Greeting | Weeknotes 10/21

Coyote is Not a Metaphor, The Epic of Gilgamesh, good cooking, Ella Young, Appalachian witchcraft & Scottish cowboys.

Comrades—

J took a break from her pile of half-read books this week to dig into Cutcha Risling Baldy's powerful article Coyote is Not a Metaphor.¹ It's an argument, though not a title, she fundamentally agrees with. Baldy critiques how universalizing Coyote's name and role across diverse cultures flattens Coyote's meaning and power. To universalize Coyote is to separate Coyote from the people and the land—from relationship. It renders him “merely” a metaphor.

This is fundamentally true, though insufficiently haunted. To paraphrase Rhyd Wildermuth: when we say “You mean the world to me,” we mean, “I reinterpret the nature of everything by how my relationship to you has changed me.” When we say “You mean nothing to me.” we mean “I want to erase my sense of relation to you.” Meaning is map of relations.

And so the meaning of Coyote is in your relationship to Coyote. The many names and many stories of Coyote across Turtle Island carry those relationships between Coyote, the people, and the land. Italpas to the Chinook. Ma'ii to the Dine. Mica to the Lakota. Skinkuts in Kutenai and Isil in Cupeno. Tcu-unnkita, “off-spring of the moon,” to the Pima. Pihnêefich, “shitty old man” to the Karuk.

This past weekend, we sat around a campfire in Vermont with friends, wrapped in blankets, listening to coyotes sing. That moment of relationship is different than being the pheasant in the forest that coyote was hunting. It is different than finding your dog surrounded by coyotes in your backyard. Where you sit changes what you see in the shadow loping through the trees. 

Our only quibble is that Coyote is a metaphor—it's our conception of metaphor itself that is insufficiently haunted. Metaphors are, quite literally, the language of relations—language that draws meaning from the relationship between things. To paraphrase Gordon White, metaphor is literally the “dimensional divide” between the Seen and Unseen worlds. And Coyote stalks across it.

She weaves between the aging posts of the rotting fence of reality, wheedling, crooning, crying, shrieking, laughing.

Jess & Brian.

Earth

Good and Cheap: How to Eat Well on $4/Day continues to be a cookbook I return to years after I first found the free PDF. The recipes are flexible, user-friendly, tasty and (even though food prices have gone up since it was published) cheap. From the author: "Good cooking can't solve hunger in America, but it can make life happier." -J

This spooky season gem on the Mountain Witches of Appalachia compiles a mountain perspective in a mountain voice. Hearing the music of the speech is one way to hear those stories as close as you can get to being on country. The video referenced, Signs Cures and Witchery includes interviews, you'll just have to hold your nose on some technocratic condescension to get to the good stuff. And there is good stuff. -B

I got onto one of those lovely friend ramble chats about nothing with Andie this week re: the subject of bat guano and am somewhat dismayed to inform you it inevitably led to imperialism. -B

Sea

Umm, yes please, more cute Irish boys trespassing to sing songs about smuggling and freedom (this is so on the money for me I am worried it's a siren song). - B

Oh, goddammit, they got me for one more, I can't say no to a Scottish cowboy. -B

Sky

Beautiful illustrations of the Epic of Gilgamesh by Polish artist Marek Żuławski. -J

Paul Wolkowinski, the first person I ever encountered teaching Indian Clubs, offers an understanding of both the Hanuman Prayer for Gada training and how movement is healing. -B

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Greeting

by Ella Young

Over the wave-patterned sea-floor

Over the long sun-burnt ridge of the world,

I bid the winds seek you.

I bid them cry to you

Night and morning

A name you loved once;

I bid them bring to you

Dreams, and strange imaginings, and sleep.

1. Baldy is obviously doing a callback to "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor," which has its own specific strategic value as a title, and I can’t actually quibble with that.