Listening for the Heartbeat of Being: The Arts of Robert Bringhurst 9780773598102

Table of contents :
Cover
Listening for the Heartbeat of Being
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Editors’ Note and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Robert Bringhurst: An Artistic and Intellectual Biography
2 Renaissance Men and Presocratic Philosophers: The Path to The Fragments of Parmenides
3 Ecologies of Estrangement: Bringhurst’s Antigone
4 Salvage Selvage Joinery: Bringhurst’s Early Drafts
5 Grace in Two-and-a-Half Dimensions: Robert Bringhurst, Typographer
6 Anatomy of a Voice: Bringhurst’s Rhythms
7 “Conversations with a Toad”: A Prologue to Polyphony
8 Braided Skeins of Sound: Bringhurst’s Oral Polyphony
9 Water Music: Close Listening to The Blue Roofs of Japan
10 Bringhurst in West Coast Book Design and Publishing
11 Story and Silence
12 Uncovered: An American Iliad
13 At Land’s End: Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers
14 Sgalangáay Díinaa lijang: “This Is My Song”
15 The Reincarnation of Stories
16 Ursa Major: Polyphony, Myth, Ecology
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

16.2 Aluminum “crystal” from Ursa Major.

“investigative actions” in response to the “shapes, textures and spaces” of Noestheden’s installation, a modus operandus central to her work (Cleniuk 370; New Dance web). The astronomical conceits were a natural fit for Poitras, who, like Bringhurst and Noestheden, has explored how art, science, and nature “feed back and forth in mythical, mysterious, elusive and sometimes obvious ways” (New Dance web). Further enhancing the scene was an electronic soundscape by composer Chiyoko Szlavnics. In Ursa Major, the tradition of the Renaissance masque coincided with contemporary installation art in that there was no clear boundary separating the performers from the spectators, who were free to move around the room. Audience member Sharon Butala’s initial impression of the space provides a sense of the wonder and confusion experienced by those in attendance. The hall was very dimly lit, there were no chairs for the audience to sit on, there were installations here and there throughout the large, rectangular space, and the first one I saw consisted of clay telephone receivers hanging from the ceiling, many of them broken

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16.3 Davida Monk as Hera among elements of John Noestheden’s “Crystalline Vision of the Cosmos” installation for Ursa Major.

into shards lying on marble sheets on the floor, and I thought at once, Oh, broken communication. Further on a number of what I thought were old drive-in movie speakers hung from the ceiling … At intervals around the room’s perimeter there were further installations or spots that had been marked out either by shapes of different flooring lying on the carpet or by what appeared to be minimal ‘sets.’ In a couple of places yellow spotlights were attached to the floor. We milled around, fifty or sixty of us, including some very young children, trying to find a place to stand or sit from which to watch whatever was going to happen. Dancers – I should say ‘performers’ – were already among us doing strange things, one swathed in fabric, holding a flashlight, and moving back and forth slowly over a few feet (she was on wheels), one lying high above us at the top of one of the fat structural pillars, another lying on her back on a wheeled pallet and pushing herself around very slowly. (Butala 2–3) Butala’s frank comments on the unintelligibility of the spoken texts attest to the chaotic quality of the event, but also reveal how the initial chaos coalesced into an inspiring, meaningful experience over the course of the performance: I missed most of the story, hearing only the first part recited by Davida Monk [playing Hera], but it seemed to be enough that the rest (in three languages I don’t read, write or speak) acted for me simply as a background musical score might. (I think I ‘tuned out’ the Latin and Greek, but enjoyed listening to Floyd Favel Starr in his soft, gentle voice, reading the Cree version). All of the performers moved beautifully, in the slowest, controlled turning and twisting … On a structure looking like a mountain-climbing practice wall, Robin Poitras (wearing a bearskin) as Ursa Major, put there by Hera, writhed slowly, and turned around the yellow sky. In fact, I saw in a whole way, at last, that we were watching the sky and hearing the story of the objects in the sky. It was a genuinely stunning vision that was executed beautifully by the performers, with Robert Bringhurst reciting his text in his wonderful resonant, deep voice while taking part in the movement. (6–7)

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For Bringhurst, participating in the performance at invisible ceremonies was just the beginning. Aware that the complexity of his textual fabric would overwhelm any listener unfamiliar with the constituent texts, he set out to complete it in print form by finishing a new translation of “The Bear Woman” from Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Cree.4 Gaspereau Press published the first edition of Ursa Major in 2003 in large 7.5" × 11" format with an engraving of a bear’s face by Ontario artist Wesley Bates, and included a substantial afterword by Nova Scotia poet and academic Peter Sanger (both of whom have had working relationships with Gaspereau). The book presents the text of Ursa Major twice. Initially, each monologue in each scene is rendered sequentially, with directions as to when each enters and roughly how it corresponds in time with the others. A second version under the heading “Voice Map” lays out the voices in simultaneous “stanzas” of closely set lines in black, grey, and blue. The first presentation is designed for reading to oneself, the second for reading aloud in ensemble. The intended effects of the interweaving voices can only be sensed through the Voice Map, because Bringhurst has carefully orchestrated them to maximize intertextual ironies and intercultural resonances, and to exploit a few verbal harmonies. In spite of the attention to detail in the volume, Bringhurst and Steeves evidently felt that they could do better. In 2009, a second edition was published in a more standard 5" × 8" paperback size with the afterword removed, and a newly designed Voice Map which improves readability by utilizing four distinct colours for the voices and by adding marginal indicators for the entrances and exits for each voice. A poetic suite entitled “Ursa Minor” in Bringhurst’s Selected Poems, also published in 2009 by Gaspereau, incorporates monologues by Arcturus and the Celestial Janitor and a few lines from Hera, along with some newly written material, but none of the source texts. This configuration creates quite different though related effects, and warrants discussion on its own terms.

Callisto, Zeus, Arcturus, and Hera The ancient Greek myth featuring Callisto, Zeus, Arcturus, and Hera provides the basis for Scenes One, Three, and Five (subtitled Metamorphosis I , II , and III ). The story also provides the context for the bicultural counterpoint in Scenes Two and Four (subtitled “Arcturus Awakens” and “Arcturus Dreams”). The basic elements of the story may be summarized

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quickly, but the ramifications of Bringhurst’s arrangement are both complex and subtle. Callisto the huntress, a member of a band of women devoted to the goddess Artemis, is raped by Zeus who initially appears disguised as Artemis herself, and is then punished by jealous Hera, who transforms her into a bear. Callisto gives birth to a human son, Arcturus, who grows up away from her, unaware of the events of his conception. One day he unknowingly hunts his mother, but Zeus intervenes at the last moment to turn them both into constellations, leaving them to endlessly re-enact their chase through the skies, a perpetual moment referred to in New World Suite No. 3.5 Framed by transformations enacted by Zeus which are reminiscent of other myths6 is the central metamorphosis of the huntress Callisto, whose name means “most beautiful,” into a hunted bear. The story’s origins are unknown, and the earliest complete written account exists not in Greek but in the Latin of Ovid (on which Bringhurst worked during his post-graduate studies), composed hundreds of years after its currency among the Greeks. Ovid includes his version in Book Two of the Metamorphoses, an extended collection of myths concerning transformations of various kinds, arranged as a history of mortals and gods from the creation of the world up to Ovid’s time. Bringhurst excerpts twelve fragments from Ovid, each between one and five lines, beginning with line 401 of Book II and ending at line 507. Callisto herself is never named by Ovid within the story, even though Zeus and Artemis are each indicated by several Roman appellations, Hera takes her usual Roman name, Juno, and Callisto’s son is called Arcas. Following Ovid’s example with Callisto, Bringhurst has cut the text such that none of the characters are actually named, except for the epithets “Moon-woman” for Artemis and “the Queen” for Hera. Many important elements of the action are missing, including Zeus’s initial attraction to Callisto, his disguise as Artemis, his rape of Callisto, her pregnancy, and Arcturus’s birth. Eight aspects remain: Zeus’s initial effort to return life to the land which had been burned by Phaethon’s ill-fated attempt to drive the chariot of the sun (in the preceding story); a brief description of Callisto’s careless grace; the warning that “no power lasts for long” (nulla potentia longa est); Artemis’s exclamation of banishment; Hera’s vow to destroy Callisto’s beauty; Callisto’s transformation into a bear; a brief description of her lonely life and the moment of encounter with her son; and finally their relocation to the sky as constellations. The story of Phaethon, though not mentioned by Bringhurst explicitly, forms a significant backdrop to the Callisto tale. Phaethon, child of the Sun and the mortal woman Clymene, succumbs to a hubris born of

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insecurity when a rival casts doubt on his parentage. Seeking to prove his celestial heritage, Phaethon convinces his father to let him take a turn at driving the chariot of the sun across the sky, with predictably disastrous results.7 Zeus surveys the damage wrought on the earth, and begins his revitalization project with Arcadia, his favoured land, which Bringhurst calls plainly “bear country.” The conflagration caused by Phaethon is echoed in Scene Four by the Celestial Janitor, who remarks, “As for history, / that nightmare, it is fire; / as for what you call technology, / it offers you the wherewithal / to cook the feast, the guest, the host, / the dining hall, the whole shebang” (Ursa 50, 82–3). This direct address of the audience takes place just as the hunter in “The Bear Woman” sits down to a feast with his wife’s family. Phaethon’s costly hubris suggests our own contemporary flirtation with disaster through climate change as a result of our reckless burning of fossil fuels, contrasted with the hunter’s unwitting induction into the bear family. Nevertheless, Bringhurst characterizes the initial scene in which Zeus visits Arcadia as taking place not following a holocaust, but “after the flood,” adding a hint of irony to the observation that “the springs were shy, the rivers timid” (13, 61) while rooting the Callisto story in a mythical framework common to cultural traditions around the world.8 In eliding the passage in which Zeus first spies Callisto, Bringhurst creates a new sentence from the fragments: “He gave the country life again … // … her dress just wrapped round and pinned, / a white cord knotted in the hair she never combed, / and always a spear or bow in her hand: / one of Moon Woman’s warriors” (13, 61). The possessive pronoun “her” seems to refer to the country of Arcadia itself, and Callisto’s unstudied attractiveness to the natural beauty of the wild – appropriate for a devotee of Artemis, goddess of wilderness. This sleight-of-hand sets in motion a key allegorical dimension of Ursa Major. Zeus’s enticing of Arcadia’s “shy” rivers out of hiding takes on the overtones of seduction, helping compensate for the elision of Zeus’s subsequent impersonation of Artemis and rape of Callisto, which are hinted at only by the phrases “no power lasts for long” and “then she hated the flowers and trees / that had seen it and felt it” (14, 62). Bringhurst renders the key Latin line adimam tibi namque figuram as “I’ll drive the beauty out of you” (14, 62), Hera’s rationale for turning Callisto into a bear. Yet in spite of the grotesque description of the metamorphosis, those familiar with the mythology around Artemis can’t help but find Hera’s choice of punishment ironic, probably intentionally so. Artemis had been closely associated with bears through festivals in her honour at Brauron on the west coast of the Aegean, in the

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early days of which girls and young women of marriageable age wore bearskin furs and performed a dance called the arkteia in which they imitated the “slow, solemn steps” of a bear (Hughes 1994: 95).9 Ovid must have been aware of the irony, yet bears were not a feature of Roman life, and he portrayed Callisto’s transformation as a simple punishment based on Hera’s famous jealousy. Bears are resident on the Northwest coastal areas familiar to Bringhurst, however, and Ursa Major moves well beyond Ovid. If Zeus’s rape of Callisto is a parallel to industrial culture’s forcing of the earth to yield to its will, following the allegorical trail we see the transformation of Callisto into a bear as dramatizing the estrangement we feel from the natural world which bore us, which we may now perceive as frightening and unfamiliar. Just as Zeus discovers Callisto, both Hera and the Celestial Janitor add their voices to the mix, complicating the story by invoking the figure of the silver bow from different source texts. Hera sings the line she will repeat frequently throughout the performance: “Καλλιστὼ κατέπεφνεν ἀπ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο” (Kallistō katépephnen ap arguréoio bióìo; “Callisto killed with a silver bow”).10 Though she chants in Greek, the name Callisto is nevertheless audible, a significant addition made by Bringhurst to the Ovidian text in which she is not named. The line has been imported from a text known as “The Contest of Homer and Hesiod” (Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi), an imagined dialogue between the two great writers of Greek antiquity, likely originating in the fourth century BC or earlier.11 Although in the context of Ursa Major it seems that Hera celebrates her victory over Callisto from the moment her husband sees her young mortal rival, the source text points to a different version of the story, in which Artemis herself kills Callisto. At the same time, the Celestial Janitor begins his own chant, quoting a passage from the opening scene of Homer’s Iliad which concludes with the same Greek words ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο (“arguréoio bióìo,” silver bow). Bringhurst offers the following translation as a note to the text, then later in Scene Three has Hera actually speak the lines in English. The god of light descended like the darkness, with a flock of arrows keening at his shoulder. He was trembling with anger. He kneeled far back from the ships and nocked an arrow and took aim and the silver bow started its heart stopping scream. (16)

An uncomfortable irony arises as Callisto is described by Ovid’s Daughter and the Translator as having “always a spear or bow in her hand”

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immediately after Hera chants arguréoio bióìo and while the Celestial Janitor describes the “flock of arrows” on the back of the descending god. The Celestial Janitor’s enunciation of arguréoio bióìo precedes the final iterations of Hera’s chant, and the coinciding repetition of this motif, extricated from its original context, again carries sexual connotations, as if it were Zeus launching the “arrow” from his “silver bow” into Callisto.12 Just as Artemis speaks up to banish Callisto for her infidelity, Hera ceases her chant and launches into a tirade in verses composed in an uneven vernacular by Bringhurst which sharply contrasts with the diction expected of “the Queen.” The Latin adimam tibi namque figuram (“I’ll drive the beauty out of you”) is Hera’s way of summing up her revenge on Callisto. She delivers it in the midst of threats and insults in English so as to coincide with Ovid’s Daughter’s enunciation of the same line, doubling its strength and yoking together Bringhurst’s Hera with Ovid’s. The lines uttered by Bringhurst’s Hera, “you’ll fart and stink / and poop your clothes / and spend the winter buried in the ground” (16, 62), convey haughty anger with a tinge of juvenile revenge while Ovid’s Daughter describes the metamorphosis of Callisto into a bear. Hera reiterates the “Callisto killed with a silver bow” refrain in Greek while Ovid’s Daughter describes how Callisto loses “her grip on language.” Hera then repeats her tirade word-by-word in reverse order: “Ground the in buried, winter the spend …” (17, 63) just as Callisto is said to retain her human mind while in the body of a bear. The retrograde motion is part of Bringhurst’s attempt to claim for literature the properties of polyphonic music, and the effect here illustrates the perspective of Callisto, whose position in the world has been reversed from hunter to prey, and to whom language has become strange. The reversed-order English also bears a mocking resemblance to the Latin syntax. When she finishes, Hera resumes chanting in Greek “Callisto killed with a silver bow” just as Ovid’s Daughter and the Translator reach the moment at which Arcturus’s spear is about to enter Callisto’s chest. Scene Three (Metamorphosis II ) repeats the story in nearly the same way, emphasizing its mythical, timeless quality, and illustrating the perpetual confrontation between Callisto and Arcturus. Ovid’s Daughter and the Translator repeat the same fragments from beginning to end, accompanied by the Translator only up until the moment at which Arcturus unknowingly meets his mother. Bringhurst varies the accompanying material, creating an alternate set of contrapuntal resonances around the figure of the silver bow, and introducing information about Callisto’s father, Lycaus, germane to Scene Four. This time Hera enters with her

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now-familiar chant while Zeus is reviving the countryside, then commences the English version of the passage from the Iliad describing Apollo’s descent “with a flock of arrows” (34, 73) just as Callisto is described with a spear or bow in her hand. She doesn’t complete the passage right away, but instead resumes chanting while Ovid’s Daughter carries on. As Callisto’s metamorphosis begins, Hera picks up the passage again: “He kneeled back far from the ships and nocked an arrow and took aim” (35, 74). Finally, after further chants of arguréoio bióìo, Hera delivers the final line “and the silver bow started its heart-stopping scream” (35, 75) just as Arcturus meets his mother and the Translator leaves off his translation of Ovid’s Daughter’s tale. Now the silver bow is plainly identified with Arcturus’s attempt to spear his mother, and the “heart stopping scream” suggests Callisto’s reaction as well as the spear’s deadly sound, intensifying the allegorical assault on the earth. As Ovid’s Daughter’s story concludes, the Celestial Janitor speaks up for the first time in the scene. He quotes two passages in Greek from related ancient astronomical texts adding details of Callisto’s story we haven’t heard yet, and the Translator, now finished with Ovid’s Daughter, renders them in English simultaneously. In the first, from the Catasterismi, a compendium of mythological narratives around constellations, we learn that Callisto was said by Hesiod to be the daughter of “the Wolf Man.” This is Bringhurst’s rendering of Lycaus, the name of Callisto’s father, who was turned into a wolf by Zeus (as recounted by Ovid in Book I of the Metamorphoses). In the second fragment, from a commentary on the Phainomena of Aratus, we learn that the constellation sometimes known as “the Cowherd or the Bearguard” is said to be actually “Arkas,” or Arcturus, the “son of Callisto and Zeus / who lived in the country of wolves.” Hera completes the scene with a sarcastic understatement, “that’s not the only thing they say” (37, 76), indicating that she’s been listening to the Celestial Janitor even while chanting. The new frame involving wolves adds another animal spirit to the wilderness, and prepares Arcturus’s version of the story of the encounter between his maternal grandfather Lycaus and his father Zeus in Scene Four, “Arcturus Dreams.”

The Lonely Hunter, the Bear Woman, and Arcturus Scenes Two and Four are set to contrast Scenes One and Three, creating an oscillating effect in the work. The first half of “The Bear Woman” is recounted by Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son in Cree and rendered in

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English by the Translator in Scene Two (“Arcturus Awakens”), and the story completed in Scene Four (“Arcturus Dreams”). In both scenes, the dominant counterpoint is between “The Bear Woman” and speeches of Bringhurst’s own composition in the voice of Arcturus (who like his mother has no voice in Ovid’s narrative). The counterpoint creates an ebb and flow of resonance and tension on the themes of relationships between male and female, god and mortal, human and animal. Bringhurst enhances the dynamic by timing key intersections of complementary actions, ideas, and words so as to highlight what might be thought of as cosmic ironies arising from the texts’ intersections. The bear-woman herself becomes a kind of inverse Callisto, a figure for the natural bounty of the greater ecology who, rather than being made alien by intervening forces, translates herself into the human sphere in order to be understood by the hunter. In Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son’s story, a lonely hunter kills a series of buffalo, taking only small portions from each for his own meals. Arriving home one day he is pleased by signs that a woman has been present. The woman remains elusive for a time, but appears near the end of Scene Two when the hunter returns to his camp to encounter her sitting in his seat, having apparently done the domestic chores. She asks why he brings so little meat, and he asks where she comes from. Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son makes it through ten lines before Arcturus, who has “awakened,” joins in with his own story, using no names and referring to himself in the third person. Though Arcturus’s tone is casual and matter-of-fact, he does imply a questioning of received concepts of sexuality and purity, and makes some overtly ontological claims which prefigure ideas put forth by the Celestial Janitor in Scene Five. Arcturus is posited as the child of wild earthly beauty and a powerful and desirous god, who unwittingly hunts his own mother, of whom he is afraid. In this sense, Arcturus represents Western civilization, inheritor of the perspectives of ancient Greece and Rome, now transplanted to North America, trying to piece together what its own story means. He is also paralleled with the lonely hunter who is the central figure in Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s story. As is often the case when North American First Nations oral narratives are juxtaposed with their European counterparts, there is a curious reverse symmetry about the way relationships between humans and animals are portrayed: the lonely hunter is seduced by a bear in the form of a woman, while Arcturus encounters his mother in the guise of a bear. Both young male hunters are in the process of learning key lessons, creating the basis for the resonances brought out by Bringhurst’s contrapuntal arrangement.

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Arcturus enters just as the lonely hunter has killed his first buffalo, taken the tongue and a haunch, and returned to his camp. He begins by framing his own creation story as “perfectly simple” – the familiar scenario in which “one of the ones in the sky [Zeus] / wanted one of the ones on the ground [Callisto]. / And got what he wanted, as usual” (28, 66). He observes that his father, Zeus, “couldn’t keep” the woman he had momentarily possessed, and his subsequent remark, “If they can’t, who can?” implies a growing wisdom regarding the impossibility of ownership and the imperative of eternal change. “You can have what you want but you can’t have it for long. / That’s the rule” (28, 66) is how Arcturus colloquially sums up this key lesson, echoing the Latin line nulla potentia longa est from the previous scene. “What a way to find yourself a mother,” his next expression, is a double-entendre, perhaps triple, as Arcturus, Callisto, and Zeus all “find” themselves mothers, in different senses of the word. Yet his question, “But what other way is better?” indicates a certain masculine naïveté, as if deception and force were bound to be a part of mating, reminding us that Arcturus may not be fully mature in his outlook. Ironic juxtapositions and narrative tensions abound as the stories proceed. Artemis’s expulsion of Callisto is recounted just as Kâ-kîsikâwpîhtokêw’s Son tells of the lonely hunter’s discovery that a mysterious presence has stacked firewood at his camp for him. The simultaneous arrival and banishment create a harmonious dissonance, which Bringhurst marks with a coincidence of the word “thinking.” Arcturus utters this word immediately after the Translator sums up the hunter’s realization that “Someone must have come” with “That’s what he was thinking” (21, 66). Arcturus critiques the ideological veneration of virgin purity in plain terms, observing that “even thinking / about loving isn’t pure, in some people’s thinking” (28, 67), just as the lonely hunter is clearly implied to be doing exactly that. As Arcturus repeats “One of the ones in the sky/ wanted one of the ones on the ground,” a parallel is suggested between Zeus’s desire and that of the lonely hunter, who at this moment sees a pair of moccasins and speculates that they belong to a woman. With a hint of dramatic irony, he links his search for game animals with his search for the woman, thinking “First thing in the morning, I’ll go hunting. / I’ll see if I can spot her” (22, 67). A potent resonance is created as Arcturus describes the circumstances of his birth just as the lonely hunter kills another buffalo and takes “the ribs, the kidneys and a haunch” (23, 68). The passing association between Zeus and the lonely hunter is extended as the hunter runs to his camp to seek out the mystery woman just as Zeus’s pursuit of Callisto and his last-minute intervention to save her are

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described by Arcturus (who doesn’t include himself in the story when Zeus lifts his mother into the sky). Arcturus describes how his mother is visible from the prairie, though not from the cities because “the ground is getting awfully bright these days” (29, 68) even as the lonely hunter returns to his camp to find “a little bit of smoke / and a big, very big, pile of firewood” (23, 68). At this point, about halfway through Scene Two, the Celestial Janitor adds a fourth voice and third semantic stream, saturating the polyphonic texture and the conceptual matrix. He intones “Grandmother earth, / grandfather fire, / grandmother water, / and grandfather air” (29, 69), conjoining the ongoing focus on the four elements with the “grandparent” figurations commonly found in North American First Nations culture. “Grandmother earth” is timed to gesture to the bear-woman, whose moccasins the lonely hunter has spotted, and “grandfather fire” to the hunter himself, whose fleeting, consuming presence is indicated as he thinks “First thing in the morning I’ll be gone” (24, 69). Arcturus muses on the relationship between earth and heaven: “Those stars are the plants and animals / of the sky. / They used to be people / who lived on the ground”; conversely, “the plants and animals / of the ground used to be people who lived in the sky” (29–30, 69–70). Meanwhile, the Celestial Janitor continues his commentary on reciprocal relationships, alternating with Arcturus so that they do not overlap: “We are only at home so long / as we are inhabited,” he asserts (29, 69). He then ventures ideas to which he will return in Scene Five, including “Earth at its purest / is crystal and metal,” alluding at once to the shining geometrical objects comprising the set of the invisible ceremonies performance and to the “silver bow” which Hera claims has killed Callisto, which has ironically come from inside the very earth for which Callisto has become a figure. As Arcturus makes his observations, the lonely hunter comes face to face with the “fine-looking woman” who herself once inhabited another realm. Her disguise is hinted at by the Celestial Janitor’s comment “in hiding but gleaming,” which ostensibly characterizes the “luminous shadow” of crystal and metal within the earth. As the woman washes the hunter’s hands and feet and subsequently feeds him, Arcturus comments again on the relationships between gods and mortals: “You know, the people of the sky eat / everything that you eat, / without eating” (30, 71). At the same time, the Celestial Janitor lists off a series of metals and elements from the periodic table which are the building blocks of life, culminating in a mischievous echo between “zinc” and Arcturus’s “think,” while the lonely hunter exclaims “I didn’t think anyone was here” in response to

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the woman’s question as to why he brought home so little meat. Arcturus claims that “the people on the ground think / everything that they [the gods] think, / without thinking” (30, 71).13 The line “I didn’t think anyone was here” rings powerfully in the allegorical framework associating the hunter with own civilization and culture, bolstered by the simultaneous “without thinking” of Arcturus as a double-entendre. When Kâ-kîsikâwpîhtokêw’s Son’s narrative pauses at the end of Scene Two with the lonely hunter’s query “Where do you come from?” Arcturus’s observation “My mother is a woman of both worlds / with no escape from feeling or from thinking” (31, 72) seems to act as a reply, again linking the bear-woman with Callisto. The Celestial Janitor has the last word after these primary voices have ceased, highlighting his figuration of the metallic and crystal elements of earth as “orthogonal, hexagonal, / simple, symmetrical, / latticed, rotational / thoughts of the gods” (31, 72). The generative yet potentially destructive synthesis of the inorganic, the human, and godly power is made explicit as these carefully shaped configurations of the elements “twist with their milk-smooth faces / and crystalline edges / in the breasts / of human beings” (31, 72), leading back to the silver bows and arrows that dominate Scene Three. Having “awakened” in Scene Two, Arcturus in Scene Four ostensibly “dreams” while Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son completes “The Bear Woman” story. His dreams seem to be of hunting and feasting, and there is immediate resonance between the stories on these themes. The mysterious woman in the lonely hunter’s camp answers the hunter’s question which had been left hanging at the end of Scene Two by saying “we live a long way from here” and then asking the hunter to “get a lot more meat” because her father and his people are hungry (39, 77). As the hunter departs, Arcturus poses his own question about his mother: “what would a girl be doing out hunting?” (48, 77). He has no answer, puzzled that she lives and hunts with other mortal women and with “sky women” too, who “don’t eat and don’t die” and whose blood is “like sap from a poplar, white as snow, clear as water” (48, 78). While Arcturus describes gods who don’t need to eat, Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son carries on his tale of mortals who are not human, who do need to eat, and are hungry. After the hunter has brought in a lot of meat and stored it, the woman suggests taking it to her family. She sends the hunter on ahead, then lays “the bundles of gear and provisions out in a row,” and steps on each, making them disappear (42, 79). At the same time, Arcturus launches into the story of his grandfather Lycaus, who was curious about the cosmos, especially about the relationships between mortals and gods. As recounted by Ovid,

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Lycaus tried to test Zeus by cooking a soup with a human boy instead of a goat in it, but, according to Arcturus, Zeus “smelled the human soup a hundred miles off!” (49, 80). Zeus himself transforms Lycaus into a wolf, paralleling Hera’s reaction to Callisto’s encounter with Zeus. As Arcturus unfolds this tale, which follows from the closing lines of Scene Three, Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son shows the mysterious woman stamping her feet inside the hunter’s newly pitched tent and bringing the provisions back into place again. “How did she do it?” wonders the hunter (43, 80). This time, the hunter is put in a position similar to Lycaus, and the realm of the gods about which he is curious becomes analogous to the animal world. Ironically, according to this framework of juxtapositions, Lycaus’s reward is to be made into a hunting animal. The mysteries of transformations and relationships between realms of being, sometimes precipitated by hunting and feasting, are highlighted by resonances in the following passages. Arcturus comments on the fine line between one state of being and another, with a pun on the word “bear”: “Humans can eat and sleep with gods, / and bear their children. Still, they can be just a breath away / from being rocks and trees and wolves and deer” (49, 81). Meanwhile, the mysterious woman offers to satisfy the hunter’s curiosity about her packing skills. As he watches her repeat her technique of laying out the bundles and then stepping on each one to invisibly “pack” it, the Celestial Janitor enters the scene, just a moment after Arcturus finishes his speech, maintaining the two-voice counterpoint. He comments on Arcturus’s place in the sky, naming the stars that define Ursa Major and Ursa Minor and painting his own version of what is happening in the heavens, anticipating Hera’s descriptions in Scene Five by describing Arcturus as “the Cub … still sucking what once / was the nipple of heaven,” or the North Star (49–50, 81). At the same time, the eternal child is “biting what then / was the point of a spear. Chewing what now / is the radar screen, bombsight and crosshair,” showing the immature attitude of our own civilization in which hunting tools have become high-tech war weapons (50, 82). This sudden shift is contrasted with the descriptions of the mysterious woman’s packing of provisions of meat with no tools at all, and the final line of that section, “the man saw that nothing remained” (45, 82) is given an ironic second implication as a description of the end result of warfare. The amazed hunter and the woman, who is now his wife, walk along until they see the smoke from her family’s fire. At the same time, the Celestial Janitor describes the constellation Ursa Major in a different way than it is often seen, as if she were “stretching her neck and her tongue / to Arcturus, her son,

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who is clutching / the butt of the spear” (50, 82). Callisto the bear is thus completely vulnerable to her hunter son even as the Cree hunter’s wife’s bear-family is about to invite him into their midst. As noted earlier, the Celestial Janitor alludes to the conflagration caused by Phaethon’s hubris in the Metamorphoses, proceeding from the comments on the dangers of technological weapons and tools pointing at the bear-mother: “As for what you call technology, / it offers you the wherewithal / to cook the feast, the guest, the host, / the dining hall, the whole shebang. / How long till done, it seems that no one / knows. Nor who might be here to digest / that last, long supper / when it’s served” (50, 82–3). The Celestial Janitor gives this sharp warning to the audience just as the hunter sits down to a feast at his in-laws’ camp. His wife’s younger sister exclaims “Hey! My big sister is bringing piles of food” (46, 82) which are invisible to the hunter, indicating that his wife’s family perceives the world differently than he does, and that he has not yet seen the truth of his situation. “That last, long supper” coincides ironically with the wife’s mother’s thought “Now I’ll have something to eat” (47, 83). As the Celestial Janitor pauses, Hera unexpectedly jumps into the scene with her familiar chant in Greek, “Callisto killed with a silver bow,” while the hunter’s father-in-law speaks up, indicating that he had set the whole process of the story in motion: “That’s just what I was thinking of, my daughter, / when I said to you, ‘Go over there / where my son-in-law lives by himself ’” (83–4). Hera’s chant continues on the theme of dangerous technology begun by Arcturus and the Celestial Janitor just as the hunter is welcomed into his wife’s family, creating a stark contrast between the awareness he is in the process of developing and the fear-driven encounter between Callisto and Arcturus. The hunter’s acceptance into his wife’s family, and the time he spends with them in that world, are signified only by words translated as “Then he stayed there” (48, 84). It is possible that Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw deliberately left details from this part of the story out when telling it to Bloomfield,14 but it may also be fundamentally complete as it stands if the reason we hear nothing about the hunter’s time with his wife’s family is simply because he has entered another kind of world. The hunter himself spends “quite a while” in that realm before recognizing “early in the spring … that he was married to a bear, / who seemed to him to be a woman,” and realizing with sorrow that “he could stay there no longer” (48–51, 84).15 The Celestial Janitor, anticipating the theme of cleansing and purity in Scene Five, concludes with a prayer to the four elements and to the Trickster: “bathe us. Clean our bones” (51,

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84), asking in his own way for the kind of transformative experience just undergone by the hunter.

The Neverending Finale Scene Five (Metamorphosis III ) pulls together the diverse threads and provides a musical, narrative, and conceptual conclusion to Ursa Major that is at the same time ontologically unresolved. The source texts recede and Bringhurst’s own lines in the mouths of Hera and the Celestial Janitor occupy centre stage, their contrasting perspectives on the ongoing cycles of life and death counterpointed in the final cadence. Like Scenes One and Three, Scene Five begins with Ovid’s Daughter’s recounting of the fragments concerning Callisto, but this time the Translator does not render them in English (perhaps on the assumption that the audience will by this point have recognized the Latin text). Hera maintains her vengeful, spiteful character at the outset, shifts unexpectedly as she lists the names of prairie First Nations in a co-operative antiphony with a speech by the Celestial Janitor in the penultimate passage, then concludes the masque with her familiar chant, suggesting the ongoing repeated attacks on the natural world by the technological, even as the Celestial Janitor contemplates in measured verses the endless transformations between elements and realms that constitute our cosmos. Hera enters chanting Kallistō katépephnen ap arguréoio bióìo, then, when Callisto’s downfall begins, launches into a monologue in vernacular English as in Scene One, subsequently to be reversed, reinforcing a sense of symmetry in the masque’s structure. She echoes the line delivered by Ovid’s Daughter in which Artemis admonishes Callisto, i procul hinc, dixit, nec sacros pollue fontes, then translates it: “Don’t pollute the sacred pool!” Following Zeus’s rescue of Callisto and Arcturus, Hera can’t resist further vengeance as she decrees “that sacred pool now / is the whole ocean” and Callisto will “never have another bath / or ever bathe her baby either” (55, 86), alluding to the position of the constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, which despite the rotation of the stars throughout the year never appear to dip below the horizon into the ocean. She continues on this theme of mutual punishment and perpetual arrested development as she describes Arcturus’s “cub teeth fastened to the sky’s breast,” echoing the Celestial Janitor’s comments from Scene Four, just as Ovid’s Daughter reaches the point of the story at which Arcturus

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encounters his mother: ille refugit inmotosque oculos in se sine fine tenentem, “he wanted to escape / those eyes that didn’t blink and never left him” (54, 86; trans. 63). Hera moves into retrograde as Zeus intervenes in Ovid’s Daughter’s tale and places Callisto and Arcturus into the sky. Her reverse-order lines are more comprehensible than in Scene One, as “moves never that star” and “is he there” are acceptable syntactical formulations, and she poetically adds to the Celestial Janitor’s pronouncements on the substance of reality: “Seas seven the all, ocean whole the is” (55, 87). The Celestial Janitor enters after Ovid’s Daughter has completed her tale, as in Scene Three. Using the elemental language and plain syntax typical of Bringhurst’s single-voice poetry, he repeats his comments from Scene Four, beginning “Earth at its purest is crystal and metal” just as Hera discusses polluting the sacred pool in reverse-motion, intensifying the sense of irony around the “purest” constituents of earth becoming the stuff of self-destructive technology. As Hera discusses Callisto’s and Arcturus’s inability to bathe, the Celestial Janitor lists examples of “the orthogonal, hexagonal, / simple, symmetrical, / latticed, rotational / thoughts of the gods,” acknowledging the fundamental web of the elemental, the mortal, and the immortal. The piece’s final cadence begins with Hera and the Celestial Janitor speaking in sustained antiphony, alternating single words or pairs of words. Hera names twenty-one First Nations across the Canadian prairies, including the Sweet Grass, of which Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw was a member. Star Blanket and Bearskin are notably the first in the list (57, 87). In the spaces between, the Celestial Janitor continues with his elemental formulae distinguishing gods from mortals: The voices of the gods are water; ours are air; their bodies fire; ours are water. Gods have hearts of air, but ours are earth. Their thought is earth, and ours is fire. (57, 87)

This intriguing matrix of metaphoric relationships is as concise and elegant a set of propositions outlining his conception of the complementary forces of gods and mortals as Bringhurst has ever offered, a sequel to his comments on Herakleitos nearly thirty years earlier.16 What is Hera, a Greek goddess, doing contemplating the prairie First Nations? If her thought is earth and her voice is water, she might be thinking hearts and

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speaking bodies. If earth is the sky of the gods, she gazes at what to her appear to be stars in the prairie night, even constellations, as hinted by the names “Little Black Bear” and “White Bear” and by her subsequent lines: “All those fires on the coal black prairie, / every night forever more, forever more, forever more” (57, 88). As Hera reverts to the “Callisto killed with a silver bow” refrain, the Celestial Janitor extends his ontological metaphors, adding stairs and ladders into the framework to illustrate the interrelationships of the elements within living trees, then adding Callisto, “the wounded mother,” to the picture as she “shinnies up the tree.” In the aspens and the spruces, the larches and birches […] earth is climbing a ladder of water and water a ladder of air, and air is climbing a ladder of fire, and fire descending a stair of air and water into the earth that is reaching and climbing with tiny hands a ladder knotted of water, air and fire. The wounded mother clambers up the spear shaft, shinnies up the tree, transforming earth and water, fire and air, […] and hunter to hunted and breath to air all over and over and over again. (58, 88)

The timelessness of myth is here linked with the eternal rotations of the stars relative to the mortals’ eye-view and the rhythmic pulsing of biological life, echoing in many ways the conclusion of New World Suite No. 3. Yet this counterpoint attempts to raise the audience’s consciousness above ground level, above even the stories just told, to an unresolvable second-order tension and cosmic irony maintained between the unchanging nature of change and the voluntary nature of the inevitable, from a vantage point fixed neither to the ground nor the stars. This moment of clarity and acceptance is a kind of catharsis at the end of a tumultuous psychological workout in which language-processing faculties have been pushed beyond their limits. The rich web of myth and monologue in Ursa Major reveals a complex reality of cultural and ideological interactivity, complicating the framework within which relations between Indigenous and colonial cultures is

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sometimes conceived in North America. Bringhurst’s poetic polyphony has the potential to push experienced, attentive listeners to transcend the narratives we have come to inhabit, to move through the mythologies we may have unconsciously accepted as truth into a new perspective on our past, present, and future. For Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw it might be said that metamorphosis is simply part of the order of things, like the Greek idea of physis an integral feature of a world going about constant changes in which identity is permeable and fluid. In a culture dependent on gathering and hunting, etiquette is required when travelling through a world where one is never truly sure what – or whom – one is hunting. Differences at the level of physical appearances often mask underlying similarities; as Bringhurst pointed out during a discussion of Ursa Major at Acadia University, a bear with its skin removed looks remarkably like a human being. Yet the truly remarkable metamorphosis in Kâ-kîsikâwpîhtokêw’s story is not that of a woman into a bear, but the inner transformation of the lonely Cree hunter. While left heartsick at the end of the story, he will never be the same after falling in love with his prey. Arcturus in Ursa Major begins to recover this ever-enlarging circle, yet another quietly profound transformation in the masque, stemming from his growing awareness of his own tragic circumstances. Technocratic North American culture, though master of perspective from the microscopic to the evolutionary scale, like Arcturus needs to learn the essential lessons of myth, polyphony, and formline art – to comprehend the unresolvable complexities that arise in a reality in which more than one being, story, or speech can occupy the same space, even the same body, at the same time, in the midst of their own transformations.

notes 1 All page references in this essay are to the 2009 edition of Ursa Major. 2 In the interview, published by Douglas & McIntyre under the title Translating Haida Poetry: An Interview with Robert Bringhurst in 2002, Bringhurst explained the rationale behind some of his decisions regarding the trilogy. He acknowledged that Haida was for him a literary language, which he has learned to read but not to speak, and that he had received feedback on drafts of his translations from some Haida speakers. He also recounted some of the history around the political complications he encountered when working with Bill Reid on The Raven Steals the Light

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3

4

5

6

7

8

9

(1984) and The Black Canoe (1991), and affirmed his recognition of the interdependence of individual artists and their cultural communities. This focus was in part inspired by hallucinations Noestheden had as a teen that his body was floating among the stars (MacKenzie). Born in the Netherlands and raised in Ontario, Noestheden spent the 1990s and early 2000s living and working in Regina (Saskatchewan NAC ), and has recently collaborated with Inuit artist Shunivai Ashoona on a giant banner on the theme of Earth and Sky displayed first in Basel, Switzerland in 2008 and later that year at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. At the performance, the Translator had read Leonard Bloomfield’s original prose translation, while Floyd Favell Starr recited the story from his own memory, rather than memorizing Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s version. In the fourth movement of Bringhurst’s New World Suite No. 3, two voices at two different points, cascading, say “Arcturus, spearing the Great Bear of heaven, sees in her eyes, now and always, the eyes of his mother,” juxtaposed with “Orion, the old god, disguised as a deer, is out stalking Aldebaran, the doe, his daughter, forever,” giving mythic shape to the cycles of ecological and spiritual ennui that the “new world” finds so difficult to escape (Selected 228–30). Among these are the story of Leda and the Swan, in which Zeus disguises himself as the bird, treated by Bringhurst in his poem of the same name (Selected 81–2), and the story of Artemis and Orion, in which Orion is elevated to the heavens after Artemis unwittingly shoots him with her arrow. The young Phaethon loses control of the steeds, and the earth is engulfed in fire, drying up great rivers and creating the Sahara desert. At last Mother Earth herself cries out to Zeus, indignant, “Is this the honour and reward you give me for my fruitfulness and service?” (hosne mihi fructus, hunc fertilitatis honorem officiique refers, lines 285–6; trans. A.S. Kline). Zeus responds by killing Phaethon, which drives the Sun into despair and retreat until he is beseeched by the gods to return to his routine of illuminating the world. In Book I of Ovid’s chronologically inconsistent Metamorphoses, Jove (Zeus) had, prior to Phaethon’s wild ride, contemplated burning up the earth himself in response to the affront he had received from Callisto’s father, Lycaus, but had opted to flood it instead, which occasions the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha. Classicist J. Donald Hughes has argued that Artemis should be understood as the “Goddess of Conservation” (1990) and that the purpose of the initiation at the Brauronian festivals was to promote “respect and even love for wild creatures.” Artemis’s function was to nurture relations between humans and wild creatures, as she was “believed to care for the young of

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10 11

12

13

14

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both humans and animals” and to send “wild animals as foster mothers to suckle infants that had been exposed” (Pan’s Travail 95). Bringhurst includes a simple melody sketch and transliteration of the Greek into Roman characters in his endnotes (Ursa 89). Part of the Certamen recounts a game in which Hesiod delivers a riddling line regarding well-known mythic characters or scenes and Homer is required to complete them correctly. To Hesiod’s prompt, “But when she had been made subject in love, Artemis, who delights in arrows …” (αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δμήθη γάμῳ Ἄρτεμις ἰοχέαιρα), Homer replies, “Slew Callisto with her silver bow” (Καλλιστὼ κατέπεφνεν ἀπ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο) (lines 117–18, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White). The riddle turns on the ambiguity of the pronoun “she.” Artemis the virgin huntress presumably can’t be made subject in love, so Homer must resolve the sense of the line (Bassino). The full phrase ἀπ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο occurs in the final scene of the Iliad (24.605), again attached to Apollo, but this time associated also with his sister, Artemis. The passage from Book I of the Iliad quoted by the Celestial Janitor describes an angry Apollo, the god of light, descending ironically “like the darkness,” in response to a prayer by Chryses, one of Apollo’s priests whose daughter has been captured by Agamemnon. The proud Agamemnon refuses to give up his “prize,” and her father begs Apollo to intervene, precipitating his angry descent to slay with arrows not young defenseless women but the Achaean men. The ensuing dispute over how to placate Chryses and Apollo drives a wedge between the heroes Agamemnon and Achilles which becomes significant for the story. At the end of the Iliad, Achilles invokes a story about a woman, Niobe, whose six daughters were killed by Artemis and six sons by Apollo, as he attempts to persuade the fallen king Priam of Troy into eating a meal in spite of his despair. This line echoes the assertion in the voice of Greek philosopher Xenophanes made by Bringhurst much earlier in his career that “we must learn to be thought / by the gods, not to think them” (“Xenophanes,” Selected 51). As Leonard Bloomfield notes in his introduction to his compendium Sacred Stories of the Sweetgrass Cree, Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s, also known as Coming-Day, tended to “simplify his stories or omit certain parts of them” (Bloomfield 1). One might conjecture that Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw had his own reasons for leaving some parts of the stories incomplete, perhaps deducing that the non-Native anthropologist would not understand, did not need or had not earned the right to hear them, or that they were inappropriate for other reasons. “The Bear Woman” echoes many other First Nation stories about humans entering the worlds of animals in just this way, including the Haida story “In His Father’s Village, Someone Was Just about to Go Out Hunting Birds”

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by Ghandl, in which a hunter of birds ends up marrying one of them, then is later obliged to leave, as discussed by Nicholas Bradley in this volume. 16 Cf. “The birth of the one is the death of the other; / the dying of one gives life to the other” (“Herakleitos,” Selected 38).

works cited Bassino, Paola. Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi: Introduction, Critical Edition and Commentary, Durham theses, Durham University. 2013. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/8448/ Bloomfield, Leonard. Sacred Songs of the Sweet Grass Cree. Bulletin no. 60, National Museum of Canada. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1930. Bringhurst, Robert. Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers and Dancers. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau 2009 [2003]. Butala, Sharon. “Invisible Ceremonies: A Personal Response.” Floating In Land: New Dance Horizons web archive. http://www.newdancehorizons.ca/ floating-inland-an archive/articles-and-videos/ Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi: http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/homer/ homrhes.htm Cleniuk, Brenda. “Robin Poitras” in Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women. Ed. Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder. Toronto: YYZ , 2004. Hughes, J. Donald. “Goddess of Conservation” Forest and Conservation History (34:4 Oct. 1990), 191–7. – Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Krause, Judith. “Pantoum for invisible ceremonies, part one.” Floating in Land: New Dance Horizons web archive. http://www.newdancehorizons.ca/ floating-inland-an-archive/articles-and-videos/ MacKenzie Art Gallery website. http://www.mackenzieartgallery.ca/engage/ exhibitions/john-noestheden-sky-shuvinai-ashoona-earth New Dance Horizons website. http://www.newdancehorizons.ca/ rouge-gorge-creation-company/about-robin-poitras/ Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A.S. Kline. http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/ Metamorph2.htm Ovid. Metamorphoses. http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/metamorphoseonUVA.html Rigaud, Thérèse. Translating Haida Poetry: An Interview with Robert Bringhurst. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2002. Saskatchewan NAC website. http://www.sknac.ca/index.php?page= ArtistDetail&id=321

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Contributors

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction. Her latest work is a book of short stories called Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (McClelland & Stewart, 2014). Nicholas Bradley is an associate professor in the Department of

English at the University of Victoria. His recent publications include We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947–1987 (Harbour, 2014).

Mark Dickinson teaches courses in the humanities at the Ontario

College of Art and Design University in Toronto. He co-edited Lyric Ecology: An Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky (Cormorant, 2010) and is the author of the forthcoming book Canadian Primal: Poet-thinkers and the Rediscovery of Earth.

Crispin Elsted is a poet, essayist, translator, designer, and compositor. With his wife, Jan, he is owner/publisher of Barbarian Press in Mission, BC , which publishes limited edition letterpress books. Between 2002 and 2005 he edited a new edition of Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, published by Barbarian Press in 2011. Clare Goulet edits literary and academic work and teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. Her most recent book is the novel Cantata (Wolsak and Wynn, 2015).

Iain Macleod Higgins teaches in the English Department at the

University of Victoria and is the translator of the best-selling medieval travel memoir, The Book of John Mandeville (Hackett, 2011).

Ishmael Hope is an Alaska Native storyteller and writer. His Iñupiaq name is Angaluuk and his Tlingit name is Khaagwáask’. In the fall of 2014, he released his first book of poetry, Courtesans of Flounder Hill (Ishmael Reed Publications). Peter Rutledge Koch , proprietor of Peter Koch Printers and director of the Codex Foundation, resides in Berkeley, California. Dennis Lee lives in Toronto, where he is a resident artist at the Soul-

pepper Theatre Company. His most recent poetry collections are Testament (Anansi, 2012) and Melvis and Elvis (HarperCollins, 2015).

Scott M c Intyre was publisher, chief executive officer, and chairman

of Douglas & McIntyre until his retirement in 2012. His current duties include vice-chairman of the board of the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, and member of the Aboriginal Educational Council of the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Katherine M c Leod holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and

is a postdoctoral fellow with SpokenWeb (English Department, Concordia University) where she is researching CBC radio broadcasts of Canadian poetry.

Kevin M c Neilly is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Embouchure, a book of poems (Nightwood Editions, 2011). Káawan Sangáa (W . F . Morrison ) is a storyteller, dancer, community organizer, radio host, and teacher of the Haida language.

Erica Wagner is an author and journalist, born in New York City but

long a resident of the United Kingdom. Her books include a collection of short stories, Gravity (Granta), Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters, and Seizure, a novel (both Faber and Faber).

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Brent Wood teaches in the Department of English and Drama at the

University of Toronto at Mississauga. He writes critical analysis of Canadian poetry, and of performance poetry in a range of modes from experimental polyphony to popular song.

Contributors

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Index

“Anecdote of the Squid,” 63, 108 Antigone, 12, 53–61 “Antistrophe from Leopardi,” 71–8 “Ararat,” 77, 81–2, 108 Bagshawe, Charlotte, 38 The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972–82, 28, 47, 62–6, 69, 77, 95, 107 Being in Being, 41, 121–31, 180, 184, 196, 199, 214 Bergschrund, 12, 27, 30, 63–4, 76–82, 90–2 The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwai, 8, 13, 17, 34, 38–9, 124, 134, 179–80, 196, 232 Blue Roofs of Japan, 4, 9, 13, 34–6, 149–52, 155–74, 204, 231 “Bone Flute Breathing,” 111 “Book of Silences,” 34, 41, 71, 112–13, 168–9 Bringhurst, Robert: as book designer, 9, 30, 47, 49–50, 88–100, 175–8; and Canada, 4, 7, 10, 16–17, 21, 30, 166; early life, 20–3; education, 21–3, 26–7, 202; and the military, 23–5; as teacher 15, 30; as translator, 7, 48–9, 54–8, 71–5, 105, 122, 196, 202–3

Cadastre, 9, 68–76, 88–90, 203 The Calling: Selected Poems 1970–1995, 9, 62–3, 76, 95, 159–60 Carson, Anne, 12, 58–60 “Conversations with a Toad,”13, 37, 137–45, 151–2, 171 “Demokritos,” 109 “Deuteronomy,” 17, 28, 71, 77, 87, 108–9 Douglas & McIntyre, 13, 32, 94, 175–81, 185 ecology, 19, 30, 41, 52, 245–6, 253–4 The Elements of Typographic Style, 4, 9, 11–12, 66, 95–8, 102, 105, 202 “Essay on Adam,” 17 Everywhere Being Is Dancing, Knowing Is Known: Twenty Pieces of Thinking, 10, 35, 43, 102 The Fragments of Parmenides, 11, 46–51, 91, 99 Gaspereau Press, 10, 232, 239 Ghandl of the Qayahal Llaanas, 6, 8, 13, 31, 33, 36, 121–5, 186–7, 189–93, 199–200, 208–14 “Gloria, Credo, Sanctus et Oreamnos,” 113

Gould, Glenn, 5, 38, 151 “The Greenland Stone,” 28, 69, 71, “Hachadura,” 16, 28, 77 Haida: history and texts, 7–8, 31–4, 41–2, 121–31, 179, 186–93, 195–215, 228–30; language, 36, 121–31, 180, 196, 224–6; nation, 7–8, 15, 32, 36, 38, 42, 179–81, 195, 214–5, 224–6 “Haruspications in a Whorehouse,” 68 “Heart Sutra,” 113–14 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 53–5, 58–9, 73, 80 “Herakleitos,” 16, 69, 71, 77 “Jacob Singing,” 77, 108–9 Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw, Cree mythteller, 15, 232–54 “Limassol,” 67, 78–9 “Lyell Island Variations,” 9, 71 Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, 4–6, 8, 11, 13–14, 121–31, 180–1, 184–215, 232 McClelland & Stewart, 28, 95, 159 music, 12–13, 21, 35, 37–8, 102–6, 115–18, 122, 134, 157–61, 164–9 New World Suite No. 3, 4, 11–13, 39–40, 43, 102, 114–21, 137–41, 150–2, 161, 231, 240 Nine Visits to the Mythworld, 41, 121–5, 180, 184, 195, 199, 208, 214 “Ode of Imr el-Qais,” 71 “Of the Snaring of Birds,” 52–61, 71 “The Old in Their Knowing,” 9, 28, 47, 50, 77, 109–10, 231 “One Glyph,” 16, 69

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Oral culture and tradition, 6, 19, 31, 188–92, 200–1, 207, 224–6, 228–30 Ovid, 27, 42, 232–54 Parmenides, 6, 10–11, 48, 91, 109–10 Petrarch, Francesco, 4, 6, 28, 110–11 Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, 9, 17, 19, 29, 35, 95, 156–60, 167, 173, 196 “Poem about Crystal,” 69, 71 polyphony, 8, 33–41, 101, 114–21, 134, 137–45, 147–53, 155–73, 231–54 post-colonial, 15, 43–4, 206, 233, 253–4 Pound, Ezra, 22, 26–30, 35, 66, 69 Presocratics, 5, 10, 16, 28, 46–50, 71, 109 “Ptahotep’s River,” 111 “A Quadratic Equation,” 108 The Raven Steals the Light, 13, 32, 94, 179 Reid, Bill, 8, 31–4, 36, 38–9, 94, 124–5, 134, 178–80, 196, 230, 232 “Sapsucker,” 16 Selected Poems, 10, 19, 62, 76, 171, 239 Sheffield, Miki, 26–7 The Shipwright’s Log, 9–10, 12, 25–6, 64–8, 88–90, 203 “Sinai,” 26, 68 Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, 6, 8, 14, 16, 31–3, 36, 41–2, 121–30, 189–91, 199–200, 228 Solitary Raven: The Writings of Bill Reid, 8, 196 “The Song of Ptahotep,” 28 “Song of the Summit,” 16–17, 68–9, 71, 77–82 “Song of Tzuhalem,” 112 Stevens, Wallace, 16, 28, 63, 78

“The Stonecutter’s Horses,” 28, 110–11 A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World, 5, 7, 13, 41–2, 122–6, 178–81, 184, 190, 195–215, 227, 231 “Study for an Ecumenical Window,” 69, 71 “The Sun and the Moon,” 64 The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada, 11–12, 94 “These Poems, She Said,” 17 Thomas, Audrey, 34, 155, 160, 162 “Three Ways of Looking at the Northwest Passage in the Shipyards of Bristol and Rouen,” 70

The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks, 10, 43 Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers and Dancers, 5, 10–11, 15, 43, 161, 231–54 Voices in the Land, 44 Zwicky, Jan, 16, 19, 41, 52, 99, 115, 139, 145

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16.2 Aluminum “crystal” from Ursa Major.

“investigative actions” in response to the “shapes, textures and spaces” of Noestheden’s installation, a modus operandus central to her work (Cleniuk 370; New Dance web). The astronomical conceits were a natural fit for Poitras, who, like Bringhurst and Noestheden, has explored how art, science, and nature “feed back and forth in mythical, mysterious, elusive and sometimes obvious ways” (New Dance web). Further enhancing the scene was an electronic soundscape by composer Chiyoko Szlavnics. In Ursa Major, the tradition of the Renaissance masque coincided with contemporary installation art in that there was no clear boundary separating the performers from the spectators, who were free to move around the room. Audience member Sharon Butala’s initial impression of the space provides a sense of the wonder and confusion experienced by those in attendance. The hall was very dimly lit, there were no chairs for the audience to sit on, there were installations here and there throughout the large, rectangular space, and the first one I saw consisted of clay telephone receivers hanging from the ceiling, many of them broken

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16.3 Davida Monk as Hera among elements of John Noestheden’s “Crystalline Vision of the Cosmos” installation for Ursa Major.

into shards lying on marble sheets on the floor, and I thought at once, Oh, broken communication. Further on a number of what I thought were old drive-in movie speakers hung from the ceiling … At intervals around the room’s perimeter there were further installations or spots that had been marked out either by shapes of different flooring lying on the carpet or by what appeared to be minimal ‘sets.’ In a couple of places yellow spotlights were attached to the floor. We milled around, fifty or sixty of us, including some very young children, trying to find a place to stand or sit from which to watch whatever was going to happen. Dancers – I should say ‘performers’ – were already among us doing strange things, one swathed in fabric, holding a flashlight, and moving back and forth slowly over a few feet (she was on wheels), one lying high above us at the top of one of the fat structural pillars, another lying on her back on a wheeled pallet and pushing herself around very slowly. (Butala 2–3) Butala’s frank comments on the unintelligibility of the spoken texts attest to the chaotic quality of the event, but also reveal how the initial chaos coalesced into an inspiring, meaningful experience over the course of the performance: I missed most of the story, hearing only the first part recited by Davida Monk [playing Hera], but it seemed to be enough that the rest (in three languages I don’t read, write or speak) acted for me simply as a background musical score might. (I think I ‘tuned out’ the Latin and Greek, but enjoyed listening to Floyd Favel Starr in his soft, gentle voice, reading the Cree version). All of the performers moved beautifully, in the slowest, controlled turning and twisting … On a structure looking like a mountain-climbing practice wall, Robin Poitras (wearing a bearskin) as Ursa Major, put there by Hera, writhed slowly, and turned around the yellow sky. In fact, I saw in a whole way, at last, that we were watching the sky and hearing the story of the objects in the sky. It was a genuinely stunning vision that was executed beautifully by the performers, with Robert Bringhurst reciting his text in his wonderful resonant, deep voice while taking part in the movement. (6–7)

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For Bringhurst, participating in the performance at invisible ceremonies was just the beginning. Aware that the complexity of his textual fabric would overwhelm any listener unfamiliar with the constituent texts, he set out to complete it in print form by finishing a new translation of “The Bear Woman” from Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Cree.4 Gaspereau Press published the first edition of Ursa Major in 2003 in large 7.5" × 11" format with an engraving of a bear’s face by Ontario artist Wesley Bates, and included a substantial afterword by Nova Scotia poet and academic Peter Sanger (both of whom have had working relationships with Gaspereau). The book presents the text of Ursa Major twice. Initially, each monologue in each scene is rendered sequentially, with directions as to when each enters and roughly how it corresponds in time with the others. A second version under the heading “Voice Map” lays out the voices in simultaneous “stanzas” of closely set lines in black, grey, and blue. The first presentation is designed for reading to oneself, the second for reading aloud in ensemble. The intended effects of the interweaving voices can only be sensed through the Voice Map, because Bringhurst has carefully orchestrated them to maximize intertextual ironies and intercultural resonances, and to exploit a few verbal harmonies. In spite of the attention to detail in the volume, Bringhurst and Steeves evidently felt that they could do better. In 2009, a second edition was published in a more standard 5" × 8" paperback size with the afterword removed, and a newly designed Voice Map which improves readability by utilizing four distinct colours for the voices and by adding marginal indicators for the entrances and exits for each voice. A poetic suite entitled “Ursa Minor” in Bringhurst’s Selected Poems, also published in 2009 by Gaspereau, incorporates monologues by Arcturus and the Celestial Janitor and a few lines from Hera, along with some newly written material, but none of the source texts. This configuration creates quite different though related effects, and warrants discussion on its own terms.

Callisto, Zeus, Arcturus, and Hera The ancient Greek myth featuring Callisto, Zeus, Arcturus, and Hera provides the basis for Scenes One, Three, and Five (subtitled Metamorphosis I , II , and III ). The story also provides the context for the bicultural counterpoint in Scenes Two and Four (subtitled “Arcturus Awakens” and “Arcturus Dreams”). The basic elements of the story may be summarized

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quickly, but the ramifications of Bringhurst’s arrangement are both complex and subtle. Callisto the huntress, a member of a band of women devoted to the goddess Artemis, is raped by Zeus who initially appears disguised as Artemis herself, and is then punished by jealous Hera, who transforms her into a bear. Callisto gives birth to a human son, Arcturus, who grows up away from her, unaware of the events of his conception. One day he unknowingly hunts his mother, but Zeus intervenes at the last moment to turn them both into constellations, leaving them to endlessly re-enact their chase through the skies, a perpetual moment referred to in New World Suite No. 3.5 Framed by transformations enacted by Zeus which are reminiscent of other myths6 is the central metamorphosis of the huntress Callisto, whose name means “most beautiful,” into a hunted bear. The story’s origins are unknown, and the earliest complete written account exists not in Greek but in the Latin of Ovid (on which Bringhurst worked during his post-graduate studies), composed hundreds of years after its currency among the Greeks. Ovid includes his version in Book Two of the Metamorphoses, an extended collection of myths concerning transformations of various kinds, arranged as a history of mortals and gods from the creation of the world up to Ovid’s time. Bringhurst excerpts twelve fragments from Ovid, each between one and five lines, beginning with line 401 of Book II and ending at line 507. Callisto herself is never named by Ovid within the story, even though Zeus and Artemis are each indicated by several Roman appellations, Hera takes her usual Roman name, Juno, and Callisto’s son is called Arcas. Following Ovid’s example with Callisto, Bringhurst has cut the text such that none of the characters are actually named, except for the epithets “Moon-woman” for Artemis and “the Queen” for Hera. Many important elements of the action are missing, including Zeus’s initial attraction to Callisto, his disguise as Artemis, his rape of Callisto, her pregnancy, and Arcturus’s birth. Eight aspects remain: Zeus’s initial effort to return life to the land which had been burned by Phaethon’s ill-fated attempt to drive the chariot of the sun (in the preceding story); a brief description of Callisto’s careless grace; the warning that “no power lasts for long” (nulla potentia longa est); Artemis’s exclamation of banishment; Hera’s vow to destroy Callisto’s beauty; Callisto’s transformation into a bear; a brief description of her lonely life and the moment of encounter with her son; and finally their relocation to the sky as constellations. The story of Phaethon, though not mentioned by Bringhurst explicitly, forms a significant backdrop to the Callisto tale. Phaethon, child of the Sun and the mortal woman Clymene, succumbs to a hubris born of

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insecurity when a rival casts doubt on his parentage. Seeking to prove his celestial heritage, Phaethon convinces his father to let him take a turn at driving the chariot of the sun across the sky, with predictably disastrous results.7 Zeus surveys the damage wrought on the earth, and begins his revitalization project with Arcadia, his favoured land, which Bringhurst calls plainly “bear country.” The conflagration caused by Phaethon is echoed in Scene Four by the Celestial Janitor, who remarks, “As for history, / that nightmare, it is fire; / as for what you call technology, / it offers you the wherewithal / to cook the feast, the guest, the host, / the dining hall, the whole shebang” (Ursa 50, 82–3). This direct address of the audience takes place just as the hunter in “The Bear Woman” sits down to a feast with his wife’s family. Phaethon’s costly hubris suggests our own contemporary flirtation with disaster through climate change as a result of our reckless burning of fossil fuels, contrasted with the hunter’s unwitting induction into the bear family. Nevertheless, Bringhurst characterizes the initial scene in which Zeus visits Arcadia as taking place not following a holocaust, but “after the flood,” adding a hint of irony to the observation that “the springs were shy, the rivers timid” (13, 61) while rooting the Callisto story in a mythical framework common to cultural traditions around the world.8 In eliding the passage in which Zeus first spies Callisto, Bringhurst creates a new sentence from the fragments: “He gave the country life again … // … her dress just wrapped round and pinned, / a white cord knotted in the hair she never combed, / and always a spear or bow in her hand: / one of Moon Woman’s warriors” (13, 61). The possessive pronoun “her” seems to refer to the country of Arcadia itself, and Callisto’s unstudied attractiveness to the natural beauty of the wild – appropriate for a devotee of Artemis, goddess of wilderness. This sleight-of-hand sets in motion a key allegorical dimension of Ursa Major. Zeus’s enticing of Arcadia’s “shy” rivers out of hiding takes on the overtones of seduction, helping compensate for the elision of Zeus’s subsequent impersonation of Artemis and rape of Callisto, which are hinted at only by the phrases “no power lasts for long” and “then she hated the flowers and trees / that had seen it and felt it” (14, 62). Bringhurst renders the key Latin line adimam tibi namque figuram as “I’ll drive the beauty out of you” (14, 62), Hera’s rationale for turning Callisto into a bear. Yet in spite of the grotesque description of the metamorphosis, those familiar with the mythology around Artemis can’t help but find Hera’s choice of punishment ironic, probably intentionally so. Artemis had been closely associated with bears through festivals in her honour at Brauron on the west coast of the Aegean, in the

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early days of which girls and young women of marriageable age wore bearskin furs and performed a dance called the arkteia in which they imitated the “slow, solemn steps” of a bear (Hughes 1994: 95).9 Ovid must have been aware of the irony, yet bears were not a feature of Roman life, and he portrayed Callisto’s transformation as a simple punishment based on Hera’s famous jealousy. Bears are resident on the Northwest coastal areas familiar to Bringhurst, however, and Ursa Major moves well beyond Ovid. If Zeus’s rape of Callisto is a parallel to industrial culture’s forcing of the earth to yield to its will, following the allegorical trail we see the transformation of Callisto into a bear as dramatizing the estrangement we feel from the natural world which bore us, which we may now perceive as frightening and unfamiliar. Just as Zeus discovers Callisto, both Hera and the Celestial Janitor add their voices to the mix, complicating the story by invoking the figure of the silver bow from different source texts. Hera sings the line she will repeat frequently throughout the performance: “Καλλιστὼ κατέπεφνεν ἀπ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο” (Kallistō katépephnen ap arguréoio bióìo; “Callisto killed with a silver bow”).10 Though she chants in Greek, the name Callisto is nevertheless audible, a significant addition made by Bringhurst to the Ovidian text in which she is not named. The line has been imported from a text known as “The Contest of Homer and Hesiod” (Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi), an imagined dialogue between the two great writers of Greek antiquity, likely originating in the fourth century BC or earlier.11 Although in the context of Ursa Major it seems that Hera celebrates her victory over Callisto from the moment her husband sees her young mortal rival, the source text points to a different version of the story, in which Artemis herself kills Callisto. At the same time, the Celestial Janitor begins his own chant, quoting a passage from the opening scene of Homer’s Iliad which concludes with the same Greek words ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο (“arguréoio bióìo,” silver bow). Bringhurst offers the following translation as a note to the text, then later in Scene Three has Hera actually speak the lines in English. The god of light descended like the darkness, with a flock of arrows keening at his shoulder. He was trembling with anger. He kneeled far back from the ships and nocked an arrow and took aim and the silver bow started its heart stopping scream. (16)

An uncomfortable irony arises as Callisto is described by Ovid’s Daughter and the Translator as having “always a spear or bow in her hand”

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immediately after Hera chants arguréoio bióìo and while the Celestial Janitor describes the “flock of arrows” on the back of the descending god. The Celestial Janitor’s enunciation of arguréoio bióìo precedes the final iterations of Hera’s chant, and the coinciding repetition of this motif, extricated from its original context, again carries sexual connotations, as if it were Zeus launching the “arrow” from his “silver bow” into Callisto.12 Just as Artemis speaks up to banish Callisto for her infidelity, Hera ceases her chant and launches into a tirade in verses composed in an uneven vernacular by Bringhurst which sharply contrasts with the diction expected of “the Queen.” The Latin adimam tibi namque figuram (“I’ll drive the beauty out of you”) is Hera’s way of summing up her revenge on Callisto. She delivers it in the midst of threats and insults in English so as to coincide with Ovid’s Daughter’s enunciation of the same line, doubling its strength and yoking together Bringhurst’s Hera with Ovid’s. The lines uttered by Bringhurst’s Hera, “you’ll fart and stink / and poop your clothes / and spend the winter buried in the ground” (16, 62), convey haughty anger with a tinge of juvenile revenge while Ovid’s Daughter describes the metamorphosis of Callisto into a bear. Hera reiterates the “Callisto killed with a silver bow” refrain in Greek while Ovid’s Daughter describes how Callisto loses “her grip on language.” Hera then repeats her tirade word-by-word in reverse order: “Ground the in buried, winter the spend …” (17, 63) just as Callisto is said to retain her human mind while in the body of a bear. The retrograde motion is part of Bringhurst’s attempt to claim for literature the properties of polyphonic music, and the effect here illustrates the perspective of Callisto, whose position in the world has been reversed from hunter to prey, and to whom language has become strange. The reversed-order English also bears a mocking resemblance to the Latin syntax. When she finishes, Hera resumes chanting in Greek “Callisto killed with a silver bow” just as Ovid’s Daughter and the Translator reach the moment at which Arcturus’s spear is about to enter Callisto’s chest. Scene Three (Metamorphosis II ) repeats the story in nearly the same way, emphasizing its mythical, timeless quality, and illustrating the perpetual confrontation between Callisto and Arcturus. Ovid’s Daughter and the Translator repeat the same fragments from beginning to end, accompanied by the Translator only up until the moment at which Arcturus unknowingly meets his mother. Bringhurst varies the accompanying material, creating an alternate set of contrapuntal resonances around the figure of the silver bow, and introducing information about Callisto’s father, Lycaus, germane to Scene Four. This time Hera enters with her

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now-familiar chant while Zeus is reviving the countryside, then commences the English version of the passage from the Iliad describing Apollo’s descent “with a flock of arrows” (34, 73) just as Callisto is described with a spear or bow in her hand. She doesn’t complete the passage right away, but instead resumes chanting while Ovid’s Daughter carries on. As Callisto’s metamorphosis begins, Hera picks up the passage again: “He kneeled back far from the ships and nocked an arrow and took aim” (35, 74). Finally, after further chants of arguréoio bióìo, Hera delivers the final line “and the silver bow started its heart-stopping scream” (35, 75) just as Arcturus meets his mother and the Translator leaves off his translation of Ovid’s Daughter’s tale. Now the silver bow is plainly identified with Arcturus’s attempt to spear his mother, and the “heart stopping scream” suggests Callisto’s reaction as well as the spear’s deadly sound, intensifying the allegorical assault on the earth. As Ovid’s Daughter’s story concludes, the Celestial Janitor speaks up for the first time in the scene. He quotes two passages in Greek from related ancient astronomical texts adding details of Callisto’s story we haven’t heard yet, and the Translator, now finished with Ovid’s Daughter, renders them in English simultaneously. In the first, from the Catasterismi, a compendium of mythological narratives around constellations, we learn that Callisto was said by Hesiod to be the daughter of “the Wolf Man.” This is Bringhurst’s rendering of Lycaus, the name of Callisto’s father, who was turned into a wolf by Zeus (as recounted by Ovid in Book I of the Metamorphoses). In the second fragment, from a commentary on the Phainomena of Aratus, we learn that the constellation sometimes known as “the Cowherd or the Bearguard” is said to be actually “Arkas,” or Arcturus, the “son of Callisto and Zeus / who lived in the country of wolves.” Hera completes the scene with a sarcastic understatement, “that’s not the only thing they say” (37, 76), indicating that she’s been listening to the Celestial Janitor even while chanting. The new frame involving wolves adds another animal spirit to the wilderness, and prepares Arcturus’s version of the story of the encounter between his maternal grandfather Lycaus and his father Zeus in Scene Four, “Arcturus Dreams.”

The Lonely Hunter, the Bear Woman, and Arcturus Scenes Two and Four are set to contrast Scenes One and Three, creating an oscillating effect in the work. The first half of “The Bear Woman” is recounted by Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son in Cree and rendered in

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English by the Translator in Scene Two (“Arcturus Awakens”), and the story completed in Scene Four (“Arcturus Dreams”). In both scenes, the dominant counterpoint is between “The Bear Woman” and speeches of Bringhurst’s own composition in the voice of Arcturus (who like his mother has no voice in Ovid’s narrative). The counterpoint creates an ebb and flow of resonance and tension on the themes of relationships between male and female, god and mortal, human and animal. Bringhurst enhances the dynamic by timing key intersections of complementary actions, ideas, and words so as to highlight what might be thought of as cosmic ironies arising from the texts’ intersections. The bear-woman herself becomes a kind of inverse Callisto, a figure for the natural bounty of the greater ecology who, rather than being made alien by intervening forces, translates herself into the human sphere in order to be understood by the hunter. In Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son’s story, a lonely hunter kills a series of buffalo, taking only small portions from each for his own meals. Arriving home one day he is pleased by signs that a woman has been present. The woman remains elusive for a time, but appears near the end of Scene Two when the hunter returns to his camp to encounter her sitting in his seat, having apparently done the domestic chores. She asks why he brings so little meat, and he asks where she comes from. Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son makes it through ten lines before Arcturus, who has “awakened,” joins in with his own story, using no names and referring to himself in the third person. Though Arcturus’s tone is casual and matter-of-fact, he does imply a questioning of received concepts of sexuality and purity, and makes some overtly ontological claims which prefigure ideas put forth by the Celestial Janitor in Scene Five. Arcturus is posited as the child of wild earthly beauty and a powerful and desirous god, who unwittingly hunts his own mother, of whom he is afraid. In this sense, Arcturus represents Western civilization, inheritor of the perspectives of ancient Greece and Rome, now transplanted to North America, trying to piece together what its own story means. He is also paralleled with the lonely hunter who is the central figure in Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s story. As is often the case when North American First Nations oral narratives are juxtaposed with their European counterparts, there is a curious reverse symmetry about the way relationships between humans and animals are portrayed: the lonely hunter is seduced by a bear in the form of a woman, while Arcturus encounters his mother in the guise of a bear. Both young male hunters are in the process of learning key lessons, creating the basis for the resonances brought out by Bringhurst’s contrapuntal arrangement.

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Arcturus enters just as the lonely hunter has killed his first buffalo, taken the tongue and a haunch, and returned to his camp. He begins by framing his own creation story as “perfectly simple” – the familiar scenario in which “one of the ones in the sky [Zeus] / wanted one of the ones on the ground [Callisto]. / And got what he wanted, as usual” (28, 66). He observes that his father, Zeus, “couldn’t keep” the woman he had momentarily possessed, and his subsequent remark, “If they can’t, who can?” implies a growing wisdom regarding the impossibility of ownership and the imperative of eternal change. “You can have what you want but you can’t have it for long. / That’s the rule” (28, 66) is how Arcturus colloquially sums up this key lesson, echoing the Latin line nulla potentia longa est from the previous scene. “What a way to find yourself a mother,” his next expression, is a double-entendre, perhaps triple, as Arcturus, Callisto, and Zeus all “find” themselves mothers, in different senses of the word. Yet his question, “But what other way is better?” indicates a certain masculine naïveté, as if deception and force were bound to be a part of mating, reminding us that Arcturus may not be fully mature in his outlook. Ironic juxtapositions and narrative tensions abound as the stories proceed. Artemis’s expulsion of Callisto is recounted just as Kâ-kîsikâwpîhtokêw’s Son tells of the lonely hunter’s discovery that a mysterious presence has stacked firewood at his camp for him. The simultaneous arrival and banishment create a harmonious dissonance, which Bringhurst marks with a coincidence of the word “thinking.” Arcturus utters this word immediately after the Translator sums up the hunter’s realization that “Someone must have come” with “That’s what he was thinking” (21, 66). Arcturus critiques the ideological veneration of virgin purity in plain terms, observing that “even thinking / about loving isn’t pure, in some people’s thinking” (28, 67), just as the lonely hunter is clearly implied to be doing exactly that. As Arcturus repeats “One of the ones in the sky/ wanted one of the ones on the ground,” a parallel is suggested between Zeus’s desire and that of the lonely hunter, who at this moment sees a pair of moccasins and speculates that they belong to a woman. With a hint of dramatic irony, he links his search for game animals with his search for the woman, thinking “First thing in the morning, I’ll go hunting. / I’ll see if I can spot her” (22, 67). A potent resonance is created as Arcturus describes the circumstances of his birth just as the lonely hunter kills another buffalo and takes “the ribs, the kidneys and a haunch” (23, 68). The passing association between Zeus and the lonely hunter is extended as the hunter runs to his camp to seek out the mystery woman just as Zeus’s pursuit of Callisto and his last-minute intervention to save her are

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described by Arcturus (who doesn’t include himself in the story when Zeus lifts his mother into the sky). Arcturus describes how his mother is visible from the prairie, though not from the cities because “the ground is getting awfully bright these days” (29, 68) even as the lonely hunter returns to his camp to find “a little bit of smoke / and a big, very big, pile of firewood” (23, 68). At this point, about halfway through Scene Two, the Celestial Janitor adds a fourth voice and third semantic stream, saturating the polyphonic texture and the conceptual matrix. He intones “Grandmother earth, / grandfather fire, / grandmother water, / and grandfather air” (29, 69), conjoining the ongoing focus on the four elements with the “grandparent” figurations commonly found in North American First Nations culture. “Grandmother earth” is timed to gesture to the bear-woman, whose moccasins the lonely hunter has spotted, and “grandfather fire” to the hunter himself, whose fleeting, consuming presence is indicated as he thinks “First thing in the morning I’ll be gone” (24, 69). Arcturus muses on the relationship between earth and heaven: “Those stars are the plants and animals / of the sky. / They used to be people / who lived on the ground”; conversely, “the plants and animals / of the ground used to be people who lived in the sky” (29–30, 69–70). Meanwhile, the Celestial Janitor continues his commentary on reciprocal relationships, alternating with Arcturus so that they do not overlap: “We are only at home so long / as we are inhabited,” he asserts (29, 69). He then ventures ideas to which he will return in Scene Five, including “Earth at its purest / is crystal and metal,” alluding at once to the shining geometrical objects comprising the set of the invisible ceremonies performance and to the “silver bow” which Hera claims has killed Callisto, which has ironically come from inside the very earth for which Callisto has become a figure. As Arcturus makes his observations, the lonely hunter comes face to face with the “fine-looking woman” who herself once inhabited another realm. Her disguise is hinted at by the Celestial Janitor’s comment “in hiding but gleaming,” which ostensibly characterizes the “luminous shadow” of crystal and metal within the earth. As the woman washes the hunter’s hands and feet and subsequently feeds him, Arcturus comments again on the relationships between gods and mortals: “You know, the people of the sky eat / everything that you eat, / without eating” (30, 71). At the same time, the Celestial Janitor lists off a series of metals and elements from the periodic table which are the building blocks of life, culminating in a mischievous echo between “zinc” and Arcturus’s “think,” while the lonely hunter exclaims “I didn’t think anyone was here” in response to

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the woman’s question as to why he brought home so little meat. Arcturus claims that “the people on the ground think / everything that they [the gods] think, / without thinking” (30, 71).13 The line “I didn’t think anyone was here” rings powerfully in the allegorical framework associating the hunter with own civilization and culture, bolstered by the simultaneous “without thinking” of Arcturus as a double-entendre. When Kâ-kîsikâwpîhtokêw’s Son’s narrative pauses at the end of Scene Two with the lonely hunter’s query “Where do you come from?” Arcturus’s observation “My mother is a woman of both worlds / with no escape from feeling or from thinking” (31, 72) seems to act as a reply, again linking the bear-woman with Callisto. The Celestial Janitor has the last word after these primary voices have ceased, highlighting his figuration of the metallic and crystal elements of earth as “orthogonal, hexagonal, / simple, symmetrical, / latticed, rotational / thoughts of the gods” (31, 72). The generative yet potentially destructive synthesis of the inorganic, the human, and godly power is made explicit as these carefully shaped configurations of the elements “twist with their milk-smooth faces / and crystalline edges / in the breasts / of human beings” (31, 72), leading back to the silver bows and arrows that dominate Scene Three. Having “awakened” in Scene Two, Arcturus in Scene Four ostensibly “dreams” while Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son completes “The Bear Woman” story. His dreams seem to be of hunting and feasting, and there is immediate resonance between the stories on these themes. The mysterious woman in the lonely hunter’s camp answers the hunter’s question which had been left hanging at the end of Scene Two by saying “we live a long way from here” and then asking the hunter to “get a lot more meat” because her father and his people are hungry (39, 77). As the hunter departs, Arcturus poses his own question about his mother: “what would a girl be doing out hunting?” (48, 77). He has no answer, puzzled that she lives and hunts with other mortal women and with “sky women” too, who “don’t eat and don’t die” and whose blood is “like sap from a poplar, white as snow, clear as water” (48, 78). While Arcturus describes gods who don’t need to eat, Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son carries on his tale of mortals who are not human, who do need to eat, and are hungry. After the hunter has brought in a lot of meat and stored it, the woman suggests taking it to her family. She sends the hunter on ahead, then lays “the bundles of gear and provisions out in a row,” and steps on each, making them disappear (42, 79). At the same time, Arcturus launches into the story of his grandfather Lycaus, who was curious about the cosmos, especially about the relationships between mortals and gods. As recounted by Ovid,

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Lycaus tried to test Zeus by cooking a soup with a human boy instead of a goat in it, but, according to Arcturus, Zeus “smelled the human soup a hundred miles off!” (49, 80). Zeus himself transforms Lycaus into a wolf, paralleling Hera’s reaction to Callisto’s encounter with Zeus. As Arcturus unfolds this tale, which follows from the closing lines of Scene Three, Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s Son shows the mysterious woman stamping her feet inside the hunter’s newly pitched tent and bringing the provisions back into place again. “How did she do it?” wonders the hunter (43, 80). This time, the hunter is put in a position similar to Lycaus, and the realm of the gods about which he is curious becomes analogous to the animal world. Ironically, according to this framework of juxtapositions, Lycaus’s reward is to be made into a hunting animal. The mysteries of transformations and relationships between realms of being, sometimes precipitated by hunting and feasting, are highlighted by resonances in the following passages. Arcturus comments on the fine line between one state of being and another, with a pun on the word “bear”: “Humans can eat and sleep with gods, / and bear their children. Still, they can be just a breath away / from being rocks and trees and wolves and deer” (49, 81). Meanwhile, the mysterious woman offers to satisfy the hunter’s curiosity about her packing skills. As he watches her repeat her technique of laying out the bundles and then stepping on each one to invisibly “pack” it, the Celestial Janitor enters the scene, just a moment after Arcturus finishes his speech, maintaining the two-voice counterpoint. He comments on Arcturus’s place in the sky, naming the stars that define Ursa Major and Ursa Minor and painting his own version of what is happening in the heavens, anticipating Hera’s descriptions in Scene Five by describing Arcturus as “the Cub … still sucking what once / was the nipple of heaven,” or the North Star (49–50, 81). At the same time, the eternal child is “biting what then / was the point of a spear. Chewing what now / is the radar screen, bombsight and crosshair,” showing the immature attitude of our own civilization in which hunting tools have become high-tech war weapons (50, 82). This sudden shift is contrasted with the descriptions of the mysterious woman’s packing of provisions of meat with no tools at all, and the final line of that section, “the man saw that nothing remained” (45, 82) is given an ironic second implication as a description of the end result of warfare. The amazed hunter and the woman, who is now his wife, walk along until they see the smoke from her family’s fire. At the same time, the Celestial Janitor describes the constellation Ursa Major in a different way than it is often seen, as if she were “stretching her neck and her tongue / to Arcturus, her son,

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who is clutching / the butt of the spear” (50, 82). Callisto the bear is thus completely vulnerable to her hunter son even as the Cree hunter’s wife’s bear-family is about to invite him into their midst. As noted earlier, the Celestial Janitor alludes to the conflagration caused by Phaethon’s hubris in the Metamorphoses, proceeding from the comments on the dangers of technological weapons and tools pointing at the bear-mother: “As for what you call technology, / it offers you the wherewithal / to cook the feast, the guest, the host, / the dining hall, the whole shebang. / How long till done, it seems that no one / knows. Nor who might be here to digest / that last, long supper / when it’s served” (50, 82–3). The Celestial Janitor gives this sharp warning to the audience just as the hunter sits down to a feast at his in-laws’ camp. His wife’s younger sister exclaims “Hey! My big sister is bringing piles of food” (46, 82) which are invisible to the hunter, indicating that his wife’s family perceives the world differently than he does, and that he has not yet seen the truth of his situation. “That last, long supper” coincides ironically with the wife’s mother’s thought “Now I’ll have something to eat” (47, 83). As the Celestial Janitor pauses, Hera unexpectedly jumps into the scene with her familiar chant in Greek, “Callisto killed with a silver bow,” while the hunter’s father-in-law speaks up, indicating that he had set the whole process of the story in motion: “That’s just what I was thinking of, my daughter, / when I said to you, ‘Go over there / where my son-in-law lives by himself ’” (83–4). Hera’s chant continues on the theme of dangerous technology begun by Arcturus and the Celestial Janitor just as the hunter is welcomed into his wife’s family, creating a stark contrast between the awareness he is in the process of developing and the fear-driven encounter between Callisto and Arcturus. The hunter’s acceptance into his wife’s family, and the time he spends with them in that world, are signified only by words translated as “Then he stayed there” (48, 84). It is possible that Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw deliberately left details from this part of the story out when telling it to Bloomfield,14 but it may also be fundamentally complete as it stands if the reason we hear nothing about the hunter’s time with his wife’s family is simply because he has entered another kind of world. The hunter himself spends “quite a while” in that realm before recognizing “early in the spring … that he was married to a bear, / who seemed to him to be a woman,” and realizing with sorrow that “he could stay there no longer” (48–51, 84).15 The Celestial Janitor, anticipating the theme of cleansing and purity in Scene Five, concludes with a prayer to the four elements and to the Trickster: “bathe us. Clean our bones” (51,

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84), asking in his own way for the kind of transformative experience just undergone by the hunter.

The Neverending Finale Scene Five (Metamorphosis III ) pulls together the diverse threads and provides a musical, narrative, and conceptual conclusion to Ursa Major that is at the same time ontologically unresolved. The source texts recede and Bringhurst’s own lines in the mouths of Hera and the Celestial Janitor occupy centre stage, their contrasting perspectives on the ongoing cycles of life and death counterpointed in the final cadence. Like Scenes One and Three, Scene Five begins with Ovid’s Daughter’s recounting of the fragments concerning Callisto, but this time the Translator does not render them in English (perhaps on the assumption that the audience will by this point have recognized the Latin text). Hera maintains her vengeful, spiteful character at the outset, shifts unexpectedly as she lists the names of prairie First Nations in a co-operative antiphony with a speech by the Celestial Janitor in the penultimate passage, then concludes the masque with her familiar chant, suggesting the ongoing repeated attacks on the natural world by the technological, even as the Celestial Janitor contemplates in measured verses the endless transformations between elements and realms that constitute our cosmos. Hera enters chanting Kallistō katépephnen ap arguréoio bióìo, then, when Callisto’s downfall begins, launches into a monologue in vernacular English as in Scene One, subsequently to be reversed, reinforcing a sense of symmetry in the masque’s structure. She echoes the line delivered by Ovid’s Daughter in which Artemis admonishes Callisto, i procul hinc, dixit, nec sacros pollue fontes, then translates it: “Don’t pollute the sacred pool!” Following Zeus’s rescue of Callisto and Arcturus, Hera can’t resist further vengeance as she decrees “that sacred pool now / is the whole ocean” and Callisto will “never have another bath / or ever bathe her baby either” (55, 86), alluding to the position of the constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, which despite the rotation of the stars throughout the year never appear to dip below the horizon into the ocean. She continues on this theme of mutual punishment and perpetual arrested development as she describes Arcturus’s “cub teeth fastened to the sky’s breast,” echoing the Celestial Janitor’s comments from Scene Four, just as Ovid’s Daughter reaches the point of the story at which Arcturus

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encounters his mother: ille refugit inmotosque oculos in se sine fine tenentem, “he wanted to escape / those eyes that didn’t blink and never left him” (54, 86; trans. 63). Hera moves into retrograde as Zeus intervenes in Ovid’s Daughter’s tale and places Callisto and Arcturus into the sky. Her reverse-order lines are more comprehensible than in Scene One, as “moves never that star” and “is he there” are acceptable syntactical formulations, and she poetically adds to the Celestial Janitor’s pronouncements on the substance of reality: “Seas seven the all, ocean whole the is” (55, 87). The Celestial Janitor enters after Ovid’s Daughter has completed her tale, as in Scene Three. Using the elemental language and plain syntax typical of Bringhurst’s single-voice poetry, he repeats his comments from Scene Four, beginning “Earth at its purest is crystal and metal” just as Hera discusses polluting the sacred pool in reverse-motion, intensifying the sense of irony around the “purest” constituents of earth becoming the stuff of self-destructive technology. As Hera discusses Callisto’s and Arcturus’s inability to bathe, the Celestial Janitor lists examples of “the orthogonal, hexagonal, / simple, symmetrical, / latticed, rotational / thoughts of the gods,” acknowledging the fundamental web of the elemental, the mortal, and the immortal. The piece’s final cadence begins with Hera and the Celestial Janitor speaking in sustained antiphony, alternating single words or pairs of words. Hera names twenty-one First Nations across the Canadian prairies, including the Sweet Grass, of which Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw was a member. Star Blanket and Bearskin are notably the first in the list (57, 87). In the spaces between, the Celestial Janitor continues with his elemental formulae distinguishing gods from mortals: The voices of the gods are water; ours are air; their bodies fire; ours are water. Gods have hearts of air, but ours are earth. Their thought is earth, and ours is fire. (57, 87)

This intriguing matrix of metaphoric relationships is as concise and elegant a set of propositions outlining his conception of the complementary forces of gods and mortals as Bringhurst has ever offered, a sequel to his comments on Herakleitos nearly thirty years earlier.16 What is Hera, a Greek goddess, doing contemplating the prairie First Nations? If her thought is earth and her voice is water, she might be thinking hearts and

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speaking bodies. If earth is the sky of the gods, she gazes at what to her appear to be stars in the prairie night, even constellations, as hinted by the names “Little Black Bear” and “White Bear” and by her subsequent lines: “All those fires on the coal black prairie, / every night forever more, forever more, forever more” (57, 88). As Hera reverts to the “Callisto killed with a silver bow” refrain, the Celestial Janitor extends his ontological metaphors, adding stairs and ladders into the framework to illustrate the interrelationships of the elements within living trees, then adding Callisto, “the wounded mother,” to the picture as she “shinnies up the tree.” In the aspens and the spruces, the larches and birches […] earth is climbing a ladder of water and water a ladder of air, and air is climbing a ladder of fire, and fire descending a stair of air and water into the earth that is reaching and climbing with tiny hands a ladder knotted of water, air and fire. The wounded mother clambers up the spear shaft, shinnies up the tree, transforming earth and water, fire and air, […] and hunter to hunted and breath to air all over and over and over again. (58, 88)

The timelessness of myth is here linked with the eternal rotations of the stars relative to the mortals’ eye-view and the rhythmic pulsing of biological life, echoing in many ways the conclusion of New World Suite No. 3. Yet this counterpoint attempts to raise the audience’s consciousness above ground level, above even the stories just told, to an unresolvable second-order tension and cosmic irony maintained between the unchanging nature of change and the voluntary nature of the inevitable, from a vantage point fixed neither to the ground nor the stars. This moment of clarity and acceptance is a kind of catharsis at the end of a tumultuous psychological workout in which language-processing faculties have been pushed beyond their limits. The rich web of myth and monologue in Ursa Major reveals a complex reality of cultural and ideological interactivity, complicating the framework within which relations between Indigenous and colonial cultures is

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sometimes conceived in North America. Bringhurst’s poetic polyphony has the potential to push experienced, attentive listeners to transcend the narratives we have come to inhabit, to move through the mythologies we may have unconsciously accepted as truth into a new perspective on our past, present, and future. For Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw it might be said that metamorphosis is simply part of the order of things, like the Greek idea of physis an integral feature of a world going about constant changes in which identity is permeable and fluid. In a culture dependent on gathering and hunting, etiquette is required when travelling through a world where one is never truly sure what – or whom – one is hunting. Differences at the level of physical appearances often mask underlying similarities; as Bringhurst pointed out during a discussion of Ursa Major at Acadia University, a bear with its skin removed looks remarkably like a human being. Yet the truly remarkable metamorphosis in Kâ-kîsikâwpîhtokêw’s story is not that of a woman into a bear, but the inner transformation of the lonely Cree hunter. While left heartsick at the end of the story, he will never be the same after falling in love with his prey. Arcturus in Ursa Major begins to recover this ever-enlarging circle, yet another quietly profound transformation in the masque, stemming from his growing awareness of his own tragic circumstances. Technocratic North American culture, though master of perspective from the microscopic to the evolutionary scale, like Arcturus needs to learn the essential lessons of myth, polyphony, and formline art – to comprehend the unresolvable complexities that arise in a reality in which more than one being, story, or speech can occupy the same space, even the same body, at the same time, in the midst of their own transformations.

notes 1 All page references in this essay are to the 2009 edition of Ursa Major. 2 In the interview, published by Douglas & McIntyre under the title Translating Haida Poetry: An Interview with Robert Bringhurst in 2002, Bringhurst explained the rationale behind some of his decisions regarding the trilogy. He acknowledged that Haida was for him a literary language, which he has learned to read but not to speak, and that he had received feedback on drafts of his translations from some Haida speakers. He also recounted some of the history around the political complications he encountered when working with Bill Reid on The Raven Steals the Light

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3

4

5

6

7

8

9

(1984) and The Black Canoe (1991), and affirmed his recognition of the interdependence of individual artists and their cultural communities. This focus was in part inspired by hallucinations Noestheden had as a teen that his body was floating among the stars (MacKenzie). Born in the Netherlands and raised in Ontario, Noestheden spent the 1990s and early 2000s living and working in Regina (Saskatchewan NAC ), and has recently collaborated with Inuit artist Shunivai Ashoona on a giant banner on the theme of Earth and Sky displayed first in Basel, Switzerland in 2008 and later that year at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. At the performance, the Translator had read Leonard Bloomfield’s original prose translation, while Floyd Favell Starr recited the story from his own memory, rather than memorizing Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s version. In the fourth movement of Bringhurst’s New World Suite No. 3, two voices at two different points, cascading, say “Arcturus, spearing the Great Bear of heaven, sees in her eyes, now and always, the eyes of his mother,” juxtaposed with “Orion, the old god, disguised as a deer, is out stalking Aldebaran, the doe, his daughter, forever,” giving mythic shape to the cycles of ecological and spiritual ennui that the “new world” finds so difficult to escape (Selected 228–30). Among these are the story of Leda and the Swan, in which Zeus disguises himself as the bird, treated by Bringhurst in his poem of the same name (Selected 81–2), and the story of Artemis and Orion, in which Orion is elevated to the heavens after Artemis unwittingly shoots him with her arrow. The young Phaethon loses control of the steeds, and the earth is engulfed in fire, drying up great rivers and creating the Sahara desert. At last Mother Earth herself cries out to Zeus, indignant, “Is this the honour and reward you give me for my fruitfulness and service?” (hosne mihi fructus, hunc fertilitatis honorem officiique refers, lines 285–6; trans. A.S. Kline). Zeus responds by killing Phaethon, which drives the Sun into despair and retreat until he is beseeched by the gods to return to his routine of illuminating the world. In Book I of Ovid’s chronologically inconsistent Metamorphoses, Jove (Zeus) had, prior to Phaethon’s wild ride, contemplated burning up the earth himself in response to the affront he had received from Callisto’s father, Lycaus, but had opted to flood it instead, which occasions the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha. Classicist J. Donald Hughes has argued that Artemis should be understood as the “Goddess of Conservation” (1990) and that the purpose of the initiation at the Brauronian festivals was to promote “respect and even love for wild creatures.” Artemis’s function was to nurture relations between humans and wild creatures, as she was “believed to care for the young of

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10 11

12

13

14

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both humans and animals” and to send “wild animals as foster mothers to suckle infants that had been exposed” (Pan’s Travail 95). Bringhurst includes a simple melody sketch and transliteration of the Greek into Roman characters in his endnotes (Ursa 89). Part of the Certamen recounts a game in which Hesiod delivers a riddling line regarding well-known mythic characters or scenes and Homer is required to complete them correctly. To Hesiod’s prompt, “But when she had been made subject in love, Artemis, who delights in arrows …” (αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δμήθη γάμῳ Ἄρτεμις ἰοχέαιρα), Homer replies, “Slew Callisto with her silver bow” (Καλλιστὼ κατέπεφνεν ἀπ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο) (lines 117–18, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White). The riddle turns on the ambiguity of the pronoun “she.” Artemis the virgin huntress presumably can’t be made subject in love, so Homer must resolve the sense of the line (Bassino). The full phrase ἀπ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο occurs in the final scene of the Iliad (24.605), again attached to Apollo, but this time associated also with his sister, Artemis. The passage from Book I of the Iliad quoted by the Celestial Janitor describes an angry Apollo, the god of light, descending ironically “like the darkness,” in response to a prayer by Chryses, one of Apollo’s priests whose daughter has been captured by Agamemnon. The proud Agamemnon refuses to give up his “prize,” and her father begs Apollo to intervene, precipitating his angry descent to slay with arrows not young defenseless women but the Achaean men. The ensuing dispute over how to placate Chryses and Apollo drives a wedge between the heroes Agamemnon and Achilles which becomes significant for the story. At the end of the Iliad, Achilles invokes a story about a woman, Niobe, whose six daughters were killed by Artemis and six sons by Apollo, as he attempts to persuade the fallen king Priam of Troy into eating a meal in spite of his despair. This line echoes the assertion in the voice of Greek philosopher Xenophanes made by Bringhurst much earlier in his career that “we must learn to be thought / by the gods, not to think them” (“Xenophanes,” Selected 51). As Leonard Bloomfield notes in his introduction to his compendium Sacred Stories of the Sweetgrass Cree, Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw’s, also known as Coming-Day, tended to “simplify his stories or omit certain parts of them” (Bloomfield 1). One might conjecture that Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw had his own reasons for leaving some parts of the stories incomplete, perhaps deducing that the non-Native anthropologist would not understand, did not need or had not earned the right to hear them, or that they were inappropriate for other reasons. “The Bear Woman” echoes many other First Nation stories about humans entering the worlds of animals in just this way, including the Haida story “In His Father’s Village, Someone Was Just about to Go Out Hunting Birds”

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by Ghandl, in which a hunter of birds ends up marrying one of them, then is later obliged to leave, as discussed by Nicholas Bradley in this volume. 16 Cf. “The birth of the one is the death of the other; / the dying of one gives life to the other” (“Herakleitos,” Selected 38).

works cited Bassino, Paola. Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi: Introduction, Critical Edition and Commentary, Durham theses, Durham University. 2013. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/8448/ Bloomfield, Leonard. Sacred Songs of the Sweet Grass Cree. Bulletin no. 60, National Museum of Canada. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1930. Bringhurst, Robert. Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers and Dancers. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau 2009 [2003]. Butala, Sharon. “Invisible Ceremonies: A Personal Response.” Floating In Land: New Dance Horizons web archive. http://www.newdancehorizons.ca/ floating-inland-an archive/articles-and-videos/ Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi: http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/homer/ homrhes.htm Cleniuk, Brenda. “Robin Poitras” in Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women. Ed. Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder. Toronto: YYZ , 2004. Hughes, J. Donald. “Goddess of Conservation” Forest and Conservation History (34:4 Oct. 1990), 191–7. – Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Krause, Judith. “Pantoum for invisible ceremonies, part one.” Floating in Land: New Dance Horizons web archive. http://www.newdancehorizons.ca/ floating-inland-an-archive/articles-and-videos/ MacKenzie Art Gallery website. http://www.mackenzieartgallery.ca/engage/ exhibitions/john-noestheden-sky-shuvinai-ashoona-earth New Dance Horizons website. http://www.newdancehorizons.ca/ rouge-gorge-creation-company/about-robin-poitras/ Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A.S. Kline. http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/ Metamorph2.htm Ovid. Metamorphoses. http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/metamorphoseonUVA.html Rigaud, Thérèse. Translating Haida Poetry: An Interview with Robert Bringhurst. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2002. Saskatchewan NAC website. http://www.sknac.ca/index.php?page= ArtistDetail&id=321

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Contributors

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction. Her latest work is a book of short stories called Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (McClelland & Stewart, 2014). Nicholas Bradley is an associate professor in the Department of

English at the University of Victoria. His recent publications include We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947–1987 (Harbour, 2014).

Mark Dickinson teaches courses in the humanities at the Ontario

College of Art and Design University in Toronto. He co-edited Lyric Ecology: An Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky (Cormorant, 2010) and is the author of the forthcoming book Canadian Primal: Poet-thinkers and the Rediscovery of Earth.

Crispin Elsted is a poet, essayist, translator, designer, and compositor. With his wife, Jan, he is owner/publisher of Barbarian Press in Mission, BC , which publishes limited edition letterpress books. Between 2002 and 2005 he edited a new edition of Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, published by Barbarian Press in 2011. Clare Goulet edits literary and academic work and teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. Her most recent book is the novel Cantata (Wolsak and Wynn, 2015).

Iain Macleod Higgins teaches in the English Department at the

University of Victoria and is the translator of the best-selling medieval travel memoir, The Book of John Mandeville (Hackett, 2011).

Ishmael Hope is an Alaska Native storyteller and writer. His Iñupiaq name is Angaluuk and his Tlingit name is Khaagwáask’. In the fall of 2014, he released his first book of poetry, Courtesans of Flounder Hill (Ishmael Reed Publications). Peter Rutledge Koch , proprietor of Peter Koch Printers and director of the Codex Foundation, resides in Berkeley, California. Dennis Lee lives in Toronto, where he is a resident artist at the Soul-

pepper Theatre Company. His most recent poetry collections are Testament (Anansi, 2012) and Melvis and Elvis (HarperCollins, 2015).

Scott M c Intyre was publisher, chief executive officer, and chairman

of Douglas & McIntyre until his retirement in 2012. His current duties include vice-chairman of the board of the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, and member of the Aboriginal Educational Council of the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Katherine M c Leod holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and

is a postdoctoral fellow with SpokenWeb (English Department, Concordia University) where she is researching CBC radio broadcasts of Canadian poetry.

Kevin M c Neilly is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Embouchure, a book of poems (Nightwood Editions, 2011). Káawan Sangáa (W . F . Morrison ) is a storyteller, dancer, community organizer, radio host, and teacher of the Haida language.

Erica Wagner is an author and journalist, born in New York City but

long a resident of the United Kingdom. Her books include a collection of short stories, Gravity (Granta), Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters, and Seizure, a novel (both Faber and Faber).

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Brent Wood teaches in the Department of English and Drama at the

University of Toronto at Mississauga. He writes critical analysis of Canadian poetry, and of performance poetry in a range of modes from experimental polyphony to popular song.

Contributors

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Index

“Anecdote of the Squid,” 63, 108 Antigone, 12, 53–61 “Antistrophe from Leopardi,” 71–8 “Ararat,” 77, 81–2, 108 Bagshawe, Charlotte, 38 The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972–82, 28, 47, 62–6, 69, 77, 95, 107 Being in Being, 41, 121–31, 180, 184, 196, 199, 214 Bergschrund, 12, 27, 30, 63–4, 76–82, 90–2 The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwai, 8, 13, 17, 34, 38–9, 124, 134, 179–80, 196, 232 Blue Roofs of Japan, 4, 9, 13, 34–6, 149–52, 155–74, 204, 231 “Bone Flute Breathing,” 111 “Book of Silences,” 34, 41, 71, 112–13, 168–9 Bringhurst, Robert: as book designer, 9, 30, 47, 49–50, 88–100, 175–8; and Canada, 4, 7, 10, 16–17, 21, 30, 166; early life, 20–3; education, 21–3, 26–7, 202; and the military, 23–5; as teacher 15, 30; as translator, 7, 48–9, 54–8, 71–5, 105, 122, 196, 202–3

Cadastre, 9, 68–76, 88–90, 203 The Calling: Selected Poems 1970–1995, 9, 62–3, 76, 95, 159–60 Carson, Anne, 12, 58–60 “Conversations with a Toad,”13, 37, 137–45, 151–2, 171 “Demokritos,” 109 “Deuteronomy,” 17, 28, 71, 77, 87, 108–9 Douglas & McIntyre, 13, 32, 94, 175–81, 185 ecology, 19, 30, 41, 52, 245–6, 253–4 The Elements of Typographic Style, 4, 9, 11–12, 66, 95–8, 102, 105, 202 “Essay on Adam,” 17 Everywhere Being Is Dancing, Knowing Is Known: Twenty Pieces of Thinking, 10, 35, 43, 102 The Fragments of Parmenides, 11, 46–51, 91, 99 Gaspereau Press, 10, 232, 239 Ghandl of the Qayahal Llaanas, 6, 8, 13, 31, 33, 36, 121–5, 186–7, 189–93, 199–200, 208–14 “Gloria, Credo, Sanctus et Oreamnos,” 113

Gould, Glenn, 5, 38, 151 “The Greenland Stone,” 28, 69, 71, “Hachadura,” 16, 28, 77 Haida: history and texts, 7–8, 31–4, 41–2, 121–31, 179, 186–93, 195–215, 228–30; language, 36, 121–31, 180, 196, 224–6; nation, 7–8, 15, 32, 36, 38, 42, 179–81, 195, 214–5, 224–6 “Haruspications in a Whorehouse,” 68 “Heart Sutra,” 113–14 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 53–5, 58–9, 73, 80 “Herakleitos,” 16, 69, 71, 77 “Jacob Singing,” 77, 108–9 Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw, Cree mythteller, 15, 232–54 “Limassol,” 67, 78–9 “Lyell Island Variations,” 9, 71 Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, 4–6, 8, 11, 13–14, 121–31, 180–1, 184–215, 232 McClelland & Stewart, 28, 95, 159 music, 12–13, 21, 35, 37–8, 102–6, 115–18, 122, 134, 157–61, 164–9 New World Suite No. 3, 4, 11–13, 39–40, 43, 102, 114–21, 137–41, 150–2, 161, 231, 240 Nine Visits to the Mythworld, 41, 121–5, 180, 184, 195, 199, 208, 214 “Ode of Imr el-Qais,” 71 “Of the Snaring of Birds,” 52–61, 71 “The Old in Their Knowing,” 9, 28, 47, 50, 77, 109–10, 231 “One Glyph,” 16, 69

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Oral culture and tradition, 6, 19, 31, 188–92, 200–1, 207, 224–6, 228–30 Ovid, 27, 42, 232–54 Parmenides, 6, 10–11, 48, 91, 109–10 Petrarch, Francesco, 4, 6, 28, 110–11 Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, 9, 17, 19, 29, 35, 95, 156–60, 167, 173, 196 “Poem about Crystal,” 69, 71 polyphony, 8, 33–41, 101, 114–21, 134, 137–45, 147–53, 155–73, 231–54 post-colonial, 15, 43–4, 206, 233, 253–4 Pound, Ezra, 22, 26–30, 35, 66, 69 Presocratics, 5, 10, 16, 28, 46–50, 71, 109 “Ptahotep’s River,” 111 “A Quadratic Equation,” 108 The Raven Steals the Light, 13, 32, 94, 179 Reid, Bill, 8, 31–4, 36, 38–9, 94, 124–5, 134, 178–80, 196, 230, 232 “Sapsucker,” 16 Selected Poems, 10, 19, 62, 76, 171, 239 Sheffield, Miki, 26–7 The Shipwright’s Log, 9–10, 12, 25–6, 64–8, 88–90, 203 “Sinai,” 26, 68 Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, 6, 8, 14, 16, 31–3, 36, 41–2, 121–30, 189–91, 199–200, 228 Solitary Raven: The Writings of Bill Reid, 8, 196 “The Song of Ptahotep,” 28 “Song of the Summit,” 16–17, 68–9, 71, 77–82 “Song of Tzuhalem,” 112 Stevens, Wallace, 16, 28, 63, 78

“The Stonecutter’s Horses,” 28, 110–11 A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World, 5, 7, 13, 41–2, 122–6, 178–81, 184, 190, 195–215, 227, 231 “Study for an Ecumenical Window,” 69, 71 “The Sun and the Moon,” 64 The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada, 11–12, 94 “These Poems, She Said,” 17 Thomas, Audrey, 34, 155, 160, 162 “Three Ways of Looking at the Northwest Passage in the Shipyards of Bristol and Rouen,” 70

The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks, 10, 43 Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers and Dancers, 5, 10–11, 15, 43, 161, 231–54 Voices in the Land, 44 Zwicky, Jan, 16, 19, 41, 52, 99, 115, 139, 145

Index

265