Fu Sang |
Stories of Our First Arrivals
by Chris Lorenc, © 2001
![]() Coast of the Santa Lucia, by Boon Hughey, © 2001
After matins at the hermitage I carry toast and tea down to a secret
perch I know, through the brush and beneath sprawling live oak, to
watch the coast and idle in the morning sun. I think of Jaime de Angulo's
character Esteban Berenda, who fled the Portolá expedition in 1769 for
these mountains, married an Esselen woman, and when she died would sit
out against the wall of his cabin and doze in the sun as I do now. He would dream of the
Spanish galleons that would drift by each year on their way to Acapulco, carrying porcelain and spices and silk above all, to be offered in return for the silver they would carry back across the Pacific to Manila.
I come here again and again to this spot where the Pacific stretches
out before me just as dreamily, and where any writing upon it is as
delible as a voyage, since in the end she always takes all things back;
Chinese coins, the mast of a forgotten junk, olivella shells, fishing
baskets, the rumor of five Buddhist monks who walked this shore
fifteen hundred years ago -- a text I love, since so few know it.
We love myths of our origins. They help to locate us in the world. By
telling us who we were, they tell us what we might become. On one
hand creation stories, and on the other, allied with them, but not
identical, are the stories of our first arrivals. Lovers know by
heart the story of the moment they first met, and each of us who love
this coast can tell the story of how, in one way or another, we first
came here, too. Not a bad evening would be spent around a campfire in the
backcountry, sharing those stories. Every poet has them. Robinson
Jeffers tells his in the form of his first trip down the old coast
road with Una in Corbett Grimes' mail stage in December 1914. Jaime
de Angulo describes riding on horseback below Post's with Roche Castro
around Christmas in 1915, where the coast trail becomes so narrow and
dizzyingly steep, a thousand foot sheer drop to the Pacific, that de
Angulo had to dismount, steady himself, and stand in awe.
These myths of creation and the stories of our first arrivals here:
the first exist in a dateless, cyclic, mythopoetic time. The latter,
by definition, begin with a date since they mark the first moment in a
personal history, the arrival of a discrete "I" upon this shore. We
find the fragments of creation stories in all the first peoples of
this coast, the Rumsen and Esselens and Salinans and Chumash. In
fact, the evidence points to a vast, integrated, epic culture wheel of
myth so that what remains to us as fragments only appears so because
our own recovery and understanding has become fragmentary itself. But
to my incomplete understanding, there aren't stories among these
fragments that depict the arrival of the first people here. Perhaps
someone can enlighten us otherwise, someone like Joe Freeman working
with the earliest Salinan stories. But so far the origin stories all
seem to be about how the human being was created anew in this very
place after the flood, when eagle and coyote - with perhaps
hummingbird or kingfisher - perched on a height somewhere like Pico
Blanco and succeeded in riddling out the complexity of human existence
once again.
For arrival stories we have had to wait for the Europeans. Juan
Rodríquez Cabrillo made the first European voyage along the coast in
1542, then Sebastián Vizcaíno landed in Monterey Bay for three days in
1602. And perhaps most consequential of all, the Portolá land expedition
of 1769, when history walked up this coast in the apparently meager
form of a few Spanish officers, two Franciscans, a group of Catalan
volunteers, leather-jacketed soldiers from New Spain, and neophyte
indios from Baja California. Together they stood for an historical
consciousness, a scientific mind in the form of engineering and
cartography, a written script that appeared in four separate journals,
and the story of a personal salvation and a personal aggrandisement,
the cross and sword together. And meager as they might be, they would
be enough.
But that alone should've been enough to warn us from the easy myth of
a western movement, as if we could ever have had more in common with
the eastern seaboard than we do with the vast and imponderable Pacific
stretching beyond us like a dream towards the western islands of the
dead and then beyond even them, the only western movement of any last
import, the inevitable movement beyond the limitations of the self.
And then there is that other story that I love so much because it
appears so incidental and so rare. In the year of Everlasting Origin -
499 AD in western reckoning - a Buddhist priest named Hui-Shen appeared
in the Chinese court and said he had just returned from a land he
called Fu-Sang, named for a plant we would later call the agave or maguey
or yucca, and which the Spanish would call Our Lord's Candle and which
native peoples all along the coast used for food and cordage. You can
follow Hui-Shen's descriptions and distances from the Ainu in Japan to
Kamkatcha to Fu-Sang, which measures out to California although the
culture resembles people further south since the people of Fu-Sang had
a form of writing and parchment made from the fu-sang plant. There is
no iron in Fu-Sang, but plenty of copper, which like gold and silver,
is not prized in trade. There are no tariffs or fixed prices or
citadels or walled cities or warfare or implements of war. Houses
are made with wooden beams and mats are made of reeds. Criminals are
judged in excavated places and if guilty are strewn with ash. If the
offender was a person of rank, the stigma could remain for
generations.
Hui-Shen says that forty years before his journey five Buddhist monks
from Kabul first brought the dharma to Fu-Sang, along with images of the
Buddha. They introduced monasticism and, Hui-Shen says, "reformed the
manners of the entire land."
Czeslaw Milosz imagined a similar case, a Japanese survivor from a
shipwreck washed up upon this shore, perhaps a fisherman or merchant
or even a poet. The story is not only likely, but inevitable, since
it is a straight line from Japan to here following the Kuroshiro current
right along the coast. Then if the castaway moved upcanyon and found
a group of brownskinned inhabitants, what would have happened then,
Milosz wonders, since no rumor of the castaway would ever return home.
This is the perspective of an exile, of course. This coast appears in
Milosz as a vanishing point, a kind of pure space that swallows
history. Milosz partly took the idea from Jeffers; the beauty and
violence intermingled in a wilderness like this, and also from a
Jeffers' poem he borrowed the idea that the only trace of the first
inhabitants here was a cave of painted hands near Tassajara whereas
the mountains are full of middens and bedrock mortars and birthing
stones and jimsonweed marking ritual sites, the fit signs of people
who moved in small groups, loved their children, knew the plants and
animals and every nuance of the watersheds that fed them and were
their calendars as they passed through the seasons like the deer they
also followed, a son taking a kill from the herd his family knew for
centuries in an elaborate and familiar dance between the hunter and
the sacred prey. And while there are no relics of cathedrals or
ramparts, they had poetry, too, those epic culture cycles that we only
hold fragmented notes to, notes that only an eccentric few would even
bother to attend to. Poetry and dance and visions and night-fears and
hunger and intimacy and love. Hui-Shen and Esteban Berenda stand for
a word coming back out of the wilderness, which is the only place the
word ever comes from, and they allow us to affix a date to the
dateless, that precious intersection, which perhaps relieves us a
moment from the anxiety, or even terror, we feel when we enter this
pure space for ourselves.
But that is the other story we know so well and tell around our
campfires, if we are honest enough, the panic terror we have felt at
the footfall of our own abandonment and aloneness and confrontation
with what we love and fear and which will inevitably consume us,
alienation or communion, the guise dependent only on the habit of mind
we have come to trust, grace upon grace, carrying us beyond even this
beloved coast, beyond even the impeccable sunset islands of the dead.
In the year of Everlasting Origin, Hui-Shen appeared in court. In
1769 the Portolá expedition walked up this coast…
Esteban Berenda is a character in Jaime de Angulo's brilliant novella The Lariat. Jeffers tells of his first trip downcoast in his preface to Jeffers Country: The Seed Plots of Robinson Jeffers' Poetry, with photographs by Horace Lyon. That preface was reprinted in Not Man Apart. Jaime de Angulo describes his first visit to Big Sur, on horseback with Roche Castro, in "La Costa del Sur," which appears in A Jaime de Angulo Reader, edited by Bob Callahan. Hui-Shen's narrative of his travels to Fu-Sang are re-printed, with commentary, in Fu-Sang, or the Discovery of America by Chinese Buddhist Priests in the Fifth Century, by Charles G. Leland. This ancient chronicle is also discussed by historian Charles Chapman in his chapter "The Chinese Along the Pacific Coast in Ancient Times" from A History of California: the Spanish Period, and also by Sandy Lydon in Chinese Gold: the Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region. Nobel poet Czeslaw Milosz imagines the Japanese castaway and discusses Jeffers' poem "Hands" in "The Edge of the Continent" in Road-Side Dog. Milosz is one of the most perceptive readers of Jeffers, who figures prominently in Milosz's Visions from San Francisco Bay, most directly in "Carmel." Cf. in particular Milosz's poem "To Robinson Jeffers." I am grateful to Jeffers' scholar Rob Kafka for our correspondence on "panic terror in the Santa Lucias," a theme that recurs in Jeffers' poetry, in de Angulo's writings, and in Steinbeck's short story "Flight."
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