Ursula K. LeGuin - Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences

by Неизвестный Автор

  May's Lion Ll87

  She retethered Rose where she could stand down in the creek if she liked. When she came back up the rise with the pail of milk in hand, the lion had not moved. The sun was down, the air above the ridges turning clear gold. The yellow eyes watched her, no light in them. She came to pour milk into the lion's bowl. As she did so, he all at once half rose up. Rains End started, and spilled some of the milk she was pouring. "Shoo! Stop that!" she whispered fiercely, waving her skinny arm at the lion. "Lie down now! I'm afraid of you when you get up, can't you see that, stupid? Lie down now, lion. There you are. Here I am. It's all right You know what you're doing" Talking softly as she went, she returned to her house of stick and matting There she sat down as before, in the open porch, on the grass mats.

  The mountain lion made the grumbling sound, ending with a long sigh, and let his head sink back down on his paws.

  Rains End got some combread and a tomato from the pantry box while there was still daylight left to see by, and ate slowly and neatly. She did not offer the lion food. He had not touched the milk, and she thought he would eat no more in the House of Earth.

  From time to time as the quiet evening darkened and stars gathered thicker overhead she sang to the lion. She sang the five songs of Going Westward to the Sunrise, which are sung to human beings dying She did not know if it was proper and appropriate to sing these songs to a dying mountain lion, but she did not know his songs.

  Twice he also sang once a quavering moan, like a house-cat challenging another torn to battle, and once a long sighing purr.

  Before the Scorpion had swung clear of Sinshan Mountain, Rains End had pulled her heavy shawl around herself in case the fog came in, and had gone sound asleep in the porch of her house.

  18 8 J/ BUFFALO GALS

  She woke with the grey light before sunrise. The lion was a motionless shadow, a little farther from the trunk of the fig tree than he had been the night before. As the light grew, she saw that he had stretched himself out full length. She knew he had finished his dying, and sang the fifth song the last song in a whisper, for him:

  The doors of the Four Houses

  are open.

  Surely they are open.

  Near sunrise she went to milk Rose, and to wash in the creek. When she came back up to the house she went closer to the lion, though not so close as to crowd him, and stood for a long time looking at him stretched out in the long, tawny, delicate light "As thin as I am!" she said to Valiant, when she went up to Gahheya later in the morning to

  tell the story and to ask help carrying the body of the lion off where the buzzards and coyotes could clean it

  It's still your story, Aunt May; it was your lion. He came to you. He brought his death to you, a gift; but the men with the guns won't take gifts, they think they own death already. And so they took from you the honor he did you, and you felt that loss. I wanted to restore it But you don't need it. You followed the lion where he went, years ago now.

  (1983-87)

  XI

  Rilke's "Eighth Duino Elegy" and "She Unnames Them"

  / learned most of my German from Mark Twain. My translation of Rise's poem was achieved by chewing up and digesting other translations --C.F. Mclntyre's still seems the truest to me -- and then using a German dictionary and a lot of nerve. The "Elegy" is the poem about animals that I have loved the longest and learned the most from.

  It is followed by the story that had to come Tost in this book because it states (equivocally, of course) whose side (so long as sides must be taken) I am on and what the consequences (maybe) are.

  The Eighth Elegy

  (From "The Duino Elegies" of Rainer Maria Rilke)

  With all its gaze the animal sees openness. Only our eyes are as if reversed, set like traps all around its free forthgoing.

  What is outside, we know from the face of the animal only; for we turn even the youngest child

  around and force it to see all forms backwards, not the openness so deep in the beast's gaze. Free from death.

  191

  192-ABUFFALO GALS

  Only we see that The free animal has its dying always behind it and God in front of it, and its way

  is the eternal way, as the spring flowing.

  Never, not for a moment, do we have pure space before us, where the flowers endlessly open. Always it's world and never nowhere-nothing-not, that pure unoverseen we breathe

  and know without desiring forever. So a child, losing itself in that silence, has to be jolted back. Or one dies, and is.

  For close to death we don't see death,

  but stare outward, maybe with the beast's great gaze.

  And lovers, if it weren't for the other

  getting in the way, come very close to it, amazed,

  as if it had been left open by mistake,

  behind the beloved -- but nobody

  gets all the way, and it's all world again.

  Facing Creation forever, all we see in it is a mirror-image of the free in our own dark shadow. Or an animal, a dumb beast, stares right through us, peaceably.

  This is called Destiny: being face to face, and never anything but face to face.

  Were this consciousness of ours shared by the beast, that in its certainty approaches us in a different direction, it would take us with it on its way. But its being is to it unending, uncontained, no glimpse of its condition, pure, as is its gaze. And where we see the Future, it sees all, and itself in all, and healed forever.

  The Eighth Elegy A 193

  Yet in the warm, watching animal

  is the care and weight of a great sadness.

  For it bears always, as we bear, and are borne down by, memory.

  As if not long ago all we yearn for had been closer to us, truer, and the bond endlessly tender. Here all is distance, there it was breathing After the first home, the second is duplicitous, drafty.

  O happiness of tiny creatures

  that stay forever in the womb that bears them!

  O fly's joy, buzzing still within, even on its mating-day! For womb is all.

  And look at the half-certainty of birds, that from the start know almost both, like a soul of the Etruscans in the body shut inside the tomb, its own resting figure as the lid.

  And how distressed the womb-born are when they must fly! As if scared

  by themselves, they jerk across the air, as a crack

  goes through a cup: so the bat's track

  through the porcelain of twilight

  And we, onlookers, always, everywhere,

  our face turned to it all and never from!

  It overfills us. We control it It breaks down.

  We re-control it, and break down ourselves.

  Who turned us round like this, so that

  no matter what we do, we have the air

  of somebody departing? As a traveller

  on the last hill, for the last time seeing

  all the home valley, turns, and stands, and lingers --

  so we live forever taking leave.

  194 JT

  She Unnames Them

  MOST OF THEM ACCEPTED NAMELESSNESS with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular grace and alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element A faction of yaks, however, protested. They said that "yak" sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they existed called them that Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats or fleas who had been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name. They discussed the matter all summer. The councils of the elderly females finally agreed that though the name might be useful to others, it was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it themselves, and hence might as well dispense with it After they presented the argument in this light to their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early blizzards. Soon after the beg
inning of the thaw their agreement was reached and the designation "yak" was returned to the donor.

  Among the domestic animals, few horses had cared what anybody called them since the failure of Dean Swift's attempt to name them from their own vocabulary. Cattle, sheep, swine, asses, mules, and goats, along with chickens, geese, and turkeys, all agreed enthusiastically to give their names back to the people to whom -- as they put it -- they belonged.

  A couple of problems did come up with pets. The cats of course steadfastly denied ever having had any name other than those selfgiven, unspoken, effanineffably personal

  She Unnames Them L 195

  names which, as the poet named Eliot said, they spend long hours daily contemplating -- though none of the con-templators has ever admitted that what they contemplate is in fact their name, and some onlookers have wondered if the object of that meditative gaze might not in fact be the Perfect, or Platonic, Mouse. In any case it is a moot point now. It was with the dogs, and with some parrots, lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs that the trouble arose. These verbally talented individuals insisted that their names were important to them, and flatly refused to part with them. But as soon as they understood that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou, or Polly, or even Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so, not one of them had the least objection to parting with the lower case (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) generic appellations poodle, parrot dog, or bird, and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail.

  The insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and

  crawling and tunneling away.

  As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace.

  None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell one another's smells, feel or rub or caress one another's scales or skin or

  196 JT BUFFALO GALS

  feathers or fur, taste one another's blood or flesh, keep one another warm, -- that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.

  This was more or less the effect I had been after. It was somewhat more powerful than I had anticipated, but I could not now, in all conscience, make an exception for myself. I resolutely put anxiety away, went to Adam, and said, 'You and your father lent me this -- gave it to me, actually. It's been really useful, but it doesn't exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It's really been very useful."

  It is hard to give back a gift without sounding peevish or ungrateful, and I did not want to leave him with that impression of me. He was not paying much attention, as it happened, and said only, "Put it down over there, OK?" and went on with what he was doing.

  One of my reasons for doing what I did was that talk was getting us nowhere; but all the same I felt a little let down. I had been prepared to defend my decision. And I thought that perhaps when he did notice he might be upset and want to talk. I put some things away and fiddled around a little, but he continued to do what he was doing and to take no notice of anything else. At last I said, "Well, goodbye, dear. I hope the garden key turns up."

  He was fitting parts together, and said without looking around, "OK, fine, dear. When's dinner?"

  "I'm not sure," I said. "I'm going now. With the -- " I hesitated, and finally said, "With them, you know," and went on. In fact I had only just then realized how hard it would have been to explain myself. I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words now must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.

  (1985)

  'Plume

  THE BEST IN MODERN FICTION

  (0452)

  D BLUE MOVIE by Terry Southern. Monstrous egos battling enormous libidos. A flying God squad from the Vatican. The small but scrappy principality of Liechtenstein. And of course, the incredible, electric, bizarre and wildly erotic imagination of Terry Southern -- make up a hip and hilarious spoof of Hollywood at its finest, funniest and filthiest. (257239-47.95)

  D BUFFALO GALS AND OTHER ANIMAL PRESENCES by Ursula K. LeGuin.

  A collection of stories and poems from the National Book Award-Winning Author. "An imaginative transformation of the world sometimes called magical realism, science fiction, or fantasy." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

  (261392 -- $6.95)

  D INVISIBLE MENDING by Frederick Busch. Zimmer's wife Lil says their love is dead. He says ifs just tired. Divorcing, he feels as if his whole love life is passing before him -- and part of it really is, in the still-sexy form of old flame Rhona Glinsky. Caught between these two women Zimmer proves that opposites still attract, by falling in love again -- with both of them. (256798 -- $6.95)

  D AT SWIM-TWO BIRDS by Flann O'Brien. "A fantastic, parodistic stew of drunken banter, journalese, pulp fiction, and Celtic myth. Like Beckett, O'Brien ... has the gift of the perfect sentence, the art, which they both learned from Joyce, of turning plain language to a lyric pitch." -- John Updike

  (259134 -- 18.95)

  D 0, HOW THE WHEEL BECOMES IT! by Anthony Powell. In this new novel Powell introduces the aging G.FH. Shadbold, a minor man of letters majoring in media exposure. But his self-satisfied glow is suddenly overshadowed by reappearances from his past, and with a turn of fortune's wheel, his scheming is about to bring him, quite hilariously, low. (257565 -- $5.95)*

  D THE GRASS IS SINGING by Doris Lessing. Both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique where the heroine, Mary Turner, deteriorates from a self-confident, independent young woman into the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual farmer. "Passion, piercing accuracy." -- The New York Times (261198 -- $9.95)

  Prices slightly higher in Canada. 'Not available in Canada.

  Buy them at your local bookstore or use coupon on next page for ordering.

  FICTION • Z6139 • U.S. $6.95

  (Canada $8.95)

  Ursula K. Le Guin does hear the animals' voices, and as she shows us in this luminous collection of one novella, ten stories and eighteen poems, they are magical, fascinating, and terrifying. In the novella of the title, Buffalo Gals, a child survives a plane crash and enters the Dream Time of primitive myths, where the coyote knows secrets about that world-and this one. In other stories we journey further into unknown realms, like the deep space planet where only fear dwells, or the unfamiliar worlds of wolves, rats, and horses whose realities make us question our own.

  Ursula K. Le Guin is pne of America's best storytellers, and here accompanied by the author's candid and intriguing commentary, we are treated to the finest examples of her art.

  "Her elegant wild eye shameless, funny and intelligent...this book is a bundle of unrefined delights." -GarySnyder

  "A vivid expression of Le Guin's mind and personality... her fans will admire this new book."

  -Mythpnnt

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: {d4388226-ef45-4952-98d6-60b17b5c4272}

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 129881016853730000

  Created using: ABBYY FineReader 11 software

  OCR Source: ABBYY FineReader 11

  Document authors :

  Неизвестный автор

  About


  This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.

  (This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)

  Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.

  (Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)

  http://www.fb2epub.net

  https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/