Survival of Humankind - Rattlesnake, Coyote, and Beuys

“But
They have forgotten the allness
Of the creation
In their eager quest of vanity”

How do we bridge the gap between the old world where humans were in harmony with the rest of creation -------- to the place we are now, where science leads the way, and the beauty of the world is destroyed and pushed back farther and farther to little side-pockets. How do we use our creativity in a positive way, and take it into our own hands?

--Rattlesnake – A Dialogue of Creatures

--Reckoning with Coyote


For Rattlesnake
A Dialogue of Creatures
Peter Blue Cloud
(each speaker is introduced by a voice)


snow plant, child of winter


see now the curving brownness emerging from snow
as earth her winter robe begins to fold,
a trickle of moisture
a gurgle then sand
rolling,
so like a pebble-filled gourd
clasped between hands
to mute to gentle murmur.
Then freshets sigh the hillsides
And stones to roundness tumble
Their praise


Cedar, oldest of trees:
Yes, my friend,
And dawn breezes lend me voice
My branches whisper
And sweet
My scent
Mingles your own breath
As we await the others


Woodpecker:

It seems then a short night and day
That berries have mantled
The mountain’s greenness,
Then bear-who-used-to-be, would…
(a long pause)


oak tree:

yes, brothers and sisters.
Bear, no more his soft and heavy walk
Bear, no more
His strange and sacred manner,


Woodpecker: (quickly)
Are we about to speak of THEM
Again?


Fox: (as a chanting)


I remember the last of bear’s tribe
Dragged
By fear-sweating horse
Foaming from whip and smell
Eyes rolling and bear
Great clots of blood

And the human a most awful smell
Of hate
And fear and lust
And the thought-pictures
Of his mind
Hurting all,
And we wondered at such cruelty
For his thought-pictures
Were of himself
Torn and devoured
By others of his likeness.


Squirrel:


Wasn’t this get together supposed to be for rattlesnake?
Hey, coyote, what of you,
Your silence is like a burr
Beneath my tail.

Coyote: (man in old long coat, floppy hat, long tail he strokes)


Yes, well,
Rattlesnake is on his way and should be here soon
And don’t forget
It’s said
That we are here to say
As long as one of us remains,
And…


Bluejay: (interrupting)


Who said that?

Coyote: (innocently)
Why, I guess I just did.

Lizard: (stamping his foot in agitation)


You know, this is beginning to sound like
A made-up lie and the liar
Don’t know what to say next.

A voice (of rattlesnake)
I am a manner
A custom
A tribal creature.

Coyote:
He’s here!

Rattlesnake: (emerging from concealment, carrying his head)
I come to you cut in half
And cut again headless
With strong heart beating a constant pulse
I crawl to you bloody
A nightmare of man’s genius




I too am springtime
Like my brother bear
For together we emerge
From sleep
To the cancers pounding feet
And the wormwood smell.
I rattle them a music of my nearness
But they fear my dance
And ax, or knife, or gun, is the feast
I am given.

I tell again of the creation
And beg the peace of their council
And name the many clans and tribes
That none be omitted.

I teach them the necessary lesson
Of alertness
Of mind and body every ready
For the tribal will
But
They have forgotten the allness
Of the creation
In their eager quest of vanity

I lie headless and bloody at their feet
Who am
Their former brother.
(begins to chant)
I dream bear
I vision bear
I call bear
We must all become bear.


Bear: (a dark mass, slowly shuffling in dance, four times in
circle, slowly, humming, as to himself, then pauses to speak)


they kill my body
they
skin me and leave my body
as in shame,
let us
then begin again the praise
forgotten by man.
Snow plant, please begin again.

Snow plant, child of winter
see now the curving brownness emerging from snow
as earth her winter robe begins to fold,
a trickle of moisture
a gurgle then sand
rolling,
so like a pebble-filled gourd
clasped between hands
to mute to gentle murmur.
Then freshets sigh the hillsides
And stones to roundness tumble
Their praise

Cedar, oldest of trees:
Yes, my friend,
And dawn breezes lend me voice
My branches whisper
A weeping as from an evil dream
Of creatures born of hate

Let us again
Then
Chant the evil back
Into earth’s womb
To be reborn
Or not
As will be.

All the voices:
Man no more
Look
He is fading
Man no more
See
He lies in dreaming,
Man no more
Forever
Let us forget the pain,
Man no more
Forever
Man no more
Forever
His bones of dust
The wind is taking
To scatter
To scatter
To scatter
To scatter.





"I Like America & America Likes Me"
Joseph Beuys



You could say that a reckoning has to be made with the coyote, and only then can this trauma be lifted.

For three days in May of 1974, Joseph Beuys lived and communicated with a coyote in a small room in the newly-opened Rene Block Gallery at 409 West Broadway in New York.

Coyote in America
Coyote, ululating on the hill,
is it my fire that distresses you so?
Or the memories of long ago
when you were a man roaming the hills.

Native American Coyote tales speak of a time long ago "when animals were people" and everyone communicate with each other.

During Sacred Time, the time of Creation, Coyote taught humans how to survive, and the incredible survival of the coyote, both mythologically and biologically, continues to be one of the great American mysteries.

Many people feel that the Vietnamese mistake was the first war that the United States didn't win. That isn't true. For forty-five years, Uncle Sam has fought a war against coyotes...and lost! In the years between 1937 and 1981, minions of the Fish & Wildlife Service scalped 3, 612, 220 coyotes. The ears with a connecting strip of skin were sent to a central tallying point as proof of their 'body count.' If my calculations are reasonable, coyotes suffered six million casualties in this war with Uncle Sam. Yet, we would have to admit that the coyotes have won the war.

Mythologically and biologically, Coyote is a survivor and exemplar of evolutionary change. This is what attracted Beuys to Coyote.

Like the American Indian, he was the Other in our midst, and we did everything we could to eliminate them both.

The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America.

The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. . . . Oglala Sioux Chief Luther Standing Bear in his autobiography, 1933

The American intelligence is an indigenous plumage. Is it not evident that America itself was paralyzed by the same blow that paralyzed the Indian! And until the Indian is caused to walk, America itself will not begin to walk... Jose Marti, "Autores americanos aborigenes," 1884

The Trauma
Coyote Old Man is a fine doctor, a great medicine man.

Beuys's intentions in the Coyote action were primarily therapeutic. Using shamanic techniques appropriate to the coyote, his own characteristic tools, and a widely syncretic symbolic language, he engaged the coyote in a dialogue to get to "the psychological trauma point of the United States' energy constellation"; namely, the schism between native intelligence and European mechanistic, materialistic, and positivistic values.
Arriving for his first and only action in America in an ambulance, with "Emergency" emblazoned across its front and marked with the red crosses so prevalent in his earlier drawings and paintings, Beuys left no doubt about the purpose of his trip. Wrapped I n a felt cocoon inside the ambulance, Beuys recalled his own myth of origin, in which he was shot down over the Crimea and rescued by nomadic Tartars, who wrapped him in insulating felt to warm him.






Here again, the artist journeys to another world (the New World) through ritualizing threshold rites. Again he is wounded and in need of treatment. The trauma is always double. The Coyote action is an updated version of the masked dance dating from the Upper Paleolithic. In 1974, a New York art gallery replaced the cave as temenos.

Beuys's "medicine" in this action consisted of his usual costume (felt hat and fishing vest), staff, flashlight, two large pieces of felt, a musical triangle, a pile of hay, and stacks of the daily Wall Street Journal.





Upon arrival in the room with the coyote, Beuys began an orchestrated sequence of actions to be repeated over and over in the next three days. A triangle is struck three times to begin the sequence. This triangle that Beuys wears pendant around his neck is the alchemical sign for fire (dry, fiery, choleric warmth), which ancient glacial Eurasian shamans sorely needed. It is also a sign for the feminine element (earthy & mercurial) and for the creative intellect, and it is the Pythagorean symbol for wisdom. Striking its three sides three times, Beuys calls himself, Coyote, and the Audience to order.

After the triangle is struck, a recording of loud turbine engine noise is played outside the enclosure, signifying "indetermined energy" and calling up a chaotic vitality. At this point, Beuys pulls on his gloves, reminiscent of the traditional bear-claw gloves worn by "master of animals" shamans such as those depicted on the walls of Trois Freres, and gets into his fur pelt/felt, wrapping it around himself so that he disappears into it with the flashlight. He then extends the crook of his staff out from the opening at the top of the felt wrap, as an energy conductor and receptor, antenna or lightning rod.

The conical shape of the felt resembles a tipi, the nomadic shelter which migrated from Siberia to North America with the hunters. Topped with the crooked staff, it also recalls both the stag and the shape of the lightning The felt enclosure doubles as a sweat lodge for Beuys, accumulating the heat necessary for transformation.
Beuys bends at the waist and follows the movements of the coyote around the room, keeping the receptor/staff pointed in the coyote's direction at all times.
When the beam of the flashlight is glimpsed from beneath the felt, we recognize the figure of the Hermit from the Tarot--an old man with a staff, holding a lighted lamp half-hidden by t he great mantle which envelopes him.







After awhile, Beuys emerges from the felt and walks to the edge of the room, marking the end of the sequence of gestures. There is a pile of straw, another piece of felt, and stacks of each day's Wall Street Journal in the room. Beuys sleeps on the coyote's straw; the coyote sleeps on Beuys's felt. The copies of the Wall Street Journal arrive each day from outside (like the engine noise) and enter the dialogue as evidence of the limits of materialist thinking.

Beuys's ongoing argument with materialism is what most clearly identifies him as an Anthroposophical artist. Following Rudolf Steiner, Beuys was not against materialism, per se. He valued it as a positive result of Christianity and recognized its historical necessity, but believed that humankind's survival depends on its letting go of materialism in order to move on to the next evolutionary stage.


http://bockleygallery.com/css/american_beuys.html



Rose for Direct Democracy (1973), one of his most famous multiples, consists of a single rose in a graduated cylinder. This simple image expresses the importance of uniting love and knowledge, passion and science.

[oneighty]

1. Nice

Bookmarked for later.

180

2. thanks

one reply is enough.

[newswolf56]

3. Thank you for posting this. In a truly sane world, each of us would...

begin and end our day by thanking nature for our being.

Cedar, oldest of trees:
Yes, my friend,
And dawn breezes lend me voice
My branches whisper
And sweet
My scent
Mingles your own breath
As we await the others

When I lived in the country, often the first sound I heard in the morning and always the last sound I heard at night was wind in ancient cedars.