The Art of Freedom by Earl Shorris

Author:Earl Shorris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Joe and I sat together at a dance performance in Chevak that afternoon, two chubby, balding fellows who didn’t dance. People from the village came to talk to Uyaquq. They spoke in Cup’ik and made gestures of reverence and gave him gifts of food and fresh seal oil. After he left on the afternoon flight, I spent the rest of the afternoon talking about Cup’ik ethics. What seems like animism to the uninitiated was told this way: If you are out on the tundra in winter and you see a piece of wood, turn it over so that it will dry in the sun, then the yua of the wood will return the favor to you. When I inquired further about the meaning of it, Tacuk explained that the dry wood might then be used by the next traveler to make a fire.

I slept in Chevak that night on the floor of the Kashunamiut School District building lying on one gym mat and covered over with two others. A local family fed me and drove me to the school seated on the metal bars on the back of a four-wheeler. It was very cold.

The next day, we met to discuss the course with potential students and teachers in Chevak. I rode again on the back of the four-wheeler, which was badly in need of some sort of cushion, but it was warmer in the sun, and I was glad for that and the sharpness of the air off the sea. I missed Joe. When he left, it was as if the world had been diminished. I looked out toward the sea, remembering that he had told me there were only two directions: toward the sea and away from the sea. Later, in a conversation about the ircinrrraq world, which is a C/Yup’ik idea of a miniature world, a kind of alternate reality, there was a question raised about the directions in that world. Were they the same as in the world in which the conversation was taking place or were they opposite? The ircinrrraq world is sometimes described now as meaning a place of little people, like Leprechauns, but the elders who came to teach in the Yaaveskaniryaraq version of the Clemente Course had an older, more sophisticated understanding of the ideas that had come to the people who lived and danced and told stories and worked magic in the low houses of the Cupiit.

As much as I listened and read, I could only understand a little of what went on around me. In the first meeting with the people who would teach and attend the course, a young man sitting next to me said of a much older woman sitting across the table, “I am her mother.” I nodded wisely, knowing that it was a joke on the Gussaq. But it was not a joke. Cup’ik kinship structures are so complex and so utterly unrelated to anything in the European culture that a young man could be the mother of an old woman.

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