APOLOGIES TO THE IROQUOIS

Devotees of satire and parody, and their current manifestations, fame and media, appreciate when those fundaments of culture-interpretation are stilled without equivocation. In the late 1950s, Edmund Wilson visited the longhouse at the Onondaga Nation Territory (then referred to as the Onondaga Reservation, or, with some distain, “the Res”) he saw in their most raw forms, the key elements of the Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy: democracy, matriarchy, natural law, peacemaking, and linguistic differentiation. Beyond that view, however, Wilson, (fondly but now quite distantly referred to as the “pre-eminent literary critic of the Twentieth Century”) saw that each of those characteristics were in a devolving latter stage, a twilight of the god-form in which democracy was being wrenched into victim-capital, matriarchy was supplanted by a caste system based on privilege, natural law was contravened by plutocracy, greed-wars erased the commonweal, and today’s Mohican and Onondaga languages are stultified only on blackboards.

In the early 1970s the Everson Museum in Syracuse calculated to venture that they would exhibit the feckless notions of Yoko Ono, who was then a New York City artoid. I find it disturbingly possible to imagine that John Lennon, unaccustomed to escort status and suffocating at any rate with his unseemly uxoriousness, needed to find his own space to reassume the center of the floor. At the Syracuse Jazz Festival last summer I had a long talk with an Onondaga woman who told me about Lennon’s visit to the place she called, without prejudice, “the Res.” Understanding the Nation’s 6100 acres to be a poor shambles – not so far from the truth - Lennon had carried down there gifts of music, and had met with braves and mothers and kids at the Longhouse.

My jazz festival friend said there are photographs of the meeting, and the impromptu party held to signify the Nation’s audience with the celebrated moptop. She spoke of the event with a sparkle of uncritical admiration for the star’s presence and his act of munificence.

Unencumbered by actually having seen these photographs, I imagine the countenances on the faces of the elder Onondaga gentlemen in the company of the benefactor from Liverpool – though the latter was doubtless sincerely generous and even self-effacing in the company of a truer genealogical line to the Thirteenth Century than his own on the war-mongering and imperialistic sceptered isle - and there I might see the pitying yet age-wearied tolerance of strong and natural men forced to accept irrelevant alms from the representative of the clumpy schmucks who had abused their land, perverted their bravery with brutal brutish force, poisoned their waters, and banished their heritage to the disgrace of desiccation.

But ah well, the kids wanted a used guitar, don’t you know?

TOPOGRAPHY

Patricia Hampl was a bright and noble friend for the two years we each lived out in the green plains just west of the Mississippi River. Her work since then has earned truly its many devotees, and her understanding of memoir has withstood distortion and contamination by the hot vogue of its adjacent cousins, genealogy and blatant self-reflection. I vex myself by saying that she is the wittiest woman I have ever known, thus revealing latent gender prejudices, but other than the writing of Dorothy Parker, the band of literary wits is gentle men.

A Romantic Education was published in 1981, an era when my feverish reading of Pound, Henry James, and Briffault had wholly given way to feverish reading of bicycling manuals, bicycling catalogs, and tales of sailing. My rustication was quite fine, yet hermetic. Since my MFA thesis at Iowa had concerned itself with the Cayuga Iroquois who had not so long before fished the very waters upon which I sailed and rowed, and the long thesis poem had ventured fanciful semantic fantasies about their linguistic interpretation of our topography, I could not avoid presuming that Pat’s “sometimes in fake and unconvincing ways” was remembering my poetastical presumptions. But I’d had about the same reaction then as I later had when in a book Brock Yates lifted without attribution a phrase from a letter I’d written him, and when Stacy Schiff had lavishly and embarrassingly overlauded me in the credits to her Pulitzer Prize winning book in 2000: it was only pleasant to be inside a joke.

But I regard the Cayuga who grew peaches in Chonodote (Aurora) and netted graylings in the gorge creeks at the south end of the lake principally as persons like myself who regard this glacial topography as the immanent form in which all ideas and perceptions – and all poems too – are born and flourish. People who live and write in Ithaca listen to the torrents of spring, and are deafened-to-trance by this second source of thunder; they throw fifteen-year-old virgins off 215 foot waterfalls; we never thought it was necessarily amusing that Daisy Miller came from a blunt place called Schenectady, and George Washington camped on West Hill, just up from the wayward inlet that one day would be called the Rhine, and his colonels couldn’t always get his attention because he would spend hours tossing a ball back and forth with some of his young soldiers. You may wish to look this up. I rode the city buses listening to girls have conversations that sounded like Roman declamations; the land shall submit to floodwaters, and east shore towns shall have constant dawns, the sun rising and obscured by long hills. It is natural that green knee socks gain a quarter inch of supple sinew from climbing slopes and steps. There seem to be currents on the water, rippling cross the garden party bits of conversation heaving breasts, and clefts take bits from the horizon, cool wet walkways did they secret themselves within, eddies turn the story round; and we are always climbing, fountains sunsets creeks. They were not braves here, and we let the Tuscarora in later on because in Carolina their talk had become barbarbar. Keeping fire; the Iroquois were matrilineal; Apaches sought their democratic counsel. It is useful to remember that the Iroquois had no word or use for mythology. There is a small triangular park up Elm Street, upon which fifty years ago I sat for centuries benumbed with wonder that there was no noticeable difference between what I thought of as the past and what I thought of as the future. Now I go there with a bottle of sherry in a paper bag and a good cigar and take the measure of the certainty that this is where George played ball, and where, if it came to that, I would chase and prepare bunnies for my evening meal. Poetically.

in the dooryard bloomed

Ms. Ulysses and I live in a hollow, a moderate ravine, a gap in the hills overlooking Ithaca. 350 years ago Cayugas lived here, in a village of longhouses on a spot chosen doubtless for the same reason later was built a mill and a covered bridge extant.
In the dooryard (pictographic form, above) eighty years ago, a family domesticated the scene. The house on the site was built just after 1865. When Hellhound the sheepdog and I go out to chase sticks and look down the valley half-lost in dreamy contemplation, roughened features pop up their heads through the years. Arrowheads, an apple tree, a blackberry bush, a raspberry bush, a chicken coop, granite boundary markers, a community of voles, forsythia, pine trees, a huge oak and the rotting stump of another oak that must have been enormous, bees, a creek, a rowstand of pines, a lilac bush. It is a frieze. An outbuilding houses my studio, where I produce art tiles (woodstove, electricity, church-like silence). In the house, the roof leaks; the chimney is doubtful; there is a 1903 Steinway on which La Vogdessa plays Gottschalk, Brahms, and Rhapsody in Blue, and another woodstove. In 1779 George Washington commanded John Sullivan to My Lai the persons living in this hollow; I have elsewhere seen the text translated from the English using the word "mischief."

But you will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.