My neighbor tells me that last week a coyote walked by just beside her as she was digging in her garden. She says that at first she thought it was the dog from across the street and kept working, but then she turned and it turned and they looked at each other before it continued on its way. She tells me she has a theory: coyotes try to act nonchalant when they see us so that we don’t see them for what they are, so they can pass as dogs and move unmolested. I think this is an interesting reading of the casual laziness of the coyotes’ demeanor; after all, this is an animal whose adaptability has been documented as long as there has been documenting. But actually what was happening here when the coyote was being seen as a dog was not passing, it was shifting.
One of the meanings of to pass is to be taken for something you are not, to be contingently assumed equivalent to something you inherently aren’t. And the unspoken underlay of this worldview is an accepted desire on the part of the passing to be something they do not have claim to. Passing is what those who cannot do so, see, because they believe in the gravity of their world as the only attractive force. Shifting is what we, the liminal, do.
To shift, it is important to clarify, is not pretense it is translation. It means to change and replace. A shifter (a shape-shifter, someone who is shifty) is one who can do this efficaciously and autonomously, who contains both the objective and the subjective, the familiar and the other, the hearth and the wilderness, this tongue y este lengua, and can move these halves quickly enough to reflect back to the beholder the familiar, the understood.
Or here is another way of explaining: Do you know what a thaumatrope is? It is an antique toy made of a piece of card on a string with two incomplete images printed on either side, often an empty cage and a free bird. When you spin the string, the illusion of unity is created through the oscillation of the two distinct and separate sides. You see the bird in its cage. A thaumatrope is a perfect illustration of a mongrel.
I have a memory from when I was a child in the States, of the father of a classmate asking me where I was from because of my García. And when I explained that my father was a Mexican and my mother was an Anglo, he smiled and told me I was what was called a coyóte, because I was not a wolf and I was not a dog, because I was a neither. Whatever his intentions were in telling me this, I am telling you this story because in that moment, for the first time in my short life, I felt that someone had finally seen me for what I truly was.
Coyotes are considered scavengers here. Liminal creatures who thrive living along the shifting borders between the human and the nonhuman. Scientists classify them as crepuscular animals because they are most active in gray times between day and night. Mostly they are considered pests though, occasionally, they are considered murderers and are hunted. Their crimes are ephemeral, unsubstantiated, and rife as ghost stories.
Besides the animal, another common definition for the word coyóte in this country is a man who guides the travelling in secret through the wilderness across the border. Like the animal, the man must also be not a dog and not a wolf, must also not owe allegiance to either side. And I say in secret because in order to be successful, this crossing must be unseen.
The ferryman is never the hero. He is always heartless. If your family cannot pay, you cannot pass. Reviled by both sides, his only purpose, his only function, is to change people from one side to the other. In Western myths, the ferryman sometimes rows alone and sometimes is accompanied by Hermes the trickster, the guider of souls. In American mythology, Coyóte plays all the roles. He is not a note in a larger spiritual pantheon but a full revolution of unraveling and creation, of journey and return.
A few days after the towers fell, a friend and I went to a bar downtown only to find it full of dancing, weeping firemen. When we walked in, we became the only two women in the room. Over the course of the night, we danced slowly with them all in turn. We held each of them crying in our arms, and they waited patiently as quiet children as we moved from one to another like bees among the flowers. One man, I took outside into the darkness. While we stood on the rushing shore of the West Side Highway, he tenderly and silently traced on me the outline of the woman’s body he had pulled from the ruins. Starting at my heart, across my breast, dividing my nipple under my armpit, sweeping down my horrified arm holding my finger, then back to my shoulder, softer now to the base of my neck, parting up through my hair—me silent and still to help him, as a finger breath drew a border across the hollow of my eye, around my nose, through my chin, separating with its touch the corpse from what she was missing. When he was done, he closed himself completely in grief and would no longer speak. The whole next day I felt the side of my body he had traced to be almost imperceptibly heavier, like it had been leafed in lead, like it was someone else’s, until I remembered and reminded myself I was neither the dead woman or what she’d lost, or even the border between. And just like that, his projection evaporated, and what was left was me.
Keats’s concept of Negative Capability, the assertion that “man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason” is nothing but an old world homogenous epiphany. The truth of the new world is that the capability to hold both, to embody both, negates both and somehow, in defiance, in wonder, this neitherness becomes a life.
I am lying in someone’s lap in a waking dream, in a restaurant or at a party, under the table. Through the body of the person I rest on, papá, mom, tía, tío, the words I hear with my ear pressed against them like the trunk of a tree or the crest of a shell are resonant and booming, the responses as far above as the rustling of high leaves, as far away as the swallowed roar of the waves. Meaning drips down through my lulled sleepiness like condensation, but mostly the conversation is only listened to as a whole, a rushing, a shushing like all adults talking. This is where Spanish always takes me, to the shore of the country that I left. The country I shifted away from.
In New Mexico we would call our dogs inside at night, and when we heard the coyotes outside singing, we would keep them inside no matter how much the dogs begged us, whining to let them free. I had been told that to let dogs out to run with the coyotes was to let them run to their deaths. Though I was also told that in an act of balanced cruelty and benevolence, the coyotes first let the dogs run with them through the night and empty their doghearts of all their coiled wild desire before finally, just before dawn, circling them, killing them, eating them in a final blaze of glory. I believed by keeping them inside, we were protecting the dogs from the power of the coyote song, which was asking them something they did not have the strength or the wisdom to leave unanswered.
The siren is a singer who is half woman half bird. Sometimes depicted as angelic and sometimes demonic, she sings from the rocks to the sailors who pass by her shores. If the sailors follow her song, then they and their ships are smashed and killed on the rocks. In some retellings, the sirens are considered phychopomps, or spirit conductors, guiding those souls parted from their bodies on the rocks. And in other retellings, the truth emerges that the sirens die if they don’t sing.
In English, a siren song is another way to say an alluring deception, a seductive lie. But I ask you: how can a song be deceptive if it is a matter of life or death that it be sung? If our very existence depends on it being sung? And in case you cannot see it, I should inform you I am singing right now.
