A while ago in a poetry seminar our tutor read a Indian folktale to us. It went like this.
The War of the Ghosts
One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war cries, and they thought: “Maybe this is a war party.” They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said:
“What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people.”
One of the young men said: “I have no arrows.”
“Arrows are in the canoe,” they said.
“I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you,” he said, turning to the other, “may go with them.”
So one of the young men went, but the other returned home.
And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water, and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one of the warriors say: “Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit.” Now he thought: “Oh, they are ghosts.” He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot.
So the canoes went back to Egulac, and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire. And he told everybody and said: “Behold, I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to a fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit and I did not feel sick.”
He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried.
He was dead.
…
My tutor told us we had to take the last paragraph and first describe the ‘something black’ and then invert it: describe the utter opposite. This was my answer:
THE BLACK STUFF OF THE SOUL
He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried.
1. It is a cloud of black dust that coats everything it touches with a film like coal dust. It blinds everything.
2. It is a black oily substance that rises out of his throat as if he is choking backwards. It acts like a vapour, being suspended in the air in a moving form, sometimes seeming to take recognizable shapes, you could read a fortune from it. It is slick and cold. It smells sickly. Some of it dribbles down the side of his face like blood.
3. They were puddles of white milk, which ran off nothing they avoided without clots unlike clotted cream. They illuminated nothing.
4. They were white dusty nothingnesses which sunk into her ear not like she was sighing forwards. They refrain unlike some solids, seeming rooted on some soil, rarely un-seeming to give unrecognizable non-forms, I couldn’t write obituaries in them. They aren’t dry nor hot. They don’t taste sour. None for them gush up a centre for her foot unlike water.
(Source: supersonicelectronic)
