by Win Blevins
A mid all forms visible, the rising smoke
I see, as I move from place to place.
A mid all forms visible, the little hills in rows
I see, as I move from place to place.
A mid all forms visible, the spreading blades
I see as I move from place to place.
A mid all forms visible, the light day
I see as I move from place to place.
Baptiste translated the song into German, line by line, pointing out that the new greenness and the growth-bringing mist are the visible forms of the great spirit, his footprints, and pointing out the tone of reverence and thanks. The incantation of these powers, he explained, would make the corn sprout from the earth. The Indian perceived a magic power not only in natural forces, but in the words of his song that named them. The making of the sound of the word, this act itself, has a magical power. So it is with a death song, he said. An Indian sings his death song and clutches his medicine when in ultimate danger. The object would have been revealed to him in a dream, as protective against death, and the song with it. He believes that if he invokes the powers implicit in the object and the words of the song, they will defend him against insuperable odds. So it is with a rain song and rain dance, a buffalo song and buffalo dance. All call on mysterious forces in nature to make something happen. Indian music in that way is sacred.
Baptiste was talking animatedly. He had not quite known he knew these things.
Johannes asked if the white man’s music seemed sacred to him as well. Baptiste considered. He thought not. He did not see a religious attitude in a boatman’s song or in a square-dance music or a polka or a drinking song. But in some European music, yes. He thought of the orchestra concert he heard when first in Stuttgart. That had a serious tone, maybe a sacred tone. The words were elusive here, he thought, the meaning of “sacred.” He mentioned Beethoven and Mozart. Some of their music was not frivolous like a drinking song. Still, young ladies performed their music in salons to demonstrate their personal accomplishments, with no sacred motive. That was frivolity. The white man had a different attitude toward music.
Jacques asked what the words “visible forms” in the “Corn Song” meant.
Some Indians have the idea, Baptiste said, that things, objects in the world, are visible representations of their true forms, which reside in the center of the earth and are sometimes revealed to men by the gods in dreams. Thus “renewed verdure” is the visible form of the principle, the force, that brings spring back to the earth. The principle is permanent and true, the greenness its manifestation.
“Plato among the primitives,” Jacques exclaimed, amused.
Baptiste remembered something of Plato’s metaphor of the cave from a lecture at the University, but he was impatient of metaphysical speculation. He remembered also that the lecturer pondered whether individual men exist or only the idea Man, or whether all men and all existence might not be an idea in the mind of God, and have no independent existence at all. Baptiste thought that sort of questioning the silliest thing he had ever heard. Only a white man, he had thought, would ask whether hunger pangs were real, whether he had a belly to be empty. A sensible man asked only where the pantry was.
So Baptiste was annoyed at the prospect of the conversation’s taking a metaphysical turn.
Just then, Karlheinz fortunately suggested a supper at his favorite small restaurant, which served squid, and they all accepted.
When the supper broke up, Jacques insisted to Baptiste that they must meet again and talk. Jacques was terribly urgent about everything, Baptiste thought, but he accepted. Johannes thanked him. Baptiste noticed that Jacques took Sophie home, and was jealous. He noted in his diary that night that he had not made any small gesture toward starting his campaign to become her lover.
JANUARY 9, 1825: Baptiste’s diary: “Sophie, myself, Karlheinz, Johannes, and Jacques to the ballet this evening. Boring, boring, boring. We left at the interval.”
JANUARY 12: “Sophie, Helga, and Stemenstein to the river this afternoon for a long walk. A splendid day: The temperature was down, and kept the snow hard; it shone almost blindingly in the sunlight. Cold enough to require warmed brandy after. Helga, a middle-aged gentlewoman who was once mistress to a duke, is the only female friend Sophie has, so far as I know.”
JANUARY 15: “Visited Sophie’s salon this afternoon, but found her much preoccupied with her friend Giovanni, a Florentine sculptor who arrived today and is apparently her houseguest. Tavern-crawling with Karlheinz and Hamlet most of the night, with the result of too much wine and a groggy head.”
JANUARY 19: “The morning with Herr Kapellmeister: My playing has improved greatly since I dropped classes and started practicing with a modicum of regularity. Consequently, he has offered to teach me musical theory as well, which promises to be interesting. I was writing out some exercises when Sophie and Jacques appeared by surprise at my rooms. (She really cares nothing for the proprieties!) The afternoon spent amiably in their company, they talking about novelists; le sauvage naïf, regrettably, could do little but listen. She and Jacques are invariably together; I wonder what she sees in him, as I find him mildly interesting but abrasive.”
“Are you religious?” Jacques asked over the rim of his brandy glass.
“Sophie,” said Karlheinz, “if we are teetering into this sort of talk again, I will need much more brandy than this.”
“I’d like to talk about it,” Baptiste said. He had been given three religions, in fact: the first by his mother and the Minataree Indians, wordlessly; the second by a hell-fire-and-damnation Baptist preacher—here Baptiste gave a short comic digression on Welch’s lurid imaginings; the third by a withdrawn, effete, intellectual Jesuit. The three freethinkers were amused by the tales of the confusion these religions caused in Baptiste. Until he was fourteen or fifteen, he said, he had simply believed all of them without questioning. He was aware of no contradiction.
“And which would you choose now?” Karlheinz asked. Baptiste was taken aback at Karlheinz’s asking.
“None,” he replied promptly. “Religion is a way of putting order onto what should remain chaotic.”
Sophie asked him to describe the Indian attitudes toward their gods.
The principal difference between the Indian gods and the Christian god, Baptiste answered, was that Jehovah was a defined sort of person, a kind of superman, and the Indian gods were natural forces, power of the water that makes it flow, the power that brings rain, the power of the winds, the power in the elk, the power in grass. The Indians saw power in every animate and inanimate thing—the secret power that made it what it was—and he revered and solicited that power, the hardness of the rock, the ferocity of the bear, the warmth and light of the sun. That was the essence of his religion.
Jacques judged that it sounded more sensible to him than Christianity. At least the object of worship was, in a sense, real.
Karlheinz disagreed. It was not real. If the Indian understood that gravity makes water run downhill, that rain comes from the ocean and is brought by winds whose motion follows natural laws—if he understood that the phenomena he worshipped were natural and not supernatural—he would have no religion.
Jacques said that was why it was more sensible.
Sophie asked Baptiste what he thought.
He reflected a little before he answered. “The religion sounds more attractive than it is. The Indians I’ve seen are craven in their worship. They are dominated by fear of the powers they appeal to. Since they don’t understand natural forces, they believe the powers are whimsical, arbitrary, malicious. Why do the rains abandon them for long periods? Why does thunder come and strike their forests with fire and deluge them with water and swell the rivers until they are impossible to cross? It makes no sense. So the Indian quakes before his gods. I hate that.”
“I like you, Baptiste,” Sophie said abruptly. Baptiste, who had never gotten a compliment from Sophie and normally would have hung on every
word, was now merely pleased and interested. “You have an original mind. You consult your experience for your answers—what you’ve heard and seen yourself. You contemplate your experience and answer from that. First-hand.”
Baptiste took what she said seriously. After a moment he said, “I have been deceived by both and have learned to distrust them. From very early I had to figure out things wholly by myself.”
“What are you, Baptiste, an Indian or a white man?” Jacques asked.
Baptiste said nothing. He thought of saying that he was a white man who used his Indian blood to attract the attention of those who would otherwise ignore him. Finally he said, “I am neither. I am simply me.” And he shrugged, embarrassed.
“Why, then, do you wear that totem object about your neck?” Jacques asked. Baptiste always wore it showing, now.
“In memory of my mother, who gave it to me. I have my own meaning.” He explained Sacajawea’s message relating to the symbolism of the hoop and the fragment of meteor.
“What is your meaning for it?” asked Sophie.
“Like this stone, I am an alien.”
JANUARY 27: Baptiste’s diary: “The afternoon with Herr Kapellmeister, who is pleased with my progress in learning the chords; soon, he says, I will start at elementary counterpoint; I can now play the little Beethoven andante at the pianoforte with a reasonable facsimile of musicality; it is all great fun. Though I was at the castle, I did not see Prince Paul, who is much absorbed in making his notes on North American flora, fauna, typography, inhabitants, customs, and commerce into book form. The king lets his minstrel run free.”
FEBRUARY 2: “My tutor—at least he is officially my tutor—suggests strongly that I make an effort at the University; else why, he asks, did I matriculate? I answered that I am most given to the study of music. Sternenstein is also given, we know, to interesting people, stimulating talk, and good wine.”
“Oh, don’t tease us, Karlheinz, tell all, tell,” Sophie laughed.
He had been casting about amusing hints of the charms of a Viennese whore he had once known. “If you are intrigued by the ways of little Anna,” Karlheinz offered in his most courtly tone, “perhaps you would be intrigued by the real thing. I know a reputable sporting house in town, one where gentlemen of means can imbibe, gamble, and take their pleasure with the ladies if they like.” He smiled wickedly at her and Baptiste.
Sophie slipped out of her parlor. Twenty minutes later she came back dressed completely as a man, in fact in a rather conservative man’s costume, her short hair looking perfectly male under her beaver hat and her make-up stripped off. Baptiste laughed, because she looked exactly like a green youth going out to examine the doings of the sophisticated world. She announced that she was ready to go.
At the house she was quiet and intense at first, following Karlheinz and Baptiste from table to table as they rolled the dice. When they found a table and ordered some champagne, she relaxed and became gay. The ladies of the house, who were splendidly dressed—as fashionable and handsome as ladies of a court—flirted with the three of them. Sophie, in the middle, was infinitely amused. She asked in a whisper whether Karlheinz or Baptiste did not intend to go upstairs with one of them. They had a brisk talk about which would be the best, Sophie pooh-poohing the men’s notions and picking out entirely different ladies. Finally the men declined the opportunity. At that point Sophie got up and flirted with one, an elaborately feminine, auburn-haired girl full of giggles and sighs—just the opposite of Sophie. After a few minutes the two of them went upstairs. Sophie came back much later looking perfectly composed. She refused absolutely, on the way home, to say what had gone on upstairs. Baptiste had never seen her so full of fun.
FEBRUARY 10: Baptiste’s diary: “Our hero is beginning to suspect that his friend Madame Hoffman is trying to immerse him in culture. She has led me (always in company, so that I am frustrated in my desire to make her a licentious proposition) on a furious round of theatre, opera, and museums for the last ten days, and has given me a slim volume of the verses of Heine. She walked through the museum today at a terrific pace, spending half-hour in front of whatever she liked and dismissing the rest with scarcely a glance. She cannot be described as tolerant: She is contemptuous of all in art that she thinks is sham, imitative, the work of poseurs. With decorative and roccoco she has only a little more patience. Yet when she sees something that strikes her as original, or ‘first-hand,’ as she is fond of saying, she is full of enthusiasm for it, and most articulate about her reasons. I saw her one afternoon at salon firmly slap down a professor who criticized Benvenuto Cellini, one of her favorites. Le sauvage naïf, being in such matters precisely naïf, has only an inkling of what she is talking about.”
“Why do Europeans have such strange, rule-ridden notions about sex?” Baptiste asked. For once he had called by surprise and had found her alone. He was trying to slip up on the subject of her own romantic life.
“Why?” Sophie smiled. She let a beat pass as she settled her demitasse of coffee next to the silver service in front of her. “Are Indians superior in their attitudes?”
“Well, they’re natural. They do whatever they feel like doing.”
“For instance?”
“They copulate without embarrassment in the tipis next to their children, sometimes even in public view. A chief in a tribe where I stayed made a habit of walking around camp naked and tumescent. They’re open about it.”
“Don’t they have customs, restrictions, taboos?”
He thought a moment. “I don’t know.” He smiled sheepishly. “I guess so.” Women are property, he explained, as horses are property. When a girl comes of marriageable age, her father sells her to a brave who wants her. He may sell her again, or trade her for a while, or lend her to another man. She is property, and a rich brave accumulates wives as he accumulates all the trappings of wealth.
Romantic love doesn’t enter into it. A man marries out of practical considerations—to have his clothes and lodge made, his food cooked, his household arranged, his belongings toted on long trips, his lust appeased, his family increased in numbers. Women are useful. Of course, the Indian notion of honor assigns the woman the drudgery and the role of beast of burden. (Sophie was making faces through all this.)
Jealousy is almost unheard of. Adultery is censured, sometimes mildly and sometimes severely, but that’s because a squaw belongs to a brave, and he has as much right to her usefulness as to the usefulness of a horse. He can and does lend or sell her, but she has no autonomous rights on her own. Adultery violates a principle of property. Some tribes don’t take adultery very seriously, their ideas about it notwithstanding. But the Blackfeet cut off the noses of adulterous squaws, or kill them.
Otherwise there are no sexual taboos. Girls are expected to take their pleasure where they find it until they are sold to their husbands. Men are expected to take pleasure where they can get it all their lives. That way of doing things is obvious to the Indian, and the white man’s restrictions are simply incomprehensible to him. (Baptiste looked for an expression of approval about this, but saw nothing in particular in Sophie’s face.)
They do whatever feels good, he said. They are sensualists, and experimental ones. Indian teen-agers do in bed what respectable European couples have barely heard of. (He couldn’t help smiling.) Homosexuality is acceptable; homosexuals are thought to be following the way revealed to them in a dream in childhood. You can copulate with an animal if you want to, it’s common enough. Sometimes braves rape their dead enemies to humiliate them one final time.
And with all this, the Indian just doesn’t make a big thing of sex. That most of all.
He looked at Sophie expectantly. “It sounds awful,” she said. Baptiste was puzzled. “There’s no room for feeling.”
“They don’t have any hopeless, pining longings,” Baptiste said, “or all-absorbing passions.”
“It sounds like they have no room for feelings,” Sophie repeated. “They’re just masters a
nd slaves.”
“They stay away from fairy tales,” Baptiste answered, uneasily.
“Baptiste, forget storybook romance. Haven’t you ever felt really strongly about anyone? More excited and more alive when you’re with them? Haven’t you ever been enthralled by anyone?” No answer. “I couldn’t stand to live with someone just from duty and habit. I want.…” She broke off with a playful smile, her eyes hinting at whatever it was she wanted.
Baptiste didn’t know what to say. If he had ever felt strongly about a woman, he thought, it was Sophie.
She rescued him by asking him to take her out to dinner. They dined quietly and leisurely at a small restaurant that was one of her favorites. They reminisced. He spoke tenderly of his mother and tolerantly of his father. She told him stories about her childhood, which had been spent in the Tyrol and at the sea. She had come to love the sea more than she could love people, she said. She seemed softer than usual. She also seemed, he thought, amused about something, but he didn’t know what.
When they got to her house, he had made up his mind to speak to her, not to tell her that he loved her, which never occurred to him, but to say that he wanted to sleep with her. He held the violence of the word he would use for it in his mind. He turned around different ways to say it, most of them blunt, some of them witty. But there in the foyer, as he helped her off with her heavy coat, he could say nothing.
So he turned her around and kissed her. After a long moment she began to pull away gently. He held her with one arm and tilted her head back firmly with the other. “I want you,” he said. She looked at him for a long time, then turned a playful smile. She slipped out of his arm before he knew what happened, walked down the hall and started up the stairs. He followed her.
They made love all night. She had a long, slender body, smooth like a swimmer’s, wide shoulders, small breasts, willowy arms and legs. He thought she was beautiful. They said almost nothing. He was afraid to speak, afraid he would sound foolish. He had the impression that she was laughing at him inside, laughing with delight, perhaps, but laughing. When he came at her again, and again, she laughed aloud. It was the only sound that passed between them. When they made love, they kept their eyes open and looked at each other hard.
