LIKE DISTANT STARS
mi hirim tasol singawt bilong yu
I WILL HEAR ONLY YOUR VOICE
em i-kamap na fal.
RISING AND FALLING.
Yu singim singawt bilong yu, em i-no gat frant, i-no gat ars.
YOU SING YOUR SOUND, IT HAS NO FRONT, HAS NO END.
Yet mi kichim tok long singawt yu sing.
YET I UNDERSTAND SOUND YOU SING.
NA mi sing wantaim lon yu.
NOW I SING WITH YOU.
Long wonam mi sing?. Mi no saevi.
WHY DO I SING? I DON'T KNOW.
NA mi sing tu.
238 ALICE HICKEY
NOW I SING ALSO.
After reading it several times, Alice said, “You’re right, it is the glue that holds the story together, that propels it forward.”
“Exactly. You simply have to watch a native speaking pidgin—or a very young child telling a story for that matter—to see how the rhythm is set up by the use of
‘and then’ or ‘and’ or ‘now’ or ‘but’. It’s so pervasive and so necessary to storytelling that the speaker always emphasizes it. I believe that was the beginning of rhythm.
“In reality, it may simply have been a gesture that first indicated: ‘and then’. But at some stage, very early humans began creating a new kind of sound—
words, names of things—and the word for ‘and then’ was probably one of the first.”
ALICE HICKEY 239
Chapter 49: Alice and the First Mother
March 2007, Sarasota
Alice had been particularly helpful in unwinding the labyrinth of The White Goddess and relating it to the myth . We were sitting in Starbucks one day when she said to me, “It’s a shame that Graves didn’t look at the Mother Goddess in Jungian terms, because it would have given him a useful structuring tool. God knows he could have used it.
“Archetypes form the way we see and know and act. We have no control over them. From Jung’s point of view, the Mother archetype is one of the most powerful archetypes in the collective unconscious. Under the right conditions, its effect upon our behavior and perceptions can be staggering. You have a mother, don’t you?”
“What kind of questions is that? Of course I have a mother. She’s been dead for some time though.”
“She may be dead, but she’s still with you. And so is her mother. And so is every other mother. Jung saw the Mother archetype as embodying all of our collective perceptions of the mother since time began.”
“You mean back to the First Mother—the one in Africa that everyone’s DNA points to?”
“That’s as good a starting point as any. It may go back to our animal mothers. But let’s not quibble. It’s our collective perceptions of the First Mother. Now add in the thousands and thousands of other mothers who came into being over the millennia. While you’re at it, add in the Mother Goddess, Graves’ White Goddess.”
“But that’s a psychic mother, not a physical mother.”
“Since when are you so picky? The psychic entity we call the Mother Goddess developed out of the physical mothers. That’s what an archetype is: a psychic entity that creates itself around our perceptions. It may even exist before our perceptions. The Mother Goddess, the White Goddess, is one aspect of the Mother archetype , but a very large aspect. In preliterate times, you could say they were one and the same.
“Archetypes are nothing more than psychic representations of collective memories. Why and when they are formed and how they are formed is a mystery, yet they play a critical role in how we see and act in the world. You can think of them as “human” instincts that developed to supplement our basic animal instincts, such as those associated with hunger and sex.
“One more thing—those archetypes sometimes take form and enter our consciousness to assist us. Why this happens and how and why they take a particular form is also a mystery, but they always come in a form that is comprehensible to us —a figure, a luminous presence, a voice. Got it?”
240 ALICE HICKEY
“Got it. You know, Alice, Graves says the Muse—the Poetry archetype—is another, later name for the White Goddess. Something tells me he’s right about that, but I can’t put my finger on why.”
“Why shouldn’t it be true? There's no reason why the Poetry archetype—the Muse—wouldn’t be associated with the Mother archetype . It was the First Mother who told the first stories—who was the first witness. Right?”
“Right. But how does she get to be the Muse?”
“The Muse is an archetype that must have developed very early, right along with the Mother Goddess archetype. I think you’re right in saying that the Muse began as an internal modification of the directive voices early humans heard. Those early directive voices, by the way, were most probably those of the Mother Goddess.
“I also can’t help but think that the ‘ more human, storytelling’ voices we experienced in that internal modification also incorporated the essential nature of a mother’s stories to her children, because our memories of those stories would have been such an essential part of the Mother Goddess archetype. After all, there is nothing more critical to human development than a mother telling stories to her children—and then encouraging them to tell those stories back— and listening to those stories to make sure the children understood what was said.”
“You know, Alice, it just occurred to me that at some later stage of our development, a division occurred, and the Muse part of the Mother Goddess archetype became a distinct archetype. You know what else just came to me?”
“I can only imagine.”
“I think that the feeling you had when you wrote the six poems you showed me—
the ones where the energy of prophecy merged with the energy of the poem—was probably very close to what those early humans felt before the Muse and Mother Goddess became distinct archetypes.”
“Franklin, your mother must have loved you—you can be one bright boy at times; did I ever tell you that? And you know what? It says to me that those particular poems were also prophetic in nature—just like mine were. Our memory of that is probably the reason why we continued to associate prophecy with poetry right up to the times of the Greeks and Romans.”
“Your mother must have loved you too, Alice. Anything else?”
“That’s about it on archetypes. What I really wanted to knock around with you was the First Mother’s first story. Any ideas?”
“Not really,” I replied.
“It’s a toughie, isn’t it? I suspect it was about something of immense importance to her—perhaps the day she discovered she was different. Not smarter than her animal companions, or a better hunter, or a stronger fighter, but different in a whole new way. So here’s the question—what happened that made her realize she was different?”
“I have no idea.”
“Come on Franklin. Live a little.”
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“Well, she’d look the same as everybody else, so she wouldn’t know she was different until something happened that made it evident, but I have no idea what.”
“Franklin, I’m embarrassed at how thick you can be. Wake up and listen to your mother Alice—it happened when she tried to tell the others her first story and they didn’t understand a thing she was saying. I’ve had that experience with you several times by the way.”
“Keep rubbing it in Alice.”
“Oh, stop being so dramatic—you’re a regular Streisand, you know that? Listen to me—imagine the First Mother is 12 years old—old enough to mate and hunt. But what she doesn’t know is that she’s feeling something the others don’t.”
“And what is that?” I shot back.
“A mysterious—and extraordinary—longing for something, but she doesn’t know what that something is. Nor can she tell those around her what she’s feeling, can she now?”
“No. She can’t.”
“And why is that, Justin?”
“OK, OK, knock it off, will you Alice? It’s because she doesn’t know how to describe that entirely new feeling, let alone why she’s feeling it. She doesn’t know yet that the mysterious longing she is feeling is pulling her towards a momentous step—reaching back into memory and creating a story.
“She doesn’t know yet that she is capable of creating a story, or even what a story is. Nor does she have any way of knowing that she will be released from that longing as soon as she opens her mouth. She doesn’t yet know that unlike her animal brothers and sisters—who can only howl and bark and yelp—that she can step out of time and create a story—a little world describing what is happening to her.
“But she’s not completely lost. She does know something. She intuitively senses that the mysterious longing she’s feeling is related to the mysterious, invisible interest in her she’s been feeling for years.
“It’s a very different kind of interest, though. It’s not the killing interest of an animal stalking her, or the rising sexual interest of a male in the group. It’s something like the interest of her mother, and she finds herself drawn to it, but she doesn’t know how to get to the source of that interest. It’s invisible. Do I have to go any further?”
“No, of course not; she’s become aware of the Listeners,” Alice replied , “ but she has no name for them yet, only a sense of something invisible that is interested in her feelings in and of themselves. I think you were right when you told me the Listeners represent the animal consciousness we left behind when we acquired human consciousness. How did you put it? When we became conscious, our animal consciousness became our unconscious. We could feel its presence, its interest in us, but we couldn’t see it or touch it.”
“I don’t know why,” I replied, “but I’ve always imagined the creation of human consciousness as a split, a tearing apart, something like the internal cell modification and division you see in cancer, with some part of our animal 242 ALICE HICKEY
consciousness becoming human consciousness, and the other part becoming what we call our unconscious.
“I see the split as happening very quickly. Our first consciousness may have been very weak compared to our unconscious, but what keeps coming to me is that all the basic mechanics were there, and by that I mean the ability to witness, to observe and report, to make stories. I don’t see that evolutionary jump as a gradual biological process over millennia.
“I have no way of proving this of course—it’s simply a very strong intuition. While it’s very likely that our early consciousness with its ability to witness was extremely tentative and fragile—most probably we were continually slipping back into our old animal consciousness and then re-emerging from it—I see our basic ability to create stories as coming into existence with all the elements intact. Partial witnessing doesn’t make any sense—at least to me.
“Our ability to witness—to create narrative worlds out of memory—is such an unprecedented evolutionary jump that all our evolutionary theories pale before it. How it occurred—and why it occurred—is simply a mystery. Seeing it as a series of accidental, partial leaps over millennia doesn’t necessarily make it any less mysterious. If anything, it makes it more mysterious because witnessing is made up of such a complex continuum of reflexive interactions.”
“I hate to tell you this Justin, but if a scientist heard us talking like this, picturing the first human coming into being fully intact and suddenly telling stories, they’d go ape, if you’ll excuse the pun. Things don’t happen like that, they’d tell you, they happen gradually, step by step.”
“That’s because they’re prejudiced towards a tedious kind of truth, whereas we’re prejudiced towards a miraculous kind of truth. Besides, we’re talking about a simple conceptual model. We’re not trying to rewrite evolutionary theory.
Einstein used the same simplified, conceptual thinking to help him get a gut feel for the nature and effects of relativity.
“He used to imagine there was nothing in the universe except him riding on a broomstick next to a beam of light. Then he’d let his mind wander as to what would happen to him (and the broomstick) as he approached, maybe exceeded, the speed of light. His was not a “real” picture of the world anymore than ours is, but it helped him to get to the essence of the situation. If that kind of thinking was good enough for Einstein, it should be good enough for us.
“Yet no matter how witnessing actually did evolve, just how mysterious and unique it was can be seen in the fact that it has never been duplicated in any way whatsoever by any other biological form. There’s nothing that even remotely approaches it. Some people will tell you that animals can tell stories—such as the so-called “stories” the buzzing, wiggling bees tell each other regarding the location of new pollen.
“Unfortunately, it’s always the same story, told the same way except for the wiggled direction to the pollen. There is no variation in structure or tone, no imagined world, no sense of triumph or sorrow. It’s not a story—it’s instinctive, specialized communication as to the location of prey. Let me put it this way—no
ALICE HICKEY 243
animal ever wiggled or barked or squeaked, ‘Once upon a time, ’ or anything close to it.
“I know I’m ranting, but I hate the way human evolution is treated nowadays. To put witnessing in the same basket as fins becoming fingers is to be blind to the true magnificence of what it means to be human. I know most people think my suggestion that our witnessing came into existence full-blown like Topsy is crazy, but we have to remember our first witnessings weren’t John Updike stories. They were probably something like: ‘I saw him I was sad, ’ and even that might be stretching it. But they were stories, no matter how crude they might seem by our standards.
“The myth suggests the same thing about witnessing, but it is very slippery as to how, or why, our ability to witness evolved. The myth simply tells us—
without giving any of the details—that our becoming aware of the Listeners was coterminous with the emergence of our human consciousness: ‘When the Listeners came / we changed. / We became Witnesses.’
“From that point in time we were able to express ourselves in a startling new way—not by simply declaiming our immediate emotions, which is what animals do, but by stopping time: by reflexively reaching into memory and creating a story—a little world—that reflected how we feel.”
“You know, Franklin, what keeps coming to me is that our two minds must have worked together from the very beginning—almost as if in the process of tearing away, they spread tendrils into each other to stop the splitting from going all the way. That way, the two minds could feed each other. If they hadn’t, human evolution might have stopped dead in its tracks. The conscious mind by itself isn’t much. It’s just the surface of a very deep lake. We would have been easy prey for just about anything.”
“The Witnesses Log says something about that, Alice. It says our conscious and unconscious minds—the Witnesses and the Listeners—are bound to each other by unknowable promises. I can’t help thinking the promises involved some kind of agreement between the two that they would never leave each other. The tendrils you sensed may represent that.”
“I’m sure of it, Franklin, I also keep getting that if those tendrils are ever completely sundered, if the promises are ever broken, it would be the end of the human race as we know it. The villain would most likely be the conscious mind, wouldn’t it? After all, human consciousness is a very ingenious baby. If we ever found a way of completely isolating ourselves from the unconscious, we’d find ourselves in the worst nightmare imaginable. We’d be completely lost. The unconscious is the gateway that allows us to know what is true, or beautiful, or honorable, or hateful. We’d be paper figures blown about by uncontrollable winds. We’d have no anchor. We’d be worse than animals.”
She looked at me for a moment like she was momentarily lost. “You know, I 244 ALICE HICKEY
forgot what we were talking about.”
“It was about the First Mother’s first story.”
“Oh, right. What do you think it was?” she asked.
“It was about her being different from her brothers and sisters, remember?”
“But how do we really know that was her first story?”
“Alice, we’re making this up, remember? Historical accuracy isn’t the point.”
“I know we’re making it up, Mr. Fine Hairs—Oh was Jane right about that—but the fact of the matter is the first story could have been about something else entirely.”
“Alice….”
“Relax, Franklin—I’m still feeling my way. You know, despite your merciless crushing of those poor bees, there are some very credible people who wouldn’t agree with you. They’re sure animals can tell stories because of that gorilla in Atlanta who can link together sounds or symbols to say things like, ‘Kinko hungry for banana.’”
“I know—but Kinko’s not making stories Alice. Kinko is simply expressing her present hungry state. A story is much different. A story begins— This happened, or Once upon a time. It means stepping out of the present and reaching back into memory to create a little world—a story—a miraculous narrative linking of symbols that expresses our feelings about something.
“You might say Kinko is something like we were when the myth says ‘ We were like moss on the mountainside/ waiting for the sun.’ I bet if Kinko had her way—and not her trainer’s way—she’d rather point to the banana—or grab it.”
“Wait a minute, Franklin—I have it. The First Mother’s first story had to do with hunting!”
“Alice, please…”
“I’d have given anything to have heard it!”
“Alice, for Christ sake, what is it with you? Calm down.”
“I am calm. But you’re right—we really don’t have any way of knowing what the first story was. So let’s just say it was about her awareness she was different. She must have lifted out of herself— Heaven blazing into her head as you like to say—in creating that story.”
“No doubt about it; and you know, Alice, it may have been done entirely with her existing animal vocabulary. But who knows, maybe entirely new sounds and gestures came to her, because we’re in the midst of such a mysterious act that anything could have happened. Right?”
“Right.”
“But that’s not the important thing, is it Alice?”
“Oh you’re are a sly one, you are. You almost got me there, using my own words to knock me.”
“Alice, have you been drinking again?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“OK, OK, you’re right. It isn’t. What I was trying to say was that the really
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important thing was no one understood her. Her story would have been completely unintelligible to her animal siblings. It would be like me talking to Jane’s dog. What she had done was beyond her understanding—the sounds and gestures she had always known had somehow allied themselves with memory and arranged themselves to create something entirely new: a story— a little world with a beginning, middle and end.
“It just happened. She wouldn’t have been aware of any of this, only that she had done something entirely new, something that had released her from that intense longing and moved her to an ecstatic state. If she understood anything, it was that the she had somehow created that ‘little world’ within herself. And here’s the other important thing: she sensed she could recreate it, add to it, anytime she wanted to, because it was hers.
“She must have been as terrified and ecstatic as she had been in her first mating—and completely confused as to why the others had walked away. After a number of tries, she would have given up, completely baffled, almost crazy that what made sense to her and lifted her into ecstasy was incomprehensible to the others. You know, I sometimes get that feeling when I read my poetry at bookstores.”
“Of course you do, you little darling. But it’s really the same thing isn’t it? You said so yourself—that our very first stories, our very first words, were poems—
that they rose unbidden out of the unconscious in a moment of ecstasy.”
“I can’t see it happening any other way. In a way, Emerson thought so too. He sensed that the act of poetry begot language. ‘ Language is fossilized poetry,’ is the way he put it.
“You know what, Alice? I was just picturing the First Mother retelling her story over and over about her knowing she was different—and getting absolutely nowhere—and then one day looking out of the corner of her eye and seeing some younger male, maybe a brother, looking back at her with a gleam of recognition.
Isn’t that eerie?”
“It would have been one glorious day, Franklin, because what you’d be looking at is Eve and Adam, in that order, don’t you think? In time, there would be more and more gleams. Is there any doubt that story would have been told over and over to other humans as they were born? And is there any doubt that eventually that same story—that first genesis story—would be repeated over thousands of ensuing generations?
“Think of it: because of her you were a human being, a storyteller, a witness, and not an animal. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that these stories would eventually give rise to a much richer Mother Goddess archetype—
one that would also include her as storyteller— as Muse.”
“You know, Alice, what I hadn’t realized—until you put it all together for me just now—is that those first stories about the First Mother knowing she was different—that she was the creator of the human race—was also the soil out of 246 ALICE HICKEY
which the Mother Goddess archetype and the Muse archetype eventually grew. It also explains why the Muse has always been intuitively sensed as a female, don’t you think? It verifies Graves’ thesis that the Mother Goddess and the Muse were once one and the same.”
“To tell you the truth,” Alice replied, “I’ve always felt Graves hit the nail right on the head. I could feel it. Then one day, after you spoke to me about the Muse’s
‘more human’ voice, I imagined I was at the very beginning of the human race, before there were any Gods, and there was only the First Mother and her young offspring. Some would have been human, some not. In the very beginning, it would have been like that because she would have had to mate with an animal.
“I realized then that one of the ways the First Mother would have been perceived by her offspring would be as the One who told her children stories, who knew the truth and, most especially, who always listened to their responses to see if they understood— to see if they were human or animal. ”
“Jesus, Alice, that's goddamn eerie.”
“Isn’t it though? You know what else?”
“What?”
“I’m tempted to make one of those equations you’re so crazy about.”
“What equations?”
“Like the one you showed me to explain Jung’s statement that God, the unconscious, and the soul are terms describing essentially the same thing. I remember you showing it to me one day. It was quite impressive. You wrote it out like this,” and here she scribbled out on a piece of paper: God <=> Soul <=> Unknowable <=> Unconscious
“It’s the mathematician in me. I can’t help it.”
“I must be losing my mind to even do this,” Alice quipped, “but I had a dream I should be communicating with you in ways you’d understand more easily. You know, the way a mother will break down complicated things like sex, so her kids will understand it without freaking out about daddy’s big one?”
With this she started cackling so wildly tears came to her eyes.