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. 

Magic at the Corners of the Everyday: Nettle Soda, Spring Winds, Early Morning Myths

It has been a green and burgeoning February. Much is afoot, including the green grass pushing and pushing up from the darkness of winter, though the rains have been scarce these past weeks. The new nettles are creating perfect spiky leaves, which we gathered together, along with some dandelion root, for wild yeast-bubbled soda.

I love the green but tangled chaos of late winter-- all the new growth is pushing up, but the old dead hemlock sticks and brambles from last year are still thick like pale bones.

The dandelion roots were bitter and sweet at once, and looked like wiry little creatures.

Some of the nettles went into a dye bath as well— I'm a bit more the mistress of dye baths than soda making, as they require that you let them only sit and steep and ferment a little bit. Alas I have no photos of the soda itself, which we drank too fast for me to remember to fetch my camera--a bubbly sweet rooty sort of flavor, more refreshing and rich than I can describe, like a tonic full of the sharp of winter and the tenderness of spring at once.

The mama tule elk are gathered together now in big female harems, the males off in their own bachelor groups, away from the pregnant cows, who wander the Tomales Point hills, following the oldest and wisest cow to the places of sweet grass, of water, of birth.

The winds are beginning to whip up foam on the wild beaches of Point Reyes, as they always do in spring (though we aren't quite there yet). The froth at McClure's beach was so thick, so alive, like pale green whipped cream, that when we rubbed it between our hands, my lovely friends and I, it made a lovely green face paint, which you see here, happily smeared across our cold cheeks.

A mussel perfect and shining and the shape of a heart. Imagine, if inside, your heart were so iridescent, so smooth and sea-worn and blue.

There is something so exhilarating, almost frightening too, in the strength of wind and wave out here on  the very edge of the land. 

The mornings have been cold and beautiful up in the little carriage house where we find ourselves living at the moment. I bundle up early, sometimes light a candle, make tea and write. It is a habit so deeply pleasurable to me, this weaving of tales early in the morning, as the sun is being born (or has just been born recently). The tea is an essential piece, and the fountain pen my love gave me last year on my birthday, which is now almost 1-year old itself, and such a remarkable tool. Sometimes I think it does all the work... enchanted thing.

Last weekend, in this white barn, out in the green cow-cropped hills of Petaluma, myths of true magic were told by the Dartmoor native, Dr. Martin Shaw. To sit in an old barn, woodstove lit, as a story of wildness and ancient magic is told by a man who can sing up the bobcat-clawed, fox-eyed, osprey-hearted truth of an old tale with utter grace—this is joy. I can't quite describe the feeling of opening up again, like a child, to the story of the Handless Maiden, of Ivan, the Wolf and the Firebird, of Dame Ragnelle.

Back in January, after the first evening Simon and I heard Martin Shaw tell a tale in the church in Point Reyes Station, I woke up in the night feeling elated. It was a feeling very similar to the night after my very first tracking class; I woke up almost in tears of happiness at the memory of side-trotting coyote tracks. It's something to do with touching your heart to the great wildness of the world, both self and animal.

We spent the two mornings listening to tales, the afternoons walking those tales out in the hills. I felt dreamy, wandering with the Handless Maiden in my bones, thinking of magic apple trees and undergrounds, of silver hands and the does who fed her from their own teeth.

The world took on a glow, delicate as moss, strong as the neck of a white horse seen in the sun across a perfect open field.

"We remember your face, we remember your face, we remember your face," Dr. Shaw chanted as we went off on our solo walks with the stories in our hearts; he meant the faces of the characters in the tales, the tales themselves, and also all the wild creatures around us—oak tree, gray-wacke stone, fence lizard, deer. There is something very intimate in that phrase, full of honesty; if we do not remember the faces (faces being individual, with eyes that see you back, even if they look only like cracks in stone) of salt harvest mice, of Ivan and Koschei the Deathless, Vasalisa and the Baba Yaga in old Russian tales, of black oaks and white horses with brown eyes, they cease to be alive to us in the world; we act in ways that are harmful; the animate world—story, language, human heart, fox— begins to wither.

My basket, full of the tea, the tales, the warm layers and bags for lunches, from the weekend; it pleases me still to see it, as if some of the magic of the stories and the wanderings came home with me in that basket, curled up like a mouse under my scarves.

I felt a glow around me the color of that mustard-field, watched over by a red-winged blackbird, which I nearly drove off the road staring at on my way back. Old stories, told to you and eaten straight up  by your heart, can do this...

And amidst all of these green wanderings, nettle sodas, green wind-beaten sea foams and tea-strong myths in old barns, at the meeting place between winter and spring, I have been hard at work on the very first Gray Fox Epistle. My lovely friend Molly let me come to her textile studio by the marsh, in an old greenhouse, to use scraps of beautiful old fabrics to wrap each tale.... I'll give you only a taste for now, more photos when all of my blessed and wonderful subscribers receive their first tales.

May the lace-white bones of winter and the new green magic of spring (how is it, truly, that a hazel catkin becomes a perfect, folded hazel leaf, bright green against a silver branch?) bless you all. Amidst all the frenzy of the everyday, the drives to post office and bank and grocery store, the gas and the plastic and the cell phones, which seem to eat at the corners of wonder, may you gather up in your arms the small beauties of green and old white bones, the scraps of magic at the edges of all of our worlds,  like forgotten and perfect lace, made long ago by capable fingers and lost in a box.