Mrs. Wilson’s True Tales Retold


In Memory of James Buford LevitzA Deering Trade Card (circa 1890), included in the online collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Novelty trade card advertising harvesting machinery manufactured by William Deering and Company. At close range, the image shows two young girls holding a dog. At a distance, the image appears as a human skull.The caption reads: "The beginning and the end of life (Hold the picture 1 foot away for Life and 20 feet for Death)."The reverse of the card reads (in part): "...the skull duggery practiced by some manufacturers of Harvesting Machinery, in palming off cheap machines on unsuspecting farmers, finds no favor in the Deering factory."

In which we are introduced to some of the principal characters of these tales----the Peddler and Captain Maximillian Robin among them-----and the recurring themes of America’s distressed abundance, our woods and wealth ripped out of the earth, yet hope not exhausted by our inexhaustible expectations. After the Civil War our nineteenth century America was extreme, a time of delirious boons and desperate busts. The mighty white pine forests-----”green gold” as it was called-----which had carpeted the midwest land were nearly gone from clear cutting. Farms, ever larger, ever harder to keep, yielded fickle profit at the cruel mercies of giant Trusts of money and industry which extorted them. Daunting depressions in jobs and markets repeatedly crushed as many with debt and poverty as in the 1930’s, but no one spoke for welfare. Hence, such stories as this from the Badger State Banner of Black River Falls, Wisconsin: John Kuch, a farmer living in the town of Oakland, was found in his barn the other morning, hanging by his neck…. No cause was known. About 12 years ago, his father hanged himself in the same barn.16 January 1890

(corresponding to “Esther: Her Story”)You will see that it is loosely inspired, although the mood and quality of magical absurdity is kept, I hope.Again, we see these abstractions in terms of our own concrete images. Whether it is people who are animals, or animals who are people.

This is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, one of several models of self-sustaining rotaries, which he proposed for perpetual motion. His experiments, however, displeased him and he declared: "Oh, ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the gold-seeking alchemists."Many men of science have nonetheless pursued it. Pascal, the logician, pursued it. One Proud American InventorIn America the pursuit for the perpetual motion machine was popular throughout the nineteenth century, and several dozen hopeful patents were issued by the U.S. government for its invention, none of which were ever manufactured.

(corresponding to “Myth of Perpetual Motion”)The myth of capturing the sun or capturing fire is a myth of human transformation. Man claims a place in the cosmos no other can attain, but also pays a price for it. The traditional Pacific Northwest Coast tale, as related by the Haida in the this instance, is the tale of the Raven Stealing the Sun, quite different from that of Mrs. Wilson:Long ago, near the beginning of the world, Gray Eagle was the guardian of the Sun, Moon and Stars, of fresh water, and of fire. Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden. People lived in darkness, without fire and without fresh water.Gray Eagle had a beautiful daughter, and Raven fell in love with her. In the beginning, Raven was a snow-white bird, and as a such, he pleased Gray Eagle's daughter. She invited him to her father's longhouse.When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and stars, and fresh water hanging on the sides of Eagle's lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and a brand of fire also, and flew out of the longhouse through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got outside he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made so much light that he was able to fly far out to an island in the middle of the ocean. When the Sun set, he fastened the Moon up in the sky and hung the stars around in different places. By this new light he kept on flying, carrying with him the fresh water and the brand of fire he had stolen.He flew back over the land. When he had reached the right place, he dropped all the water he had stolen. It fell to the ground and there became the source of all the fresh-water streams and lakes in the world. Then Raven flew on, holding the brand of fire in his bill. The smoke from the fire blew back over his white feathers and made them black. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the firebrand. It struck rocks and hid itself within them. That is why, if you strike two stones together, sparks of fire will drop out.Raven's feathers never became white again after they were blackened by the smoke from the firebrand. That is why Raven is now a black bird.

The song in this story----Wildwood Flower----is now a traditional “folk song,” but was composed as parlor music by J. P. Webster, living in Elkhorn, Wisconsin at the time, shortly before the Civil War. The original lyrics by Maud Irving were so strange that most renditions of the song make mondegreen of them. Take, for example, the first stanza. Maud wrote: I’ll twine 'mid the ringlets of my raven black hair,The lilies so pale and the roses so fair,The myrtle so bright with an emerald hue,And the pale aronatus with eyes of bright blue.But the usual version given, is that which is sung here by Maybelle Carter in 1928:Oh, I'll twine with my mingles and waving black hair,With the roses so red and the lilies so fair,And the myrtle so bright with the emerald dew,The pale and the leader and eyes look like blue.Actually, neither one makes much sense. But there is no flower called “aronatus;” what Maud meant by that is anybody’s guess.

(corresponding to “The Story of the Bride”)Women are central to the myths told by Mrs. Wilson. They control the plot. They dominate the characters. Their interests and virtues are foremost.Once again, we find out how important it is not to be stingy with your wife.

“Hope is the Heart in the Body of Belief.”In which we learn how the peddler made Maximilian Robin the man he became and why he hated water, how Amy was a singer and Amy was a dancer, and how love can split you in two.

(corresponding to “Catching Sky”) In which we learn how birds get their colors and why you ought not to trust little girls who go digging for roots that aren’t really good to eat.

In which we are introduced to Chicago, city of America’s Will, Heart, Muscle, and Nerve. In the mighty words of Carl Sandburg:“They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.“And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.“And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.“And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:“Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.“Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;“Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness....”

In which the adventures of the masked man begin and end.“A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.”Nathaniel Hawthorne

(corresponding to “Fabulous Masked Man”) From Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Act II, Scene I:THIRD FISHERMAN.... Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.FIRST FISHERMAN.Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones: I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; a’ plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. such whales have I heard on o’ the land, who never leave gaping till they they’ve swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.PERICLES. [Aside]A pretty moral.

In which we are introduced to Mr. Kite and Mr. Boyd, better known as Even and Odd, and the enterprise of logging and those occupations which supported it. In Wisconsin and Minnesota white pine forests covered better than half of the entire territory, before settlement; so densely covered it that a squirrel could travel leaping limb-to-limb from the shore of Green Bay to the Lake of the Woods, almost a thousand miles, without ever touching ground, and its 150-foot mature trees were prized for sailing masts, so tall, so straight, so indomitable they were.They----sons of the industry who had decimated the forests of New England----had started cutting them down in earnest after the Civil War ended, and in less than a single human generation, before the century was over, they were virtually all gone.

(corresponding to “How to Make a Buck----First”) John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of Kellogg’s corn flakes, a vegetarian, and a guru of health and the mind cure movement which dominated popular culture in America of the late nineteenth century, held that clean bowels was the road to wellness. Patients to his Battlecreek Sanitarium were required to undergo a therapy of enemas. Every patient every day was plied with purgative rinses, from above and below. His favorite device was an enema machine that could rapidly instill several gallons of water in a series of enemas. Every water enema was followed by a pint of yogurt— half was eaten, the other half was administered by enema. In the words of Dr. Kellogg: “Thus planting the protective germs where they are most needed and may render most effective service." Yogurt, he believed, served to replace the intestinal flora of the bowel, creating what he claimed would be squeaky-clean intestines.With these daily purgatives patients also devoted themselves to rigorous exercise and a strict diet which further purged the poisons in their bodies. Kellogg was an especially strong proponent of nuts, which he also believed would save mankind in the face of decreasing food supply.His many notable patients included: former president of the United States, William Howard Taft; the British satirist, socialist and playwright George Bernard Shaw; Olympic athlete Johnny Weissmuller (who later starred as Tarzan in the movies); Henry Ford; Thomas Edison; and actress Sarah Bernhardt. Preoccupation with bowels was common. Every magazine that posted to the American prairie home contained dozens of remedies for constipation. Children were popularly induced to gag down a ration of cod liver oil, not for its vitamins. Meat as the principle diet for these hard working folk, especially well salted and preserved meats, made for guts of steel. The man who wrote sentimental drivel for his mother in Valentines also took a spoonful of sand and shot of kerosene each morning to keep his pipes going.

Image is the botanical drawing of American Ginseng (Panax Quinquefolius), an herbal native to Wisconsin, but related to the Asian ginseng (Panax Ginseng), which grows wild in Northern Manchuria and has been harvested there for thousands of years.Ginseng was one of the earliest marketable herbs to be harvested in America. In 1860, more than 120 tons of dried ginseng roots were shipped from the state to China.

(corresponding to “How to Make a Buck----Second”) Two variations of the myth are presented. Both tell the tale of how the salmon came into the river. Both begin with the notion that the people were dying of hunger and ate roots, before the salmon appear, that food which dominates and enriches their diet, and which symbolizes wealth.The action of the myth is how salmon goes up river for the first time. As he goes up, the salmon travels with “people” who stop him as he goes and declare they want out of the canoe. The people referred to are not only the human beings. All living creatures are sentient, even plants, and therefore all are “persons” and are called “people.” So in the first instance it is skunk-cabbage who stops wants to go ashore, then Arrowhead, and then other roots. Each one goes ashore and settles into its environment, encoding the tale with the ethnology of naming and finding these foods. And to each one Salmon makes a gift—a potlatch, in the traditional manner—giving him something of value in honor and appreciation for them. After all when Salmon are not found, these keep us alive. We are grateful to them.There is an odd expression here, which each one says when he wants to get off: “At last my brother’s son arrived, whose anus is full of maggots. If it had not been for me, your people would be dead.” The “brother’s son” in the reference is the salmon, the nephew by a brother. Assuming that the speaker is a woman, this is the closest kin to her after her own child. A common kindred affinity amongst tribal people is the lineage from the woman, because the woman is the obvious parent; the father of a child could be anyone; the mother is certain and therefore the uncle who is the mother’s brother is most important (often a sponsor or sort of “god-father” for a child), and so too his children are important to her. What is meant by the odd phrase “whose anus is full of maggots”? It is to the Salmon that it refers. It is observed that the Pacific salmon going up-stream in the spring are going up to spawn, and there they shall all die. As they go up, they are dying, it seems. Perhaps because of the ordeal of cascades or the change from sea-water to fresh-water, their bodies suffer: they will lose their oil; they will look physically distressed; they will discolor; they will deform. Their pink flesh will turn white. The flesh will be mushy when you cook them. And finally, after they spawn, they will lie spent, gasping and exposed in shallows, to be pecked at by birds or devoured by bear, or to rot while half-alive. This then is the reference of the phrase, I think, that the Salmon is foredoomed.At the end of the tale Salmon going up river encounters three last people: Flounder, Crow and Blue-jay. They tell him a lie about the journey, that it takes only one day’s travel when it actually takes five. Salmon takes some revenge of them. It is how Flounder got his face sideways, for example.

Of the monsters told in this tale, I believe you can find further information on the internet concerning the common Hodag and Wobblecat. The Hidebehind is rarely spoken of out-loud and is not to be found there. The mysterious bayl is not a creature that can be described and is only known by intimation; hence, the word “baleful,” which is etymologically derived from the creature’s name and its lore.

(corresponding to “Monsters Today...”) Because we live in a world that is largely man-made, in which our needs are fulfilled by intercession of a society that is the predominant reality of our lives, we are not aware how monstrous, irrational, unconscious are the forces that govern and surround us. We have forgotten the experience of being prey. The unexpected in our lives is an accident, and we think we should avoid them, if we are careful, if we are intelligent. But this is not so. We are yet the animal in the wilderness. Our predators surprise us.And while we like to believe that our capacity to control our lives is absolute, our own bodies, our own minds are like that wilderness in which our being, like animal, is vulnerable. We are stalked by what we cannot control; our natural frailty makes us its prey.

The Motto of the 
graduating class of ’96 was:
 “Vim, Vigor, Victory.”Badger State Banner18 June 18961896 was the last year of a severe depression that had begun with the bank Panic of 1893. At its height 19% of American workers had lost jobs, the middle class lost homes on foreclosed mortgages by the thousands, 15000 companies shut down, more than 500 banks failed. The worst of it occurred in the mid-western states like Wisconsin. By 1896, however, times began changing. The progress of science and affluence put forth promise and portent. The Klondike Goldrush began in earnest after Kate Carmack and Skookum Jim found motherlodes in Bonanza Creek. Tens of thousands stampeded north for their fortune. In that year too scientists used x-rays for the first time to reveal the skeleton in a live human body. In that year history recorded the first time that an automobile killed a pedestrian, a mother holding the hand of her child, as she crossed a road.Our story takes place twenty-five years earlier in 1871 when America was at new heights of prosperity. A Panic very like the one of 1893 was just two years off, and its depression would darken lives for a decade. But in 1871, as I say, America reveled in prosperity and optimism: the centennial of our Independence on the horizon, new railroads flung for miles and miles each new day, our banks and granaries bursting, our hopes at a peak, rising on our soaring ambitions. Chicago, America’s new Rome, is coming into its heyday. The Palmer House Hotel, newly built, had just opened a week before the events which we shall relate. Its enormous marbled gold-leafed frescoed lobby, comfortably trafficked hundreds of patrons at a time, or directed them aside into elegant salons for dining, drinking, shopping or barbering, also splendid in marble, gold-leaf, and frescoes of the French pastorals, princesses playing at shepherdesses.The story that follows is the true account of the events of October 8, 1871, including the fate of that new hotel in Chicago.

“It was the completeness of the wreck; the total desolation which met the eye on every hand; the utter blankness of what had a few hours before been so full of life, of associations, of aspirations, of all things which kept the mind of a Chicagoan so constantly driven.”
 ––– Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration, 1871The web site----The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory Copyright © 1996 by the Chicago Historical Society and the Trustees of Northwestern University----describes the aftermath of the fire this way: Devastated Chicago remained so hot that it took a day or two before it was possible even to begin a survey of the physical damage. According to the papers, in some instances when anxious businessmen opened their safes among the rubble of what was once their offices, precious contents that had survived the inferno suddenly burst into flame on exposure to the air. Shortly after the fire, Stephen L. Robinson, a North Division resident whose home was not burned, set out with a printed map of the city to mark what was still standing. Among the few scattered survivors he noted were the mansion of Ogden on Lafayette.... Had he then crossed to the West Division, he would have found the O'Leary cottage safe and sound in front of the ashes of the barn.The so-called "Burnt District," a map of which appeared in virtually every account of the fire, encompassed an area four miles long and an average of three-quarters of a mile wide--more than two thousand acres--including over twenty-eight miles of streets, 120 miles of sidewalks, and over 2,000 lampposts, along with countless trees, shrubs, and flowering plants in "the Garden City of the West." Gone were eighteen thousand buildings and some two hundred million dollars in property, about a third of the valuation of the entire city. Around half of this was insured, but the failure of numerous companies cut the actual payments in half again. One hundred thousand Chicagoans lost their homes, an uncounted number their places of work.

Chicago was rebuilt. The Palmer House was rebuilt immediately. Reopened in less than two years, it was built bigger—three-times bigger—and more ostentatious, more luxurious than ever: oversized over-decorated suites; a grand restaurant with a thirty-foot ceiling which spangled gilded plaster Beaux Arts garlands, scrolls and festoons, where frescos of Louis Quatorze pastorals chromed the walls, where enormous crystal chandeliers dazzled, where the best-dressed and best-mannered of society were humbly served sumptuous meals by tuxedoed negro staff. The floor of the Palmer House barbershop was tiled with silver dollars. Rudyard Kipling would shortly visit. “They told me to go to the Palmer House,” he said. “A gilded and mirrored rabbit-warren,” he exclaimed “…. and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble, crammed with people talking about money and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him told me that this was the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty's earth.” America is irrepressible.

(corresponding to “Southwest Wind...”) Wind is a word we took from Norsemen when they invaded England in the ninth century.Window is another word that we took from these Norse invaders, and which contains the word wind, and is related to it. Window is a word in two parts – wind and o – meaning literally the “wind eye.” The prevailing winds of our ancestral Britain and our North America, or for that matter any place that is north of the 35th parallel latitude, are the southwest winds. Notoriously these are winds of our spring and our fall. This is the western wind of Shelley’s Ode. O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being    Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead  Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,      Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,  Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou          Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed    The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,    Each like a corpse within its grave, until  Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow      Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill  (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)    With living hues and odours plain and hill;    Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;  Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!This is the wind that torments Lear and drives him mad:Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once, That make ingrateful man!It is not a wind that the Greek’s knew or that the Bible knows. Those winds are different, blowing differently, having different meaning. The Greek winds are unreliable. They are not the foundation of the earth as they are to us. The Biblical winds are judgments, like everything in the Bible; they are comment on man’s relationship to God. They are the breath of God, what breath we breathe. They cast change, what change we cannot hold back. Try. Try to put up a wall to the wind. The wind will blow past it and around it and over it or will knock it down. That is God’s wind. This wind, the Southwest wind, this is a different wind. This is the wind that defines sky. This is the wind that shapes world. This is the story of how that happens.

We are aware of consciousness in many forms, including that which is not conscious, which we call sleep, where time is forgotten. If remembered for its moments, it is the remembrance we call dreams and these seep back into that forgetfulness like water into sand and so often disappear. If we remember anything, it is remembrance of the remembrance.There are also the simultaneities of consciousness of which we are aware, the many moving parts of ourselves—sensations, perceptions, within, without—and finally the engineer, the pilot to the motion, attending to the machinery of it, the signals demanding decision and coordination. Our actor. The actor is our presence of mind, at least that is the billing he gets. If he is incoherent, then so am I. If out of his mind, so am I.But what is mind? What is presence of mind? A will? Not merely. A coherent thought? Not always. Logic? Language? Not always. Although it is difficult to distinguish mind from thought in words, since thought in words is how we understand our mind. But all of us know, that words seem to drape like cloth the form of what we mean, to give appearance to what lies beneath, and thus some words with more elegance and charm than others. We like nice clothes.But we are also naked. Music is naked thought, thought without words. The athlete thinks naked. When doing is thought. The artist thinks naked. When what is created and the creator melds, the creation is thought. At any rate we can sense the way in which thought with words is both artificial and artful. It is not quite the real, but it is a semblance, a verisimilitude, and in itself is highly attractive, colorful, and often so beautiful it can be evocative of what that ineffable consciousness is. It can indeed seem to be so exact to the truth that we mistake for what is real.But what if there is more than one actor here? What if I am a whole stage full of actors? What if there are not just representations of me from different times of my life, but roles I have not played, except subconsciously, or maybe roles that I have never played? What if I can be anyone I have ever met or anyone I can imagine? And what if these actors play? What if I am that drama?

(corresponding to “The Bird-Headed Woman”) Aq!asXe’nasXena, the name of the one whom I call the Bird-headed Woman in my rendition, is an untranslated name, now untranslatable name. To what it refers was not known by Boas or his confidant, Charles Cultee. So too, the name of the boy in the story is an untranslated, untranslatable name, Itcixia’ne, which name was given to him at the end of the story. It is suggested by Boas parenthetically that this name pertains to the strange celestial phenomenon, called sundogs or (in Greek) parhelion, which is the meteorological appearance of a frost-ringed sun, or if the sun is setting, the appearance of a sun with paired orbiculate ghosts beside it, equidistant on either side, at the span of the horizon.... and that rare phenomenon
The iridule--when beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range….(From Vladimir Nabokov's introduction to his 1962 novel Pale Fire)Like frenetic hallucination, the tale is disjointed, nervous and bizarre; it lurches sickly, arousing ill feelings. We cannot tell clearly what matter this is, or when, or where it occurs. The meaning of this tale is not a social rational message; this is not a benign story of naming or custom or explanation like the others. It is raw unwholesome frightening meaning: something that cannot be named, something gnawing in the gut, something psychotic. The substance of such myths as these, as Jung and Campbell remind us, is the soul laid out at its vivisection, and we in horror, in awe, repulsed and compelled, we cannot explain what we see. So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.
Tho’ all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door,
There’s no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.(From Leonard Cohen’s song, “Boogie Street”)

In which we encounter early inhabitants to Wisconsin, before the advent of logging, cities, and steamboats.

(corresponding to “Jack and Beulah”) A creature like a rabbit, whose heart beats so rapidly that he must see details in motion which for me are a blur, must hear whispers in the brush across the span of large meadows, even when the wind is blowing, has reflexes and agility that I cannot imagine—anticipating harm before it strikes, he is gone before I can start to think. Because of this keen intensity, he must be so much more happy when he is happy, so much more enthusiastic, excited in how he feels, than we are, the dull and the plodding and the ordinary types. His leaping is breath-taking; he exults; he is heroic. The rabbit is not timid at all. Don’t mistake it for timidity, because he runs away—that is his gift and gaiety—and many are so jealous of him, they want to eat him, so they can become just like him. Children are like this, and some who have not grown up. They go like bees about us, so fast and energetically, we think they will ignite by the heat of it, while we prefer our sofas and our snacks and our TV’s. Well, who sees life better after all? Of course, theirs is not the wisdom of the world. They get nothing for what they do. They always want more, and they shall not stop going at it. From my sofa I can see how this will end, while they will no doubt keep running until then.

In which we learn how Mr. Kite and Mr. Boyd met one another and assumed the sobriquet Even and Odd, famous for the vaudeville act under that name, once featured at the New Alsatia theatre of Chicago, and how it happened that they should eventually become wanderers of the north woods, vagabonds for venison.

(corresponding to “Topping the Bill”) At end of the Nineteenth century, Joseph Pujol was presented to Parisians by the Moulin Rouge for his incomparable performance of farts. In French he was called Le Petomane; translated into English, the “Fartiste”. Finely dressed in a red coat and black satin breeches with a vent for his buttock, gesturing for effect with white-gloved hands, he explained with deadpan to the audience that his emissions were completely odorless, since he irrigated his colon daily. He opened his act with fart impressions: a new bride’s timid toot; her long-winded emission after her first night of connubial pleasures; the booming fart of a miller; and the imitation of a dress maker tearing two-yards of calico—a ten-second-rip. He did impressions of famous people and blew out candles and the gas footlights from yards away. He exploded like cannon fire and thundered like a storm. And that was just the first half of the show. For the second half he retreated offstage and discretely inserted a rubber tube into his anus, which dangled out the back of his trousers. Using the tube he smoked two cigarettes at once, exhaling from bottom and top simultaneously. And as a grand finale he attached an ocarina to the end of the hose and played popular tunes—La Marseillaise, most notably—while beckoning the audience to sing along.As his act matured he added a limerick about farmyard animals, which was punctuated with anal mimicry of animal sounds—pigs, chickens, cows, horses. And famously the climax of his act became his stupendous impression of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.Astonishment devolved to contagion of laughter in the audience. Sometimes numbers of women passed out, unable to catch their breath because of laughter and their tight corsets, and had to be unbound in emergency. It is said his appreciative audiences included many notables, such as Sigmund Freud, whose psychiatric interpretation unfortunately is not recorded for us, and Edward the Prince of Wales who came on more than one occasion.

In which we learn about Lynch when he was a small boy, and how it came about that he becomes a traveling man, and took to selling Bibles.

The conclusion of the tale of Lynch when he was a small boy.

(corresponding to “Granny Goody’s Hairy Lips”) If my tale of “Granny Goody’s Hairy Lips” may be off-putting by some of its imagery, the tale of “Panther and Lynx,” upon which it is based, shall seem grotesque. A lynx and panther lose the fire they keep and Lynx goes out to steal some. He finds an old woman with fire. He steals a firebrand from her. When he does, the old woman notices it and spreading her legs, she looks at her vulva and accuses it of taking the firebrand, and strikes her vulva with another firebrand. This is very strange. In the end a series of grizzly bears, who are the old woman’s sons, seek out the lynx to punish him for taking the firebrand. By our understanding of the normal grammar of myth, some of this is not difficult to address. Animals in fables are a motif we have heard, and in the first instance this seems a classic tale, the theme of the taking and making of fire. This much we can make out. But the old woman striking her vulva with a firebrand and accusing it of taking fire is so bizarre, if not to say in our aesthetics obscene, that we can make no sense of it.We turn to the study of the semiotics of mythology and folklore to explicate it. We trust in scholars such as Campbell, Jung, Fraser, and Eliade, and in books such as the Encyclopedia of Symbols, and the Archetypes of the Body. Here we learn that fire has several associations, but foremost it represents the triumph of culture, the preferment upon the human animal of its gift makes us capable of keeping fire for so much that advances us, cooking and metallurgy and simply warmth and light. Fire symbolizes what makes us human, and also has psychological associations to the body, to the warmth of the body and the energies of the body. In his study The Forge and the Crucible, concerning metallurgy and alchemy in anthropological history, Mircea Eliade tells us that to keep embers is to keep the life of the body. This life-giving aspect is generative, just as a woman is naturally generative, and so fire suggests sexuality, for the generation of life is sexual. Thus, Eliade found: “According to the myths of certain primitive people, the aged women of the tribe naturally possessed fire in their genital organs and made use of it to do their cooking, but kept it hidden from men who were able to get possession of it by trickery. These myths reflect the ideology of a matriarchal society and remind us, also, of the fact that fire, being produced by the friction of two pieces of wood (that is, by their sexual union), was regarded as existing naturally in the piece which represented the female.”Thus the disconcerting motif of the old woman, fire and her vulva makes sense in the context, not in our aesthetics, but in the naturalism and explicit truth of Mrs. Wilson’s Tales.The translation of the Kathlamet text by Boas speaks of the old woman’s vulva, that is, the female genitals outwardly, but it seems by the way in which the matter is told that the exact usage should be the cavity of the vagina itself, the portal to the womb. In any case the explicit reference to women’s genitalia will be striking as a motif to us, because in our Western art the genitals of women is erased from view, unless it is intentionally pornographic. But this has not always been so. In Celtic stone artifacts found in England a strange fetish is portrayed, the Sheela-na-Gig, a squatting naked woman who holds open her vulva with both her hands to reveal her gaping vagina. The only survival of this pagan image, ironically, is stone carvings upon early Gothic churches, where sometimes other pagan artifacts, such as the Green Man, gargoyles and some other sexually explicit images, also survive in decorations to doors, eaves, and cornices. The interpretation of these by early European Christians is ambiguous. Joking references to the Sheela-na-Gig found it sexually obscene, but others interpreted it for the posture of birth. Still others considered them representations of Satanic matters. What is remarkable about this pagan presence in sacred Christian art is the fact of its survival despite a general religious intolerance for the erotic, indeed a profoundly anxious misogyny that deplored the sexuality of women, indeed was frightened of it.In listening to the tale of “Panther and Lynx” we should be reminded again how different is the conception of these matters in this culture, and once again remember these are Mrs. Wilson’s tales, who celebrated woman.

Ferdnand Thieman, 10 years old, jumped into a cistern and drowned himself because his sister wanted him to go on an errand. The mother conducts a home for aged Germans at Wauwatosa, and was away at the time.Badger State Banner26 January 1899Musical excerpt: “Music Box” by Philip Glass from the movie Candyman

(corresponding to “Cecelia and Crab”) It shall be apparent on the reading that my rendition has only passing similarity to that which was originally told by Mrs. Wilson, “The Seal and the Crab.”My tale—which I have named “Cecelia and Crab”—is a vignette of mystery. It evokes the uncertainty of human society, featuring two innocents, who have been cast into a world which is naturally good and beautiful but where human nature may be cruel and ugly. Nothing is more sinister than an evil child, as encountered here, for it is certain then that evil is not merely acquired but shall be innate and compulsive.Mrs. Wilson’s tale is a fable of animals in the common tradition. It is little more than chatter about their animal habits and manners. But there are presumptive intimations in the tale concerning human nature and how humans are perceived and experienced by animals such as these. Some of the events, especially the quirky mingy behavior of Blue Jay at the end of the Mrs. Wilson’s tale, is told in phrasing so spare, seemingly so indirect, that it is difficult to grasp what is intended. I have therefore edited her telling with some clarifying phrases, so that it will make more sense to we who cannot hear it with the ear that Mrs. Wilson was speaking to

In which we learn of the origin of Mr. Minx, who was not known by any other name than this surname or given name, as it may have happened to be, and how Minx met P (eldest brother of Lynch) and how that saved him

(corresponding to “Adventures in a Wobbling World”) This tale is typical of the characteristic disjunctiveness of oral storytelling, what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss likened to bricolage. Most often this characteristic is evident in the concatenation of commonplace motifs or recurrent techniques—how things often happen in threes, for example—or in the artificial incorporation of popular vignettes, which the storyteller has retold for new, although borrowed and old (howsoever artfully adapted). In this tale the disjunctiveness is featured with a fractured episodic plot; as if the whole tale were actually a collation of several unrelated tales. Its nominal characters sustain its continuity, but only barely, the tale as a whole lacks coherence in theme or logic and integrity to its plot. Its incoherent transitions will seem contrived, gratuitous, and inadequate to our aesthetics. Conceivably, these several episodes were traditionally related about the Mink and simply grouped for the occasion, as a compendium. Just as conceivably, the episodes were related on other occasions concerning different characters with other circumstantial justifications. To bright-line the disjunctive feature of this tale, I have isolated its episodes by parenthesis. This disjunctiveness, by the way, reminds me of how Buddhist teaching, the Dhammapada, or sayings of the Buddha—and for that matter, those of Jesus—are broken pieces that have been tossed into one box, glassy shards of wisdom, disjointed, catching light thereby, and when we pick one up we are meant to hold it and ponder it by itself, even though we sense that they have come from a larger complete object. These pieces of wisdom, these parables, these episodes feature their broken edges and their fragmentary expression purposefully; those misfit mysteries are what we must contemplate so that we can guess the larger complete object to which they fit, and yet we shall come to realize each piece is a whole unto itself. Wisdom is bricolage.

In the coveting guidance of the seasons, as it is taught by sacred literature, the turning of moldering and fertility embraces us, her celebrants, and we are taken by suddenness, by adventure, by intentions that we feel must overwhelm. The man who must wander, the woman who must escape, the child who must hide, the flower that grows or dies, the rain falling, the snows melting—all the shriveling and burgeoning, the lush or desiccated, the frail or lustful, bursts and breathless goes, and goes on….Music excerpt is the song “Somebody’s Gone...” from the album Hand-Me-Down Music: Old Songs, Old Friends - Vol. 1 Traditional Music of Union County, North Carolina

(corresponding to “The Berry Girls....”) Once again, we are presented with a story that is told with presumptions and intimations that are beyond our aesthetic or our common experience, and so we may not understand what is being said. Once again, I have interjected clarifications to state some presumptions and intimations explicitly.There are always such presumptions and intimations in art. These are often derived from the norms of society or our accustomed conceptions of reality, which are so implicit or logical that we do not explain them. These are also sometimes technical conventions in the art. In film art, for example, the sequence of shots exploits implicit ideas of the storytelling. A cut to another scene is presumed to be simultaneous parallel action, if it is abrupt and cues the logic of the plot; but a slow dissolve from one to another scene, where another set of subtle intimations suggest to the viewer a significant change in time and place, makes for different logic—the flash-back. When crosscuts of different scenes were introduced to movies as a sequence of shots, the technique was not immediately accepted. The audience needed to learn its “grammar.” Now children who grow up in front of television, their brains daily steeped with frenetic sound and imagery, will have mastered visual grammar of film edits without instruction. But I remember how confusing my Grandmother found these frenetic sounds and imagery; there were many movies and TV shows that she simply could not make sense of; she preferred the slow-pace and staid stagecraft of soap operas. In the narrative of written and oral storytelling, the essential participation of the audience exploits presumptions and intimations as a matter of craft; for the telling of a tale is an exchange of understandings between the teller and the told. Who listens puts in her mind her own imaginings of what the author implies; imagination completes the tale; the teller and the told acknowledge this completion implicitly; it is a private understanding between them of matter intimately shared. In the case of this tale much that is told shall be too alien for intimate sharing of imagination. Presumably the meaning of strange relationship of Robin and Salmonberry was understood by Mrs. Wilson’s own people; the bizarre sequence of murders and mutilations bespeaks matters of the world that were self-evident to them, but are not so to us. Instead the matter of the story seems largely incomprehensible. I am afraid I am going to have to leave you to take this tale in your imaginings howsoever you may conceive it. I have no explanation for it myself.

(corresponding to “Boss Boil....”) In an exception to the rule, Mrs. Wilson’s tale shall in this case precede my own rendition of it, partly so that my rendition may conclude this collection, but more importantly so that the distinctive parallels between this tale and my rendition may be known to you before you read it. This tale is a love story of a kind, not sentimental, but its passions are strong. During the life and times of Mrs. Wilson a woman was a commodity of the tribe, not perhaps more than any other person, whose value as a person is principally social, but we see that a woman shall be given as a wife in transactions that are not matters of love, and that she is not diminished therefore, nor necessarily unhappy for it. Nonetheless erotic compulsions matter too. The relations of men and women are not only practical. Men will compete jealously for women; they will kill one another for the possession of them. Women in turn will play men for their own desires and advantages.

In which, the last tale told, we learn how P travels to Peshtigo to find work and finds terror and passion in a meld he did not want, circumstance and consequence fused, and the molten amalgam of Fate.

The tale continues.The image from Edward Burne Jones, “Perseus and Andromeda.”Music is “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads, found on this album.

The tale continues.The image from Edward Burne Jones, “Perseus and Andromeda.”Music is “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads, found on this album.

The tale concludes.Music is “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads, found on this album.