New Tune, “Coyote on Valencia”

“Coyote on Valencia” from Garageband Demos 2009-2010.

Lyrics, in .pdf, with chords.

My velvet blazer and my whiskers waxed
I tip my top-hat as I cross the tracks
Without copper coin or greenbacks
My paws patter on the blacktop
Leave no reflection passing window panes
Nor no impression passing peoples’ brains
I slip between the cars and bike lanes
That litter this, my creation

I’m sneaking through windows and doors
My claws click upon floors
On this howling mid-January evening
I’m seeking out scents
Coming in from the past tense
And in minutes my pack starts its quiet forming

So, if you feel like somebody’s found you
But you can’t see any people around
Then you’ll know
That you’ll never be alone in the Financial District
You’ll have company inside the station at 24th St.
And if you take in your surroundings
You’ll see fancy mirrors and hear distant tape recordings
You’ll know
That you’ll never be alone on the Big Red Bridge
You’ll see long ago footprints in Dolores Park

I catch inarticulate infants’ eyes
I read the forms in that clouded sky
I see the metal buildings gone too high
While crouching down on the pavement
Despite that history hunting on my track
I didn’t leave, so I can’t come back
The past is gone, and the present’s cracked
So I put my eyesight ahead of me

I’m sneaking through windows and doors
My claws click upon floors
On this howling mid-January evening
I’m seeking out scents
Coming in from the past tense
And in minutes my pack starts its quiet forming

So, if you feel like somebody’s found you
But you can’t see any people around
Then you’ll know
That you’ll never be alone when you’re taking the T
You’ll have so much company you won’t know what to do with it.
And if you take in your surroundings
You’ll see fancy mirrors and hear distant tape recordings
You’ll know
That you’ll never be alone when you’re cursing the Mayor’s office
You’ll see any number of brown eyes staring back at you

When the paper reads the Mission burned
White Jesus gone, Father Serra spurned
You’ll know that I took my turn
Though it was too long in coming

I feel I take a bit of a pass on writing for 2009, because I recorded Adieu, False Heart, printed it up (such as I did), and dealt with other musical things, like performance and getting my web situation to something that fits my life at this point.  I do have a number of little ideas for tunes built up from last year, but the fact remains that I completed no new tunes in 2009.  I began this one, but only got the first verse and a bit of the second last year, and a start on the second part–”Sneaking through windows and doors,” etc.  The third part, the chorus such as it is (I’m not using these terms scientifically) had been a wisp of a melody I’d had in my head for years but which connected to this tune on the last day of a meditation retreat I attended over winter break.

I read Vine Deloria‘s God is Red a couple years ago, and it had a big impact on how I see things.  Particularly powerful was a lengthy except from a speech Chief Seattle gave in 1854 or 1855, here shortened to the relevant passage:

And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.

It will be noted that eminent historians working for the National Archives have questioned the existence of the speech:

The dubious and murky origins of Chief Seattle’s alleged “Unanswered Challenge” renders it useless as supporting evidence.  The historical record suggests that the compliant and passive individual named Seattle is not recognizable in the image of the defiant and angry man whose words reverberate in our time.

I’ll go with Vine Deloria over some white hack working for the Federal Government any day of the week.  The paper is worth a gander, if only to dismiss it more specifically.  What we have here is one of a long series of examples of white academics and intellectuals trying to determine the meaning of, in this case, Indian people’s past.  Among other things, a dead giveaway for Jerry Clark’s intellectual bankruptcy: “angry man.”  Chief Seattle comes across as many things in the speech, but angry is not one of them.  If I had a dime for every time some white person called a non-angry non-white person angry…

Clark, of course, not wanting, as an employee of the Federal Government, the institution most responsible for the destruction of Indian societies in North America, and a beneficiary of that slaughter, to deal with the substance of the words.  They mean something to Deloria for a reason.  Rather than understand that reason, the argument is changed from a political to a technical one.  Clark–in Clark’s own mental world–here has the home-field advantage.  If I don’t know it, he thinks as a National Archivist, it therefore must not exist.  This is absolutely typical of white academia particularly as it examines non-white people.  We are the ones who truly know your history.

I have a pretty simple rule when looking at the past: I try to find out what peoples say about their own history as a starting point, and proceed from there.  Control of the narrative has to remain with the subjects, so to speak, of the story.  This is particularly true in North America, as in any settler colony.

There’s a litmus test to apply to any such debate about history and evidence.  When the white scholar lectures the non-white scholar or person about objectivity (broadly put), you know the white scholar is the villain, and that an attempt to maintain white control over the meaning of the past is in play.  Viz. Philip Curtain:

I note a curious anti-empiricist tone to some of the recent postings concerning the slave trade from Goree.

Where the tune differs with Chief Seattle is that it doesn’t posit the disappearance of native people:

I didn’t leave, so I can’t come back
The past is gone, and the present’s cracked
So I put my eyesight ahead of me

Credit where credit is due: our friend, Nellie, refers to the Golden Gate as “the Big Red Bridge.”  I cribbed the line for this tune.