– New York
October ’76
The Tale of Old Venn
The chain of deconstruction cannot, of course, be contained here: for if the image functions as a violent displacement from the origin, life, or meaning to which it apparently refers, there is a second fundamental question raised more or less explicitly in each of these essays. What about my text as the image of the image: what about the possibility of reading …?
– Carol Jacobs
The Dissimulating Harmony
1
The Ulvayn islands lay well east of port Kolhari; known on the Nevèrÿon shore for the fisherwomen who occasionally appeared at the mainland docks, these islands had – had anyone bothered to count – probably four fishermen to every fisherwoman. Alas, its particular fame on the Nevèrÿon coast was more a projection of the overmasculinization of that culture (empress and all) than a true reflection of the island culture so famed.
Nevertheless Norema’s mother had been for a time firstmate on a fishingboat (captained by an older cousin, a rough-skinned and wrinkled woman after whom Norema had been named – for fishing tended to run in families); the child spent her first two years more or less bound to her mother’s back, as Quema swayed on the boat’s pitched and pitching deck. Snar, her father, was a boat builder; and after the second girl was born, Quema left the fishingboat to work in Snar’s island boat yard. The second girl died, but Quema stayed on at the yard, where the boat skeletons rose, more and more of them each year, their high ribs yellow for the first week, gray thereafter. She sorted bundles of pitch-backed bark, went into the village to harangue the smith to finish a shipment of brads made from a combination of metals and magic that her husband (with Venn’s help) had discovered did not rust; she stirred at great cauldrons of glue, while her daughter tagged along and stared, or ran off and giggled. And she felt unhappy with life and proud of her husband and girl and wished she were back at sea.
Another daughter came, who lived. Both Snar and Quema spent more time directing other workers who labored in the yard; and Norema ran after her younger sister now, more than her mother did.
Snar was a tall, sullen man with a rough beard and tool-scarred hands, who loved his family and his work with breath-stopping intensity – and was frequently and frankly impossible with anyone he did not think of as a friend; indeed, he made a rather bad salesman in a prospering business that soon had to deal with many more people from other islands and even Nevèrÿon herself, rather than just the small circle who had bought his boats or brought him boats to repair in the early years. Quema, on the other hand, had the personality called in the inns and drinking places along the island’s docks (and in that long-ago distant language the term applied equally to men and women) a good sailor, which meant someone who could live easily in close quarters with others under swaying conditions. So Quema actually did much of the selling and bargaining over materials from their suppliers and over finished boats with their customers; and she frequently took the girls to other islands, rimmed with blue and silver sand, when she went out on business.
Coming back from such a trip, at night, with moonlight on the deck of the boat they’d built themselves (at any rate, twelve-year-old Norema had carried bark and driven dowels and caulked seams and mixed glue; and three-year-old Jori had once stepped in a bowl of that same glue), the three sat on the deck with the fire box glowing through its grillwork, fish grilling on its tines, and the rocks of the Lesser Ulvayns thrusting high and sheer at the sea’s edge like the broken flanks of some shattered, petrified beast. Quema sat across from the fire box; the flattened copper circles she wore in her ears ran with light (her hair, in that moonlight, had lost the last of its reds to some color like the gray shrubs that grew on the island hills); the rings and her hair quavered in the gusts. And she told her daughters stories about sea monsters and sunken cities and water witches and wind wizards; sometimes she told of sailing lore and fishing routes; and sometimes just the lazy, late-night woman-talk of people and places mother and daughter could discuss here in a detail so much more exact, insightful, and intense because – here – moonlight and the dark mirror circling them put the subjects at a distance that had precisely the proper illumination and focal length for such marine investigation. (Venn had a curved mirror that she had once shown to Norema; and had made up a term in that language which might as well be translated ‘focal length.’) Sometimes they just sat and didn’t talk at all, their backs wedged against the rail of the boat, feeling the sea’s sibilances under them and the rocking night over them and the probing chills around them (usually, by now, Jori was asleep, curled against her mother’s leggings). Norema stared across the seven feet of damp, varnished decking to where her mother sat, arms across her knees, looking as contented as Norema ever saw her, and Norema sometimes wondered, too, if her mother hadn’t been somewhat cheated by her father’s near fanatical absorption in his craft and trade. For wasn’t it here that an eminently sea-worthy and seasoned woman really belonged, under the wind and the moon, with her own good boat rocking on the belly of the Great Mother, like a woman half dreaming on her back with her own sea-daughter astraddle her?
And they would sail; and sail; and sometimes Norema would sleep; and when she would wake up, it was always curious which would come first: the flares set out on the docks of the island’s harbor, or the red dawn – the old scar of the horizon broke open and bleeding again, cut by the sun like a copper coin with its rim knife-sharpened.
Then Quema was hauling dock rope through the wooden cleats, one bare foot on the deck, one on the deck rail, the ligaments along her brown ankle shifting as the boat shifted; Norema pulled cloth bags from under the leanto that served them as cabin; and Joni strolled up the dock, humming. It was day.
Venn?
Norema first knew her as a woman who had been a close friend of her parents. Later, through anecdotes (and both Quema and Snar were still fond of the elderly woman), Norema realized that the closeness with each parent dated from different times. As a child, her father had built boats with Venn, and together they had invented all sorts of tools and tackling devices that her father still used; even before then Venn had figured out, by herself, a system for telling where you were by the stars. But that was before her father was born. From time to time, rumor had it, Venn disappeared. One such disappearance was a trip to Nevèrÿon, where she met (the adults still talked of it) with an aged and great inventor of that country who himself had actually invented the lock and key; he’d also taken her navigation system and used it for a series of metal disks – rhet, scales, and map, which, today, sailors and travelers called an astrolabe. The great man, it was said, from time to time even came to the island to meet with her, for he knew a wise woman when he met one. It was after returning from one such disappearance that Venn and her mother had shared a hut (long since torn down) out of which Quema had gone every morning to work on the fishingboat with Old Norema and from which Venn went, apparently, to study the woods and the waterfalls that plummeted from the high rocks.
Her mother had married her father; and somehow contact with the woman who was eighteen years older than both of them faltered and all but ceased. Yet both swore that Venn was the wisest woman on the island.
Norema suspected Venn was perfectly crazy.
Nevertheless, Norema was sent, with the daughters and sons of most of the other families in the harbor village – some thirty-five in all – to be with Venn every morning. Some of the young men and women of the village when they’d been children had built a shelter, under Venn’s instruction, with ingenious traps in its roof so you could climb up on top and look down from the hill across the huts to the harbor; and Norema and the children who sat with Venn under the thatched awning every morning made a cage for small animals they caught; and they learned the marks Venn could make on pieces of dried vegetable fiber (that you could unroll from the reeds that grew in the swamps across the hill): some marks were for animals, some for fish, some for numbers, and some
for ideas; and some were for words (Norema’s own contribution to the system, with which Venn was appropriately impressed) – there was a great spate of secret-message sending that autumn. Marks in red clay meant one thing. The same mark in black charcoal meant something else. You could use Venn’s system, or make up a new one with your friends. They nearly used up all the reeds, and Venn made them plant many more and go hunting for seedlings to be carefully nursed in especially nice mud. The whole enterprise came to a stop when someone got the idea of assigning special marks for everyone’s name, so you could tell at a glance (rather than having to figure it out from what it was about) just whom the message came from. Venn apparently intercepted one of these; someone apparently deciphered it for her.
‘We must stop this,’ she told them, holding her walking stick tight with both hands up near the head, while an autumn rain fell from the edge of the thatch to make a curtain at her back, fraying the great oak tree, sheeting the broken slope that rose beside it, dulling the foot path that cut across the grass beneath it. ‘Or we must curtail it severely. I did not invent this system. I only learned it – when I was in Nevèrÿon. And I modified it, even as you have done. And do you know what it was invented for, and still is largely used for there? The control of slaves. If you can write down a woman’s or man’s name, you can write down all sorts of things next to that name, about the amount of work they do, the time it takes for them to do it, about their methods, their attitudes, and you can compare all this very carefully with what you have written about others. If you do this, you can maneuver your own dealings with them in ways that will soon control them; and very soon you will have the control over your fellows that is slavery. Civilized people are very careful about who they let write down their names, and who they do not. Since we, here, do not aspire to civilization, it is perhaps best we halt the entire process.’ Venn separated her hands on the gnarled stick. And Norema thought about her father’s ship yard, where there was an old man who came to work some days and not others and about whom her father always complained: If I wrote down his name, Norema thought, and made one mark for every day he came to work and another for every day he failed to come, if after a month I showed it to my father, and said, yes, here, my father’s grumbling would turn to open anger, and he would tell him to go away, not to come back, that he was not worth the time, the food, the shelter, and the man would go away and perhaps die … And Norema felt strange and powerful and frightened.
But Venn had started to tell them a story. Venn’s stories were very much like her mother’s; indeed, some were the same. Norema loved her mother; but Venn told tales better. Most were scarey. Sitting under the thatch, on the ground, shoulder to shoulder with the others, with Venn seated on the heavy log across the end, the sunlight now coming through the rain, a glitter in the grass, on the tree trunks, runneling down the slate scarp, here in the little space of shadow (‘We are sitting in the shadow of knowledge; knowledge is written all around us, in the trees and on the rocks, as clearly as my marks on reed paper,’ Venn often told them) Norema would suddenly feel her shoulders and the back of her neck prickle at tales of some lone man’s approach to some ancient pile of rough-cut masonry, at some intrepid twin sisters’ boat foundering closer and closer to the weedy rocks.
Venn taught them the stories (as she must once have taught her mother, Norema surmised): the children would tell them back, and Venn would get angry if they got the names of various giants, queens, and the distances between imaginary islands wrong, or misdescribed various landscapes at various times of year; other things in the tales she urged them to elaborate on and invent for themselves – the kinds of beasts found guarding some treasure that stood behind two tall white stones, one of which, on the last day of summer, cast a shadow, an hour after sunrise, three times the length of the other (‘That,’ said Venn, ‘you’d best not forget’), or the family names of the hero’s and heroine’s maternal uncle who provided a train of twenty-three servants (‘That you must remember’), each of which tried to betray them in any way the children could think of.
For a while, Venn spent much time with a particular half a dozen youngsters, going for walks with them after the others were dismissed, exploring the edges of the forest, of the sea, sometimes summoning them up to her small, wonder-filled shack at dawn, sometimes turning up at any one of theirs down in the village at sunset. The group included Norema; and for a while Norema thought (as did the rest) Venn favored them because they were cleverer. Later, she realized that, though none of them was backward, they were just more astutely sociable than most adolescents – more tolerant of a crippled old woman’s oddities. Though Venn commanded an almost awed respect from the village adults, her friends were more or less the children. And this particular group of children was finally not all that clever, or wonderful, or talented. They were just her friends.
One afternoon, Norema and two others of the favored few rambled with the old woman under the trees alongside the stream. For a while, above the sound of Venn’s stick, shushing through fallen leaves, Norema had been talking on about the trials of working in her parents’ boat yard – indeed, had been talking on for quite some time, and had just begun to wonder if for the last few minutes Venn had really heard. (Dell was arguing softly and intently with Enin, who wasn’t listening.) Venn stopped at a wide rock tabling into the water.
Gnats thrashed out in the sun beyond.
Venn, tapping her stick – rather nervously – said, suddenly and hoarsely: ‘I know something. I know how to tell you about it, but I don’t know how to tell you what it is. I can show you what it does, but I cannot show you the “what” itself. Come here, children. Out to the sunlight.’
Dell stopped talking; Enin started listening.
Norema felt embarrassed at her own prattling and smiled alertly to show she didn’t.
Venn, her stick leaning in the crook of her arm, reached around in her many-pocketed orange robe. The shoulders were threadbare. The hem was stained with leaf dirt. ‘Come here.’ She beckoned Norema on to the stone with a sharp, brown chin. ‘What is this?’
A piece of reed paper? Venn’s brown fingers pecked in it and prodded it open. She held it up. The red marks across the paper, left to right, were Venn’s special signs for: a three-horned beetle, three horned lizards, and two crested parrots. Red meant she had observed them before noon.
‘You saw a three-horned beetle, three horned lizards, and two crested parrots in the morning – probably you were at the estuary, on the far bank; because the parrots never come over on this side. And it was probably yesterday morning, because it was raining the night before last and the lizards usually come out in the mornings after rain.’
‘That’s a very good reading.’ Venn smiled. ‘Now, Enin. Come out here, on the rock, and stand just so.’ The tall, short-haired boy stepped out, blinking. The mirror he wore strapped across his stomach flashed light down on Venn’s stained hem. (All the boys, for the last month, had taken to wearing the mirrored stomach plates.) ‘Norema,’ Venn said. ‘Come here and look at this now.’
Norema stepped up beside her old teacher.
‘Here,’ Venn said. ‘Here, girl. Hold the paper up beside your face, crouch down, and look at it in Enin’s belly.’
Norema took the paper and held it open beside her face; she had to stoop to a half-squat to see.
‘Now what is it?’
In the shiny, irregular-shaped plate, topped by Enin’s first chest hair and below which ran his shell belt, she saw her concentrating face and, beside it, in her fingers … ‘Of course, it’s backward,’ Norema said. When they painted the prow designs on her father’s boats, frequently for the more delicate work that could not be done with the cut-out stencils, the painters checked their outlines in mirrors. The reversal of the image made irregularities more apparent. ‘It goes wrong way forward.’
‘Read it,’ Venn said.
‘Um … crested parrots two, horned lizards … four … eh … no, three … a green … fish!’
Norema laughed. ‘But that’s because the sign for green fish is just the sign for horned beetle written reversed. That’s why I hesitated over the others … I think.’ She started to stand.
‘No,’ Venn said. ‘Keep looking. Dell, now you come stand here.’
Dell who was short and wore his hair in three long braids, stepped up beside Norema on the rock.
‘No,’ Venn said. ‘You stand over here behind Norema. Yes, that’s right. Here … Now, Norema, turn around and look at Dell’s mirror, until you can see in it the reflection in Enin’s.’