Abstract
Most of the texts that stand behind the present chapter or find their way into it stem from the 1960s, but there are two that date from William Blake’s time. In The Book of Urizen, which he composed in 1794, immortals fall headfirst into the abyss of time and space with snakes coiled around their bodies (illustration 3). Each snake, traced downward from its tail, forms a clockwise helix. In Blake’s watercolorJacob’s Ladder, which he painted around 1800, the ladder is a stairway. The angels coming down walk a clockwise helix, while those going up walk a counterclockwise helix. At the top of the stairway is the sun.
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Notes
Dennis Tedlock, “Finding the Middle of the Earth,” Alcheringa 1 (1970): 67–80.
Dennis Tedlock, Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians (New York: Dial, 1972), 223–71. The title of the story in this book and a reprint edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978) is “The Beginning,” which is one way of translating the Zuni title, Chimiky’ana’kowa. A revised translation of the story, with the title rendered as “When Newness Was Made,” appears in Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 243–84, 295–318.
David Antin, “A Note on Poetry & Prose & Talking as Postscript to ‘Talking at Pomona,’ ” Alcheringa 4 (Autumn 1972): 44.
Charles Olson, Causal Mythology (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1969), 1.
Andrew Peynetsa, “The Boy and the Deer,” trans. Dennis Tedlock, in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, vol. 2, ed. Maynard Mack et al. (New York: W W Norton, 1995), 2122–38.
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© 2011 James Maynard
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Tedlock, D. (2011). The Story Told of What Cannot Be Told. In: Maynard, J. (eds) (Re:)Working the Ground. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119932_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119932_12
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