The backwards people
"A note on the backward-head people: The awful-est ghoul of the Valley was a human being with its head on backwards...
They populated ghost stories; in popular tales they lurked all about the poisoned lands and at the brink of polluted waters. An imagined glimpse of one would send a child screaming from the woods- and not without reason, for the most fearful of the White Clowns of the Sun was the unearthly tall, thin, silent Wry Neck, who walked backward and looked forward.” -Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin
This month I come to your inbox with two letters, this is my second. I woke up this lovely day, the day I celebrate the feast of the Good Cyprian, and it is Friday. I was listening to music, it started with Black Sabbath, then had to sit and delight in some Jimi Hendrix, then Led Zeppelin zoomed in and it became a whole morning.
Suddenly, in the playlist, Blind Melon popped in and a phrase struck out at me.
All I can say Is that my life is pretty plain You don’t like my point of view You think that I’m insane It’s not sane... it’s not sane. -No rain
Suddenly the backwards people came to mind. Perhaps because I had the resonance of “War Pigs” still reverberating in my mind.
There is a tale in Always Coming Home, A Hole in the Air, where a man goes back in time, or goes through time to another timeline. It was a place like his place but no his place, “the air smelled different. It was a great valley of land without water, covered with walls, roofs, roads, walls, roofs, roads, walls, roofs, roads, as far as the eye could see.” He died several times as he walked, trying to cross the roads, run over by big four-wheeled motors, but since he was both in this world and not in this world, belonging to another, he was able to get up from these deaths. The motors went on, no one stopped after hitting him.
He ventured into the homes, at first fearful that he would be seen but quickly found that every backward-headed person saw through him, he was not seen by the peoples of this backwards place. Hungry he soon discovered that the food was poisoned, an apple from the apple tree, poisoned, the boxed foods the people ate, poisoned. Then he listened to the backward-headed people talking and it sounded to him like, “kill people! kill people! (dushe ushud, dushe ushud). That was the sound of their words…
A cursed peoples. No coherence.
In all those houses the backward-headed people lived. They had electrical wires in their ears, and were deaf. They smoked tobacco day and night and were continually making war.
Needless to imagine, the man from another world was poisoned as he experienced this place. Poisoned to the brink of death. He returned to the hole, the portal, and walked through to his world. He was terribly ill, so terribly ill and poisoned that after several days he died of “grief and poison.”
A metaphor, what’s the word, précis.
Thinking with that Blind Melon line and the backward-headed people. What to say? What else to add?
In a world of peoples gone bad and backward, clamoring for horrors and strife.
One must still hope and create pockets of beauty and life. Cleanse where cleansing is needed of poisons that press upon us.
May the blessings of the purple-cloaked Saint Cyprian of Antioch and the candle-holding Saint Justina be with us all in the times when monsters roam carefree.
Endnotes
I recently had a relacing conversation with a couple lovely ladies at the Mysterious Teahouse. If you are looking for a something to listen to while sitting on your balcony or the back/front porch while sipping tea, or maybe coffee, this conversation could be it: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-s66rr-192fc5b.
I close with a song worth a linger:
Until next month, keep shuffling and reading…
