"Ever since Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, gave the wax tablet to mortals, memory, writing and technology have been interconnected. "

-- Carolyn Guertin

 




All thumbnails link to larger, high quality versions of Califia's illustrations. All images are from
M. D. Coverley's Califia (Eastgate Systems, in press). Reproduced by permission of Eastgate Systems.

Three-Dimensional Dementia 7
 ___by Carolyn Guertin

Just as Augusta's great great grandfather Samuel Walker is the father of the quest for the elusive cache of gold, his Chumash wife, Willing Stars, is the mother of tribal secrets and the unofficial discourse of ancient ways of knowing.

Twice rechristened by whites in attempts to erase her identity [3], she is saviour and medicine woman to her people. As the last audible voice of her line and a liminal figure between worlds, she is the keeper of forgotten knowledge:

Willing Stars apprenticed as a healer, learning the directions of the land, the proper shape of tattoos, the curative herbs and roots, the skill of divining stones, the old stories, how to tie the dead for burial, and the string figures that told the pattern of the stars (Stars Fell From the Heavens).

Utilizing her 'incomprehensible' discourse and countercultural knowledge as a form of encryption, Willing Stars as mapmaker is the author of the symbolic language that guards the family secrets.

Where official records document only the sale of a blue blanket to an Indian woman for $3.00 (Tejon Letters 1), the family legacy is preserved in the pieces of the delicately embroidered blanket itself.

The stitching tells the location of the gold for those who know how to read the old ways. The language of Willing Stars' map has its origins in native astronomy and the myths of the Southwest. Not recognizable as any kind of science, the art of reading the stars--particularly as a tool for navigation--was taught to children in the form of string games including the still popular Cat's Cradle.

Each pattern has an accompanying chant that tells a story. Literacy in this art has been forgotten: "The stars do not correspond with the fingers," Kaye says, "and we have lost the reading of the constellations in the loops of web. For now." (Kaye's Path: Cat's Cradle).

It is the Whirling Man or dipper pattern--a cluster of eight stars encompassing the seven stars of the Big Dipper--that guards the treasure's location in Willing Stars' handiwork. Her symbolic language is a perfect blending of image and text, where that which is outside language speaks aesthetic meaning, and where her code is not crackable without prior knowledge of her people's stories.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Sources

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