Opal Whiteley (1897–1992)

We are positioned within the human world, but that world is not truly delineated from that of nature— they are the same world (and they are not). The division is only within us. We may believe that in the human world, there are such things as jugs, baskets, vases made of clay. There are halter bows. There are utilitarian things for us. She gifted such objects to the woods and animal citizens of the woods. Opal Whiteley lived in this liminal space, or she lived completely in the world if one gives up the dichotomy (and one should). Lars Porsena of Clusium’s interest in the thimble is a an exchange between these worlds (if one can’t let that Cartesian dichotomy go yet) or this exchange happens within the singular space of this world we beings all share. The placement of the halter bow upon Aphrodite is a similar metaphor. The babies Opal is always thinking about (animal and human) are equivalent—the babies for Dear Love and the baby spiders in their spider sacs beneath the board.

Opal likes the view from high. Whether it is climbing to the roof of the barn or climbing high into the treetops, from here she has a vantage of the homestead and the land around. I remember studying the Transcendentalists and I remember encountering two types. One type, the Emersonian type, is necessarily theoretical. The other type, Thoreauvian, is praxis of theory. Emerson refused to fund Brook Farm; Hawthorne was disgusted with the mounds of manure there. On the other hand, Thoreau built a cabin at Walden. I think of Opal as fitting into the latter model—the Thoreauvian model. On “exploration trips” she climbs up trees and jumps intro trees from roofs and crawls inside of logs and under the house searching for snakes to count the number of stripes. She makes lists of the world around her, opens herself, gives names to animals to make them equals to herself. She sings aloud and prays aloud. Praxis. She feeds the wild—the wasps (faeries)—her bread and jam. She feeds the tramps. Indeed, her tasks to open up and to absorb and to give to this world are more of a priority to her than the incessant list of chores she has to complete. Only the former has true value to her. Opal is a sponge rather than a container for ego. She sees in a way that uses all of the senses rather than just the eyes—and this takes on relevance later with Opal’s relationship with a blind girl who “hears what the grasses say.”

There is a price paid for not supporting the delusion of division between human and nature. Corporal punishment—child abuse— Opal’s being placed under a bed or tied to a woodshed in the hot sun without water or beaten with a switch—is didactic: Opal is supposed to get in line, finish tasks in a fast and efficient manner, stay in place, follow a linear path of chore completion through the day as enforced by “the mama.” This is the price (the suffering) Opal pays. Is Opal naïve? I doubt it. She knows that every act of defiance—every anarchic digression from the linear thinking of the human world—will cost her. I think this knowledge is there but unstated in the book. It’s my instinct. She doesn’t learn from her “mistakes” not because she is foolish but because she is wise. Perhaps “the mama” (who is a violent figure but also one that Opal is sympathetic toward) is a metonym for the larger rigid resistance to nonconformity.

Yet it is a trap to say that such nonconformity is a result of childlike innocence. This only reinforces that to be adult is to give up magical thinking. Some adults who still see the world as a space of magic—though perhaps some of these figures—such as Sadie McKibben—do so willfully and vicariously. Often these adults provide for her what her own family does not. Opal doesn’t delineate the world and sees no problem in a pig’s desire (an artist’s desire, for the pig is named Peter Paul Rubens) to attend school with her (and poor Peter Paul Rubens—later slaughtered when Opal is tricked away!). It’s the teacher who has a problem with this worldview. It’s interesting that the teacher demands to know “what is a snake” in a Socratic way but rejects all answers from Opal. Opal’s language is not her language. Her language—authoritative, Latinate, and taxonomic—can only be understood as earthy homophones for the Latinate phonemes (“egg sam pull”). But Sadie McKibben provides a ribbon for Peter Paul Rubens, and when he is later fenced in more securely to prevent further escape, Opal takes special interest in this caging because she understands it as a metaphor for her own life. Again, unstated, but instinctive. Opal is less interested in the older girls and their desire for bows and dresses and to be great ladies than she is in getting back down to the brook to listen to its song. The only dresses she are interested in are those she will put onto the 31 potatoes in their choir in her grandfather’s field (Opal is there with Sir Philip Sidney, and add these two to the 31 and this makes 33—the magic Christian number, year of death and resurrection, and much more could be said about the Christianity of the book—the pure overhaul of it here, and the larger sense of constant regeneration and return she believes in). Inner vision is important to Opal—it is her freedom, escape, and transcendence.

And what of Opal’s writing itself? The heuristic grammar and syntax of these sentences, small details piling up repetitively and from multiple angles, enacts a high level of absorption into the very atoms that make up nature. This is wreading. This is also a language of praxis. The hyper-anaphora, the cadences, of “I do” reinforces that every action is first a willing toward action. I do know. I do have thinks. I do have lonesome feels. I do sit. I do hear. Sometimes it reminded me of Gertrude Stein’s How to Write—one of my favorite books. Cubist piling. Joy in tautology. One of the most important quotes of the book, which I hand copied into my own journal, is “earth-voices are glad voices, and earth songs come up from the ground through the plants; and in their flowering and in the days before these days are come, they did tell the earth-songs to the wind.” Copying it in my own writing brings me into temporal union with Opal for the moment. I think the cadences are the curls of Opal’s head. O’s curls. Fleur in the hair. The ornate French conjures forest and meadow pastorals—of Troubadours—O! playing the reed pipe when O goes “a pipin’.” The backdrop a lumber camp, no less, a little anti-pastoral always there.

So many thoughts do abide near unto us… we must search for the thoughts that do dwell near about…… (plus d'informations)