This event has been used often to argue that Trillim was mentally unstable and prone to visions. Based on this event, literary critic Asaka Iguchi and psychological historian J’Kahla Khornezh have argued that there are clear indications of undiagnosed schizophrenia in Gilda Trillim’s writings and especially in accounts such as the following.1 This will come as a blow to these researchers because of the evidence I present in this portion of the thesis. This finding alone does not answer the question of whether she was mad, of course. However it does remove a rather prominent arrow from their quivers.
This entry also gives a sense of the depth of Gilda’s Mormonism and its central tenet on the importance of embodiment (see for example, Faulconer’s treatise2 on the subject). Here she reflects on the centrality of the body for spirituality. A recurring theme for Trillim in much of her work. This is the most explicit treatment of that idea among all her writings.
The aspens are shimmering in the morning air, their pale green underside, the dark emerald top flipping back and forth creating a jitterbug that enlivens the already delightful sunlight streaming into our little valley. The carefree stream that falls from the western La Sals into Buckeye makes a lovely splashing sound and drowns out any other noise. I’m following the little rivulet up to a beaver dam that I like to watch.
I come to the dam, then skirt it and approach from the side, trying to creep closer to the pond where I take a position from which I can survey the giant rodents’ work below me. I sit on a fallen aspen that they (I’m sure) have provided for my comfort by falling it and not dragging it away for their construction projects. Delightfully kind of them. I take out my sketchpad and try to draw the scene below me. It’s a small pond, maybe an acre, and roundish, surrounded by aspens on one side and Ponderosa pine and scrub oak on the other.
I have two friends here. One is a strange otherworldly creation of my mind. The other is real. The fantasy apparition has appeared twice, both near sundown. The first time, I’d been relaxing by the pond drawing. I had just finished a sketch and set back to enjoy the magic that falls upon the place when the sun gets low, the shadows lengthen, and the stark lemon sun starts to sneak behind the La Sals. I fell into a late afternoon drowsy slumber; I awoke to find a small young woman standing on the other side of the water looking at me. By ‘small’ I mean strangely so, perhaps three and a half feet tall, but proportioned like an adult, not a child or a dwarf. She was a wild thing. Her hair was fierce and untamed, not long or short. She was dressed in a soft leather kirtle, but with a fey, otherworldly, shimmering purple shift beneath. A deerskin was draped across her shoulders like a cloak. On her feet were loose, well-fitting leather moccasins. Most strange of all she wore a silver tiara with a gorgeous star sapphire centered over her forehead. It was in that bit of detail that gave away that she was the creation of my own mind. I looked at her for a second and she looked at me and flipped me off; raising her middle finger with a look on her face that sent a chill down my spine. I rubbed my eyes with my fists and opened my eyes again and sure enough she was gone. I’d heard of this effect occurring when people awake suddenly and the mind continues in a dream state. I went to the other side of the pond and looked for a sign that she had been real, but it had been unusually dry that season and there were no tracks of any kind.
However, I saw her again. Or I think I did. This time she was buck-naked with a small bow in her hand. I came upon her while I was hiking up near Taylor Flats in late summer. I saw her down a sheer embankment following a small stream through some thick dark aspens. I had taken a small cattle trail off of the main road and as I rounded a corner I looked down the draw and saw her as clear as anything. She looked up at me and leapt away, her white butt flashing as she fled. Babs thinks it was a mule deer with its white bottom doing the same. It’s true the mind can play tricks, but it seemed so real to me! I suppose that scores of Bigfoot sightings are bears or elk in which people are sure they saw the monster instead3.
Today I see my other friend. My real one. Or rather her manifestation flying below the water creating a moving chevron traced out in the tiny waves that mark her passing. It surfaces, its brown back and flat black tail exposed. It’s the female. I’ve named her Beth because I’m unimaginative and have decided to give them all names that start with ‘B.’ I watch her gliding along the surface. She dives again, and heads directly for the lodge in the center of the pond—a large dome of piled sticks that serve as a nursery and sleeping berth.
She has a wondrous beaver body. What would that be like? To swim, to have teeth that can gnaw through the trunk of an aspen, to have the strength to pull a felled tree a hundred yards and then swim it into place for a dam of one’s own construction and design—and to be driven so to do? To feel compelled to cut another tree, to pull it to just the right place in the dam? What would having such a body be like? One that could swim in icy winter water? One with webbed feet that would give purchase to those motions that propelled it through the pond like a proper water dweller. Like a fish. Bodies are such remarkable things. We need them. They define us and our place in the universe. They allow us to be who we are. I love my body. Do beavers love theirs?
The bodies of my rats were essential to their singing. Their claws grasped minute protuberances, each chosen by their relationship to how it allowed them to position their bodies on the wall. Their angle, given in relation to Earth’s gravity, was facilitated by tiny imperfections in the surface of the wall that determined, for example, how spread out their legs were, how hunched they had to hold their back to keep from losing balance and tumbling to the floor. The little holds fixed just how akimbo each limb had to be positioned in relation to the others—sometimes their front legs were pulled far forward and perhaps one back leg was pulled in close to the body while another was held at a distance at an odd unnatural angle (where ‘odd’ here is in reference to their normal gait while scurrying through a field or up a tree). These body positions, held in reference to multiple forces, (e.g., the topology of the wall, gravitational fields, frictional forces determined by the humidity, or the growth of some odd mold, algae, or lichen, or the pattern of air flow or circulation, or what sorts of things adhered to their claws like slimes or muds, etc.) must have affected their song. Perhaps their bodies being stretched too far, in some cases, their lungs held less capacity and influenced how long they could hold a note, or by being contorted in some strange way it conditioned the timbre or quality of their musical expression. As such, each concert was a unique moment in the universe’s existence. Never to be repeated. All because they, like us, are embodied. All their muscles, neurology, the keratin mesh molding their claws, their whiskers sending messages to their brains adding nuance to its position and place in the universe, their tails providing the balance their body needs to move properly, all combine to create the music.
And their bodies do not just exist in relation to the physical world as given, but stand apropos of other bodies that add another layer of positioning with which they must engage. A given rat finds itself not just in physical fields of force, but social ones as well—how far must I arrange myself from my enemies? How close to my friends? Does a rat notice the quality of their song in the context of another’s? Does this influence how they want to place themselves on the wall? As in, ‘I sound so much better above so and so, and to the right and below of that person?’ Who’s to say rats, highly social creatures indeed, are not placing themselves to their best advantage in creating beauty in concert with their neighbors?
It is in the bodies of rats that all this music is integrated, and defined, and this rarified materialized manifest bubbles into the world as something new and wondrous. Bodies. What wondrous things they are and what a poorer world this would be if we were but some kind of ghost or spirit. It seems to me that this is where the freedom of expression found so abundantly in the universe flowers and fruits. For it is only in such a feeling thing, integrating across myriad fields, that the interest in placing oneself in relation to other existences emanates and springs new into the universe, creating novelty. Or so I believe.
Babs is ringing the lunch bell. My mother has promised to make toasted cheese sandwiches for lunch, which I often make when it is my turn to craft our noontime repast, but somehow my mother’s are superior in every way. A work of art. My mother, cheddar cheese, butter, bread, and a searing skillet, are without question one of the universe’s most pleasing creations.