She-Fire: A Safari into the Human Spirit

© Copyright 2012 Mary Jean Irion.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4669-2097-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-2098-9 (e)

Trafford rev. 05/30/2012

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WITH THANKS

to five enduring experiences

that are still enriching the last half of my life

Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, 1964, ’66

Middlebury College Summer Campus, Vermont

Chautauqua Institution

Especially Writers in Residence at Fernwood,

Chautauqua, NY

Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture

Mobile, but usually in NYC

Hierophants: Twelve women meeting monthly for lunch, reading/discussing fine literature, Lancaster, PA

The Poetry Circle

Willow Valley Cultural Center, Lancaster, PA

Contents

WISE WORDS

A Collection of Quotations

THE SUMMONS

Only in That Voice Was the Lion Free

PACKING FOR SAFARI

Make Room for Elephants

LEAVING HOME, LEARNING NEW WAYS TO SEE

Day

1 BIRDS BEGET PLANES AND I GET HIGH ON SKY AND BLUE

2. STRETCHED FROM NANCY TO BERYL MARKHAM

3 AARTHOGS WIN BEAUTY CONTEST

4 WHITE MINDS DIPPED AND TIE-DYED IN BLACK NAIROBI

THE JOURNEY OF THE MIND

5 THE SCAR, THE WILD MADONNA, MOUNTAIN LODGE

6 FROM LODGE TO BLUE GOD TO CATFIRE

7 ZEBRAS ARE THINKERS AND NANCY JUMPS HIGH

8 DIKDIKS, FLAMINGOS AND GIRAFFES: THE PROTECTED LIFE REMEMBERED

9 FROM HIPPOS TO HELL’S GATE

10 HUMANFIRE, FLIES AND FIREFLIES

THE JOURNEY OF THE BODY

11 GODFIRE 1: LIONS

12a GODFIRE 2: BUFFALO

12b GODFIRE 3: EARTH LANGUAGE

13 LEAVING THE RIFT VALLEY

14 FIRE IN THE MOUNTAIN

15 FIRE IN THE HORN

THE MARRIAGE OF RELIGION AND POETRY

16 Fire In The Thorns, The Bones, The Words

17 She-Fire

Textual Notes

Acknowledgments

The Elephants Of Kitum: A Study of Interpretation

Mountain Lodge: Old Myth and New Church

The Crowing Of The Cock

In Ways You’ll Never Know

Releasing The Animals Into The New World

The Glossary

WISE WORDS

We have had too much talk of sheep. I want to see the lions come out.

—Teilhard de Chardin

It is only by living completely in this world that one learns how to have faith.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Women cannot confine themselves to short sections of time or separations of fields, which give established scholarship its illusion of total mastery of its subject.

—Rosemary Radford Reuther

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

—Meister Eckhart

Freedom is the right not to lie.

—Albert Camus

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

—Albert Einstein

Connectedness is the essence of all things. No fact is merely itself.

—Alfred North Whitehead

Any approach to problems must begin by making connections.

—Norman Cousins

The deliberate conjunction of disparate items which we call metaphor is not so much a way of understanding the world but a perpetually exciting way of recreating it from its own parts… It is a way of putting the world together according to rules which one never fully understands, but which are as powerfully compelling as anything in the whole human makeup… A poet is ‘one who feels the world as a gift.’

—James Dickey

Meaning is not in things but in between; in the iridescence, the interplay; in the interconnections; at the intersections, at the crossroads. Meaning is transitional as it is transitory; in the puns or bridges, the correspondence.

—Norman O. Brown

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence; any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature… To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional individual phenomenon is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.

—Erich Fromm

Not talking about sex does not make it go away, and the lack of discourse about sexuality is not a stable situation… Finding a vision of sexuality commensurate with the significance of sex in people’s lives remains monotheism’s unfinished agenda.

—Tivka Frymer-Kensky

". . . In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and Earth.

"Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.

"To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.

"All people, all living things, are part of the Earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.

To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible. To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.

—Starhawk

What is man without the beasts?

If all the beasts were gone,

Men would die from a great loneliness of spirit.

For whatever happens to the beasts,

Soon happens to man.

All things are connected.

—Chief Seattle

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. Evil comes about because good people stand by and do nothing.

—Barack Obama

It is not important that the Universe relate to me. As far as I know, the Universe doesn’t even know my name. But it is all-important that I relate to the Universe.

—John Ciardi

Parenthetically: Inside our family of three (1922-1944)

You’re as good as any man, and don’t you ever forget that, said Carrie Watson McElfresh, my smart grandmother, who was the youngest of twelve children growing up on a tobacco farm in Bracken County, Kentucky. Her father wouldn’t let her go to high school; only the boys were allowed to go. That injustice made Carrie a feisty feminist before there was a word for it.

This is why I want you to be honest: if you lie, then people won’t believe you, no matter what you say, even when you are telling the truth. You lose your power when you lie, my grandfather explained to me, after I had been caught in a big one. He was Joe McElfresh, a clerk in the New York Central Railroad office in Cleveland, Ohio. He and Carrie raised me from a pup which meant, financially, there was no money for investment, even in their later years. We lived paycheck to paycheck, and took in roomers during the Great Depression and fed tramps at the kitchen door. But I never knew we were almost poor, because I always had new clothes for Easter, and a new doll and a new book for Christmas. I never doubted that I was loved every day by Carrie and Joe and God and Jesus.

Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should.

—The Desiderata

Come to the edge.

We might fall—

Come to the edge.

It’s too high—

Come to the edge.

And they came

And he pushed—

And they flew.

—Christopher Logue

This is what I have learned in a lifetime from my fellows, in addition to those quoted above: we human beings have been given by Nature two gifts that raise us above the other animals: a big brain and a thumb. We are hard-wired to stand up and walk; we share the fear of falling and the fear of dying. We have natural drives, like competition and sex, that can regress to killing and orgies and or grow up to artistic shaping. We learn to make choices: we can gobble our food or eat with nice manners or dine.

We perform reflex reactions brought about by exterior stimuli, like going to church or going to school; or minding our parents or falling into step with pop culture or with our own select society. We do well to consider the hammers that make us move in a knee-jerk way.

Religion is a hammer fashioned, at best, to ring a bell. When the sound of truth fills the air, ringing our own time, echoing real rhyme, we will know it by our love, by our love.

THE SUMMONS

Swinging by in his mane on swishes of big paws slurring their claws under the power-drive of legs and haunches, His Royal Highness made his daily rounds. It must have been fifty years ago, in the Philadelphia Zoo: my first summons to Africa.

Chafing a lean, long-lined restlessness against the bars of his cage, the King of Beasts paced and paced toward the irons of the next requirement, forced at every corner to concede, concede. He seemed to be working his sullen gold in such a way that either the authority of the cage or the authority of his power would confirm itself down under his fur in bone, blood, muscle. Ease would have rounded off the angles; but no: this cat pushed his square boundaries, making ninety-degree turns that felt all the hard straits of captivity. Cornered.

At last the King of Beasts settled down. There on the smallness of that concrete floor routinely befouled and routinely, if not recently, hosed down, he laid the almightiness of his strength flat on its side. Useless. In one last cool lift of the head before he let it drop, amber eyes glowed under the mane’s dark halo, then lowered and closed. So a flaming power inside was turned way down… . turned almost… off… . as… he drifted… away from the zoo on… . the rhythmic verb… . of his… breed’s… . penultimate… talent: to… . sleep.

I sat on a bench and watched him in that House of Carnivores, then walked along the railings and bars, looking at cheetahs, leopards, tigers, before coming back to watch again the lion taking his rest.

In due time, he stood up over the steam of his own excrement and sent into its stench a roar that took hold of me, went right through me, declaring the Africa he still remembered: a world of freedom. However far away in miles and time, it was also here in his own cells, as out of that mouth a wholeness sure and loud was sounding, shaking the zoo with the more of his presence. The roar rose and spread like fire in the wind—cage after cage, building after building powerless against it.

Only in his voice was the lion free. And there, I said, goes poetry, the beat of my heart already following, high.

So much later now, at the age of eighty-nine, listening back over my whole lifetime, that voice sounds also like prophecy. For a lion was to come who would be the carrier of fire. I could never take him home with me, no matter how many times I found him, but back at the zoo, the lioness in the next cage was somehow my own wildness and is my engine still. There she was, raising her own roar. It was feeding time, and I, too, heard what was coming. Metal tubs packed full of red slabs soon arrived on wheels, and great hunks of dead cow* were slung just under the bars to skid across the floor.

Not until years later when I lay still in my bed one cold equatorial night, having followed the lion into his own country, did I hear the roar again. Suddenly prickled alive, hairs on the back of my neck rising, I sat bolt upright under an unmistakable visitation: not far from our cabin, the guttural news of Real Presence rumbled and rolled gut-deep out of the heart-hollow, so wild, so Earth-round, so Absolutely Other. Who could forget how it swelled into sound, claiming the whole savannah before it subsided? And then again the foreign Here-I-Am sounding and sounding; and yet again, the great mouth roaring, filling all empty spaces before diminishing down dark steps of sound into uh-uh-uh—and gone.

Seven times the lion roared that night. When the voice came no more, the grasses all relaxed from tip to root, lying down under a cool breeze passing its peace over the dark savannah. Or was it only the settling down of my hair? I needed to hear a lion on its own ground, on its own terms: free!

PACKING FOR SAFARI

(MAKE ROOM FOR ELEPHANTS)

If we are to make this book a safe and enjoyable adventure together—you reading in your armchair while I take you with me on a seventeen-day African safari—clarity and honesty are as necessary on my part as thoughtful reading and a tolerance for surprise are on your part. Just like watching animals in the wild, you never know what you will meet next in SHE-FIRE until it appears. (Safari sounds very much like life, yes?)

Think of this Preface as an open suitcase in your mind, into which you’ll now be packing some relevant information about me as writer and about this book. You need these for the journey.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Long before I traveled to Africa, my intellectual search had led me beyond the conventional comforts of religion. Born, raised in, and wed to theology, I grew into my grandparents’ fundamentalism, then into my minister-husband’s middle-of-the-road Protestantism, then into the liberal Christianity in which our two children were raised, at each level saving whatever still rang true. Needing to share all this meaningfully somehow, I started to write and publish essays in The United Church Herald, our denominational magazine, hiding nothing; and found it always, laudably, a free press. My words were never censored nor reshaped nor rejected, and once more I salute J. Martin Bailey, the editor for most of my nine years as a columnist and the denomination that has not (yet) asked me to leave its membership.

But neither have I been known spiritually, as deeply as readers here will find me out. By mid-life I had settled down into the raw, spare meaninglessness of this world, with no other in sight. Heaven was the price I paid for reality as the metaphysics of the medieval worldview settled down into the physics of the twentieth century. (Imagine my spiritual poverty with only the Universe left!)

The struggle for intellectual integrity is expensive. Indeed—as illusion and self-delusion are stripped away—it costs what feels like everything, before continued search begins to nourish the soul. Meanwhile, the rational self survives and prospers on the excitement of being real, honest, grown up at last, in step with modernity, and hallelujah! off religion’s drugs—first, the hard ones, then the soft ones—at last clean and free. (My first book traced the steps of this journey into reality, as we now understand it—an experience still being widely shared. Picasso’s Nude Descending a Staircase expresses it perfectly.)

I called myself (and still do) a Post-Christian, which is neither anti- nor un- nor non-. By old definitions, I was also a quiet atheist who found that state of mind a real improvement over traditional theism. It was a necessary station located well along the road of spiritual journeying, where I conversed with science and the arts and Christian liberalism and Greek myth and modern secular humanism and naturalism, and, always, contemporary poetry, all of which enriched my life. I was certainly not an unhappy traveler after surviving the shock of living without the idols of my tribe. The high price of heaven had bought a new value system, and the whole natural, human enterprise and its setting commanded an enhanced respect in my mind, as it became the only possible locus for a meaningful life.

This is what going to college as an adult had done for me over a period of eight years, taking classes part-time at nearby Millersville University, while my husband was teaching at Lancaster Theological Seminary and our two children were in public school. This renewal of my inner life began to coincide with definitions, instructions, warnings and invitations about becoming a writer, all of which were triggered by writers and/or lecturers speaking/writing to general audiences, while I received their power personally, intensely.

A writer must give himself away. Within a few days after those six words hit me (part of an address delivered by Dr. Mary Ely Lyman at a United Church Women’s meeting in St. Louis, Missouri), I had—in the middle of the night—the only grand mal seizure of my life to this day. However unusual in medical records, this is not a worrisome exception, I was assured, and to this day, I suppose it was coincidental; but its fact remains interesting, given the context, when my brain was re-ordering its little paths and major highways.

That event was soon followed by a long sequence of John Ciardi’s essays in Saturday Review of Literature and his lectures at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont and also at Chautauqua, NY. Always he was honest, profound and so beautiful in his use of language. Over those years, I came to remember this poet/teacher as my Guide through hell, the flipside of his beloved Beatrice and Dante. Although tough-minded Ciardi was only an acquaintance who knew nothing about my spiritual trauma, his wife, Judith, and I were summer friends who annually shared mothering anxieties, as we tried to cope with our teenagers in the tumultuous 1960’s and early 70’s. They were so right and so dangerously wrong, but we adults had survived, and still looked pretty good, we assured each other annually, in spite of all. Those were tough years, and not until I went on safari twenty years later, did I ever feel supported from the Sacred Outside. My strength was Inside, no doubt built there by the (supposedly) one and only absolute truth of Jesus, hammered into me by those fundamentalist preachers when I was growing up. (The terms of myth are expendable; but the structure of myth is eternal, you will hear me repeat more than once; and the irony built into religious experience turns out to be, in the end, delicious. Yeats was right in his spiral theory that never comes back to where it was in the first place, but can look down from a higher level and see that earlier position, left behind, still part of the journey.)

For various reasons, plus an affection that needs no reason at all, I kept my long ties with the church, hoping somehow to be useful in its transformation process, which had already begun in liberal places and is still going on today. Many, if not most, independent thinkers have fled the church in a holy fever of impatience mixed with boredom tinged with anger; and I can’t blame them. Nor do I blame myself for hanging around the church’s edges, still afflicted with similar negative feelings, while balancing myself with another holy fever of relentless patience mixed with curiosity tinged with hope for signs of an honest, effective, contemporary religion.

Some of this complexity was in my state of mind when I began teaching high school juniors and seniors in Lancaster, Pennsylvania 1968-73. Having recently honed my mind on the brilliant teaching of Alan Hart in the History of Philosophy, while majoring in English Literature at nearby Millersville University and having been immersed in Donald Tighe’s depth perception as he worked with images in American Literature, I had been introduced to the hidden power of language. It happened while Tighe’s class was studying Stephen Crane’s short story, The Blue Hotel. Right there, the world of language began to open, and later, as a teacher, I became fascinated with metaphor, symbol, archetypal image, whenever loaded words appeared in the great books of Lancaster Country Day School’s classical curriculum. So began my long, independent, voluntary, moneyfree work: cracking the literary code as I prepared, every day, to teach my classes.

Had I gone on to graduate school at Bryn Mawr in 1966, which I considered doing after receiving a B.A. in English magna cum laude at the age of forty-four, I might have pursued literary criticism and learned more about all this; but (although I was less and less active in church work) family life was taking precedence, with extended travels abroad during my husband’s sabbaticals; and what I really wanted to do was write.

Writing has been my passion for almost fifty years, and I cannot repent of it, for it has kept me learning constantly, however haphazardly, digging into the texts of great writers. Once, for a year in Oxford and later at Cambridge, I worked alone on Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, studying long and hard until I had decoded the whole text. Hardy led me to Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and other classics. Always amazed at what can be learned from subtexts, I have been doing this kind of decoding or translating, ever since, often with plays that intrigue me, such as Waiting for Godot, The Elephant Man, Death of a Salesman.

However: something in me was becoming more aware and was yearning, leaning forward past books, past poems, learning to listen more attentively to the things themselves. It had taken well over half a lifetime to arrive, in a way, where I started; for, like a young child, I was opening, getting ready to learn from the world around me;—amazement at the grass in my hand, amazement at the bedroom furniture’s reappearance in morning light (why should anything be here?)—amazement kept growing, not without hindrance, through further multiple mysteries into a consciousness of my own presence within that Great Living Cosmos of many parts of unimaginable complexity, all in motion—each part at least as deserving of attention as some people give to a great painting or a great symphony or (for me, always) a great book.

Higher education in general and modern literature in particular had laid open the natural, physical world and its realities that my religion had always demeaned in favor of the spiritual world up there beyond this one where, sitting at the right hand of God, who was spirit, was the spiritual Body of Christ, which on Earth manifested Itself in the Church. Its people, deep within all house and body, were each gifted by God at birth or, some say, at conception, with His Spirit, as was the church itself which routinely invoked the Spirit of God, who knows us and loves us, each human being individually, and will receive us back into His spiritual home when we die. (Even if expressed with more sophistication, the split between body and spirit, with spirit being prior and pre-eminent, is basic to Christian doctrine. Otherwise, what is heaven about? )

In the thought of ancient people, God was a spirit, and it was thought that a spirit could produce a live body. Mary was only a willing channel through which God became flesh. Many people long trained by religion, to this day, still think that God, a spirit, produces all zygotes who are immediately persons, because each contains a spirit of its own created by God; this makes birth control and abortion sins against God. If their premise is right, their conclusion is right. Also, they think that God, the Spirit, can raise a dead body back to life. Since God raised Jesus from the dead, he will raise all those who believe in him. Texts in the Bible, or in the God-given authority of the church, are proof enough to satisfy this enclosed, circular kind of mind that circles always back into its own salvation, which is far from the way modern people understand life in the world we inhabit.

With all its ghostly other-worldliness gone, a spirit cannot produce a body; but a body can produce a spirit whose meaning is found more readily in metaphor than in statement. The abstract is drawn from the concrete. Spirit, being abstract, has no definition or reality of its own; it is dependent on the material from which it comes. It is not to be defined, but shown or heard or sniffed or felt or tasted as it happens. A good spirit surrounds its person as fragrance surrounds a rose or a spice; and an evil spirit surrounds its person as a stench surrounds a rotten cabbage or a steaming cowpie. This is a modern way of understanding the word spirit. Giordano Bruno would agree with this; but he was in hot contention with Christianity. The spirit of the church burned him at the stake in 1600.

Looking back now, I think that I went on safari, at the age of sixty-four, in search of wholeness or integrity, not only of the mind, but of the spirit, although I didn’t know that beforehand, and even now it is not easy to use that problematical word. Maybe it takes the whole book to see how a new spirit evolved. Or did it? You must be the judge of that.

AND NOW, MEET THE BOOK

It was twenty-five years ago when I packed my suitcase, excited about going to Africa, and while you wonder how a woman in her late eighties can remember enough of that journey to write a book about it, I say, How could I ever forget it? To this day, riding along in the country, I miss the faces of gazelles not quite hidden in tall grass, a giraffe in silhouette on the horizon, a warthog running with his tail up, a herd of zebras under a grove of acacias—what an experience, constantly being scribbled down in my notebook!

Back home at my desk, I wrote out all those busy, full days as a travel journal. Brief at first, it was a Christmas gift for my tour group. Publish it, they said. Good idea, I thought, but it needs to be developed, never imagining that development would lead me, as it did. Always staying close to my original notes, I put away draft after draft as better, but not yet finished.

Along the way I had found myself learning from my own writing, as the frequency and sequence of emerging meanings began to surprise me. Rewriting added nothing to, nor deleted anything from, my careful record of the facts of the experience (except the few explained in Textual Notes at the end) nor did I rearrange the order of their happening; but as I worked each draft more carefully, with more detail, meanings kept coming out, sometimes working together like a web. So it was that the subtext came slowly into my consciousness. The narrative contains a network of quiet discoveries that my fellow travelers never saw, nor did I at the time.

As I tell you about the writing process now, it reminds me of that afternoon in England when I made a brass rubbing, one of the interesting things that Americans tend to do when on sabbatical. Using the flat side of a gold crayon, I kept rubbing and rubbing a large rectangle of black paper, going over and over the same space, applying pressure; and as I worked, lines kept appearing and appearing until, at last, the elegant figure of a knight, dead under that brass grave plate since the 14th century, was complete. There is no spookiness involved in doing a brass rubbing, nor in finding and translating a subtext, but the experience of lifting the hidden up into view is an exhilarating and satisfying experience.

I could not have found the subtext at all without my earlier studies of Hardy, Shakespeare and Homer, learning from their work the literary code. There is no excitement like that of the mind when it makes connections, sniffs at truth, and takes off like a hound of Earth and cosmos, not to kill the fox nor to pocket the stars, and certainly not with the stride of an overstuffed ego intent upon living forever by whatever fair means or foul coattails it can hang onto. This book is not that kind of chase. Its fire is simply my own energy longing to learn what is true, and even if I am the one and only reader who walks away from its last chapter with wick on fire, all my work will have been worthwhile. The book owes me nothing.

But what does a writer, so blessed by the field of language, owe to the human community?

Marketing the book was another matter. Rejection letters were often encouraging, but all agreed that sales would never make the bottom line. And they were right. This is not an easy page-turner with wide appeal, and among those who read it, many will find it strongly controversial. (Furthermore, it was not finished, I was to find out much later. )

The manuscript went into a long rest in my cabinet.

Several years later, I was thumbing through a magazine and came across an article of great interest. When I put it down, I understood for the first time what I had done. I had written what Native Americans long ago called a vision quest. She-Fire had found its genre, and I like that link to our American ground; but even deeper, safari had pulled out of me more than I knew what to do with: a new I, who was seeing the world through a new eye, and finding in the world’s wild, original, substantial truth, a new aye. Yes! If safari had done that kind of visionary work for me, maybe others—

But there lay the manuscript in the dark of my cabinet, stowed away also in my computer, all because of the intimidating bottom line. Safe. Useless.

Then, suddenly encouraged by my husband’s recent experience with Trafford, when he self-published his novel on immigration (That Far Land We Dream About by Paul Irion, available at Barnes & Noble or Amazon), I pulled my manuscript out of hiding and started work on this last revision of She-Fire.

A safari that began as a personal adventure, almost timeless in its wild drama, is here being shared as a communal adventure whose time has come. This book offers a reasonable, hopeful perspective via a different way of seeing, much needed as the chaotic institutions of religion and state—in the civilized world out there—keep moving us into what is often being called the end times. This phrase usually refers to prophecies in the Book of Revelation, describing what will happen at the end of the world, when the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will lift up all his saved believers, taking them with him into heaven, while all other humans, whether pledged to false religions or none, must remain on Earth to suffer the terrors of the great tribulation, when there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, later to be followed by the lost ones’ permanent torture in the fires of hell. Moderate versions of the belief system, found in traditional or liberal Christian churches, are usually silent about these dire prophecies, but the pleasant comforts of that old Christian worldview prevail to this day without question: the good spirits of God and Jesus are alive and well in that attic that rules over this world. Those comfortable assurances form the biblical floor on which the church and cultural habit stand: truth in the Bible comes down to this: God wants us to stay in this story and this church or else we will not go to heaven when we die.

Meanwhile, the walls made of doctrine and credence lean upon each other, sharing the problems of age and rot, and all the victorious singing and shouting of evangelism in megachurches will not change the fact of Christianity’s decline, as long as humans think. (But do they, any more? Think. Does anyone out there in pop culture, where power grows, value science and thinking?)

She-fire approaches our time in history with a journey in language that sees very differently, seeing ahead—not the end of the world, but the end of a worldview, accompanied by the need to understand myth, as an old sacred story moves out of history not into the waste can, but into the treasured shelves of myth where stories of interaction between humans, gods and heroes sometimes hold wisdom for lively human beings who will never turn history around nor walk backwards.

The end of a worldview, of course, is a serious social problem. Ours is not an easy time to be alive; but it is a time over which we humans can exert a large measure of control by the way we behave, as two worldviews play out the challenge of change. The way we behave depends largely on the way we think and feel; so thinking and feeling are the major rails upon which this train of seventeen chapters rides.

She-fire makes no apology for invading the inner lives of its readers. The inner life is not strictly private territory as long as it influences our lives together as a society, and it certainly does. The polite silence on religious issues in the public sector may be politically correct, but it is intellectually stultifying and morally dangerous. Silence has not served us well, nor will hotheaded fighting serve us any better—fighting about abortion, sexuality, assisted suicide, rights for gays and lesbians, gun laws, war—This book begs for end times that call out the best in us all, when we will speak together with frankness, honesty, good will, open minds, reason, and mutual concern. If that complex isn’t love, what is?

This book and I work toward the acceptance of the scientific worldview, which badly needs a religion that will help it to go forward in the best possible ways; the scientific method of search for truth in fact is the strongest engine civilization has found; but it is hard for society’s train to carry us along wholesomely, when its caboose, religion, will not give up its square wheels. We sit and sit in the long cars, waiting for religion’s wheels to go round, so we can move ahead in compassionate ways that help one another, leaving behind the ghostly voices of the past.

The answer is not to get rid of religion and marriage and government, for—being social animals, as well as individual animals—we need forms and structures to advance our civilization. Rather, this book invites people of both religious and secular persuasions to examine structures and update messages that are going out to people, especially on Sunday.

The medieval stage setting, like its mindset, where a mega-melodrama played out its lines spoken by bodiless spiritual actors has simply outlived its time and needs to go offstage, as Zeus & Co. once retreated, however slowly, when Jesus, Mary, and Joseph entered from the wings and gained an audience of shepherds, angels and church-going mortals for hundreds of years.

Now in another time of deep change, we post-Christians and humanists can be helpful to those minds/hearts/caught still in the ancient Judeo-Christian worldview, assuring them that it was not all wrong, nor has everything we have done by means of science/technology all right. Look at the atomic bomb, look at the drones. The fact is: we need each other.

Much of the Old Story can be lifted up to a higher plane where it will live usefully again. For we humans, all of us, are the chosen people who by our thoughts, feelings and actions will decide what the end times mean, and how not to prolong any self-caused suffering that ensues.

Meanwhile, we bear our cross, writing resurrections and revelations of our own, led by the Real World we now call The Universe, mysterious though it seems, or is, in its unimaginable hugeness within which we live and move and have our being. It so deserves our awe, we cannot help calling it sacred. Little we know, most of us, but we know more now than we used to know. So here we stand, and here we go, puppets no longer, but lively Parts within the Whole Evolving Universe, playing the connections as we find them. We can do no other.

Meanwhile, there is a faith to keep, to share and to inhabit: that the new worldview, long in its swelling, will soon be born, and that the old worldview, its long life of triumphs and terrors over, will come to rest in the Ground of Being, empowered by sun and rain to send up welcome green shoots in due season. There could be no better burial for the past.

The peaceable kingdom at this stage of evolution does not await the lion lying down with the lamb. It awaits humanity’s willingness to examine its own stage, where it plays out its own roles. (What is this that you are telling your people, your audience?) The peaceable kingdom awaits the time when we who are born story tellers do not ask people to die for a story, but will let a story die for love of the people; it awaits the time when we thrill with the joy of writing the new story together, many keys clicking on many machines with many themes and many adventurous beginnings as many intelligent, creative, courageous searchers of truth invest their hearts and minds in the new worldview, its new art forms, its new religion, its new government.

Granted, this is not an easy time to be alive; but it is ours to claim, to shape and to bless. I like to think that it was for NOW we humans were given, or simply grew, those two gifts that raise us above all the other animals: a big brain; and a thumb. So, dear reader: think; and turn pages.

NOTES AND TIPS FOR THE READER

She-Fire is not an ordinary reading experience, and I’d rather have you define what we will have done together at the end of the book than define it for you, here at the beginning. But a short preview may be helpful to insure that, above all, reading this book is enjoyable.

As writer, I play alternately three roles: storyteller, interpreter, and seeker. The storyteller brings to the book the actual characters and events of safari in the order in which they happened. The interpreter shows language at work in its probe of meaning, slowing the narrative, now and then, to explore meaningful connections, uncovering the subtext. Meanwhile, the seeker offers a window into personal thoughts/feelings, while tracking a fresh encounter with the sacred, whatever the sacred may be—(and little this writer knows about that mystery, but much she feels). These asides or down unders from critic and seeker (often lengthy) appear in italics.

By using these braided means in your own way, readers may think, ponder, study, skim or skip along pages according to who you are and what you need. (You would do this even without my blessing, but I give it freely.) My favorite safarists, of course, are those of you who become with me not only armchair travelers, but also interpreters and seekers who will find yourselves, later, in the world beyond this book, doing detective work with word and world on your own. Even if all this is new to you, once you understand how to make the rational connections between language and life, myth and truth, it is natural to keep on exploring. (Anyone interested in a detailed explanation of how I work from word to hidden meaning, should read the essay near the end of this book which explains the process of interpreting The Elephants Of Kitum. )

Even without giving special attention to how I work with language, you will all get the hang of it on Day 1 of safari when we set out for Africa. During the first plane ride, you will be reading my mind as we fly along, getting high on sky and blue from the moment of take-off. At first, your mind will help you via memory and imagination of your own flights, and the typography will help you by playing with the pure fun of speeding and lifting, and as you go higher, you will see how symbolic language finds its meanings: by making connections. As you understand how reasonable the method of interpretation is, you will likely be able to do it yourself.

About the Glossary: In the interest of your sanity and mine, not all symbols are starred at the point of first usage, which is appropriate in most books, but not in this one. Here, it would be a nuisance. In the interest of all kinds of readers from serious to casual, the most important meanings are revealed in the text, or at least starred* along the way, directing you to the Glossary as needed. However, this method creates the illusion, as I spin out the seventeen days, that I understood the depth of events as they were happening. You know that is not true. As I have told you, meanings came out of hiding as I was writing and rewriting; but never did I tamper with the objective facts of the safari nor with the order of their occurrence in order to force some meaning I wanted to use. That would be wrong. (The Textual Notes explain a few purely narrative additions.)

So this job of packing for safari is all but finished. I have tried to show you who I am, where I have come from, how this book was written, what its burden is, and how to read it. What else could you need?

Oh! One more thing: before you close and zip your suitcase (properly known as The Preface to this book) you must make room for elephants, who will soon arrive—in families, a long line of them—but not to worry. They’ve been compressed into a three-page narrative poem that came about like this:

In the spring of 1986, a documentary film about elephant behavior appeared on the TV series called Nature. A certain darkness of my mind was illumined as I taped and studied this phenomenon, and so began to read the world in a new way. This happened just in time, for in August I would go on my first safari.

This serendipity happened only because of the dedicated work of two British photographers, Ian and Caroline Redmond, who had heard about this strange elephant event—known to recur on the side of Mount Elgon, near the Kenya/Uganda border, but not exactly regularly. Guessing when it might happen next, the two brought their sophisticated equipment and set up camp, hidden away near the mouth of the cave. They carefully positioned, along the inner trail, cameras and lights whose rays elephant eyes cannot receive, so that their behavior would not be affected by filming it. Six weeks later, the elephants came in their own good time, did what they had to, and never knew the cave was any different than it had been before and would be again.

Here, then, is the narrative poem that came from this viewing experience. You will see the great beasts, at first, as I did on the screen, assembling for the journey.

THE ELEPHANTS OF KITUM

Tonight under a full African moon

the massive bodies move, clouds of light

borne on misty legs as large as trees.

Great wing-like ears lift and fall,

trunks sway in their supple way, tusks shine,

while skinny tails swing like shabby ropes

whose rankle ravels, ending in twist and fuzz.

In this violent region of secrets and revelations

where ancient volcanoes created the Great Rift Valley,

the matriarch, feeling a need in her bones,

has summoned elephants, one at a time, to follow.

Their line, quiet and slow, crosses the land

where many generations have crossed en masse

for the risky climb up the side of Mount Elgon.

The trek to Kitum Cave is always at night,

always at full moon. Maasai have watched

this ritual, when it happens, as long as legends

remember, standing wide-eyed with their children,

even the wisest elders mystified. The matriarch

leads the way through dense forest, having watched

her mother as that mother watched her mother.

Ponderous, weightless, an epic on Elgon’s foot,

the long procession winds in dapple of leaves,

enabled by cushioned feet and night vision.

(no stanza break)

The trail, sometimes steep, is doubly treacherous

for the little ones and the old, as they make their way

through leaves, stalks, vines over rocks and logs,

then labor across a chaos of broken boulders.

Approaching Kitum’s hole in the mountainside

a cow’s trunk pulls its calf away from a crevice.

Now in the low growl of the waterfall,

each foot plans and places its next step

on mossy rocks and mud. Inside, the trek be-

comes yet more exact on muck and guano—

but a bull slips and breaks a tusk on stone,

stirring a thick flurry of clicking bats

hurrying off into the open dark.

Slowly through the ancestral entrance hall

the beasts lumber close to one another

merging their dark hides into the shadows

where eyes see less and less with moonlight fading

while feet and trunks learn more and more by feeling

hollows now it is utterly black all moonlight gone

trunks keep the order by touching others

one beast rumbles low one trumpets loudly

calves fumble trying to suckle cows

one half-grown stumbles and half-falls

its mother prods it on and on they go

treading on dung of leopard antelope buffalo

dropping and mixing in some of their own

trunks find and fondle a clutter of bones.

The elephants whoosh and pad toward an upper room

where soon the matriarch stops. The line disperses

as each animal finds a place to work.

Tusks are gouging and scraping across the ceiling,

loosening softer ashes, letting them fall,

marking walls with ivory-ciphered lines

that criticize and edit former scriptures.

Toes, trunks sort, shift the rubble,

lift to tongues hunks from the old volcano—

bitter chunks to be cracked, crunched and swallowed

for their content, sometimes needed by weak bones:

it is salt, mixed with ashes’ caustic cover.

To salt the ailing marrow has been drawn.

They take and eat here, where the heart of the mountain

rhymes with the tears and sweat our tongues remember,

along with the vast, distant taste of the sea.

They eat alone, according to need, then rest

until the mother trunk nudges. It is time.

In perfect dark she heads the grand recessional,

the way reversed—but not relieved of danger.

Just when gray grows at the mouth of the cave

a young bull trusts an edge that suddenly crumbles,

dropping him loudly upside down in a pit

much too deep for the mother trunk’s anxious reach.

His trunk thrashes, neck strains, head raises,

raises in vain, raises, wild eyes glazing,

legs ever more slowly climbing the air

with motions like prayer for what is not to be.

The cave has exacted its fee: a real grave.

The matriarch turns and leads a confusion of feet

into a nervous line that curves and falters

toward the mouth of the cave, now bright with day.

Meanwhile, salt is finding its way to marrow

through great bodies’ inner chambers and veins,

making its hidden journeys by blood, while elephants

make their journeys, one by one, by body.

Now, for survivors, stone opens to light,

and fresh air stirs under the wrinkling wings

of long-fingered bats returning to drape into sleep,

full of their insect meals, clinging along the walls.

Beside the waterfall’s white drift of veils

sparkling on the leaves of Kenya’s morning,

small pools in ungulate hollows hold the sky

as the elephants move through green down the same trail

by which by moon by need last night they came.

I was awestruck to sense, however dimly at first, a vital human experience set before me in a dumb show enacted by elephants. (An essay at the end of this book unpacks the meanings in this journey. To track the search for meanings, go to The Elephants of Kitum, p.367.)

In real life, I would not see that drama, now captured in film and poem; but a few years later, in 1991—beyond the scope of this book—I did go there on the last of my three safaris, to the Kenya/Uganda border, visiting Kitum Cave. There I got the feel of Mount Elgon, walking with a guide up the rough trail, feeling mist from the waterfall, entering the dusky interior, smelling the record of animal presences, seeing the many scratches and gouges made by tusks in the walls and ceiling, walking in deep mud and dung out of the cave mouth, mixing my own footprints with those of wild animals, signing the Earth with the connections I had made.

Now you, too, have seen through words the ritual behavior of elephants*, the largest of Earth’s land animals, in the foothills of Africa’s third-highest mountain.* Then when we get to Africa and you begin to see with your own eyes through my eyes and words, you’ll learn more as we move with animals into the foothills of Mount Kenya, the second-highest mountain in Africa; and at last, startling insights will come from other wild animals at the foot of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in all Africa, with its manifold clear springs.*

I hope to be persuasive in this book, but never coercive. Your mind must be free to decide what to do with words that come your way, not only in this text, but everywhere. Sorting out what to keep and what to put aside is a never-ending responsibility, yours and mine, as we deal with life’s grandest questions.

Tomorrow is the day! So move to your comfortable armchair under a good light, roll back the years to 1986, disappear into these pages and come with me as off I go on my way to Africa. Elephants in their large dignity can give us an overview of the spiritual journey by their night