Mrs. Wilsons True Tales Retold

Chicago was rebuilt. The Palmer House was rebuilt immediately. Reopened in less than two years, it was built bigger—three-times bigger—and more ostentatious, more luxurious than ever: oversized over-decorated suites; a grand restaurant with a thirty-foot ceiling which spangled gilded plaster Beaux Arts garlands, scrolls and festoons, where frescos of Louis Quatorze pastorals chromed the walls, where enormous crystal chandeliers dazzled, where the best-dressed and best-mannered of society were humbly served sumptuous meals by tuxedoed negro staff. The floor of the Palmer House barbershop was tiled with silver dollars. Rudyard Kipling would shortly visit. “They told me to go to the Palmer House,” he said. “A gilded and mirrored rabbit-warren,” he exclaimed “…. and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble, crammed with people talking about money and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each

(corresponding to “Southwest Wind...”) Wind is a word we took from Norsemen when they invaded England in the ninth century.Window is another word that we took from these Norse invaders, and which contains the word wind, and is related to it. Window is a word in two parts – wind and o – meaning literally the “wind eye.” The prevailing winds of our ancestral Britain and our North America, or for that matter any place that is north of the 35th parallel latitude, are the southwest winds. Notoriously these are winds of our spring and our fall. This is the western wind of Shelley’s Ode. O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being    Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead  Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,      Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,  Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou          Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed    The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,    Each like a corpse within its grave, until  Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow 

We are aware of consciousness in many forms, including that which is not conscious, which we call sleep, where time is forgotten. If remembered for its moments, it is the remembrance we call dreams and these seep back into that forgetfulness like water into sand and so often disappear. If we remember anything, it is remembrance of the remembrance.There are also the simultaneities of consciousness of which we are aware, the many moving parts of ourselves—sensations, perceptions, within, without—and finally the engineer, the pilot to the motion, attending to the machinery of it, the signals demanding decision and coordination. Our actor. The actor is our presence of mind, at least that is the billing he gets. If he is incoherent, then so am I. If out of his mind, so am I.But what is mind? What is presence of mind? A will? Not merely. A coherent thought? Not always. Logic? Language? Not always. Although it is difficult to distinguish mind from thought in words, since thought in words is how we understan

(corresponding to “The Bird-Headed Woman”) Aq!asXe’nasXena, the name of the one whom I call the Bird-headed Woman in my rendition, is an untranslated name, now untranslatable name. To what it refers was not known by Boas or his confidant, Charles Cultee. So too, the name of the boy in the story is an untranslated, untranslatable name, Itcixia’ne, which name was given to him at the end of the story. It is suggested by Boas parenthetically that this name pertains to the strange celestial phenomenon, called sundogs or (in Greek) parhelion, which is the meteorological appearance of a frost-ringed sun, or if the sun is setting, the appearance of a sun with paired orbiculate ghosts beside it, equidistant on either side, at the span of the horizon.... and that rare phenomenon
The iridule--when beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range….(From Vladimir Nabokov's introduction to his 1962 novel Pale Fire)Like frenetic hallucination, the tale is disjointed, nervous and bizarre; it lurches sickly, ar

In which we encounter early inhabitants to Wisconsin, before the advent of logging, cities, and steamboats.

(corresponding to “Jack and Beulah”) A creature like a rabbit, whose heart beats so rapidly that he must see details in motion which for me are a blur, must hear whispers in the brush across the span of large meadows, even when the wind is blowing, has reflexes and agility that I cannot imagine—anticipating harm before it strikes, he is gone before I can start to think. Because of this keen intensity, he must be so much more happy when he is happy, so much more enthusiastic, excited in how he feels, than we are, the dull and the plodding and the ordinary types. His leaping is breath-taking; he exults; he is heroic. The rabbit is not timid at all. Don’t mistake it for timidity, because he runs away—that is his gift and gaiety—and many are so jealous of him, they want to eat him, so they can become just like him. Children are like this, and some who have not grown up. They go like bees about us, so fast and energetically, we think they will ignite by the heat of it, while we prefer our sofas and our snacks

In which we learn how Mr. Kite and Mr. Boyd met one another and assumed the sobriquet Even and Odd, famous for the vaudeville act under that name, once featured at the New Alsatia theatre of Chicago, and how it happened that they should eventually become wanderers of the north woods, vagabonds for venison.

(corresponding to “Topping the Bill”) At end of the Nineteenth century, Joseph Pujol was presented to Parisians by the Moulin Rouge for his incomparable performance of farts. In French he was called Le Petomane; translated into English, the “Fartiste”. Finely dressed in a red coat and black satin breeches with a vent for his buttock, gesturing for effect with white-gloved hands, he explained with deadpan to the audience that his emissions were completely odorless, since he irrigated his colon daily. He opened his act with fart impressions: a new bride’s timid toot; her long-winded emission after her first night of connubial pleasures; the booming fart of a miller; and the imitation of a dress maker tearing two-yards of calico—a ten-second-rip. He did impressions of famous people and blew out candles and the gas footlights from yards away. He exploded like cannon fire and thundered like a storm. And that was just the first half of the show. For the second half he retreated offstage and discretely inserted a

In which we learn about Lynch when he was a small boy, and how it came about that he becomes a traveling man, and took to selling Bibles.

The conclusion of the tale of Lynch when he was a small boy.

(corresponding to “Granny Goody’s Hairy Lips”) If my tale of “Granny Goody’s Hairy Lips” may be off-putting by some of its imagery, the tale of “Panther and Lynx,” upon which it is based, shall seem grotesque. A lynx and panther lose the fire they keep and Lynx goes out to steal some. He finds an old woman with fire. He steals a firebrand from her. When he does, the old woman notices it and spreading her legs, she looks at her vulva and accuses it of taking the firebrand, and strikes her vulva with another firebrand. This is very strange. In the end a series of grizzly bears, who are the old woman’s sons, seek out the lynx to punish him for taking the firebrand. By our understanding of the normal grammar of myth, some of this is not difficult to address. Animals in fables are a motif we have heard, and in the first instance this seems a classic tale, the theme of the taking and making of fire. This much we can make out. But the old woman striking her vulva with a firebrand and accusing it of taking fire

Ferdnand Thieman, 10 years old, jumped into a cistern and drowned himself because his sister wanted him to go on an errand. The mother conducts a home for aged Germans at Wauwatosa, and was away at the time.Badger State Banner26 January 1899Musical excerpt: “Music Box” by Philip Glass from the movie Candyman

(corresponding to “Cecelia and Crab”) It shall be apparent on the reading that my rendition has only passing similarity to that which was originally told by Mrs. Wilson, “The Seal and the Crab.”My tale—which I have named “Cecelia and Crab”—is a vignette of mystery. It evokes the uncertainty of human society, featuring two innocents, who have been cast into a world which is naturally good and beautiful but where human nature may be cruel and ugly. Nothing is more sinister than an evil child, as encountered here, for it is certain then that evil is not merely acquired but shall be innate and compulsive.Mrs. Wilson’s tale is a fable of animals in the common tradition. It is little more than chatter about their animal habits and manners. But there are presumptive intimations in the tale concerning human nature and how humans are perceived and experienced by animals such as these. Some of the events, especially the quirky mingy behavior of Blue Jay at the end of the Mrs. Wilson’s tale, is told in phrasing so s

In which we learn of the origin of Mr. Minx, who was not known by any other name than this surname or given name, as it may have happened to be, and how Minx met P (eldest brother of Lynch) and how that saved him

(corresponding to “Adventures in a Wobbling World”) This tale is typical of the characteristic disjunctiveness of oral storytelling, what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss likened to bricolage. Most often this characteristic is evident in the concatenation of commonplace motifs or recurrent techniques—how things often happen in threes, for example—or in the artificial incorporation of popular vignettes, which the storyteller has retold for new, although borrowed and old (howsoever artfully adapted). In this tale the disjunctiveness is featured with a fractured episodic plot; as if the whole tale were actually a collation of several unrelated tales. Its nominal characters sustain its continuity, but only barely, the tale as a whole lacks coherence in theme or logic and integrity to its plot. Its incoherent transitions will seem contrived, gratuitous, and inadequate to our aesthetics. Conceivably, these several episodes were traditionally related about the Mink and simply grouped for the occasion, as a comp

In the coveting guidance of the seasons, as it is taught by sacred literature, the turning of moldering and fertility embraces us, her celebrants, and we are taken by suddenness, by adventure, by intentions that we feel must overwhelm. The man who must wander, the woman who must escape, the child who must hide, the flower that grows or dies, the rain falling, the snows melting—all the shriveling and burgeoning, the lush or desiccated, the frail or lustful, bursts and breathless goes, and goes on….Music excerpt is the song “Somebody’s Gone...” from the album Hand-Me-Down Music: Old Songs, Old Friends - Vol. 1 Traditional Music of Union County, North Carolina

(corresponding to “The Berry Girls....”) Once again, we are presented with a story that is told with presumptions and intimations that are beyond our aesthetic or our common experience, and so we may not understand what is being said. Once again, I have interjected clarifications to state some presumptions and intimations explicitly.There are always such presumptions and intimations in art. These are often derived from the norms of society or our accustomed conceptions of reality, which are so implicit or logical that we do not explain them. These are also sometimes technical conventions in the art. In film art, for example, the sequence of shots exploits implicit ideas of the storytelling. A cut to another scene is presumed to be simultaneous parallel action, if it is abrupt and cues the logic of the plot; but a slow dissolve from one to another scene, where another set of subtle intimations suggest to the viewer a significant change in time and place, makes for different logic—the flash-back. When cro

(corresponding to “Boss Boil....”) In an exception to the rule, Mrs. Wilson’s tale shall in this case precede my own rendition of it, partly so that my rendition may conclude this collection, but more importantly so that the distinctive parallels between this tale and my rendition may be known to you before you read it. This tale is a love story of a kind, not sentimental, but its passions are strong. During the life and times of Mrs. Wilson a woman was a commodity of the tribe, not perhaps more than any other person, whose value as a person is principally social, but we see that a woman shall be given as a wife in transactions that are not matters of love, and that she is not diminished therefore, nor necessarily unhappy for it. Nonetheless erotic compulsions matter too. The relations of men and women are not only practical. Men will compete jealously for women; they will kill one another for the possession of them. Women in turn will play men for their own desires and advantages.

In which, the last tale told, we learn how P travels to Peshtigo to find work and finds terror and passion in a meld he did not want, circumstance and consequence fused, and the molten amalgam of Fate.

The tale continues.The image from Edward Burne Jones, “Perseus and Andromeda.”Music is “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads, found on this album.