Rivers: A Novel

At night sometimes Captain Lewis would sit straight up and moan and chuckle to himself and mumble about something and would fall back into his hammock, asleep maybe.  And sometimes York would hear him cry out like a man wounded and shot.   And then he wouldn’t speak anymore.

But sometimes Captain Lewis talked to him.  He didn’t talk to Captain Clark.  At night, when all was quiet, Captain Lewis called to him.   “York,” he said.   “Where are we trending?  I’ve lost my instruments.  I can get no bearing.”  York tried to answer him, but there was something there like a wall or a hedge that couldn’t be crossed, even if he said an answer.   He told him they were going to the President and that he must prepare himself.   He told him what he knew, that there was something Captain Lewis had yet to do, to carry his private and confidential report for the President’s ear alone.

“What does Clark ask you York?   I hear him up there, scratching at our old books, the journals.   Then I hear him sometimes ask you something.  What is it, York?

“You kin ask him that yourself,” said York.

“Oh, I could ask, but he wouldn’t hear me.   He wouldn’t hear me as I hear you or you hear me.   He’s still too much in that other place, York.  The busy place outside.  He still smells of it. You and I are different, York.   We’ve been beyond the Shining Mountains.”

“And didn’t General Clark go with us?  Who was that beside us, then?”

“I don’t know, York, some effigy or ghost – who knows?   But he never went where we went.  But he talks to you.  What does he say?”

Then he told Captain Lewis how General Clark asked him about Charbonneau’s woman that he called Janey and her boy Pomp, his little dancing boy.

“Yes,” Lewis said, “he became peculiarly attached to Janey and the boy.  They made a strange sort of family. Clark began to worship that squaw like an idol.   He thought of setting up a home for her and her worthless scrap of a half-breed husband.     When she found her brother up there before the mountains, she wept and Clark too, I think shed a tear, and perhaps I did myself, as if it were a sentimental novel.     It was good she was there, for it helped us to trade for the horses, but it was no novel.    If she had enough to eat and a few trinkets, I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.  The boy had promise, I give you that.”

“I had took care of her when she was sick, but I didn’t pay much mind to her after that.”  York paused a moment, while the water slapped against the sides of the boat.  “She was just another squar as far as I was concerned.  There warn’t nothin’ so special about her”

Governor Lewis looked about him and chuckled.   “Some men have one family, Clark needs must have two.   In the end I had only my pistols and my dram.”  Then he lay back in the hammock.  “The bottle, York.   It’s a fine thing.    The Indians called our whiskey milk.  Did you know that, York?  They would beg and whine the way they did for a spoonful of our milk.   A curious name for it, and possibly a good one.  But at the bottom of it, it’s only another dream, and that bad.”     Lewis looked at him for a moment, then went on.  “I say I dream, York, but I do not dream.  One wakes up from dreams.  I think that is the nature of my disquiet.  That one-eyed Shawnee fiddler Cruzatte!  Recall how he shot me in the arse on our way back from the Pacific thinking me an elk?   A span or two higher and he would have saved me the trouble of shooting myself.    It would be good to sleep, York, but my dreams do not permit me.   I’m foundered in them like an ox.  Do you have some nigger magic to get me out?   Some Bone or Root?”

York covered him to keep out the cold and turned away.  He had no root or bone.   If he’d had one, he would have used it for himself.

Syncopated Civilization: a Study in American Style

It was, as Twain described it, a competition in elegant deportment, in which, in a hired hall, teams of elaborately dressed couples marched back and forth down the length of the room, before a jury and perhaps five hundred spectators.

All that the competitor knows of fine airs and graces he throws into his carriage, all that he knows of seductive expression he throws into his carriage, all that he knows of seductive expression he throws into his countenance.

Here follows in Twain’s account a catalogue of empty grace notes:  “watch-chain to twirl with his fingers, cane to do graceful things with, snowy handkerchief to flourish and get artful effects out of, shiny new stovepipe hat to assist in his courtly bows.   .   .”  The “colored lady” also has her accoutrements, perhaps a fan “to work up her effects with, and smile over and blush behind.”    The parade of individual couples ends and a review of all the contestants in procession commences, “with all the airs and graces and all the bowings and smirkings on exhibition at once”    A contest of surfaces, of pretenses, an elaborate play-acting.  “That,” Mark Twain – he was using the Cake Walk as the stalking horse for an attack on the empty embellishments of Victorian prose, “is what I call style.” The final review enables the panel of experts to make their comparisons and deliver their decision and the prize, “with an abundance of applause and envy along with it.”   “The negroes,”  Twain concludes, “have a name for this grave deportment tournament; a name taken from the prize contended for.  They call it a Cake-Walk.”

For Mark Twain, holding up the Cake Walk in an attack on the literary equivalents of the kind of gratuitous excrescences that attempted to ornament mass-produced furniture and stamped out iron ornaments and implements of the machine age,   the Cake-Walk is a vacuous parade of social inanities.   It is an empty vessel.   For the Cake-Walkers, the vessel is overflowing.   We see them in old photogravures and engravings, grossly caricatured sometimes, but also with their pride and elegance made emphatic, the men with their shoulders back, the leader raising his beribboned cane like the staff of a laughing hierophant, silk hats tilted to one side, the women lovely and saucy – some have appropriated their partner’s hats and canes and parade them with a fine wit,  prancing to an elegant new music that had just now begun to spread out from the African American saloons and bordellos and social clubs of places like Saint Louis and Sedalia Missouri. The Cakewalkers with their syncopated music and their elaborate gestures had come to their truth laying slantwise to white America, a truth that created a breathing room in the suffocations of the narrow space that a racialized society had made for them, a kind of aristocracy of the spirit in a democracy, for those outside it, that offered only opprobrium or silence.   Like the shaman, it is often their fate to suffer the loneliness of exile from the daily world and to take on the pain of journey to dangerous places to bring back souls besotted by death. Like the Shaman, they are experts in the magic of symbols, dancers between two worlds.

For the Shaman is not only a doctor, going to the far land of the dead and seeking the lost soul, but a trickster as well.   A sideways person– that artist of the world of possibilities.   Dancing on the borders of society, he is the hunchback, the crazy man, the sacred transvestite, drunk with sex or celibacy, visionary and jester, quack and magician, so the Shaman dances on the borders of the spirit world as well.   He teaches us how to die, but he also teaches us how to live.  If he dances alone, he has following in his train an invisible community, for he leads us to the places between the world we find and the world we desire where we can live and dance.

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For that difficult genius Charles Sanders Peirce, as for Crane pondering whether to hold or draw, we know the world by guessing    Early on in his investigation of logic Peirce had discovered that the familiar processes we imagine we understand by induction and deduction are in fact sterile.   They cannot proceed in any new direction, on their own they can really only discover themselves.   If we think we are reaching that new place by inductive reasoning, by the patient gathering of facts that will lead to some inescapable conclusion, we have obscured the real process.   Something is missing, the essential thing that causes us to jump the familiar tracks.   If we think we are recreating a process by deduction from its conclusion, we have forgotten something else.  What we have forgotten is the process of guessing.   Strictly pursued, both induction and deduction are mechanical processes whose outcomes are already implicit in their operations.  Causality itself, the links in the chain that leads to our conclusions, that gives such symmetry to the natural processes of the world, is itself a kind of illusion, the illusion of a world that has lost its originality – the creative originality of chance – and has settled into the road of habit.    Peirce created the term abduction to describe this necessary piece of his logic, this informed and sometime unconscious process of guessing.   As a careful research scientist, measuring the earth’s gravity from various sites with delicate pendulums for the Coast Geodesic Survey, he knew that even the most careful observation did not yield uniform results.   How would one know the truth of an observation if subsequent observers and subsequent moments provided different data?   How would one guess at the answer to the riddle of the universe if all life and the cosmos itself seems the product of the free play of chance in a world Lyell and Darwin had shown to be a mindless geologic process, an endless  brute struggle for existence?  But chance itself might be fertile, and just as one could cluster the errors of observation around an unseen center, tightening the probability of truth, so one might see chance in cosmological terms, a universe congealing its random variation around habit, so that the laws of the universe themselves – it was a startling idea that anticipated the most radical speculations of contemporary cosmologists –might be the products of an evolution of more and more habitual recurrence.   We cannot know the world with perfect accuracy, so we guess, but our guesses are informed by the knowledge we have of the world, by the facts we can observe, by our experience, by the unconscious processes of our psychology, by our ability to read its language, for the world, for nature itself, speak to us in signs.