world are somehow evil, threatening or even satanic. Most white authors of such fiction make it a point of having their heroes fight this sort of thinking, lathering scorn on the Luddites of their fictional futures, whereas Alexie makes it a central tenet of his story. His character is trying to obey the dictates of the Ghost Dance, but falling ever so slowly from its grace, leaving one with the feeling that he might, as Wovoka says, “grow little, just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of them [Indians who do not participate in the Ghost Dance] will be turned into wood and burned in fire.” (104) As he says himself late in the tale “I make mistakes”. (109)

Another element that often appears in post-apocalyptic fiction is the birth of mutants and new life forms, often coupled with a eugenic backlash aimed at rooting out the “sickness” of the species. Enter Tremble Dancer, the Urban survivor of the holocaust whom the narrator has a forbidden relationship with. Enter the Others, huge creatures of myth returned “from a thousand years ago”, who prey on the surviving Spokanes, yet remain an integral part of the rebirth of the world. Impregnated by one of these giants, Tremble Dancer dies giving birth to a salmon, in fulfillment of Wovaka’s prophecy that the Great Spirit will “bring back all game of every kind” (104). Another Urban gives birth to “a monster”, and we’re left to wonder what exactly the Great Spirit is trying to bring back. (106) Meanwhile those seen to be infected with the “white man’s sickness” whether an actual malady or just a despairing clutching to the world past, are burnt on the football field, prompting the narrator to proclaim that he is glad to be an orphan. (107) Wovaka’s wooden Indians are therefore burnt in fire.

Time has ceased to exist. The narrator rides his “clumsy horse” to the teepee of a friend, one of the few who have left the rez to explore the post-holocaust world outside. The friend, Noah Chirapkin, tells of a land devoid of time, and nearly lifeless.

“The was no sound...I rode for days and days, but there were no cars moving, no planes, no bulldozers, no trees. I walked through a city that was empty, walked from one side to the other and it took me a second. I just blinked me eyes and the city was gone, behind me. I found a single plant, a black flower, in the shadow of Little Falls Dam. It was forty years before I found another one, growing between the walls of an old house on the coast.” (106)

Without the “white man’s artifact”, the “sinful” watches and clocks that “measured time in seconds, minutes, hours...measured time exactly, coldly” the world is returned to a more natural, yet eerie rhythm. The narrator measures time “with my own breath, the sound of my hands across my own skin.” (109)

When “Custer” murdered time with nuclear fire, the end became the beginning, but for the narrator and the rest of the Spokanes, one wonders if Utopia is really around the corner. One wonders if the Spokanes, with all the practice they have had at surviving are going to flourish in the brave new world, or if the suicidal Custers of the dead world will reach beyond their graves and snuff out the last light. This story answers less than it questions, doubts more than it preaches, and is therefore a far more human story than most of the post-apocalyptic fiction churned out since the industrial revolution. There are no heroes, not glorious rebirth of civilization, no battles with the forces of darkness. Just like life on the Rez, only without Diet Pepsi and television.

The Beginning is The End:

Think if our world were invaded by a strange race, armed with weapons beyond our comprehension and introducing organisms that change the very face of the Earth and lead to starvation, disease, and death. Imagine being herded by forces that, no matter how hard you fight, slowly but surely pack you into holding pens, to be used at their leisure. What story would you think of? More than likely, it would be that classic of apocalyptic science fiction, War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

Most readers, on encountering James Welch’s Fools Crow would not think of an apocalypse, but that is exactly what most of the book is about. Fools Crow, the young warrior of the title, is living his life in the twilight years of traditional Blackfoot society. The end of this world as he knows it is already upon them, in the form of small-pox, cavalry massacres, barbed wire fences, bullets, treaties, and reservations. Yet few readers seem to focus on this. The whole thing is usually thought of as history, myth, legend, rather than the defeat and collapse of hundreds of societies. One need look no further for proof that history is usually written by the victor.

Fools Crow begins with a character and tribes that, though they have encountered whites, and are encountering them more and more, are still largely untouched by them. They trade for useful things, but they do not war with them, are not yet forced onto a reservation, and are more interested in showing up their traditional enemies, the Crow, than with driving the whites out of their land. They cure illnesses with traditional medicine, participate in ages old ceremonies, marry, trade, and practice their internal politics.

Slowly though, the whites begin to influence the scene, whether indirectly, in the form of small-pox and trade goods, or directly, as in the murder of Yellow Kidney, or the massacre of Heavy Runner’s band at the hands of the cavalry. The reader is shown the destruction of traditional Blackfoot society at the hands of the whites, just as Wells showed us the destruction of the industrialized world at the hands of the Martian invaders.

Yet both books hold out hope, though they differ in the hope that the hold. Wells ends his tale with the death and destruction of the Martian invaders, brought down by diseases they lack all immunity to (the irony of invaders from the Red planet succumbing to the common diseases that wiped out huge swaths of the “red man” is too thick to contemplate here), whereas Fools Crow is offered a vision of his people continuing, changed but still vibrant in a future he can barely comprehend. No last minute salvation for the Blackfoot, just the arduous victory inherent in survival.

Back to the Future:

This War of the Worlds ending fits nicely into “Distances”, where the invaders have been destroyed by their own ignorance, but “Distances” fails to deliver the message of hope that ends Fools Crow.

Alexie ends with his narrator up in a tree, clutching a plastic transistor radio, searching it for flaws. “All the mistakes would be on the inside, where you couldn’t see, couldn’t reach...I held that radio and turned it on, turned the volume to maximum, until all I could hear was the in and out, in again, of my breath.” T.S. Elliot’s “Ash Wednesday” springs to mind:

“This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the word ends,

Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

The plot of Fools Crow, on the other hand, evokes Yeates’s “The Second Coming”:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned...”

But all is not lost in for Fools Crow and his inheritors. His vision shows him the sufferings of his people, but also their hope:

“I do not fear for my people now. As you say, we will go to a happier place, far from these Napikwans [whites], this disease and starvation.” (359)

Whereas Alexie’s ghost dance leaves his narrator up in a tree clutching at the end of the world, Welch gives us brave young man staring the holocaust in the face yet trusting in his vision of his people’s future.

Things Fall Apart:

Things fall apart. Entropy is a universal rule, as far as we know. Civilizations crumble, rise reborn, and crumble again. Armageddon has already happened and will likely happen again soon. There is little use in blame, but much to learn from survivors. To quote R.E.M., “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”

Things fall apart. But people have this tendency to put them back together. Last time I was out on the Olympic Peninsula, I heard that the Quinaults are making a killing fleecing white tourists at a new resort/casino. More power to them. Things fall apart. People put them back together again.

Works Cited:

Alexie, Sherman: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The Atlantic Monthly Press. New York, 1993.

Eliot, T.S.: “Ash Wednesday”, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition, Edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. New York, 1990.

King, Thomas: Green Grass, Running Water. Bantam Books. New York, 1994.

McNickle, D’Arcy: The Surrounded. University of New Mexico Press. Albuquerque, 1997.

Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony. Penguin Books USA, Inc. New York, 1977.

Welch, James: Fools Crow. Penguin Books USA Inc. New York, 1986.

Wells, H.G.: The War of the Worlds.

Yeates, William Butler: “The Second Coming”, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition, Edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. New York, 1990.

My BA Thesis

2007-01-22T12:38:00.000-08:00

Háskóli Íslands

Hugvísindadeild

Enskuskor

Future Simple

Eco-Feminist Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and the End of the World as We Know It

Ritgerð til B.A.-prófs

Samuel Ludger Levesque

Kt.: 240876-2059

Leiðbeinandi: Guðrún Guðsteinsdóttir

Apríl, 2006

This essay is gratefully dedicated to the late

Octavia Estelle Butler

(June 22, 1947---February 24, 2006).

She may not have “Shaped God”, but her books shaped me.

“We give our dead

To the orchards

And the groves.

We give our dead

To Life.”[1]

Summary

Eco-feminist post-apocalyptica is an exciting emergent genre that turns the more standard post-apocalypse story on it figurative head. These stories argue with highly subversive flair that the world as we know it is fundamentally flawed, so much so that its end is simply inevitable. Yet, they argue that this is not necessarily a pessimistic prospect, but rather that this inevitable end means the chance to a rebuild the world in a better mode. While the first defining characteristic of the genre is the manner in which the world ends, the others serve both to define the genre and to offer alternatives to the current mode of western civilization. The genre questions the entire ideal of ‘Progress’ in its meta-narrative sense, especially our reliance on technology and science to shape our world. The current and possible future state of gender relations are held up to a very harsh light, with radical proposals for change alongside terrifying prophetic visions of the future if change does not come. Religion as an organized entity is soundly condemned, while other, less authoritarian spiritual paths are laid out for the reader. This anti-authoritarian ethos segue ways over to questions of economics and politics, where the genre prescribes decentralization and anarchistic structures as the cures, or at least treatments, for current societal woes. Finally, the genre places a great deal of emphasis on questions of community and community building in direct opposition to the common western emphasis on individual heroes and individualism. The essay concludes with a brief exploration of the application of these points to the ‘real’ world, and what can be learned from the fictional worlds the various authors create.

Table of Contents

Foreword: The Beginning of the End 1

Introduction: Future Positive? 3

I. You Might be Eco-Feminist Post-Apocalyptic Fiction If… 5

II. “This is the way the world ends”: The Making of an Eco-Feminist Armageddon 8

III. Technophobes, Luddites, and Progress Towards What? 11

IV. Little Deaths and the End of Sex as We Know It 17

V. “The ceremonies of innocence”: Monotheism and the Eco-Feminist Ethic 23

VI. “And what rough beast”: Eco-Feminism and Post-Apocalyptic Anarchy 25

VII. Outside Looking Forward: The Quest for Community 28

VIII. Odds and Ends 29

IX. “Slouching towards Bethlehem”: Some Final Thoughts on the End of the World 31

Works Cited 36

Foreword: The Beginning of the End

The demands made on academic writing these days are many and contradictory, particularly in literary studies. On one side, the student hears that “there is nothing outside the text”[2] and that the author is dead. There is no point trying to puzzle out what the author ‘really’ means. The reader is a “co-author” after all. The other side holds us to the older idea of ‘objectivity’ and its injunctions against blending the personal with the academic. The student must be impartial, argue every side of the issue and not allow emotion to cloud his or her scholarship. Furthermore, the student is expected to engage in close reading and puzzle out the subconscious or even unconscious references the author includes in his or her text. Then, to heap obstacles on top of hindrances, ideas invade from outside the ivory towers of literature; theories that tell us that by observing an experiment or any phenomenon, we affect its outcome. Post-modernism tells us that there are no grand meta-narratives to expound- that everything is in the eye of the beholder- and most troublingly, that there is nothing new under the sun. One’s ideas, no matter how original to their creators are not in fact original, but drawn out of the well of history. In academia, one must pay homage to this well in the form of references and research, lest one commit the cardinal sin of plagiarism, even if unwittingly.

As if this clash of theories were not enough, one then has to deal with the authority of professors, instructors, and evaluators. These individuals, placed in power over the student, have the luxury of choosing which of the many contradictory threads of theory they will ally themselves to. In many instances this forces the student (already caught in a tangled web of competing theories and ideologies) to follow the path laid out by those who’s authority gives them the right to claim an illusionary clarity.

This situation, this fluid chaos of idea and theory and practice, accounts for the often-deplorable state of academic writing, at least in my in-no-way-humble opinion. The student, trapped in this web, seeks to please all sides resulting in a fundamental failure. If the purpose of non-fiction is to clearly and concisely explain and expound on an idea then most academic writing, overflowing with jargon and fetishized features, fails miserably.

So what is to be done? In my case, I have simply decided to take responsibility for myself. The following thesis is unabashedly personal, undeniably political, and unrepentantly free of most of the fetishized features of academia.

That being said, I believe my thesis to be topical and worth reading. I believe it has its place in the ivory towers of literate debate, if only outside the door screaming to be let in. In rejecting the form and authority of the standard thesis, I am keeping with the spirit of that which I write about, namely Chaos, Anarchy, and the End of the World as We Know It.

Not to mention Hope.

Introduction: Future Positive?

If the future, especially the fictional future, is the “undiscovered country”, then this is an attempt to map a small section of it, to mark its borders, shed light into its dark interior, and fill in the blanks where previous cartographers have scribbled “Here there be dragons.” But like any explorer setting out into the unknown, I have my worries. Oddly, they have little to do with the place I’m exploring, since I know it well and take both its dangers and its wonders in stride. Rather, I worry about how news of this strange new place I am attempting to map will be received. Will I blunder like Columbus, or fall prey to the insidious urge to claim the place as my own?

The undiscovered country I seek to explore has yet to be named, at least as far as I have searched. I want a great name, a thundering big poetic title, but I’ve had to settle for the academic jargonite of “Eco-feminist post-apocalyptic fiction”. It feels like calling a rose by a very different name. I first blundered into it in the form of two books, both read (or should I say devoured) the summer of my 14^th birthday; Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home, and Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. Without any exaggeration I can claim that these books, tattered paperbacks clutched at whim from the Buckley branch of the Pierce County Library, changed me. Radically. Regarding politics, religion, economics, sexuality, and the whole spectrum of issues and beliefs that make up one’s world-view. For me, these books laid the groundwork.

They also gave me hope. I grew up, like a lot of my contemporaries, thoroughly convinced that I would most likely not live to see adulthood. Children of the 80’s, particularly in deeply religious areas and homes, like mine, tend to share this angst-ridden past. My original fascination with post-apocalyptic fiction, ranging from John Christopher’s post-nuclear fantasies to films like Road Warrior, was firmly rooted in the wish to banish my fears by facing them. If, as nearly every adult and most of the preachers around me said, the world would shortly end in nuclear fire followed by the tribulation of a nuclear winter, I wanted to be prepared.

The two books I read that summer differed from other post-apocalyptic texts I had read. There was little of the nihilistic anti-heroism so often found in after-the-bomb books, and little or none of the misogynistic stereotypes that often people the pages. There were in fact, no bombs, at least of the nuclear sort. The End in these books came about more slowly than that, “not with a bang but a whimper”[3]. The most astounding difference was that rather than ending on a note of savagery or despair, as many other such stories did, these books gave me a feeling of hope, liberation, and longing.

So I started to seek out more. I wanted books that fulfilled my need for a hopeful, exciting future while allowing me the guilty pleasure of witnessing the destruction (usually self-inflicted) of a society I was beginning to realize was far more flawed than school, family, and church had ever dared point out. Youth tends towards anarchism, and the collapse I once feared began to feel like a liberation to desire. So back to the library I went.

I soon discovered an almost entirely female cadre of authors who wrote the sort of books I was looking for. I never stopped to think what it was that made these books unique, what made some fit and others not. Until now that is. I have come to understand that there are certain features that in combination (give or take a pinch of this or that) define a book as Eco-feminist post-apocalyptic fiction, including the manner in which the world ends: An ambivalent and generally negative view of technology and science, emphasis on matters of sexual and reproductive power, an anti-authoritarian ethos both regarding religion and the State, and a focus on community. So, with these landmarks in view, I intend to go explore a new genre.

I. You might be Eco-feminist post-apocalyptic fiction if…

To start with, one needs a definition of the words used to define the genre itself. Neither of which is an easy thing to do. One term is a relatively obscure theory debated in academic circles, and the other is a broad and in some senses oxymoronic turn of phrase. After all, if the apocalypse is the End of the World, how can there be a ‘post’?

An offshoot of ecological or green theory, Wikipedia defines eco-feminism as, “a social and political movement which unites deep ecology[4] and feminism. Eco-feminists argue that a relationship exists between the oppression of women and the degradation of nature, and explore the intersectionality between sexism, the domination of nature, racism, speciesism, and other characteristics of social inequality.” Most of those writing in this genre tend to lean more to the ‘eco’ than to the ‘feminist,’ with the definite exception of Sheri S. Temper and the more qualified exception of Margaret Atwood. The emphasis is usually placed on the inherent destructive tendencies of consumerism, hierarchy, and patriarchy.

As for the ‘post-apocalyptic,’ it helps to think of it not as The End of the World but rather as The End of the World as We Know It. ‘Apocalypse’ therefore, becomes the event, the turning point, the sea change and paradigm shift. Everything that happens after it is therefore ‘post-apocalyptic.’ Yet this definition lacks teeth and specifics. Wikipedia defines post-apocalyptic science fiction (I generally skip the “science”, as there are examples from the fantasy genre as well) as:

[F]iction … set in a world or civilization after … a disaster. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten or mythologized. Post-apocalyptic stories often take place in an agrarian, non-technological future world, or a world where only scattered elements of technology remain.

James Berger, in After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, spends an entire book discussing and exploring the idea of ‘post-apocalypse’, without ever quite managing a succinct definition. For Berger, ‘post-apocalyptic’ is an extremely broad term, taking into account prophecy, history, and social/psychological trauma (intro.).

I find the first definition far too vague and shallow and the latter needlessly complex. My own attempt at defining the apocalypse and whatever comes after it would be this: A critical, destructive event or chain of events that erases all or most of the previous societal structures, even to the point of blurring or erasing its collective myths. The End in these books bears the seeds of new beginnings. It is the freshly cleaned slate upon which we either write a new story, or try to remember the old ones, mixing up the details and misspelling the names.

The agent of the apocalypse is limited only by the imagination. It can be supernatural, i.e. biblical, as in the best-selling Left Behind series; or mythical, as in the “Borderland” anthologies, with Færy making a crashing reappearance into the ‘real’ world; technological, i.e. nuclear accident, killer robots; or a natural disaster such as a massive earthquake or volcanic eruption. Other common apocalyptic factors include alien invasion, pandemic plagues, or, as is most common in eco-feminist post-apocalyptica, societal entropy.

Most post-apocalyptic fiction can be divided into two over-arching genres, survivalist, and catastrophic. Survivalist literature generally deals with the aftermath of a major destructive event, and usually focuses on one individual protagonist, most often male, and his struggle to survive in ‘a world gone mad’. Almost always a loner, without a settled home, these post-apocalyptic wanderers are usually anti-heroic, or at the least very grudgingly so. They embody many nihilist traits, generally thinking of themselves first and not terribly worried about ethics or their own or anyone else’s humanity. This, the reader is led to believe, is the source and foundation of their ability to survive. More often than not, this nihilist nomad is enlisted by a group of settled people to protect them from other brigands, and is slowly and reluctantly dragged back into civilization, which he then sets out to re-establish, complete with the State, Science and Progress.

Catastrophic fiction often focuses more on the story of the catastrophe itself, with survivors as a vehicle to describe the destruction. One almost universal feature of this sort of story is the epiphanic moment when a character or group of characters is forced to break with their ‘civilized’ past, usually by committing a crime in order to survive. The lesson being that since civilization has collapsed, since the State, Science, and Progress are not there anymore, those who cling to civilized standards will be seen as weak and fall prey to more nihilistic elements.

Together, these two themes seem to come full circle. In one, survival rests on the rejection of a broken ‘civilization’, struggling to survive a Hobbesian “war of all against all”. In the other, those that reject civilization for short-term survival are brought back, kicking and screaming, into the fold. At its heart, the genre as a whole seems very conflicted in regard to just what civilization is, and whether or not it is a desirable thing. While these issues remain very much at play in the eco-feminist version, they are somewhat altered in regard to emphasis and viewpoint, and deeply differ in regard to the root causes, most adamantly in to the question of civilization (as we know it), which is roundly condemned throughout the genre.

II. “This is the way the world ends”: The Making of an Eco-Feminist Armageddon.[5]

The first defining aspect of eco-feminist post-apocalyptica is the manner in which the World ends. Unlike the stories of the 50’s and 60’s, the eco-feminist catastrophe is not the sudden terrible dawn of a cataclysmic nuclear war; in fact, it is rarely sudden at all. Rather, “things fall apart,” as Yeats so aptly put it.

Ecological factors, such as pollution, climate change, over-population, drought, famine, pollution-related diseases, along with more Science Fiction-esque problems like genetic mutation, nanotechnology gone amok, and terrible new drug epidemics usually play a prominent role in the End. Other factors like politics, religion, and economics also play key roles. This is in keeping with ecological theory, in particular Deep Ecology, which seeks to show the relationships between institutions and ideas generally thought of as separate.

Unlike the catastrophe story, even when placed at center stage, the apocalypse is seldom the star of the show. The world ends in spurts and spasms in these stories, an economic depression here, and an emergent disease there, a pinch of brushfire war, a dash of ecological disaster, and then, before the characters fully realize it, the World as We Know It has suddenly ended. Sometimes the particular mode of collapse is hardly mentioned or hardly worth mentioning. One has to read LeGuin’s Always Coming Home very closely to find any direct reference to the disaster, cataclysm, or series thereof that brought about the world her people inhabit. Elizabeth Hand’s Glimmering is more forthright with the End ushered in by greed and shortsightedness, in the form of ill-favored attempts to tap the last remaining hydrocarbon resources of the Earth. Yet even that is only a small footnote to the real story. Hand’s Winterlong takes place so far in the future that the actual causes of the initial cataclysm are not only vague, but also disguised by language purposely altered by the author to obscure its true history. The myths built up around it are far more important to the story than the ‘real’ events. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale hints at a devastating religious civil war in the former United States, complete with nuclear meltdowns and biological warfare, yet the real bones of the story lie in its exploration of a Christian fundamentalist society.

Other authors keep more to the catastrophic style, having their characters live through an apocalypse of sorts, but, more often than not, this is just one in a long series of little Armageddons. Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents feature climate change, in the form of global warming and a longstanding drought, along with social and political features, including a new drug that makes pyromaniacs of its addicts, an economy in collapse, and the rise of a far-right fundamentalist government, complete with ‘company towns’ and a reinstitution of slavery. Yet even as these events unfold, they serve as a catalyst for Butler’s heroine to forge her new religion, Earthseed, a belief system that points out the flaws in the existing state of American society.

It is this slow collapse that serves as the first defining feature of eco-feminist post-apocalyptica. Unlike other post-apocalyptic fiction, there is no one event, no one catalyst, no quick fix or last minute reprieve. The comet on collision course that can be turned aside, the bombs that might or might not be launched; the plagues that can be cured at the last moment are all missing. Rather, eco-feminist post-apocalyptic fiction places the blame squarely on deep-seated socio-political factors like consumerism, centralization, capitalism, monotheism, and imbalances of power. The World, according to this genre, will end itself.

This is the rub, after all. While other post-apocalyptic fiction tends to focus on the need to re-establish civilization, to rebuild the State and everything that goes with it while mourning the world past, these books convey a much more subversive message. The world will end because it refuses to change in the right directions. Because the destructiveness of modern consumer culture is so deep-rooted that it will never reform itself until it’s too late. As Butler’s empathic prophetess/heroine, Lauren Olamina, puts it in one of her Earthseed poems from Parable of the Sower:

In order to rise

From its own ashes

A phoenix

First

Must

Burn. (137)

Sheri S. Tepper and Gwyneth Jones take this a step further, both creating groups who actively seek to end the world. In The Family Tree, Tepper creates a group of eco-centric cultists who release a virus in order to rid the world of its systematic evils, only to discover that the goddess of their cult has cured these problems herself, without their unnecessary meddling. Rather than portraying this group as villains, Tepper instead portrays them as simply misguided, entering into a kind of voluntary servitude to atone for their mistakes. In A Plague of Angels Tepper again introduces characters who purposely set out to end the world so that a new one can rise. They introduce diseases to cut excess population, dismantle the works of man, fences, roads, whole cities, and strive to reintroduce wilderness to the decaying ruins of the industrial age. These men and women, once again, are not the villains of the book, but neither are they the heroes. They are, with their tree-planting and fence-smashing, simply the agents of a new world. In Jones’ Bold as Love a mass movement made up of New Age travelers and Greens takes over Britain and sets about tearing down the previous society, slaughtering excess cattle,[6] dismantling power stations and centralized infrastructure, and generally striving to usher in a new world.

Hence, eco-feminist post-apocalyptica is defined by the systemic collapse of society. Even if, as in Tepper and Jones’ work, the end is brought about willfully, the idea is that the destruction of modern society is an inevitable result of the flawed nature of modern society itself.

III. Technophobes, Luddites, and Progress Towards What?

The second defining characteristic of the genre is its highly ambivalent attitude towards science, technology, and the idea of Progress. While it can and has been argued that the post-apocalyptic novel in general deals with our fears of technology bringing about our eventual destruction, few genres confront this issue as hard-headedly as Eco-feminists do.

Bold as Love offers an interesting glimpse of this ambivalence between the desire for more ‘green’ technologies on the one hand, and the fear that they might simply be a continuation of the destructive ‘march of progress’ on the other. While the Green movement in the book is fast outlawing and destroying certain types of technology (internal combustion engines, genetically engineered crops, television, and nearly any and every means of mass production) they are likewise hard at work producing or refining ‘green’ technologies, some of them quite fantastic. One of the lead characters infects herself with bio-engineered bacteria, which allow her to defecate sterile soil, while another uses nanites[7] in his mitochondria[8] to allow him to power electric devices with his own metabolism. Yet Jones constantly points out the failures in these new technologies as well. The heroine must spend hours a day doing special exercises to allow for the improved digestion, and eventually gives up on the process, whereas her friend/lover with the mitochondrial generators has to stuff himself just to run his lights. The book ends with a cliffhanger, wherein a society that has abandoned many of the non- green technologies (including the use of paper) in favor of computer communication is faced with a virus that will completely destroy any hope of continuing that particular technology.

Technology as both bane and balm is not a new theme, nor one restricted to Eco-feminist writing. However, the Eco-feminist approach to technology, particularly biotech, nanotech, and industrial technology is generally a very dim one. What separates this genre from most other science fiction is the baneful aspects of science are much more emphasized than the balms. In general, eco-feminist post-apocalyptica posits a future of voluntary simplicity, life without the gadgets and dubious advances afforded contemporary society through the constant pursuit of science and technological achievement, and often lays the blame for doomsday squarely at the feet of science unchecked by wisdom. There is, as a rule, never a last-minute technical fix, as is so common in the Star Trek series, to name only one. In keeping with ecological theory, technologies are judged by their appropriateness and sustainability,[9] which leads many of the genre’s future fictional societies to give up the vast majority of today’s ‘necessities’.

LeGuin’s Always Coming Home is a prime example of such a society. While her fictional society, the Kesh, have access to, and the necessary knowledge to create or recreate any technology, they steadfastly ignore this possibility. The Kesh willfully renounce most ‘modern’ technologies, especially those aimed at mass production, in order to have a simpler, more peaceful life. While they do make use of electricity and machinery, it is by and large on a very small and decentralized scale, in the form of such sustainable technologies as solar panels, micro-hydro power, and power looms (to mention the very few named in the book). This neo-Luddism is a common aspect of the genre, even in texts that implicitly call for a more high-tech element. For instance, despite the fact that Butler’s Parable heroine claims that the goal of her new religion, Earthseed, is for humankind to “take root among the stars”, the founding group spends most of the first two books of the series surviving via permaculture[10] with limited or no electricity, in housing they built themselves from local materials. Although later on in Parable of the Talents Earthseed has become powerful enough to begin building their interstellar ships, the reader is led to the conclusion that this is more of a fall from grace than a fulfillment of Lauren’s prophecy. A Plague of Angels puts the issue in very black and white terms, with the surviving ‘modern’ technology and those who use it forming the diabolical opposition to the more ‘natural’ heroes. However, it is Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Elizabeth Hand’s Winterlong that most thoroughly expose the potential risks of Science unleashed. Both books show a future where the genetic genie has not so much been let out of its bottle, but rather smashed said bottle to shards. The landscape, the ecology of the planet itself, has been forever altered, and while nominally human characters continue to live on in Hand’s haunting novel, in Oryx and Crake, we are presented with a narrator who, if not the last surviving human, is at least the next to last. Atwood’s novel tells the story of a genetics genius who, in attempting to create an Edenic utopia, wipes out the population of the planet, leaving it to be inherited by his genetically engineered post-human ‘children,’ blue skinned and biologically incapable of making the same mistakes as Homo sapiens. Both fictional worlds are ravaged with biotech run amok, where strange hybrids and mutants abound. In fact it is biotechnology, with its awesome potential for misuse and abuse, that often serves as an unthinking villain. Butler’s prophetess Lauren was made empathic due to her mother’s abuse of a designer drug, and now faces the reality of passing this condition (which forces her to feel the pain and pleasure of anyone around her, regardless of whether or not it is real) on to her children.

The other issue often faced in this genre is that of the power that technology affords. Later in this essay I will be examining the issue of power in greater depth, but when it comes to technology, the Eco-feminist outlook is much like that of the Green anarchist[11] or Eco-anarchist movement.[12] A constant theme throughout the genre is that if technological power can be abused, it will be.

This becomes interesting once one moves beyond the standard everyday definition of technology, and begins to think of ideas and concepts as technologies in their own right. In Always Coming Home, LeGuin’s Kesh, for instance, seem a prosperous and peaceful people, who have managed to combine small-scale industry with agriculture and gatherer-hunter practices. But there is a tension lurking beneath this seemingly happy arrangement. The Kesh, and through them LeGuin, seem to argue that even agriculture, long considered the cornerstone of civilization, is dangerously flawed. A poem within the book entitled “An Exhortation From the Second and Third Houses of the Earth” warns of this deep-seated flaw:

Listen, you people of the Adobes, you people of the Obsidian!

Listen, you gardeners and farmers, orcharders and vintners,

shepherds and drovers!

Your arts are admirable and generous, arts of plenty and

increase, and they are dangerous.

Among the tasseled corn the man says, this is my plowing

And sowing, this is my land

Among the grazing sheep the woman says, these are my

Breeding and caring, these are my sheep.

In the furrow the seed sprouts hunger.

In the fenced pasture the cow calves fear.

The granary is heaped full with poverty.

The foal of the bridled mare is anger.

The fruit of the olive is war.

Take care, you Adobe people, you Obsidian people, and come

Over to the wild side,

Don’t stay too long on the farming side; it’s dangerous to

live there.

Come among the unsown grasses bearing richly, the oaks

Heavy with acorns, the sweet roots in

Unplowed earth.

Come among the deer on the hill, the fish in the river, the

Quail in the meadows.

You can take them, you can eat them,

Like you they are food.

They are with you, not for you.

Who are their owners?

This is the puma’s range,

This hill the vixen’s,

This is the owl’s tree,

This is the mouse’s run,

This is the minnow’s pool:

It is all one place.

Come take your place.

No fences here, but sanctions.

No war here, but dying; there is dying here.

Come hunt, it is yourself you hunt.

Come gather yourself from the grass, the branch, the earth.

Walk here, sleep well, on the ground that is not yours, but is

yourself. (80-81)

The poem points to the dangers inherent in utilizing resources to their full potential, rather than simply to the extent necessary for material prosperity. In order to avoid the agrarian pit-fall warned of in the poem, the Kesh make it a point to practice hunter/gatherer economies as well, which allows them a life very unlike our own. As Marshal Salhins points out in his exploration of hunter/gatherer (or rather gatherer/hunter, as gathering usually played a greater part in subsistence cultures) societies in Stone Age Economics:

There is a conscious and consistent disregard for the notion of ‘maximum effort from the maximum number of people’.... Labor power is underused, technological means are not fully engaged, natural resources are left untapped ..., production is low relative to existing possibilities. The workday is short. The number of days off exceeds the number of workdays. Dancing, fishing, games, sleep, and ritual seem to occupy the greater part of one’s time (25).

Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest offers a clear-cut version of this same all-encompassing questioning of technology and modernity. One of the most realistic books in the genre, Into the Forest features a slow motion societal collapse, without any of the more sci-fi elements found in many of the other books. But the collapse, however slow and lacking in spectacle, is nonetheless so complete that the two main characters, sisters Eva and Nell, are left with no real alternative other than to abandon the slowly decaying remains of their Northern Californian town and disappear into the forests, rejecting even small-scale agriculture and a permanent shelter in order to avoid predatory male gangs and famine brought about by the collapse of modern agro-business.

IV. Little Deaths and the End of Sex as We Know It.

The predatory male gangs that roam the pages of Into the Forest, A Plague of Angels, Butler’s Parable series, and the chilling theocratic patriarchy of Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale are a common facet of the genre. Unlike the more mainstream post-apocalyptica, which tends to avoid and/or demonize sex, Eco-feminist post-apocalyptica puts issues of sex, gender, and sexual power at the forefront. In Berger’s discussion of the post-apocalyptic classic Road Warrior, he comments on the strangely conflicted sexuality of mainstream post-apocalyptica: “In Road Warrior, the human community appears rigorously chaste. There are men, women, and also children: all are clean and physically attractive. But something in their blondeness (even their clothes are blond) or in their relentless altruism seems to preclude sexuality”(10). In mainstream post-apocalyptica, women are all too often reduced to Amazonian warriors, wheedling whores, or simple plot devices, giving the nihilist hero something to unfreeze his heart and fight for.

As stated in the introduction, Eco-feminism draws parallels between the subjugation of women and patriarchal society’s relationship with the natural world. But more than this, the genre places a great deal of emphasis on sex, reproduction, sexual freedom and coercion.

There are two rather distinct sides to this sexual equation. On the one hand, there are the individuals and societies that the various authors hold up as exemplars of liberated and ‘natural’ sexuality. On the other, there is the darkness visible of sexual and reproductive subjugation, repression, and violence. More often than not, these two sides of the sexual coin are both present in the story, although some exceptions to the rule do exist.

A Handmaid’s Tale and Into the Forest are examples of the latter. The only sexual aspect in Into the Forest is a violent one. Eva, the sister of the protagonist Nell, is raped walking back to their isolated cabin. The protagonist tries to find a natural abortion drug to end her sister’s pregnancy, but fails. It is the fear of rape, and of the loss of reproductive options occasioned by the collapse of modern society, along with impending famine that finally pushes the sisters into the forest, cutting once and for all their ties to the world that was. Into The Forest is also an example of the more radical feminist ideology that occasionally makes an appearance in the genre in which all (or at least the majority) of males are prone to rape and violence. This is generally blamed on an inherent, fundamental aspect of masculinity. Tepper also has a tendency towards this essentialist aspect of eco-feminism, going so far as to purpose that, aside from sex/romance, the two genders should be held as separate as possible. In A Plague of Angels, Tepper introduces the reader to the land of Artemisia, where men and women live in separate housing, and sex has been largely removed from the reproductive equation. Only specially chosen members of both genders in their prime are allowed to reproduce. All visitors to the country must be neutered, either permanently or temporarily, lest they pollute the gene pool or introduce a sexually transmitted disease. By separating the sexes, in effect destroying the ‘nuclear family’, while simultaneously ensuring, through mandatory birth control, universal sexual freedom, the Artemisian’s attempt to rid their society of what they see as a destructive tendency in other societies.[13]

Generally though, the blame is not placed on any essentialist aspect of masculinity, but rather on societal structures and religious and political institutions. This is in keeping with the generally critical view of the current social, political, and religious conditions in society. The most common method of pointing out these and other problems is for the author to create an alternative society, in opposition to either the author’s vision of contemporary society or, as is more common, a society that exemplifies these aspects in exaggerated form.

Few have explored this particular fictional strategy more than Ursula K. LeGuin, who has long been at the forefront of pushing the envelope of discussion regarding issues of gender and sex. Her Hugo-and-Nebula-award-winning The Left Hand of Darkness portrays a world in which no one, save the human narrator has a fixed gender of any kind. Going into a state of heat on a regular basis, the population of the planet reacts to its potential partners by spontaneously transforming into one or the other sex, spending the rest of their lives (when not pregnant, the book contains the line “The King was pregnant” (99)) as non-gendered beings. Keeping to the eco-feminist view, she then creates a society, or rather two, based on this single biological difference; thereby showing just how deeply rooted and influential gender is in society.

She continues this theme, in a less fantastic manner, in Always Coming Home, by presenting the reader with two contrasting cultures, that of the Kesh, and that of the Condor People. LeGuin’s Kesh are a matrilineal society with very fluid definitions of marriage, including women’s right to divorce by pronouncement (an ancient and surprisingly wide-spread custom before the rise of the modern State), same-sex marriage, and highly egalitarian gender roles. Their language more or less inverts the concepts of wealth and poverty. They have no concept of children ‘belonging’ to either parent; rather a child “chooses to live” with its parents when it comes into the world. Neither does their language allow for the concept of ‘possessing’ a spouse. Stone Telling, one of LeGuin’s many narrators, relates the scene when her father Abhao attempts to assert his ‘paternal and marital rights’ (a concept unknown to the Kesh):

At first he acted crazily, but they quietened him, and Ninepoint explained to him that a man may come and go as he likes, and a woman may take him back or not as she likes, but the house was hers, and if she shuts the door he may not open it. People had come to listen. ... Strength, a speaker of the Blood Lodge scoffed at him. When he said, “But she belongs to me-the child belongs to me,” she began to do the Blood Clown turkey gobble around him, shouting, “The hammer menstruates to me! They pleat the courage to her!” and a string of reversal words like that. (43)[14]

Also, amongst the Kesh, contraceptives are easily available and commonly used, and virginity is in no way prized, although self-control and good sense are.

In contrast, the Condor people are sexually restrictive, prizing virginity in their brides, not allowing their wives and daughters lives outside of their homes and defining anyone not of their particular warrior class as an animal, a thing to be owned and used at will. When Stone Telling travels from the valley of the Kesh to live with her father in the Condor’s capital, she is as unable to comprehend the world she is entering as her Condor friend, Shadow, is upon their return. When informed that she is to be married, an order not to be denied, Stone Telling is aghast, stating that she isn’t ready for marriage, as she is still a virgin. Amongst the Kesh, one is not considered mature enough for marriage until one has “come inland”, that is taken a sexual partner of one’s own choosing. The Condor women who populate her father’s house on the other hand, find this statement enough to question the purity of Stone as a Condor (after all, her mother was an “animal”), which places Stone in the unlucky dilemma of having to choose either forced marriage or forced labor and a life of rape and sexual violence.

Perhaps the most shockingly realistic vision of sexual subjugation and coercion in the genre is found in the pages of Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, in which the theocratic fascist state making up most of the Eastern Seaboard of the former United States has criminalized vast swaths of sexual behavior, while forcing fertile women, at least those without a husband, into a life of sexual slavery. The culture of Atwood’s novel includes such draconian measures as death by stoning for women who commit adultery, hanging homosexual men (homosexual women, if still fertile, are forced into one or another form of sexual slavery), and beatings or stockading for masturbation. The protagonist is forced to serve as a “handmaid” in the home of a member of the governing elite. A handmaid’s duty is to provide her ‘master’ with a child if said man’s wife cannot. Never mind that in the world of the book it is often the men that are infertile, due to a weaponized version of mumps. The uber patriarchal chauvinism of the society cannot accept the possible ‘castration’ of so many of its men, so the blame is placed squarely on the women.

On the bright side, the genre also includes many celebrations of sex and sexual freedom. LeGuin’s Kesh have very few sexual taboos, mostly against incest and inter-generational relationships. They allow their children the freedom of sexual experimentation, up until they don undyed clothing, a ritual period of sexual abstinence during the early to mid teens. Lauren, the empathic protagonist of Butler’s Parables, embraces sex, her empathic nature making it doubly fulfilling, while at the same time making a point both personally and as leader of her small community to practice it safely and avoid unwanted or unwise pregnancies. Elizabeth Hand’s often subversively erotic prose shows sexuality in all its glory and horror, unflinchingly breaking taboos and questioning norms, while extolling the sacred nature of sexual union. An openly neo-pagan author, Hand looks upon the erotic as a sacred, quasi-religious space, in direct opposition to monotheistic concepts of sexual repression and sin.

Perhaps the most basic message in regard to sex and reproduction is that no authority beyond that of the individual, be it the State, cultural norms, religion, or gender-as-social-class, has no right to control the basic biological urge that is sex. As soon as an authority manages to legislate sexuality, a downward spiral begins, pulling other rights and freedoms down with it. Eco-feminism is often linked to Anarcho-feminism, which grounds itself in the belief that controlling sexuality is one of the most destructive and debasing abuses of authority. This anti-authoritarian ethos is visible throughout the genre, denouncing authoritarian control, not only over sexual issues, but, as we will see, in issues of religion and spirituality as well.

V. “The ceremonies of innocence”: Monotheism and the Eco-feminist Ethic

Questions of religion and spirituality abound in eco-feminist post apocalyptica. In fact, this genre has a tendency to attack monotheism at nearly every turn. The concept of sin, not to be confused with the concept of crime, is lacking throughout these books. At the same time, most books in the genre contain a strong element of spirituality, especially LeGuin’s, Hand’s and Butler’s.

Butler goes so far as to create a new religion, Earthseed, for her heroine to prophesize. The core concept of this belief system, which has taken on a life of its own outside of Butler’s work,[15] is the idea that as the only constant in the universe is change, “God is Change”. While quite simple at the outset, Butler expands this idea into a system of belief that is groundbreakingly subversive.

God is Power-

Infinite,

Irresistible,

Inexorable,

Indifferent.

And yet, God is Pliable-

Trickster,

Teacher,

Chaos,

Clay.

God exists to be shaped.

God is Change. (22)

Butler’s Earthseed is a religion without a sentient power, other than that of its believers. God exists to be shaped, and heaven consists of new planets (“New Earths” in Butler’s parlance) waiting to be colonized. Butler has her heroine call the collected Earthseed writings “The Book of the Living”, implying that existing religions are centered on death.

LeGuin spends a great many pages introducing the reader to the spiritual life of the Kesh, which is a challenging mix of Native American animism and ecological wisdom translated into spiritual form. Had she not decided to write the book as an “archeology of the future” complete with explanatory graphs and charts, the reader would surely be lost trying to understand the Kesh world-view. This is, to a certain extent, the whole point. In order to live in a world as peaceful and fulfilling as that of the Kesh, LeGuin seems to argue, we must learn to think in fundamentally new ways.

Hand and Tepper lean more towards the neo-pagan side of things, or, as a good friend and student of pagan history once put it, “paganism-lite”. Although Hand avoids mentioning much of her neo-paganist beliefs in The Glimmering, Winterlong contains a wealth of pagan influences, including Dionysus in the form of the “boy in the tree”, and a revived cult of the Goddess in the form of a debased Virgin Mary. In both novels, Hand portrays monotheistic religions as intolerant and destructive. The straightedge Christians in Glimmering are bullying, dogmatic, and destructive, engaging in acts of terrorism and intimidation to force others into their rigid belief system. The Ascendant Aviator in Winterlong is also a creature of monotheism. He takes over the bombed out Washington Cathedral and is consumed by his obsession with death, which connects nicely to Hand and Butler’s view of Christianity as a death-centric belief system. Tepper invokes aspects of animism and fairy-tale in both The Family Tree and A Plague of Angels. While The Family Tree includes the awakening, or rather re-awakening of a Goddess, A Plague of Angels follows the path of a prevalent trend in New Age belief, including angels[16] in her potent mix of Jungian iconography and animist beliefs.

The genres’ emphasis on spirituality rather than on organized religion is just one facet of another defining characteristic; the decentralized and anti-authoritarian ethos that permeates the genre.

VI. “And what rough beast”: Eco-feminism and Post-Apocalyptic Anarchy.

If organized monotheism is the religious/spiritual antithesis of the post-apocalyptic eco-feminist genre, then the political and social antithesis is the State, in whatever form it may take.

The inherent capital “A” Anarchy of the genre is not surprising when one takes the aforementioned spiritual, technological, and apocalyptic sentiments into consideration. Just as the spirituality expounded upon is polytheistic, animist, or utterly free of coercive power (as in Butler’s “shaping God”), and the technology is decentralized, small-scale, sustainable, and accessible, so the social structures are open, free, and lacking in complex State machinery.

It is almost impossible to find a positive example of a government or state in eco-feminist post-apocalyptica. While to some extent due to the collapse of the State being intrinsically related to the eco-feminist version of the apocalypse, any State that raises its head either during or after the period of collapse is immediately treated as a foe.

The Parable of the Talents only mentions the State and its functions in negative terms. The police are portrayed as just another predatory gang, charging fees to answer calls and prone to ‘solving’ cases by arresting whoever happens to call them. Even the fire department is predatory, charging exorbitant fees to put out fires in the drought-ridden southern California of Butler’s future. In fact, the only peace her characters seem to find is at Acorn, their first settlement in rural northern California, and then only because they are so isolated that they fail to catch the immediate attention of the government. That is until Parable of the Talents the second installation in Butler’s proposed trilogy.[17] When Acorn is discovered, rather than a benevolent State offering aid to an impoverished community, the state sends its quasi-official inquisitors to ‘re-educate’ the Earthseed colony through forced religious instruction, institutionalized rape, torture, death, and forced labor.

These same genocidal tendencies are indulged to the fullest by Atwood’s theocratic fascist regime. When not forcing women into sexual slavery or shipping them in cattle cars to die a slow death in forced decontamination camps, Atwood’s State is busy shipping blacks and other racial minorities ‘home’ in a dubious program the reader is led to believe is nothing more than a version of Hitler’s final solution, under another name. While Butler’s regime wages a war against its own poor, new varieties of slavery, forced labor camps and reeducation, Atwood’s is caught up in an ongoing religious war against other Christian denominations.

War and oppression seem to be the universal pastimes of the various states in the genre. The Janissaries of the Ascension who rule over Hand’s eastern seaboard, with the exception of the City of Trees (an anarchistic collection of squatters occupying the former Washington D.C.), have been at war with their eastern enemies for so long that the actual start of the war has been lost to history. Forever hunting for weapons new or ancient, this authoritarian regime elevate, “Aviators”, men who carry out nuclear strikes, to the highest echelons of power, precisely because they have carried out these destructive acts.

In glaring opposition, LeGuin’s Kesh have no need for any form of organized government; their way of life makes it unnecessary. One can freely join any of the Lodges (the Kesh equivalent of guilds or trade syndicates) and just as freely leave them. Free association is the rule, rather than the exception. Even one’s name is subject to change at will. Stone Telling, the narrator of the story dealing with the Condor people, once called Owl, recounts just how strange the idea of hierarchy and command were to the Kesh when she recounts the story of her Condor father teaching her how to order his troops about.

Furthermore, as the Kesh practice a gift economy, where wealth is measured in how much one can give away for communal usage, material poverty and the chains it forges are largely absent. While the Kesh would seem poor by current bourgeoisie standards, they make up for it in a life rich in culture, festival, and relative ease. Contrary to popular belief, this was the rule rather than the exception amongst most gatherer/hunter societies.

Tepper avoids mention of government or the State as such almost entirely, having their various duties fall into the hands of various gangs within the few remaining cities in A Plague of Angels, which seems to imply the very Anarchist concept that the State is at heart nothing more than an oversized protection racket. The State in Tanith Lee’s seminal eco-feminist apocalyptic novel Eva Fairdeath is reduced to nothing more than two warlords, neither of whom plays a very meaningful role in the novel.

Taken as a genre, one of the fundamental themes is the dangers inherent in the formation of a State, no matter how well intentioned. Therefore one could conclude that the sixth defining characteristic of eco-feminist post-apocalyptic fiction is a tendency towards Anarchism, as opposed to “mere anarchy”.[18]

VII. Outside Looking Forward: The Quest for Community.

The final defining characteristic of the genre has to do with who acts as a protagonist. While “the outsider” is a common choice, particularly in post-apocalyptic fiction, it is the type of outsider, and the object of their quest that differentiates the genre.

The outsiders in these novels are, to begin with the obvious, female, either young girls or women, and are very often made special by some distinction in their identity. Lauren Olamina is set apart both by her religious awakening and by her “hyper-empathy syndrome”. Wendy Wanders, the heroine of Winterlong, is also an empath of sorts, an autistic child surgically and chemically altered to have no feelings of her own, which conversely (and perversely) allows her to experience the memories, emotions, and dreams of others, simply by ingesting a small portion of their blood. She is also the lost twin of Raphael, a prized courtesan of the City of Trees, and between them they are the incarnations of a powerful supernatural force destined to defeat the Aviator.

But no matter their gift, curse, or brand, they are almost always in search of a community. Not defined as a particular place (in fact Eva of Eva Fairdeath finds her community in wandering), nor as any specific group, but rather community as a group of like-minded people prepared to form, or having already formed, a home. Unlike other forms of post-apocalyptic fiction, the question of community, especially the conscious creation of community, is central. Though they are outsiders, the protagonists are usually also part of a group or community, a contradiction that proves the truth. Human beings are essentially social creatures, no matter the canonization of the lone survivor in western, and especially American, survivalist fiction.

Furthermore, the communities created in these stories are not continuations or imitations of previous societies. They are consciously and emphatically different from contemporary society, and thereby ‘outsiders’ as communities, as well as individuals.

By making community a central aspect, the authors argue that individualism in its contemporary form (“greed is good”, “what's in it for me”) is another of the destructive aspects of modern society. Settlers who are fully prepared to become the wolf, should the situation warrant, it replace the lone wolf hero who saves the sheepish settlers. The lone survivor is cast out of the heroic role, and instead becomes a threat, or at least an annoyance.

VIII. Odds and Ends

Aside from these seven defining characteristics, there are a wealth of other recurrent themes and features that crop up throughout the genre. One of the most interesting is the tendency for these novels to be set in California, especially Northern California. But more than that, it is the East/West dichotomy that deserves more intense scrutiny.

While not widespread enough to count as a defining characteristic, there is a definite tendency to set the darker, more dystopian novels on the east coast, while novels of a more quasi-utopian, hopeful tone tend to be set on the west. One is tempted to speculate as to the cause of this. My personal opinion is that the East, with its aura of ‘old money’, and ties; both geographic and historical to the ‘old world’ tie the area to a set of social conditions that the authors see as bleak. The West- in American fiction has always represented the hopeful future- the progress of society away from the moribund shackles of history.[19]

Another common, but far from defining, aspect of the genre is its tendency to include elements of poetry and song in the story, or as in the case of Glimmering, basing the story on a poem.[20] LeGuin and Butler are both notable for their use of poetry to grant the reader a deeper insight into the story. In fact, Butler’s Parables Trilogy seems to be just that. The reader could be forgiven for concluding that the story was written to explain the poems that make up “The Book of the Living”.

Another tendency that both authors share, along with Hand, is towards quasi-to full-fledged postmodernism in their texts. Lauren Olamina references science fiction books in her journals, which make up the body of Parable of the Sower, and Hand’s Glimmering is a riot of references to, and plays upon, current trends and fashions. But few if any authors can claim a more postmodernist novel to their credit than LeGuin.

Always Coming Home is more than just the archetypal eco-feminist post-apocalyptic novel; it is also an amazing postmodernist intellectual exercise. LeGuin herself calls it an “archeology of the future”. Rather than a classic novel, the book is arranged for the most part like a complex and exceedingly well-researched ethnographic study. Collections of life-stories, songs, poetry and jokes, along with excerpts from plays and in-depth discussions of the religious and economic life of the Kesh make up the majority of the book. But a pseudonymous LeGuin even joins in the action herself, writing herself into the story in the form of Pandora, an ethnographer from the past, or perhaps from outside of time.

Another common, but by no means defining, characteristic of the genre is the importance, both symbolic and functional, of trees. The Family Tree is the most striking example, with semi-sentient mobile trees bringing mankind’s destructive ‘progress’ to a screeching halt. Arboriculture plays an important role in the societies, in both Butler’s Acorn settlement and in that of LeGuin’s Kesh, while Hand’s post-cataclysm Washington D.C. in Winterlong is renamed “The City of Trees” for its overgrown and even predatory feral forests. Nell and Eva of Into the Forest escape from their dieing society by literally running into the forest. It is as if trees represent both a feeling of the ‘natural’ and a feeling of permanence and slow, steady growth, which is very much in keeping with the tenets of ecological thought.

IX. “Slouching towards Bethlehem:” Some Final Thoughts on the End of the World.

Any time one writes or reads about the future, a prophetic dynamic is at play. It seems to be part of our nature to want to believe in prophecy, and once we start to believe, as Berger states, it is as if prophecy has become subjective truth (6). This particular dynamic applies to the entire post-apocalyptic genre and the dystopian/utopian genre as well, but is particularly strong in eco-feminist post-apocalyptica, in part because of ecological theory’s (especially Deep ecology’s) emphasis on the actual state of the world. Unlike postmodernism and deconstruction, which view the world as an intellectual construct, ecological theory emphatically states that there is a world outside of our intellect; that objective reality really and truly is which makes this form of prophecy hard to ignore. Rather than focusing on single events in time, the genre looks at society and its future as a whole, and consistently comes to the conclusion that the system is flawed beyond repair. One way or another, the World as We Know It will end, the only question is whether we will, as Butler says “with forethought and work / become a shaper of God” (27). Which is to say end it consciously in order that something better may rise up from the wreckage, or whether we will idle away our time as the run-away train careens towards its final fiery end.

If one comes to believe the prophecy, however, there is a further difficulty in store. Unlike the single-issue Armageddons of the survivalist and catastrophic genres, ecological Armageddons require a holistic fix. It is not simply a matter of nuclear disarmament (putting “simply” in front of “nuclear disarmament” shows the huge scope of ecological thought) or better protections against infectious disease, or the renunciation of one or two particular technologies. Rather, we are required to carefully observe and rework our society from the ground up, casting aside many ideas and concepts that are so rarely questioned that the vast majority of western minds consider them universal givens. Concepts like the definition of wealth, of economics, of education, of community, of interpersonal and inter-gender relationships all need to be addressed, lest we ride the train off the tracks of the future. While this is a daunting prospect in a ‘big picture’ way, the genre also provides a measure of hope.

The hope inherent in eco-feminist prophecy is that of a better, more peaceful, egalitarian, and sustainable world. Whether showing us how such a world might be achieved, as in Always Coming Home and The Parable of the Sower/Talents, or warning us of how not to go about it, as in A Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and Glimmering, the old liberal-humanist concept of literature as enriching and educational is strongly at play. Frankly, after wandering the wastelands of postmodern theory and structuralism, this is refreshing.

The primary prescriptions for changing the course of the coming Armageddon, or for surviving it, are actually quite straightforward. First, competition, that cornerstone of western culture, needs to be replaced with cooperation. LeGuin makes this point very clear; Kesh games revolve around completing a challenging set of tasks as a group, without teams of winners, or losers. Without the compulsion to compete, the great nemesis of both Deep Ecology and Marxism- Capitalism- will wither away.

Secondly, the decentralist approach to life, that of small self-governing and quasi-self-sufficient communities, is paramount. Even a cursory glance at the annals of history shows that such societies tended to survive longer, and with a higher standard of living, than massive empires. Even to this day, one easy way to predict the standard of living for a country is to look at the size of its population.

Small, semi-self-sufficient communities would require the third prescription, that is a distancing from or rejection of consumerism and many aspects of modernity, including automation, speculative economics, and mass production. E. F. Schumacher, in his brilliant criticism of the ‘science’ of economics, proposes “production by the masses rather than mass production” (57), and this maxim is echoed again and again in the writings of LeGuin, Butler, and Tepper.

If these books are meant to educate and enrich, then one is bound to find oneself in the unenviable position of running up against critics who see the proposed solutions as utopian impossibilities. It is important to note, however, that none of the authors mentioned refers to their future worlds as utopias, except to disparage the idea within the text itself. In the chapter entitled “Pandora Converses with the Archivist”, LeGuin-as-Pandora loses her patience with a denizen of the idealized world her text created. “I never did like smartass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser than me and my family and friends. People who have the answers are boring, niece. Boring, boring, boring”(335) After telling Pandora that hers in no utopian life, the Archivist responds, “This is a mere dream dreamed in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilization possible only to the civilized, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection, a glass of milk for the soul ulcered by acid rain a piece of pacifist jeanjacquerie, and a cannibal dance among the savages in the ungodly garden of the farthest West” (336). The idea, this seems to say, is to create a better world, not a perfect one. That is the utopian impossibility. The denial and rejection of positive change, on the other hand, is pure cynicism.

If prophecy is true in the future, and therefore true in the present, then the changes either proposed or forewarned in these stories are an inevitability. And only a fool argues with the inevitable.

This genre, which I still wish I could grant a better name to, is an important addition to fiction and to society, calling on its readers to question their assumptions and look at the future through a glass- not dark- but certainly not rose-colored either. The lessons and insights offered are frightfully topical, even decades after their publication, and offer us a glimpse into the undiscovered country that each year, each month, each day, and each hour brings us ever closer to.

I cannot think of better words to end this brief expedition than one of Butler’s verses from “Earthseed: The Books of the Living”:

Your teachers

Are all around you,

All that you perceive,

All that you experience,

All that is given to you

Or taken from you,

All that you love or hate

Need or fear

Will teach you.

If you will learn.

God is your first

And your last teacher.

God is your harshest teacher:

subtle,

demanding.

Learn or die. (251)

Works Cited

“Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 26 April, 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-apocalyptic>

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Fawcett Crest/Ballantine, 1985.

---. Oryx and Crake. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.

Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. “Anthenacieum Reading Room”. 26 April 2006 <http://evan-eperientalism.freespace.com/barthes06.htm>

Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner, 1993.

---. Parable of the Talents. New York: Warner, 1998.

“Deep Ecology.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 17 April, 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology>

“Eco-Anarchism.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 17 April, 2006

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-anarchism>

“Eco-Feminism.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 2 April, 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-feminism>

Eliot, Thomas Stern. “The Wasteland.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. Seventh Edition. Ed. M. H. Adams. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. (2614-27)

---. “The Hollow Men.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. Seventh Edition. Ed. M. H. Adams New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. (2627-30)

“Green Anarchism.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 17 April, 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_anarchism>

Hand, Elizabeth. Glimmering. New York: HarperPrism, 1997.

---. Winterlong. New York: HarperPrism, 1990.

Hegland, Jean. Into the Forest. New York: Bantam, 1997.

Jones, Gwyneth. Bold as Love. London: Orion, 2001.

Lee, Tanith. Eva Fairdeath. London: Headline, 1994.

LeGuin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home. New York: Bantam, 1985.

---. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace, 1969.

Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1991.

“Permaculture.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 17 April, 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture>

Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine, 1972.

Schumacher, E. F. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. London: Vintage, 1993.

Tepper, Sheri S. A Plague of Angels. New York: Bantam/Spectra, 1994.

---. The Family Tree. New York: Avon, 1997

Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. Seventh Edition. Ed. M. H. Adams. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. (2382)

[1] From Butler’s Parable of the Talents (4).

[2] Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author

[3] T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

[4] “Deep ecology is a recent philosophy or ecosophy based on a shift away from the anthropocentric bias of established environmental and green movements. The philosophy is marked by a new interpretation of “self” which de-emphasizes the rationalistic duality between the human organism and its environment, thus allowing emphasis to be placed on the intrinsic value of other species, systems, and processes in nature. This position leads to an ecocentric system of environmental ethics. Deep ecology describes itself as “deep” because it is concerned with fundamental philosophical questions about the role of human life as one part of the ecosphere, in distinction to ecology as a branch of biological science, and to merely utilitarian environmentalism based on the well-being of humans alone” (Wikipedia).

[5] T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

[6] Deep ecologists tend to place a great deal of the blame for the current state of society on the idea of ‘domestication’, and Jones’ greens are anything if not deep. Hence, they set out to free those animals that might survive in a feral state, and slaughter the rest to prevent them from dieing of starvation and neglect.

[7] “Nanites” are a common feature in modern Sci-Fi, microscopic machines capable of manipulating matter at the molecular or even atomic level.

[8] Mitochondria are the cellular organs responsible for energy production.

[9] The actual definitions of ‘appropriateness’ and ‘sustainability’ are still hotly debated in ecological theory. E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered and Jerry Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations both offer excellent insights to this debate.

[10] “[P]ermaculture can best be described as an ethical design system applicable to food production and land use, as well as community building. It seeks the creation of productive and sustainable ways of living by integrating ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agroforestry. The focus is not on these elements themselves, but rather on the relationships created among them by the way they are placed together; the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts. Permaculture is also about careful and contemplative observation of nature and natural systems, and of recognizing universal patterns and principles, then learning to apply these ‘ecological truisms’ to one’s own circumstances” (Wikipedia).

[11] “The Green anarchist critique focuses on the institutions of domination that make up society, all grouped under he broad term ‘civilization’. Such institutions include for example, the state, capatialism, globalization, domestication, patriarchy, science, technology, or work. These institutions, according to Green anarchists, are inherently destructive and exploitive, therefore they cannot be reformed” (Wikipedia).

[12] Eco-anarchism argues that small eco-villages (of no more than a few hundred people) are a scale of human living preferable to civilization, and that infrastructure and political systems should be re-organized to ensure that these are created (Wikipedia).”

[13] Tepper takes this even further in her book The Gate to Women’s Country, in which men live outside settlements reserved solely for women, girls, and pre-pubescent boys.

[14] In an endnote to the chapter quoted above, LeGuin explains the “reversal words”, stating, “ In Clown impromptus language was deliberately dislocated for subversive effect (as in surrealist poetry and imagery). Abhao inadvertently made just such a dislocation by saying that his wife and child “belonged” to him. Kesh grammar makes no provision for a relation of ownership between living beings. A language in which the verb “to have” is an intransitive and in which “to be rich” is the same word as “to give” is likely to turn its foreign speaker, and translator, into a clown all too often (43).

[15] A recent Google search by the author turned up 55,700 results for “Earthseed”, many of which were sites devoted to the discussion and expansion of Butler’s Earthseed verses.

[16] Thrones, to be precise, one of the ranks of angels just below that of the Archangels.

[17] Sadly, the third book, The Parable of the Trickster died with the author earlier this year.

[18] A somewhat incorrect usage of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, wherein ‘mere’ meant ‘pure’, but it gets the point across nicely.

[19] This is highly ironic in that European western expansion was the agent of an apocalyptic holocaust for Native Americans.

[20] T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, to be precise.