In his literary biography of Rudyard Kipling so sympathetic and perceptive a reader/writer as Angus Wilson dismisses the Jungle Books as schoolboy stories with animal costumes, and has no truck at all with the fust So Stories. As I think the Jungle Books, along with the other "children's story," Kim, are Kipling's finest work, and consider the fust So Stories a unique and miraculous interaction of prose with poetry with graphics, of adult mind with child mind, and of written with oral literature -- a shining intersection among endless dreary one-way streets -- so Wilson's dismissal of them was something I needed to understand. Not that it was anything unusual. Critical terror of Kiddilit is common. People to whom sophistication is a positive intellectual value shun anything "written for children"; if you want to clear the room of derrideans, mention Beatrix Potter without sneering. With the agreed exception of Alice in Wonderland, books for children are to be mentioned only dismissively or jocosely by the adult male critic. Just as Angus Wilson used to dismiss Virginia Woolf uncomfortably, jocosely, as a lady novelist, though he finally and creditably admitted that he might have missed something there... In literature as in "real life," women, children, and animals are the obscure matter upon which Civilization erects itself, phallologically. That they are Other is (vide Lacan etal.} the foundation of language, the Father Tongue. If Man vs. Nature is the name of the game, no wonder the team players kick out all these non-men who won't learn the rules and run around the cricket pitch squeaking and barking and chattering! But then, who are the Bandar-Log? Why do animals in kids' books talk? Why do animals in myths talk? How come the prince eats a burned fish-scale
Introduction,A. 11
and all of a sudden understands what the mice in the wall are saying about the kingdom? How come on Christmas night the beasts in the stables speak to one another in human voices? Why does the tortoise say, "111 race you," to the hare, and how does Coyote tell Death, "111 do exactly what you tell me! " Animals don't talk -- everybody knows that Everybody, including quite small children, and the men and women who told and tell talking-animal stories, knows that animals are dumb: have no words of their own. So why do we keep putting words into their mouths?
We who? We the dumb: the others.
In the dreadful self-isolation of the Church, that soul-fortress towering over the dark abysms of the bestial/ mortal/World/Hell, for St Francis to cry out "Sister sparrow, brother wolf!" was a great thing. But for the Buddha to be a jackal or a monkey was no big deal. And for the people Civilization calls "primitive," "savage," or "undeveloped," including young children, the continuity, interdependence, and community of all life, all forms of being on earth, is a lived fact, made conscious in narrative (myth, ritual, fiction). This continuity of existence, neither benevolent nor cruel itself, is fundamental to whatever morality may be built upon it Only Civilization builds its morality by denying its foundation.
By climbing up into his head and shutting out every voice but his own, "Civilized Man" has gone deaf. He can't hear the wolf calling him brother -- not Master, but brother. He can't hear the earth calling him child -- not Father, but son. He hears only his own words making up the world. He can't hear the animals, they have nothing to say. Children babble, and have to be taught how to climb up into their heads and shut the doors of perception. No use teaching women at all, they talk all the time, of course, but never say anything. This is the myth of Civilization, embodied in the monotheisms which assign soul to Man alone.
12.ABUFFALO GALS Introduction ~A~ 13
And so it is this myth which all talking-animal stories mock, or simply subvert So long as "man" "rules," animals will make rude remarks about him. Women and unruly men will tell their daughters and sons what the fox said to the ox, what Raven told South Wind. And the cat will say,
"I am the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to me!" And the Man, infuriated by this failure to acknowledge Hierarchy, will throw his boots and his little stone ax (that makes three) at the Cat Only when the Man listens, and attends, O Best Beloved, and hears, and understands, will the Cat return to the Cat's true silence.
When the word is not sword, but shuttle.
But still there will be stories, there will always be stories, in which the lion's mother scolds the lion, and the fish cries out to the fisherman, and the cat talks; because it is true that all creatures talk to one another, if only one listens.
This conversation, this community, is not a simple harmony. The Peaceable Kingdom, where lion and lamb lie down, is an endearing vision not of this world. It denies wilderness. And voices cry in the wilderness.
Users of words to get outside the head with, rash poets get caught in the traps set for animals. Some, unable to endure the cruelty, maim themselves to escape. Robinson Jeffers's "Original Sin" describes the "happy hunters" of the Stone Age, puzzled how to kill the mammoth trapped in their pitfall, discovering that they can do so by building fires around it and roasting it alive all day. The poem ends:
I would rather
Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are, and we might remember Not to hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.
This maybe wrongheaded, but I prefer it to the generous but sloppy identifications of Walt Whitman. Where Whitman takes the animal into his vast, intensely civilized ego, possesses it, engulfs and annihilates it, Jeffers at least reaches out and touches the animal, the Other, through pain, and releases it But the touching hand is crippled. Perhaps it is only when the otherness, the difference, the space between us (in which both cruelty and love occur) is perceived as holy ground, as the sacred place, that we can "come into animal presence" -- the title of Denise Lever-toVs poem, which honors my book, and stands here as its true introduction.
14 JT BUFFALO GALS
Come into Animal Presence
Come into animal presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star f
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm bush.
What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings in white star-silence? The llama rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm forest Those who were sacred have remained so, holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence of bronze, only the sight that saw it faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.
— DENISE LEVERTOV Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight "YOU FELL OUT OF THE SKY," the coyote said.
Still curled up tight, lying on her side, her back pressed against the overhanging rock, the child watched the coyote with one eye. Over the other eye she kept her hand cupped, its back on the dirt
"There was a burned place in the sky, up there alongside the rimrock, and then you fell out of it," the coyote repeated, patiently, as if the news was getting a bit stale. "Are you hurt?"
She was all right She was in the plane with Mr. Michaels, and the motor was so loud she couldn't understand what he said even when he shouted, and the way the wind rocked the wings was making her feel sick, but it was all right They were flying to Canyonville. In the plane.
She looked. The coyote was still sitting there. It yawned. It was a big one, in good condition, its coat silvery and thick The dark tear-line from its long yellow eye was as clearly marked as a tabby cat's.
She sat up, slowly, still holding her right hand pressed to her right eye.
