Hopi

When was it that Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill made me look at some long streamers of paper, right there in the doctor’s office in Keams Canyon, and told me these were pictures of my heart? In my seeing days, it must have been then, but I do not remember much more except what looked like a flat landscape, pretty much like they say it is up in Canada, with again and again a sharp little pylon with a small hump of land just next to it, then a stretch of flat land followed by a smaller, sharper hump of land and then another pylon. It looked okay to me, and he said, yes, that was a picture of my heart behaving well. Then with a rather sour smile he said he was glad his heart wasn’t in this mess too, and he showed me a picture of my heart behaving badly, with all that flat-land area turned into a squiggly line with three or more humps or what looked like an angry jagged scribble of the kind you do if you want to scratch something out. Don’t it make you sick, Uncle, to have all that coming out of you, without you doing the least thing about it to make it happen? No, I said, I don’t get sick that easy—I mean throw up. If that is how my heart wants to sign itself, then that’s fine by me. I must say, I kind of prefer the excited scribble to the other; it seems to have a more interesting exertion in it. Never, he said, that is the bad stuff, when your heart is beating all over the place and the little muscle strands are not working together. He shut up then, maybe because his Hollywood scriptwriter had given him no lines to say. He sometimes had lines, but most often he was another dumb dead Indian who had lost his scalp collection to an Anglo with pale blue eyes. Anyway, all this was way back when, and now those time strips, which is for some reason what they call the paper streamers, are sitting unlooked at in a dusty office, yellow and faded. Not Hopi yellow, which is good, but Anglo yellow, no good at all. It was his eagerness that pleased me: not so much his eagerness to have me well, what with taking my pills and all, as his eagerness to talk me to death about it. He had learned it all by heart and had been waiting half his life to say it. Up to then, I had not taken him for a well-informed man, a man of our world, so it gave him some kind of a thrill to show me up through my heartprints, so to speak, ready to blame me before I even opened my mouth. I was always one to let the world go its way. Well, if not always, then mostly. I liked to make something that took me so far out of myself I wasn’t home half the time, to be sick or hungry or sore. I lived by overlooking myself. Then the heart began its ways, and the eyes called it a day. First the heart, bumping like a little blacksmith, then the eyes; the eyes hardly got a look in, as Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill said with a sort of stammering smile. It was one of his jokes, told in ripest Anglo. Having been frail so long, from this or that going wrong with me, I had gotten used to things going wrong. It was as if they happened to somebody else close by, whose name I had forgotten. First the eyes, then the blood, then the heart. At least we have always had these names for them. It is not something going wrong with things we have not even named. I fixed on images of various gods, just for something to hold on to, not to bow to, but to keep me steady. It was like the game we played as children when, to keep your balance on one leg, you looked at a tree or a rock, something still enough to keep you still while you stared at it and tried not to blink. Well, not to blink for too long. So the god Sotuqnangu, to keep you still whether you blink or not. But gods are not there to give, not unless you put something into them. Heaven is made of homely sausages. It was not the gods, after all, who gave me even more pills, these to make me empty all the water from my body, bucketful after bucketful, night and day until I gave up. If we are that full of water, then a man can wash himself away. Then my nephew said: If you lose that much, you lose potassium; you take another pill to make up the potassium, but this pill flushes you clean of something else, so you have to take another pill whose only drawback—Put your pills, I told him then, where umbrellas do not open. I will go on having my coffee, Nephew, and go to white man’s hell. Do you think they would let me in? Do they need dolls down there? Is the wood too hot to carve? Do you have to carve dolls from red-hot charcoal in some kind of sacred torture? He gave up on me then, muttering something I could not catch. Or, rather, in that worked up way he has, he almost gave up. There was a flutter in his face, and sand in his talk, when he told me how close he was to giving up, although he had not given up yet. If I would agree to take my pills as told, he said, he Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill would draw money from his savings account in Keams Canyon, or Los Angeles, even if it cost him a penalty, and take me for a flight in an airplane right through the Grand Canyon. My heart would go up in a puff of smoke, I told him. Did you say through? Through, he said. They not only fly over it, very high, they also go down below the rim and fly about halfway along it, and you can go from Las Vegas or Scottsdale; it doesn’t matter where you start from. Bribed, I said yes, but my yesses were always meltable things. It was just like me to take the airplane ride and lie about the pills. Yes, he said, as if I had spoken out loud, if you take the airplane ride without the pills, you will end up gasping for breath, Uncle. You do not breathe so well. Up there you will be looking for heaven to breathe in, any kind of air to keep you awake. Well, I took the ride, without the pills, gasping for breath, my ears plugged with wads of squeezy yellow foam, and carving a lump of cottonwood root in my lap as the airplane edged down into the Canyon. Afraid to look out, I felt better when all I could see alongside of us was the rock-face itself, dangerously close. But what bothered me was this: I could not breathe, and what he had said about heaven was coming true. All along I pretended to have taken the pills. And I pretended to screw up my face with delight while I was choking for air. Yawn-yawn, I went, trying to find it. Where had it gone? I had not even enough breath in me to grunt as I carved, and the ride was bumpy, an old pickup on a mountain road. This made carving a danger to me and to the others too. Try hard, I told myself, this is something that Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill is anxious to have me do, for which he has slaved many hours in Hollywood. One day, he will have gone back to the movie studios, and it will be as if I had never had this ride. Or at least it will be if I do not enjoy it now. I forced myself to like every second of it, yawning as small as I could, and looking sideways in delight, when I would have given a lifetime’s kachinas to be back on the ground. So as to remember something well, you try so hard that you cannot put the bad part of it behind you. With us, the gods come down; we do not go up to them. For all his grandness of gesture, Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill had not set us up with an airplane all to ourselves. There were others on board, not Indians at all, who seemed nervous about an ancient Indian carving a lump of wood in his lap instead of looking out at the natural wonders. In fact, for looking over at me and maybe wondering what I was going to do next with the knife, some of them missed the Grand Canyon they had paid to fly into. Just another dumb Indian, the kind they like to put in charge to make the tribes behave. Smart Indians, like my nephew, are never the ones they put in charge. Anglos are best at dealing with the dumb ones; they want the smart ones to go to Hollywood, where they really know how to deal with a smart Indian. It would have been cheaper, I told my nephew, if they had stowed me in the nose with the bags, but there were no bags on this flight anyway. It was as if we knew there was no coming back. No stop on the way. All the passengers were supposed to look out, and not think about what was going on. Those big windows made me nervous, big deep windows all the way down to my knees. My head was buzzing, maybe with blood, and my eyes seemed to have fresh-dug pits behind them, and I wondered where the wet eye-soil had gone. My belly heaved and sometimes seemed to float. This was my first flight, of course, and I wondered that this was the prize a nephew gave to a sick uncle in order to make him take his pills. It was not I but someone else who threw up onto the dark brown rug, missing by a foot or two the little paper bag whose top you fold over tight as soon as you have finished. George the Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests would sooner have made himself nauseous by chewing and chomping his pills, never mind how bitter the quinine or dreary the rat poison. Look, my nephew kept telling me, we are going lower, but I could feel whatever was in my stomach turning to a purple-colored gas thick enough to be carved, and the cottonwood between my hands was getting colder than metal. If this was a pleasure flight, and paid for, then I would have been better off hunting turtles along the Little Colorado, or, in the big city, as a stranger belittling strangers. Then we landed at the Grand Canyon Airport, which was like setting down upon a sawed-off cloud. During the bus tour I fell asleep, and then we flew back, but my forehead felt full of pins and needles all the way. Then we sloped downward again, as if to crash, and all my head began to burn and sting as if I were on fire in there. It was all so long ago, before blindness, and because I survived the breathlessness I decided against the pills. They would do for a nastier time, I thought, when there was just no hope of getting through without them. I’d even eat the green mold that had begun to grow on some of them, or the pale brown mottle that had come to the surface of others. At that point, not the actual return to earth so much as my return to the village, I decided to try to instruct Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill in chiselcraft, whether the tool he wielded was chisel, knife, or ax. Crouched near that wall, as always, with the usual motley group of idlers and time killers surrounding us, I held the knife close to his face and told him to shut his eyes. You have to be able to tell the difference, I told him, between too close and too far. What I meant, really, was that you have to be able to sense the blade’s shadow on the wood, so that your best work is done almost blindly, and the virtue of the carving is in the hands, not the eyes. Starting at my most severe, I pressed the knife against his chin, which you can do with great force without ever making a cut, but you must not slide the blade. He felt that and did not like it. Next I eased the pressure, but not so much that he no longer felt the edge against him; it was just a keen touch. The third stage, which I forced upon him even while his nerves were still quivering from the blade held against him both hard and soft, was what mixed him up. Steadyhanded as always, I held the edge as close as I could without making contact, but he felt it touch him all the same because his nerves were living in the past, whereas the blade was living in the present. You do this, I explained to him, to sense the outline of a doll in the root you have chosen, not touching the wood but tracing an outline that lies only a skin’s depth beneath the surface. Or it is deeper than that, in which case divining the outline is even more difficult, and (this is the remarkable part) you have to hold the blade even farther away, not nearer, as someone unaccustomed to carving might think. I was not going to recarve the chin that nature had given him, though he still had his eyes closed, and I could sense the outline it should have had, but nature does not so much carve as throw things forth fully fashioned. To the wrong observer, of course, it must have looked bad, what with the uncle holding the knife to his nephew’s chin and throat. Something deadly, or at least heroically disagreeable, was afoot, but all I wanted him to do was to sense the closeness of metal to his blood vessels, to the places he shaved without a thought, to the underlying bone. I too have sensed the face I should have had, thinner here, bulkier there, but beyond carpentry or carving, just like the little chamber in my heart which, over the years, quietly enlarged itself as if preparing for something important that never came along. It must have wearied of the monotony in there, chugging away like a little factory behind my ribs, and haunted by the career it might have had. A year or two later, it must have been a year or two but it might have been longer, I repeated the lesson without being able to see, and clearly it was a much more delicate performance because the actual instruction depended on the principle being taught. I mean: in order to teach him sensing, I had to sense him with almighty gentleness; to thank him for the Grand Canyon and all he had found out about my pills and my heart, I had kept a close eye on him throughout, in a way cheapening the lesson, making it—as some thought—easier, whereas of course I had only made it cruder. He flinched all the while, quite unable to tell when I had the blade upon his skin and when it was a petal’s thickness away, in a sense proving my point, although I doubted at the time if he could put such awareness to practical use. Could he send his soul journeying through the upper layers of a cottonwood root? Would he know the difference between skimming the underside of the surface with his mind and, like some mining prospector, delving down into the pith, where he was not wanted? I have been accused of making carving more difficult than it needs to be, of making oversensitive an act that is both coarse and physical, and it may be true. A man can tell of his own ways only; underline or say that loudly. It is no use speaking for someone else, instructing your only interested nephew in how someone else would set about carving a doll. Would you, I asked Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill, be able to tell the difference between the actual cutting of your throat and someone merely scoring a line across it, enough to draw blood, of course, but not going through the sinews and the vessels? At that he did a big shrug and pulled his head away, and I knew it, I just knew, he had had his eyes open all the time, trusting little to a blind man with a knife practicing on a patient himself unable to see. Yet what could you see, I asked him, at that range? What could you see of what the knife was doing to your throat? At best a guess. You would have done better trusting to your other senses. When someone asks George the Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests if he will instruct Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill in the art of carving, then George the Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests brings into play an almost unheard-of range of fine attunements, none of which amounts to cutting the throat you are trying to teach. Understand me: there are uncountable degrees of closeness, far more interesting than degrees of farness away: not a matter of distance, Nephew, but of well-developed touch. We do not have a sense that reliably informs us if our traveling kinsman is five thousand or five thousand five hundred miles away from home, but there are ways of telling, without actual feel, if the razor is one, two, or three petals’ thickness from our throat. Not razor, that was a slip, I mean knife or chisel. So too with the wood. If you want to become a serious carver, you have to school yourself in the depths of thinness, and I most of all, because I sometimes have to find out if in fact a root is too thin for what I want, and that means sensing the space the doll would occupy in air if the root were bulkier than it is. It is one thing to think inward to the pith; it is quite another to think outward from the surface, getting a solid notion of where there is no wood at all. All this time, he kept trying to answer, to make a useful comment, but the knife at his throat kept him quiet, almost obedient in his way. It was not that he wanted to become a master carver, or even a good one; it was that some hunger for novelty drove him to find out what I would do next, as if I were not aware of how voluntary his interest was. Ask more of your senses, I told him, both after the Grand Canyon when I saw, and afterwards during my blindness, and they will provide. No need to be blind, just don’t be dense, Nephew. A sharper knife than this would have nicked you already, and you would know you were bleeding not because of a wet trickle but because blood smells dusty. Perhaps I have said this to him every day I have had him with me, but the more recently I have said it the less he has understood me, no doubt from the faint slur in my speech ever since my heart began to flutter and drift. Is it true that, the less you can see the face of the one you are speaking with, the less clearly you say things? Not to mention the slur in speech, the undue puffiness in my lips. With a specially sharp penknife, I tell him, you might shave away at the lips and tongue until enough raw nerve is exposed to bring the old snappy feeling back, and the same goes for the left arm, from which you have only to peel back, petal by petal thinness, layers of skin and flesh until the same thing happens and your system comes back to life. I hate this feeling, I have gotten into the habit of telling him, of being dulled down. It makes a man want to bark, to yelp, to come out with bird cries. Take your pills, Uncle, he always tells me, be sensible. People are made of chemicals. No, I tell him, dolls are made of wood, people of flesh, and gods of human intentions. If a doctor came by, just to check on me, I told him once, but he snapped the answer back at me fast as thought: Doctors do not come by, Uncle. Doctors do not even stop by to see other doctors. That is the way in Hollywood too. They do not like to leave their machines. Nor I my tools, I told him. Do not these doctors have dolls they can send out instead of themelves? What has happened to the ancient and honorable idea of the messenger? The emissary? At that moment I found myself amazed that our language had a word for this last idea—the emissary—but it does, like someone you send out to talk with the untalkable-to Navajo with their uranium mines and their wells of oil. Am I pale with the pallor of death, I asked him. When these hands go numb, as they seem to like to do for causes unknown to me, do they tremble with a shake I cannot feel, or for that matter see? Am I stammering when I speak? On all points he reassured me, but then again he said I should take my pills, just to make sure. You were going to carve a Sotuqnangu, he said, then you stopped. Isn’t it time to get back to work? I painted on the undercoat and it is dry. It is likely, I told him then, that you may have to paint the rest of it too. Study the pictures in the books, do as I say, and a fairly accurate god will see the light of day. I surely am not fit to paint a god again. Red hematite, yellow limonite: that is about the limit of my skills. I can still tell one color from another by smell, but all poster colors smell alike and the only colors I can really tell apart are those the dancers paint their bodies with. No poster colors on them. But a carver cannot go around sniffing at people just to prove his point. Gods are entitled not to be botched. Then I thought again. If a god is a god, then what does it matter if the god’s image is botched? Gods are not bound by half-baked images of themelves. All-powerful, they please themselves, so there is no such thing as a caricature of any god, surely. If you are legally blind, then it does not matter how you image the god you have in mind, so long as you intend homage and respect; you would hardly be making a doll of someone you despise. That thought of mine disturbed me since it seemed to leave everything wide open. It was humans who insisted on this or that way of representing gods, whereas gods were probably indifferent, and all those wonderful-sounding qualities such as awe, reverence, and—yes—homage and respect, were something for humans to warm their hands at. It may not sound like much of a discovery, but it shook me, making me realize I had tried too hard all along, yearning for skill and convincingness and individual stamp when, for the whole of my career, I could have gone ahead and carved as I chose, obligated to nothing at all since (and this was the nub of the whole thing) gods are only too willing to accept all versions of themselves. Their power consists, in part, anyway, in their being willing to swallow all ideas their being alive brings into being. Hatred, envy, contempt, slander, mockery—all these are grist to the mill of any self-respecting god. Your god is not there to be liked, sucked-up to, made great through human attention. Your god, Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill, I had begun to tell him in a loud voice reminiscent of my father, whose voice always set the dogs barking, is not a flirt or a weakling; oh no, he devours his reputation with unpicky relish. We are the fusspots, preferring this to that, whereas your god is willing to let anything happen because, well, say this even louder: it is the nature of gods to be in the vicinity of whatever is going on, not involved or responsible, but aloof in a kind of halfasleep vague musing endless delay in which, having neither to eat nor drink, they chew on ideas like someone nibbling on a flower stalk or those gifted loungers who (you can watch them do it) so relax and blur their eyes when they look at you that they both see and don’t see you in front of them, a few colors, maybe, a rough shape, but no more than that, and that is all the attention they will give you. Shall we say that they can no more bear to attend than they can bear to look away. They notice everything, but they remember nothing (say this quietly, whisper it into the ear of a tree only). With the gods you can always start again, so it is no use worrying about what sort of figure you cut in front of them, but merely be yourself, which means you have enormous scope beyond blame or accuracy. Of course you do, Nephew, and all these dos and don’ts from within the tribe are as so much unleavened cloud. Like a blindness diminishing, it is becoming clear to me now that, because of the limited converse with gods permitted us, the converse held with yourself is all there is, even if it amounts to no more than walking barefoot in a yard of broken glass. It is your one and only thing, subject to no laws and no norms, a private muddled mutter in a hairy ear as big as Arizona. So: if I wished, I might as well go ahead and paint my Sotuqnangu all wrong, making of it as big a mess as possible because, truth told, there would be no one alive anywhere who could make that exact mess of it. And I did, I made the mess: instead of painting with a steady hand the curly white lines on the pale blue of the chest, the sawteeth in black on the white of the kilt, the twin pyramids of black dots that make the eyebrows, the complicated diamonds and brackets on the sash, the white welts on the brown moccasins, the orange and green slant markings on the belt, instead of all this I free-handedly daubed and lined, making such a mess that Oswald Beautiful Badger Going Over the Hill whistled in astonishment, urging me to stop, at least to let it dry, and then he would sandpaper the whole thing and we would start again, my hand guided by his as if I were a blundering stallion’s penis. Then I laid down the brush and began to mold or knead the god, sometimes with a twisting motion, sometimes drawing the doll with one hand through the loop made by the other’s fingers curled, sometimes beginning at the middle (the sash) and drawing either hand away until the doll actually fell into the dirt and sand, coming up griLty and with, to a legally blind man, dark textures against my thumb. Give this a chance to dry and set, I told my nephew, and I will have a wonderful grip on my doll; it will never slide free again, I will be able to grip it while adding the one hundredth coat of paint until it is too fat with pigment to go through my hand anymore. Only when, I told him, your doll is too big to be handled at all, is it godlike enough. Which means, I said, applying enough paint to make it more than man sized, easily a lifetime’s chore. They found me interesting, a character, when I went off like this, excited by my new idea, I who had not had an idea in ten years, and this abrupt rustle of clothes, this cluck of giggles and ah’s, was something I could soon get used to, indeed something I might need in the worst way of the addict. I had no idea what my doll was like. It would be finished only when I tired of it since (and keep this down to a whisper) it no longer corresponded to anything known. It stood for itself, and only in a distant sense for me, who with no doubt garish hands would have to hold it to the feeble sun until it dried or froze. Oh me!