Rivers and Rain

Ascension Week in the City

1. Rivers

Saturday May twenty-three two forty one pm a coffee shop on thirty seventh that’s randomly become my office spot whenever I’m down here, a chain coffee shop that’s attached to some office building, the music is too loud but I like how spaced out the tables and I’ve got good headphones, the perfect distance from A’s where I’m often posted at when I come down, far enough to feel “I walked somewhere” yet not too far that I can’t retreat back if I realize I’ve forgotten something, or for whatever other reason need to get back. And only here since it’s raining, this week has been hot and summery, have been working at the tables on the water, on the Hudson, the piers might be the most underrated area of New York City, abundant benches and grass and even full-on tables to sit at unmolested by the Capitalists. Residing in Vollmann Land these past months as I finished my Vollmann piece, and much of that final week before finishing it cocooned in the final third of Fathers and Crows, it gets really glorious around the five to six hundred page mark, up through Amantacha’s death on page 666, Amantacha was the first ever Native American Jesuit priest, the first to be baptized in a Church in France in the early 1600s, the son of a Huron chief, though Amantacha and the Huron people will get brutally extincted by the Iroquois with arquebuses given them by the other group of colonizers, the Hollanders, in I wanna say 1649, this is what Fathers and Crows winds inexorably towards over its near thousand pages, the final battle, after the fourth consecutive plague, between the Iroquois and the Huron peoples—

But so living in Vollmann Land in early Native American mode (in current day Quebec, Canada), and every month is a Native American Moon-month, Vollmann did all that work researching to put you into the Native American (and also the early Jesuit) headspace so seamlessly, what you realize reading from this time and place and outlook is how alive and prominent the rivers were not only for transportation and trade but as charged cosmic centers, spiritual portals, the rivers that flowed forcefully and directly to the Atlantic were the most important rivers, the Fleuve Saint-Laurent, the Susquehanna, the Hudson, and Vollmann draws a lot of these maps in Fathers and Crows, in all of his Seven Dreams books he does,

From Fathers and Crows (1992) by William T Vollmann

and finalizing the Walk Book for a limited release in a month, I recently redrew all the maps of every state I walked across, but emphasizing the main river in each state, we sleep on the fact that every squiggly border of a US state is a river or the coast.

In an ideal world, it wouldn’t be raining today, and I’d be back working by the Hudson River, like the priest king Amantacha; sometimes it be raining though.

2. Rain

Addendum on rain in Fathers and Crows: the Jesuit priests who pulled up on the Huron were essentially foreign shamans, they had to compete to convince the people that they had a connection to the divine, and the way they did this was not only by accurately predicting and protecting against plagues, but also by convincing the people that they controlled the rain, whoever controls the rain is chief shaman—

And like Amantacha letting the rivers guide my daily peregrinations — like I am now, back upstate, sitting on my back creekside porch rather than my front road-facing (covered) one — walking each day down along the water path rather than into Times Square, not cutting in till the West Village, hitting my second favorite coffee shop right there by the triangle park, not expecting you to come first thing all open and tearful after hitting you so measured and logistical, of course the darkness makes the lines between us blur but in those first morning moments at that sunblasted windowside Table of Light already caught right back in whatever we were in before, happily synced across from each other, roaming and stalling wherever, thinking up things I could do for you, only wanting a way to be useful to you, at what point are we being obstinate suffering needlessly staying only in the light—

A wet Mercurial Wednesday like another planet with its own physical laws its own meteorological designs how the heat pushed us out all day never let us stop for long enough to think about how we were moving, shepherded by the unrelenting Sun and the Humidity, taking twinned Phaethonian flight uptown to PC Richard’s and Sons and back to get you set up and cooled down—

And how the storm the Rain hit right when we’d sheltered and sat, like clockwork, like primeval Magic, commanding we stay moored on that island till it was Time, till the storm passed, so we wouldn’t rush, who did that, whoever controls the Rain is—

3. Born Underwater

Tehorenhaennion, the resident sorcerer-shaman of the Huron Peoples, as soon as the Black Gowns (the Jesuit Fathers) convince the tribe that they control the rain and the plagues, loses his job. His societal role, in an instant, turns obsolete. He’s suddenly just a crazy guy living on a hill. Enraged, he tries to do a curse on the Father Superior with a small figurine in the Father Superior’s image, an herbal firey concoction, only it somehow backfires and he gets sick and immediately dies (the Fourth Consecutive Plague).

It’s Amantacha’s lover and bestie Born Underwater who gets the last laugh, she has a supernatural priestlike aura since she is gifted with the power of “seeing-ahead” — she can tell the future, this being the other Frazerian claim to primitive divinity, predicting the rain and the plagues and telling of what will happen after you die are all forms of foretelling, “seeing-ahead” into, the future — not to mention she’s very alluring and mysterious, the Church Fathers are both threatened and enamored by her, when the Iroquois attack and wipe out the village, the Huron converts turn on them — the Fathers — and the last one there at the very end, relishing her removal of the Father Superior’s fingers one by one, as was the custom of torturing enemies back then among the Natives, is none other than their most prized convert, Born Underwater herself…

Born Underwater’s supernatural aura stems also from her dual birth: Robert Pontgrave, one of the initial crew of Jesuits to touch down in Canada in 1606, gets fixated on the chief’s daughter, Born Swimming, and one day tracks her down and takes and impregnates her in the woods; Born Underwater is here as a result of this violent and tragic consummation. She is of dual identity, the first of her kind. For all the current publishing industry’s disrespect of the great William Tanner Vollmann (for his archaic masculinity), he almost always has a supernatural mystical heroine in his books — Freydis, the daughter of Erik the Red, in The Ice Shirt — and he works hard to be able to get to that place of finding a heroine amidst the cockfighting carnage of human history, no easy task.

From The Ice Shirt (1990) by William T Vollmann

4. The Shining One

Eighty-eight into the Tale of Genji now, and Genji is a beautiful Shining Boy, the “Shining Lord,” or “Shining Genji,” also of tragic birth since the Emperor loved his mother too much, simped for her harder than was proper according to her station, causing jealousy among the court, causing eventually, some observers suggest, for her to fall ill and die of sorrow due to this castigation, and what is it with these ancient motifs I can no longer unsee since my year of reading in the monastery, Genji is from 1000 years ago almost exactly: born of tragic birth, exceedingly beautiful, the new Prince—

And Harold channeling years of work in uninterested stand-up rooms, weekly stacks, into that upstairs reading on Tuesday, the calibration between conversational charm, obscure literary talk, and decisive paternal guidance having that room in his palm of his hand, a triumph of years in the lab honing the message, a manifestation of the message—

Though still only two chapters in (of the 33 confirmed by the author, “Murasaki,” 54 counting those of contested authorship), we’re still just assessing how the different women in the Emperor’s court are and could be as lovers, I’m not sure where things will lead or if Genji will find her, Murasaki the heroine has yet to appear, and if Vollmann (who loved Genji) is any indication, the heroine will eventually supersede the hero. More on this the moment I find out.

---

5/27/26

[my full name at gee mail]