The Handless Maiden as The Feral Palmist

A couple weeks past, I wrote an entry here called "The Feral Palmist," one of my Gatherings for the now launched Elk Lines, my latest Wild Tales by Mail project. That exploration of hand and land and story birthed an essay, which is called "A Feral Palmistry," and is now up at Dark Mountain! It is about the relationship between hands and mind and narrative, and it also includes a deeper exploration of my thoughts about The Handless Maiden story, which is the central storyline of these new Elk Lines. The essay was a joy to write; it felt as though it just flowed out through my hand and my pen, so do go and enjoy it if you are so inclined!



A wee excerpt, to whet your palette: 

The human hand has more neural innervation than any other part of the body save the lips and tongue, where our speaking and our loving and our tasting come from. Lips and hands give caresses, carrying the story of love or healing between two bodies. Lips and tongue taste and take in the lives of others — plant, animal — that sustain us as food. There’s a reason, when you see something beautiful that lifts your heart to your throat and lurches it sideways, that you reach out your hand to touch: orange poppies in full bloom in sunlight, shimmering suppler than any silk. Maybe your nose follows, to test the smell, to get dusted with pollen. Somehow, having your hands near or touching those petals brings the bloom in, as if your heart had done it. Reaching out with a foot, or an elbow, or even your lips wouldn’t be the same. The hands, cupping, seem to understand, as if in the touch they are imagining the whole creation of that flower, in whatever humble or rash way they can manage. Because this is what hands do, at their best: they make. They play creator, like Coyote at the top of Mt. Diablo crafting humans from feathers and land from mats of tule.



I spent the first part of this week in Big Sur, having had the blessing of a guest pass and the company of a good friend sweep me along to a very special place called Esalen, where we wandered the gardens and farm, got drunk on the dark blue sapphire sea, heaving with kelp beds (oh, how I longed to see a sea otter there amidst those green braided ropes!), soaked in sulphur hot springs, scrambled up a redwood creekbed scattered with swimming holes in the smooth white granite, and down a steep, narrow stone pathway arched with sycamore leaves to the rockiest and wildest of coves, my favorite sort.

Big Sur is a very wild land, despite the destination many of its coves have become for vacationers. It is too steep, too rocky, too ocean-heaved, too chaparral-dense, to be developed, and so something timeless hangs about its cliffs and hills and tides, the kind of timelessness that I like to evoke in my own writing: the life of the land that lives on under and through and around our current iterations and manifestations of culture.

As I dive headlong into the writing of Elk Lines, this time in Big Sur—envisioned at first as a brief and delicious hotspring soak between workdays—seems to have deepened and widened the landscape of Eda Crost's story in me more than I could have hoped, fueled in part by the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.

I've visited Big Sur many times before, beginning at age 16, and I had also read much of Jeffers' poetry before this adventure. Poet of Big Sur, they call him, of this whole coastline. He lived most of his life in a granite house along the Carmel coast, hewn by his own hands in the early 1900's from local stone, and wrote with beauty and melancholy and yearning about this landscape, about its timelessness and the way it makes human concerns small. This time around, when I came home, I pulled down my big book of Jeffers' poetry and felt the Big Sur ocean-blue, granite-white, pelican-flown landscape come surging through his words like it never really has for me before. He evokes Big Sur and its stones, its birds, its people, its timelessness, like the granite itself is speaking through him; he inspires the way I hope to evoke Point Reyes, my own muse.

Tor House, photo by Jessica Malikowski

And, since we are on the subject of hands, and feral palmistry, and all that, I find it poignant to note that at the height of his creativity and success, Jeffers wrote poetry for part of the day, and worked on building the structures of Tor House, all granite, all hewn by him alone for his wife and family, for the rest. He and the granite somehow became kin through his palms, and his poetry deepened with that hand-making. What verse flowed back from granite to fingerprint, and up into his poet's mind?

TO THE ROCK THAT WILL BE A CORNERSTONE OF THE HOUSE

Old garden of grayish and ochre lichen,
How long a rime since the brown people who have vanished from here
Built fires beside you and nestled by you
Out of the ranging sea-wind? A hundred years, two hundred,
You have been dissevered from humanity
And only known the stubble squirrels and the headland rabbits,
Or the long-fetlocked plowhorses
Breaking the hilltop in December, sea-gulls following,
Screaming in the black furrow; no one
Touched you with love, the gray hawk and the red hawk touched you
Where now my hand lies. So I have brought you
Wine and white milk and honey for the hundred years of famine
And the hundred cold ages of sea-wind.

I did not dream the taste of wine could bind with granite,
Nor honey and milk please you; but sweetly
They mingle down the storm-worn cracks among the mosses,
Interpenetrating the silent
Wing-prints of ancient weathers long at peace, and the older
Scars of primal fire, and the stone
Endurance that is waiting millions of years to carry
A corner of the house, this also destined.
Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you
The wings of the future, for I have them.
How dear you will be to me when I too grow old, old comrade.

-Robinson Jeffers, from Tamar (1917-23)

And finally, as you shall see if you scamper over and read "A Feral Palmistry," I didn't need to go looking nearly so far as the Paleolithic cave art of France to find handprints on stone walls. Look no further than Big Sur, for there are handprints left behind by its original Esselen native people, striped and speckled and singing out to the granite, to the ocean, to the moving of time itself.

HANDS 

Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara 

The vault of rock is painted with hands, 

A multitude of hands in the twilight, a cloud of men's palms, no more, 

No other picture. There's no one to say 

Whether the brown shy quiet people who are dead intended 

Religion or magic, or made their tracings 

In the idleness of art; but over the division of years these careful 

Signs-manual are now like a sealed message 

Saying: 'Look: we also were human; we had hands, not paws. All hail*

You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters 

In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down 

And be supplanted; for you also are human.'

-Robinson Jeffers

* This phrase troubled me at first. It reminds me of Hitler and of subjugation and despair and slaughter, and I thought that Jeffers was using it colonially, as if to say yes, European settlers deserve to be hailed, we are better, this land is ours. But upon further consideration, understanding Jeffers philosophy of inhumanism, I believe he employs this phrase knowingly, to imply the great grief and horror of this "regime change" in the beautiful country. And whatever Jeffers original meaning, and more importantly whatever the original intention of the Esselen people who made these hand-marks, I think they speak to us of the great sorrow and beauty of being human—all the sadness of conquest and violence, all the sweetness of creativity and loving "in the beautiful country" held in those palm-pads. 

Mourning the Rains of California

I am a child of rain, a child of storm and fog and thunder and the smell of a wet road, a wet garden, and oh my, the wet forest—fir trunk, bay trunk, oak trunk, duff. I remember, growing up, that when the rains came, I would dash out back and run around as the grass got muddy, reveling. I would do rain dances in the side garden with an old friend, invoking our own pantheon of water deities inspired by the Egyptian ones. (Once, it even worked!) When the sky started to get a little patch of blue showing through, I would feel upset— go away, blue, keep raining! Keep raining! 

Rain to me has never meant indoor weather, though certainly the book-worm in me delighted (and delights) in the warm evenings by the fireside with my various books (generally, at a young age, chronicling the adventures of various medieval herbalist-animal-speaking warrior-type girls...). It is weather that, for me, demands interaction. It makes me want to throw on my coat and pull up my boots and head straight for the hills. I love the sound of it pattering on the leaves of trees, on the dry grasses as they soak and soak and get ready to turn green again. I love it on the roof at night--few sounds comfort and delight me as much. I love it dripping down my nose and eyelashes out in the hills. It sparks something in me, some kind of fire that sends me dashing and whirling and leaping, perhaps like the roots underground in this drought-prone place, who must surely go into throes of ecstasy when that first big storm comes, who must positively sing as they drink, and drink, like my own soul does.

But this year, as you well know by now I am sure from all the News, no storm has come. 

The dry hills of Pfeiffer Ridge in Big Sur. Just south of this photo, a whole ridge was burned in a bad wildfire in late December. A winter wildfire is never a good sign.

The hills are caught in summertime, an aged summertime that has gone from gold to grey to old-bone grey-brown, ready to catch fire at any second. The air itself is dry, the sky so big and blue it unnerves me. I feel a palpable weight lift when we get cloud-cover for a morning or afternoon; it is winter, it is the time for muted gray skies, for slowness, for dark. As the News tells us, the reason for this drought in California and the Southwest has to do with a High Pressure Ridge larger than the Sierra Nevadas (2,000 miles long, 4 miles high) that has been clamped over the Pacific Ocean for the last 13 months, deflecting storms north and east of us. When the sky is blue and empty of clouds, I can almost feel that pressure-- or perhaps it is just a pressure system inside my own chest, clamoring for downpour, clamoring for release of rain from that silent, too-still sky.

Oh beauty, Oh Big Sur

I know that deep drought has touched California before (though not this deep since around the 1500's, according to geologists and those folk who study historical weather patterns and climate). I know that the seeds of the wildflowers in the ground are not dead, just dormant, even as the hills turn a darker and grayer dry brown than I have ever seen, a ravaged color. I know that heat can cleanse, like a fever. I know that an oak tree has deep tap roots that touch the dark cold waters of the ground.

But my animal body mourns the dry. My animal body craves the change of a season—and for you eastern folk, yes, California does have seasons, indeed, and they have to do with rain, and the blooming of different flowers, and fog, and the migrating of whales and of birds, and so many other things. My animal body has dreamt of running through rainstorms, only to wake and smell the air out the window and know that the sidewalks are dry. My animal body feels grief, it feels great unease that seems to leak into my all-too-human-mind, making anxiety rise more often, unbidden, like wildfire, able to catch light anywhere.

The plants are frozen in time, dry husks. They are wise, though. These chaparral and coastal scrub plants of Big Sur (and the rest of California), like the black sage below, know about droughts in their seeds, in their genetics, in their resinous hearts. They know how to keep water from transpiring off their leaves. They know how to go dormant into the dry times. They smell sweet, and strong, despite everything.

A part of me wants to run north, run toward the rain—some kind of wild and nomadic instinct, to follow the water, to run from drought. And without a doubt nomadic peoples of the past and present did and do just that. I've said to friends, laughing—I may need to take a train to Oregon and go lay down in a rainstorm, to be renewed, partly joking, partly serious. But another part of me, the part that is full of a grief beyond just the "soft animal of my body," as Mary Oliver would say, the part that feels, somewhere sick and sorrowful in my stomach, that this is our fault— that part of me knows that we have to stay with this. We have to stick with it, like the black sage, like the coyote brush, who cannot leave.

I think that it is only through our emotional bodies that we can really access the great environmental griefs of this era we are living through. And our emotional bodies are activated, at least in my experience, by those things which occur right around us, on the land we love, in the air we love, amidst the people and plants and trees and streets we love. Global warming and climate change have been horrifying, sad, frightening but somehow impersonal concepts to me until now. Until this dryness, this drought, which may, it's true, be "just another climate cycle," but really, honestly, let's just be straight with each other here—we've had a hand in this, we know we have. The really bad ramifications of a prolonged drought here— agricultural shortages, massive wildfires, eventual clean water scarcity—have yet to even set in, though I know that our local, small scale farmers are already panicking, and tapping into their ground water, and they, more than anyone, deserve their rain-prayers answered. I dearly hope we can avoid the worst of this. But even now, as I feel the scratchy dry air in my throat, it makes me want to yell. I can feel my rain-loving soul thrashing around, as I search the sky in the morning for clouds.

It has been believed through the ages that a drought was a sign that humankind had offended the deities of earth and sky. Whatever the "true" cause of this one, I think we might benefit from a healthy dose of this sort of humility, this kind of morality, remembering that our actions really do affect the great web of life, from ants to rainclouds, that we have a responsibility to this earth which nurtures us every day—the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the blood in our bodies. At this point, of course, I'm not sure a rain dance and offerings of sorrow left out on every roof would do the job. I think we're in a bit too deep. I'm not sure we deserve a mythic solar-hero to go and fight the dragon out over the Pacific who holds the rains in his stomach, and yet I so, so desperately wish he would come along. I think it is a lesson—that we have overreached, here in California, much of which is as arid as parts of Morocco.  That we have built up our civilization in a period of record wet, and while this drought is very likely much exacerbated by global warming, it is also part of California's character to go dry for periods of time.

Despite this calm rationality, I am writing these words because really, I am sad, because I am scared, because I am a lover of rain, because, like a good soft animal, I do not want these cycles of dryness to change the land I love, even though I know the land I love has many faces, and many phases, and part of learning to be fully human is to learn to ride through change, and adapt to it. I am writing this because I do not think we are given the space in this culture to grieve the changes we have wrought upon our landscapes, our air, our clouds, to express the anger and fear and helplessness that we often feel, or repress. After all, when we call most non-human beings "Resources" instead of "Kin," not much room is left for emotions such as sadness, such as loss and sorrow. You cannot mourn a resource. That's why I like the language used in many Native American cultures, such as the Yurok, who called all beings "people"— frog people, cloud people, human people. You can mourn the cloud people, after all, the rain people, the thirsty deer people, the newt people who have had no winter rains to spur on their mating season, the salmon people who can't make it upstream.

At the same time, as naturalist and herbalist Jolie pointed out to me this weekend, it's good to remember that while we may grieve, the plants do know about drought, like this Big Sur succulent above, which has dry and water-conservation and heat written all over it. And the native bunchgrasses may make a come-back this year, she said, pointing to the only tufts of green coming up under the dry grey-gold, which were, indeed, growing in those classic perennial bunches. At long last, perhaps they will have a chance to outgrow the invasive grasses.

In our own tangled and wild garden, the daffodils are already up, and the bees are busy gathering their pollen, and it is hard not to smile at a bee in a daffodil, with pollen on her legs, and the smell of that daffodil up to your nose. It is hard not to smile at the smell of the apple blossoms, so early, the magnolias on the street, the bright yellow faces of the sourgrass exploding everywhere along sidewalk edges.

It is hard not to smile at the sunny calendula, which hasn't missed a beat since we moved in at the start of November. And as my small 6-year old neighbor told me out in the garden as we searched the dirt for worms—if you spray the yellow flowers, and the lemons maybe too, with a little water at dusk, the fairies will come and collect the gold. Well, I thought, well. I do not know what our summer is going to look like, or even our spring, but now the flowers are coming out gold, today, this moment, and so there is always beauty, every day, everywhere. And so we adapt our hearts and our spirits, just a little bit, just enough, because that, also, is what animals do, in order to survive, in order to stave off sorrow. At once, we do not forget to sing out to the clouds, tell them how much we love their wetness when it is poured up us, how much we love the smell of mud, the sound of rain on our roofs, the taste of it on our tongues.  Whether or not it coaxes thunderstorms, perhaps such songs, such prayers, will douse our hearts with a little fairy-gold, will fill our own souls with enough rain to carry on, to make small changes, to look a warming world in the eye, to look our own guilt in the eye, and some make good of what we do, that it may be somehow in service to the land which holds us, even if that service is just a word of praise, said aloud, to a raincloud.

P.S. Nevertheless, Sir High Pressure Ridge out there beyond the clouds, if you are ready, and only in your own good time, perhaps it is time to let go. Perhaps you, too, would enjoy a big thunderous rainstorm come washing, at long last, through your high-pressure spine.