Coyote

By Rebecca Solnit, The New Yorker

20 December 14

ou can take the woman out of the Church but not the Church out of the woman. Or so I used to think, as my mother, a lapsed Catholic, carried out dramas of temptation, sin, and redemption by means of ice cream and broccoli. She had left behind the rites and the celebrations but not the anxiety that all mistakes were unforgivable. So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.

My mother’s punitive God was the enemy of Coyote. Prankish, lecherous, accident-prone Coyote and his cousins, the unpredictable creators of the world in Native American stories, brought me a vision of this realm as never perfect, made through collaboration and squabbling. I came across one of these stories a quarter century ago, when the conceptual artist Lewis deSoto, who is part Cahuilla, asked me to write about his work.

The Cahuilla were one of the myriad small tribes that inhabited the vast area now known as California. In a story that Lewis gave me, the world begins with darkness and “beautiful, faraway sounds—sounds such as might come from distant singers.” The maternal darkness endeavors to give birth and miscarries twice, then bears twin boys who grow up to quarrel constantly about which of them was born first.

As they fashion the world and all the things in it, the twins argue about whether there should be sickness and death. The brother who wins the argument is worried about overpopulation. The loser abandons the earth in a huff, leaving behind some of his creations, including coyotes, palm trees, and flies. The remaining brother becomes such a problem—lusting after his daughter, the moon; giving rattlesnakes poisonous fangs; arming people with weapons they will use against one another—that his creatures have to figure out how to kill him. No one is unequivocally good, starting with the gods.

Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Ohlone people say that Coyote was the first being, and that the world was created by him, and by Eagle and by Hummingbird, who laughs at Coyote’s attempts to determine just where to impregnate his wife. (Coyote is not always this naïve. In the Winnebago stories, from the Great Lakes region, he sends his detachable penis on long, sneaky missions in pursuit of penetration, like some drone from the Dreamtime.) As the California poet Gary Snyder once said, “Old Doctor Coyote . . . is not inclined to make a distinction between good and evil.” Instead, he’s full of contagious exuberance and great creative force. In another California creation myth I remember hearing, the gods argue about procreation: one thinks that a man and a woman should put a stick between them at night, and it will be a baby when they wake up. Another says that there should be a lot of nocturnal embracing and laughing in the baby-making process.

These supple stories, unalarmed by improvisation, failure, and sex, remind me of jazz. The creator in the Old Testament, however, is a classical musician whose score can be performed only one right way. The angel with the flaming sword kept us out of Eden because we talked to snakes and made a bad choice about fruit snacks. Everything that followed was an affliction and a curse. Redemption was required, because perfection was the standard by which everything would be measured, and against which everything would fall short.

Most people under the influence of Genesis believe in some version of the fall from grace. Even secular stories tend to be structured that way. Conservatives have their Eden before the fall (it usually involves strong fathers and demure women and nonexistent queer people), and liberals, too, have stories about when everything was uncorrupted, about matriarchal communities and paleo diets and artisanal—well, artisanal just about anything, from cheese to chairs. If you give up on grace, you can give up on the fall. You can start enjoying stuff that’s only pretty good.

According to the Pomo, another Northern California tribe, the world was formed when a god rolled his armpit wax into a ball. Or, according to the Maidu, who live largely in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains, it’s made from mud, picked out from under the nails of a turtle that had scraped it up at the bottom of the primordial soup. They’re not my property, these old stories, but they’re an invitation to reconsider what is. If the perfect is the enemy of the good, maybe imperfection is its friend.