Coyote Anthropology

2. Expersonation: The Coyote of Anthropology

2 | expersonation The Coyote of Anthropology Roy: “This is a coyote tale told to Frank Hamilton Cushing by the Zuni people.” Coyote: “And, of course, thoroughly spoiled by You-Know-Who.” Two RAVENS were racing their eyes. They were sitting on a bluff, detaching their eyes from their sockets (craack—POP) and sending them flying around the landscape. FOR FUN. Feeling the distances and perimeters of things. Then they would fly them back and secure them (POP—craack) back into their sockets. COYOTE had never seen such a sight before; he was curious , he was delighted, and he was yellow. He trotted over to the RAVENS and said “teach me that trick; teach me how to race my eyes.” “Oho,” said the RAVENS, and “Aha,” said the RAVENS. “Eyes bigger than your stomach, hey?” “You don’t know the half of it.” “Well, my legs get sort of tired, trotting around like this, and would I could fly my sight around the whole friggin’ landscape, and but stay in one place, like you.” “Well, in that case,” said the corvine competitors, those that Two Crows could not deny, “do it like this: (craack—POP) see? And (craack—POP) see?” “Done and done,” said COYOTE, and his eyes took off, flying all around the place, sniffing all the rocks and crevices, DAWG NABBIT you know. COYOTE waited and waited, anxious for a little insight, but in point of fact the eyes never came back. 48 Expersonation “Aha,” said the RAVENS, and “Oho,” said the RAVENS. “We’ll help you find them.” (In RAVEN talk this means “Nevermore .”) Find them they did, goggling about, and in point of fact they ATE them, then went on their merry way. After a while COYOTE began to get the gist of it, or at least the punch-line (like: SOCKET TO ME!), and he started, feeling blindly, to recover his missing orbs. He groped and he groped (“Aha” and “Oho”), and when he found some squish things under a bush he screwed them (squish—squish—PLOP) back into his sockets. But they were only scrawny little yellow berries , and since then COYOTE has only looked with a squint, with very weak, yellow eyes. Roy: “The eye, they say, is not part of the body.” Coyote: “What is this, folklore?” Roy: “No, folklore is the kind of thing folks pretend not to believe in, so it must be true. In a certain highly important sense one may say that the body—or what is called embodiment—is really part of the eye, since all the significant details whereby the visual is confused with reality are actually re-projected within the eye.” Coyote: “So then the eye and its field of vision are parts of the same figure-ground reversal, given that the eye cannot see itself and is never within its own field of vision (though that field of vision is always within the eye). Same perspective; different perspex.” Roy: “Yup, in anthropology they call this ‘perspectivism,’ but in perspective they call it ‘anthropology.’ What the one impersonates the other expersonates, and vice-versa. See, the eye is like the objective lens of a telescope or movie projector, in which the whole encompassing image—of anything—is twisted around and inverted on itself, actually reduced to an infinitesimal point, before it can be spread out again into a meaningful picture.” Coyote: “Lak mamaran, literally ‘luck in the double-focus,’ is how the Barok people of New Ireland put this when they want to wish someone well. It is like the Aleph that Jorge Luis Borges writes about, the possibility that, since all meaningful details The Coyote of Anthropology 49 must be contracted to an infinitesimal point in the act of perception , all of them actually are, and that single point exists somewhere on this earth.” Roy: “Whereas we know for a fact that it exists everywhere, in every possible contingency, given that the eye belongs to the body quite as much as the body belongs to the eye. So it may be that we are talking about the soul—that otherwise mysterious quality —instead of the simple thing we call vision.” Coyote: “And that would mean that the actual physical body itself is part of that vision, tactility and all—all the senses in a single focus. Like that amazing example of physiognomic tact that Jeffrey Clark reported for the Wiru people of Papua...