#pattern of myth

There had been an apple once. There had been an apple tree. When it gave no more apples, it made fire, and a slice of its trunk had become a bowl cut out into birds. The bowl unless it was turned into fire again, would stop growing and last forever. Things that came out of time, and were stopped; could be made over into another sort of time.

Geen sterveling, geen stad, geen avondrood bestaat voor hem. Hij komt gesneld van boven, zandstenen trappen af langs slangen koper. Hij ziet, schijnt het, een horizon, een zoom waaruit ononderbroken weerlicht gloort. Het is alsof hij hoort waarvan hij droomt en de plek ziet waar hij te vinden hoopt, zo snelt hij langs me, en ik voel mij doorboord. Hij loopt haastig de vestibule door. Hij hangt een sleutel op het sleutelboord. Een droge distel doet zich aan hem voor, hij grijpt zijn stok, hij wandelt fluitend voort. Hij dekt zich, ik echter ontbloot het hoofd: Wees hier, nogmaals, gij die op hoogten woont zo onbewoonbaar als Calvario.

The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds, came down from the stars, laden with its own creative enormity. It moved graciously – if you had been watching with the eyes of a bird hovering in the sky far above the ground. Looking down at the serpent’s wet body, glistening from the ancient sunlight, long before man was a creature who could contemplate the next moment in time. It came down those billions of years ago, to crawl on its heavy belly, all around the wet clay soils in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

three: unleaving Nine Weaving When a star falls, we do say: the Nine are weaving. Look!The Road's their skein, that endlong from the old moon's spindle is unreeled. Their swift's the sky. O look! says Margaret. The children of the house gaze up or glance. The namesakes. Look thou, Will. Look, Whin. They stitch your daddy's coat. The twins, still whirling in the meadow, seem as heedless as the light, as leaves. Now one and now the other one, they tumble down and down the slope, lie breathless in the summer grass. His mantle's of the burning gold, says Whin; and Will, His steed is January. I'm to have his spurs.

Well, pickney, what story I must tell allyou today? Tan-Tan, you say? You want a story about Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen; the Midnight Thief with the heart of gold; the woman who had was to save two life for every one she take; the exile on New Half-Way Tree, this prison planet? All right; I go tell oonuh a Tan-Tan story: this one name “How Tan-Tan Learn to Thief.”

According to the astrologer Evangeline Adams, America is born at 3:03 on the 4th of July, Gemini Rising. It is to be mercurial, restless, violent. It looks to the Philippines and calls gluttony the New Frontier. It looks to South America and intervenes in the internal affairs of its nations; piracy is termed "bringing about stability." If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole. If in the 1920s the British say "The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire," the American motto is "There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute."

Sheila Watson Greta was at the stove. Turning hotcakes. Reaching for the coffee beans. Grinding away James’s voice. James was at the top of the stairs. His hand half-raised. His voice in the rafters. James walking away. The old lady falling. There under the jaw of the roof. In the vault of the bed loft. Into the shadow of death. Pushed by James’s will. By James’s hand. By James’s words: This is my day. You’ll not fish today.

Tayo didn’t sleep well that night. He tossed in the old iron bed, and the coiled springs kept squeaking even after he lay still again, calling up humid dreams of black night and loud voices rolling him over and over again like debris caught in a flood. Tonight the singing had come first, squeaking out of the iron bed, a man singing in Spanish, the melody of a familiar love song, two words again and again, “Y volveré.” Sometimes the Japanese voices came first, angry and loud, pushing the song far away, and then he could hear the shift in his dreaming, like a slight afternoon wind changing its direction, coming less and less from the south, moving into the west, and the voices would become Laguna voices, and he could hear Uncle Josiah calling to him, Josiah bringing him the fever medicine when he had been sick a long time ago.