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C.
S. Giscombe
But
while it was going on it was interesting because it was us—a
term I dislike, us—, big broad US culture having an experience
together; tempting to term it—the experience—sexual, but
it was more sexually-tinged than directly pleasurable. It was more
a metaphor for sex than sex itself, an itchy blanket under which
fucking was more possible than it was a fact (to borrow an image
from Nicholson Baker). Perhaps I found it interesting because it
was representational, because it demanded of Americans—even
unimaginative Republican-types—a metaphoric virtuosity that’s
quite foreign to our everyday national character. We’re a technological
bunch—from a tradition of tinkers, Ellison said—, but
metaphors? Of particular note is that the impeachment made it possible
to look at the perpetrators themselves, the Republicans, in terms
of theirs. This isn’t about sex, said the Grand Old Poobahs.
Well it was, certainly, even a moron could see that; but then again
it wasn’t. Neither of course was it about the stuff the Republicans
said it was about—honesty, the Constitution, the law, Clinton
as a bad role model for the youth of America; but in the New York
Times Maureen Dowd said, They want payback, the Republicans, and
not just for Watergate, they want payback for Woodstock. All those
bodies in the sun and the rain caught on film, in that movie, often
naked, writhing to Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana and other jungle
music or jungle-inspired music, mostly white kids shaking that thing.
Payback for that. (I
went to the Goose Lake International Music Festival, Jackson, Michigan—near
the prison—, the summer after Woodstock, July 1970, 19 years
old, one of the few black kids there. It’s a mixed memory:
I went with a friend and freely and happily admit to doing the sorts
of things one does at a three day outdoor party but finally, I think,
there were too many bodies present for me—naked, clothed it
doesn’t matter—, groups don’t do it. I met a cute
little hippie at breakfast the morning of the 2nd day, someone who’d
come in a van, who said he pal’d around with a black guy his
age who was over there still asleep right now. “He got a goat
and I got a goat too,” he said, pulling at his wispy chin.
“Late at night ‘round the fire we both wolfmen.”
Wolfmen.) Tall
Vernon Jordan, the soul of black eloquence and haughty post-black
grace—both—striding around Washington, a “super-lawyer”
by all estimates, a man who moves with “alarming” ease
into all manner of campfires, all sorts of powerful situations.
One of the southern Republicans, though—speaking doubtless
for the gang—, thought it ought to be necessary to actually
watch Vernon Jordan testify about the whole mess. I paraphrase but
the nouns and verbs are correct—he wanted to look Vernon Jordan
in the eye and hear his tone of voice and, that way, know whether
or not he was lying. I recall it being the moronic Lindsey Graham—because
of the white southern accent I reckon—who said that, but it
was “really” Bill McCollom, from Florida, who wanted to
look old Vernon in the eye. “You a lie,” we said as children,
“you a lie.” A terrible curse but a beautiful one as well. Now
tall Vernon Jordan, he a superlawyer. And trials are, to a large
extent, theatre—the experience of presentation—and because
of that I’d certainly think that Vernon Jordan or any lawyer
worth a damn could look you in the eye and lie to you with a song
in his heart and an honest smile on his face. But Vernon’s
a colored boy, and we have that complex, knotty history with white
southerners and by “complex” and “knotty” I
mean that there’s real familiarity—commonality—there
and a savage presumption there as well. We are our bodies, the blackness
of our bodies is our curse, our cross: his body gon’ tell on
him, said Bill McCollum, his body gonna betray him and we’ll
see that he’s a liar, that he a lie. In
the city in which I used to live—Ithaca, N.Y.—there was
a feature that ran on Saturdays in the Ithaca Journal, something
sponsored by the local SPCA and encouraging readers to “adopt”
animals: each Saturday there was an article about a particular animal,
a profile as it were, and each of these was accompanied by a clear,
crisp head-and-shoulders photo of the animal in question. My wife
Katharine Wright is a photographer and also knows a great deal—through
various employments and schooling and deep interest—about animals.
The photos, she told me, are not to the point: they’re being
photographed like humans are and animals are much more their bodies—the
stretch of those—than we are. In our faces lives our intelligence
and our faces are subject to that and malleable because of it: in
my family we pride ourselves on being able to tell tall tales with
straight faces—a collie shortage in Scotland, e.g., or a 40
foot glass statue of a pigeon at the State Office Building campus
in Albany, N.Y.—and we’re not even lawyers. I realized
some years ago how much physical attraction depends on the intelligence
observed, over time, in someone’s face. Erica Hunt mentions,
as example of double exceptionalism, “the black man who yields
feeling cerebrally.” Graham Greene said that by the time you’re
50 you have the face you deserve. Now
for a colored boy such as myself who appreciates the outdoors—trees,
mountains, hills, the prairie, animals, etc.—this is troublesome
when it comes to the natural. Or this is the way we’re brought
to the natural, as the natural. Nature is quantity, its own surface
and opaque and mysterious and threatening and, obviously, erotic
because of all that, but knowable via certain conventions, discernible,
readable—Vernon Jordan’s dark body will tell on him, will
undo him, will reveal him. Our words don’t mean—it’s
our bodies that mean, that’s where our nature is. And because
of this we have no particular agency there, in the depiction of
nature—our bodies are “primitive” and “jungle”
and therefore we are not other enough from the natural world to
be able to find metaphors of ourselves there. Instead, we are the
natural world, we’re ripe: upon us can be projected metaphors
by nature writers or writers about human nature. Channel-surfing
late at night I recently got to Zalman King’s “Delta of
Venus,” the shock of nudity on TV, soft-core porn on the IFC:
I watched for a while and then I fell asleep though not before the
scene in an after-hours club—there was a frenzied crowded dance
in which women lost their tops and their breasts came out and this
was called “jungle” in the voice-over. They acted like
Negroes. This is old news but on it goes. But it’s old news,
an easy example. (But
channel-surfing again some nights later I came into the middle of
“Howling III,” a werewolf movie set in Australia that’s
too racially weird to even begin to talk about. This was not of
course on the Independent Film Channel but on TNT or USA or some
other cable channel that panders to our indelicate appetites. But
I was struck by a scene in which a white ballerina went lupine in
the middle of her frenzied dance—hairy, grey, and savage she
came after her fellow dancers with a hungry aplomb. Same scene as
in “Delta.”) Frenzied
sex and nature and us. All this is trouble to me too because I came
to understand malleability and provisional definitions and choice
and projection all at a long early point in my own life. Nothing
particularly mysterious here: reading and thinking and meeting smart
people. (Many of whom were ambivalent priests and even more ambivalent
religious brothers, the lot that educated me in high school, this
being a benefit of the black middle-class dodging the bad public
schools and sending its children downtown to be schooled by the
Catholics.) Anyway, when I got to college and read Blake’s
hellish proverb about “Where man is not, nature is barren,”
I knew that already. I learnt how to watch movies by watching movies
on TV with my mother— “Look,” she’d say, “look
what they’re making that woman do.” I became aware that
writing and photography and movie making and walking in the woods
and commenting on what one saw were not natural abilities or occurrences
but a series of choices, determined in extent by the circumstances
of one’s birth, people you’ve happened to meet and other
lucky or unlucky accidents visited on one’s person—and
this alone, this awareness which I can’t lose when I think
or write, would probably be grounds for my lifetime exclusion from
the canon of nature writing. That
canon’s even more profoundly white than others. But Eddy Harris
did make it into the Oxford Book of Nature Writing, with a snippet
of his Mississippi Solo, the book about his canoe trip down that
river from Minnesota to the Gulf. I recall hearing him interviewed
on the radio in 1989 or 1990 and realizing that he was black before
the interviewer’s questions revealed it—a familiar inflection
in the voice betrayed it to me. I was on a mission to the grocer’s
but I put that on hold and sat in the dark parking lot listening
to Eddy Harris on the car radio and thought I could do that, I could
write about unconventional, back-country travel, publish a book
about it. And then I went into the supermarket to shop for dinner
feeling quite odd about having just granted myself that permission.
I was 40 years old, a professor, middle-class—my Volvo sat
waiting for me in the lot. I’d published poetry books, done
the state some service, and won literary awards. And I certainly
understood by then—had understood long before then—that
there was no unproblematic center, that all was margin and—more—that
straddling the margin, like I’d been doing in my writing and
my life, was exhilarating, the long ride, the dance of flirtation
with various kinds of otherness, with various forms. I knew before
I heard Eddy Harris on the radio that the margin was a powerful
place to be, that you weren’t trapped there—if you were
middle-class—, that you could, because you were marginal (and
middle-class), do anything. Sure I talked in my classes about the
lack of certain narratives for black writers and women writers but
I’d thought I was immune, post-all that. I
bought Mississippi Solo and marched through it—it’s OK,
it’s a good-enough read. It did not inspire my prose book Into
and Out of Dislocation, which is about back-country travel in Canada,
among other things. (It’s really a book about ambivalence and
about family-as-metaphor, and about race—that is, blackness—and
history in the northern reaches of the continent.) Neither the book’s
content nor its form offer any particular homage to Eddy Harris
but the fact of Mississippi Solo’s existence helped me be arrogant
enough to push my own book as book. The classic path/desire of wanting
someone there before you was at work here, even for a writer such
as myself, one who’s sneered so often at narrative’s straight,
dull line and at the cliché of role model. But here I was—driving
home from the supermarket and a few years later out having lunch
at a lovely seafood restaurant near Union Square with my editor
at Farrar, Straus & Giroux— appreciative of that narrative
and humbled some by that appreciation, by my own realization of
the narrative’s power, and not wanting to trouble it or disrupt
it. (Especially not while someone was buying me lunch.) Of
course I remember “discovering” Jean Toomer’s Cane
when I was a sophomore at university and what a powerful moment
that was for me, but I was young then, at the age where one’s
supposed to be having such discoveries—when one’s not
lolling around naked in the shallow end of a Michigan lake with
a joint burning one’s fingers, which is in itself, truth be
told, a not unpleasant way to spend an afternoon. Not unpleasant
but neither is it particularly unnerving—Toomer’s complex
blackness married to issues of migration and sex and to his book’s
own unwieldiness as a book, on the other hand, unnerved me a great
deal. My book Here, begun 15 years after I read Cane for the first
time, is a belated response—an homage really—to it. But
is all this “nature writing”? Or what’s this got
to do with nature writing, which is what I’d intended for the
theme of the theme of this essay to be? I spoke last year—1998—at
St. Mark’s, invited there along with a hundred other people
to talk about “Identity and Invention.” I began by saying,
“All my life I’ve depended on geography, acknowledged
it and considered it as basic meaning, as that which is in the world
and irreducible in the world.” There’s nature, right there,
boys. But on I went to talk about my invented identity as filmgoer,
movies being an art form I truly love in a goofy, romantic sort
of way, and to document the film that had most scared me as a child—it
was not a proto-intellectual choice like “Repulsion” or
“M,” it was a wolf-man movie, “Curse of the Werewolf,”
with young Oliver Reed in the title role. My piece was short, less
than a thousand words as per the instructions from the Poetry Project.
Now, a year on, I want to return to that and add some things to
it. I’m
interested, simply, in the processes by which people estimate nature,
what we bring to descriptions of it, what syntheses. We do synthesize.
From the first chapter of Eugene Genovese’s book, Roll, Jordan,
Roll: “Slavery bound two people together in bitter antagonism
while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent
that neither could express the simplest human truth without reference
to the other.” It’s this necessary “reference to
the other” race that Genovese suggests that interests me. It’s
the soul of synthesis, of an everyday self-consciousness that black
people continue to inhabit. (The relationship is still there, I’d
argue, for white people as well but the consciousness of it has
burned off or gone underground, choose your metaphor. We still,
though, fresh and talking among ourselves, are perpetually, unforgettably
other; or, as Dick Gregory said years ago, commenting on the failure
of Madison Avenue type advertising in the ghetto, “We know
what it’s like to be Brand X.” ) But I was raised middle-class
and understood and appreciated irony and we were far removed from
the “old days,” even as I was growing up in the 50s. I
was sent to the Nature Program at the Dayton Museum of Natural History
in 1958 or 1959, only vaguely aware that I was the only black child
present. (My exhibit on Birds of Ohio is boxed in the attic still.)
My sister’s history is similar. The
question is, Why are the Giscombe children so enamored of werewolves? If
most popular and literary depictions of nature as subject are problematical
because they seem to deny—or pretend to deny—human/cultural
agency and hypothesize a de-racialized and class-free “human”
self whose metaphor might be found in the erotically primitive otherness
of the natural world . . . Well, werewolves are an antidote to that,
or at least a more direct form of address—we have the human
and the animal coupled (not sexually but sexuality enters into it).
Popular depictions of lycanthropy are a satire, arguably, of nature
writing, a cautionary tale: look too close and you’re gonna
fall in. (Langston Hughes’ “Suicide’s Note”:
“The calm / Cool face of the river / Asked me for a kiss.”)
The primitive will inhabit you. This, of course, is what “going
native” means, which phrase only seems to apply, in the customs
of usage, to white people. Native? [replacing ME. natyf (OFr. natif)
< L. nativus < natus, pp. of nasci, to be born]. If black
people are jungly, primitive nature itself then nature [ME.; OFr.;
L. natura < natus, born, produced, pp. of nasci, to be born]
will get you and take over your ass. More:
the films my sister and I enjoyed so much as children were not the
monster films of giant ants or beasts from 20,000 fathoms as much
as they were films about human bodies in revolt, infected bodies,
bodies at war with their own “selves,” the inescapability
of the monster’s human body—the werewolf in the daytime
staring at his hands, the elegant appearance of the vampire in the
drawing room in early evening, arguably even the limping mummy,
with its human form and memory. What’s at stake is the human’s
inability to truly transcend the heat of its infection, the nature
of its nature. Oliver Reed, as Leon the werewolf, was described
as being in flight “from the curse of his tainted blood.”
And blood’s a big deal, as a public metaphor for race—it
defines black people (in America) as being people with even “one
drop” of African “blood” in their veins. It’s
the one drop that stains you like it would a white tablecloth—it’s
the thing, the substance, that taints you, makes you non-white.
This is not news either, this one drop rule and the fear of hidden
miscegenation that it represents for white people. The point I’d
argue, though, is that the films we liked constructed their monsters,
partly, out of this fear—there was often a heroine to be rescued
from some dark sexual beast (Fay Wray and old King Kong, e.g.) or
the ostensibly ordinary person is the descendent of some wrong or
un-ancestor as was Simone Simon in “Cat People,” one of
the smartest werewolf movies. (Monsters had other Africanisms about
their persons as well but this is a topic for another place, another
time.) (In
the most interesting moment in “American Graffiti” one
of the minor female characters says her parents won’t let her
listen to Wolfman Jack—played by himself in the film—“because
he’s a Negro.” ) Real
wolves don’t look a thing like what Larry Talbot turned into:
their fur is very straight, their snouts are aquiline. But he is
the werewolf image that has survived in American culture—60
years on, Lon Chaney’s still the wolfman. His depiction made
it onto a postage stamp last year, just before the rates went up,
the fearsome head printed there next to 32¢. This wolfman as
opposed to the metaphorically less complex but higher tech models
of the various Howlings and American Werewolves in London and Paris.
This movie is from back in the day, from 1940, and story itself
is simple and cautionary: Larry Talbot, the wayward American son
of Sir John Talbot, arrives at the embarrassingly huge family mansion—Talbot
Castle—in England, becomes smitten with a young local woman—played
by blonde Evelyn Ankers—who is charming and all (but lower
class). He accompanies her and her unfortunate friend—the dark-haired
actress Fay Helms—to a gypsy fortune teller at a traveling
carnival. The gypsy—Bela Lugosi in a bit role—happens
to be a werewolf and, later that foggy evening, he attacks the dispensible
dark woman. Larry Talbot fights the “wolf” off—too
late, alas, for poor Fay Helms—but in the process is bitten
and becomes of course a werewolf himself. The question of the film
is whether or not he’s going to kill the blonde he’s in
love with; he does not—he’s killed (by Claude Rains as
Sir John) first and, in death, reverts to his human form. He’s
brought back to life for a number of sequels and it’s possible,
in these, to chart the advances in special effects: in “The
Wolfman,” he changes demurely—that is, off camera—but
in later films Chaney’s transformations were accomplished in
a succession of frames of the same shot: different thicknesses of
hair overlay each previous shot until he’s finished changing
into the dark-skinned, flat-nosed, kinky-furred monster who first
went off in pursuit of the English blonde who’d fallen in love
with the white boy who came back from America to live in the house
that Jack built, y’all. Why
are the Giscombe children so interested in this? Kathy Giscombe,
rolling her eyes at her brother and then getting serious, mentions
the spectacle of hidden, angry power unleashed suddenly and unexpectedly.
Robert Hayden: “the chronic angers of that house.” And
this works for me as both a female and black reading of werewolf
stories—as well as a tale of the Giscombe manse—, but
my own interest was always elsewhere. Alongside that but elsewhere.
There’s a loup-garou tradition in Haiti and it’s interesting
as well but it’s also other than this, the depiction of the
werewolf as a European-descended American icon, something we watch
at the movies or on TV. Alfred Metraux: “A woman werewolf getting
ready for a night outing first raises as many fingers as she expects
to be hours absent from her house, or else she lights a candle marked
with three notches. Unless she is back before the flame reaches
the last notch her excursion may go ill. When she has taken these
precautions she frees herself of her skin by rubbing her neck, wrists,
and ankles with a concoction of magic herbs. She hides her skin
in a cool place—in a jar or near a pitcher—so that it
will not shrink. Thus, stripped to the quick, the woman werewolf
makes movements which have the effect of preparing her for the flight
which she will shortly undertake. Flames spurt from her armpits
and anus, turkey wings sprout from her back. She takes off through
the thatch of her house . . . ” In Haiti loups garoux are shape-shifters
and devourers of children and the French for werewolf itself fits
awkwardly: there are no wolves in Haiti. And the Giscombe children’s
antecedents are Jamaican and that’s a different island. Here
in late 20th C. America werewolves are nature transformed—narrated—infused
with the wide human trace in such an ungainly way as to be—as
spectacle—of deep interest or, better, of broad interest. If
one’s interest is in the dance werewolves are a good spectacle,
a filmed metaphor, perhaps more of one than anything else I can
easily think of. More
on this: I was on Assateague Island some years ago, the island off
the Maryland coast where wild horses still roam. “Wild horse”
had always seemed oxymoronic—the term itself a combination
of opposites—after seeing horses bridled and saddled, behind
fences, for all these years. I was on a several-days cycling tour
of Maryland and Delaware with my friend the poet Cory Brown; it
was rainy and miserable this particular day but I’d convinced
him to go on in that for the extra miles so we might be able to
encounter nature in the “person” of these horses. We crossed
the bridge onto the island and rode around for a long time on the
park roads—I had on a primitive Gore-tex raincoat but Cory
was wearing a green garbage bag and was getting impatient. (The
horses of Assateague are descendents of domestic stock kept there
by Eastern Shore planters in the 17th and 18th centuries. “Truly”
wild? Well, they live without human agency or without benefit of
direct human agency anyway—Assateague, which stretches across
the state line into Virginia, is protected; the Maryland herd is
“managed” by the National Parks Service. “Feral”
might be a more appropriate term than “wild” but the distinction
is a fairly fine one.) Anyway I was anxious to actually see the
horses and was not disappointed: suddenly, there at the roadside
in front of us, was a group of them, three mares and a stallion,
grazing. They’re not tall animals, they’re stocky and
scruffy and shaggy. They’re bigger than ponies, though, and
the stallion stood still looking at us as the mares crossed the
road and disappeared into the brush. This was a harem, I realized,
and then I wondered, “Should we be afraid?” He was brown
and white, his big penis hung down toward the ground; he snorted
at us a few more times before following the mares off out of our
sight. “OK,” said Cory Brown, “we’ve seen the
fucking horses. Now can we leave?” We
went back the way we’d come, over the bridge to the mainland,
and it was on the bridge that I realized that in the “Wolfman”
movie, people claimed on the screen to be seeing a wolf, to have
seen a wolf—Canis lupus—and not Lon Chaney in black face
and fur. I remembered the screen image of the attack on poor Fay
Helms—it was a wolf (or a dog actor playing a wolf) that was
savaging her kicking form there in the fog, underneath a tree. The
gypsy’s mother—Maria Oespenskaya—explained it to
Talbot later with, “The wolf was Bela and Bela was the wolf”;
but when Bela was the wolf, the wolf looked a lot different than
when Larry Talbot was the wolf. And I realized that the figure of
the wolfman—clothed, broad-featured, hairy, dark, and upright—was
a construct for the movie audience, that in the “reality”
of the film that figure does not exist. It was a literal filmed
metaphor, I realized as we chugged up the slick road; it was an
awkward fit on the Maryland 2-lane and it’s still an awkward
fit on the way back from the story of the wild horses of Assateague—it
doesn’t particularly connect or hold together but it’s
a true story, my friends. We pushed through a heavier rain to the
condos and high-rise tourist lodgings of Ocean City and arrived
drenched and grubby and a little desperate but still managed to
fight with a desk-clerk and get the price of a room in his hotel
down. We watched a PBS program on Robert Mugabe and went out for
a wonderful seafood dinner. The ocean’s right there, of course;
fish tastes different in seaside towns. It’s a rainy Sunday
afternoon in central Pennsylvania as I keyboard this and I’m
thinking of the loups-garoux of Haiti: no wolves there so their
presence is an act of language rather than an act of God or the
devil: it’s an act “against nature,” an act of opening
the field rather than an act of connection. My
mother had dozed through one of the later wolfman movies, the one
in which a gypsy girl fell in love with cursed Larry Talbot and
then tried to kill him, as a service, with a silver bullet. I explained
the plot twists to her the next morning in what I imagine now was
likely tiresome detail. But then I pointed out that a werewolf could
only be killed by a silver bullet “fired by the hand of one
who loves him.” This, I realized, was heavy. (This is probably
why the Republicans failed to eliminate Bill Clinton, they didn’t
come to assassinate him with love in their hearts.) “But what,”
she replied, “if a strange werewolf came to town and no one
knew him well enough to love him?” What’s the nature of nature writing? It ain’t language, the jagged peaks of sentences, the dewey dells of short paragraphs. Nor is it about “reducing something to voodoo,” as Barry Lopez snorted in the werewolf chapter of his book about wolves. Henry Louis Gates suggested that Ralph Ellison was signifying on the titles of Richard Wright’s books Black Boy and Native Son with his own Invisible Man. Boy: Son: Man. Music should come up right about here. Denied the oppositeness of nature I propose my own iconography, that from the jazz standard, “Nature Boy,” the road leads crookedly to the wolf-man. |
