We
were coming down from the top of First Mesa, after visiting an old Hopi
woman who lived there; we could hear the singing clearly, even if nothing
of the ceremony was visible to us. We’d known from the signs along the
road that we weren’t allowed to see the sacred dancing, but had decided
to go, regardless, to the woman’s village. A little girl came up to us
and said very politely: Excuse me, non-Indians aren’t allowed here during
the Kachina Dance; then she skipped past us down the dirt track.
…remember
a child’s variation
upon trance
there are souls
it was said
whose faults are as if written
on paper in a dream
the yellow-haired girl and I
stroll by the water’s edge
there’s a small wound
at her wrist
she mimics the geese’s cries
as we walk in their midst
and they lift their wings
to slap against the cold air
there are souls
whose faults are as if written
on sand for the wind
While
we were driving through the desert, away from First Mesa, I began to talk
about a singer I’d long admired, whose work had been severely marginalised;
indeed, it was all-but-forgotten.
Spare, reticent,
tender melody was certainly present in her singing, but it would give
way to an athematic exploration of sounds that couldn’t always be plotted
within conventional pitch-notation — and these often seemed extended from
such as sighs, moans, screams, cries, shouts. Wistful, passionate, sad,
anguished, joyful, serenely resigned, or enraptured. A voice that sometimes
appeared to ride on the merest breath, could assume an intensity that
evoked a fierce wind. Visited, ecstatically; as part of a serious game,
a sober inebriation. For her distinction was also in the way that
her singing took on all the colours of a devotion that passes through
the stations of self-abandonment.
Suddenness,
transverse.
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