The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

The Nervous System
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concerned by this apparent inconsistency. In the song lines immediately
following, in which the shaman, likened to the penis, that is, to the action
of the penis, wipes the inner place dry, they rather anxiously reaffirm the
interior—the vaginal—location of the action in language that is a study in
indeterminacy, combining the interrogative with the subjunctive moods.
"The dessication . . . again indicates that the place in question is supposed
to be located inside the woman."
Penis or Hummingbird?
There is, furthermore, every reason to be skeptical of the major frisson of
the work, where erotics and exotics were conflated into their alteric best,
namely the identification of the narrative movement as one of the penis
moving vaginaward to telos. For it is confidently stated by an anthropologist
comfortable with the Cuna languages (everyday and spiritual), Norman
Macpherson Chapin, that the word nuspane, translated by Holmer and Wassen
as penis, is woefully mistranslated and in fact means 'hummingbird'! This
puts a rather different complexion on things, most important of which, to
my mind, is the sacrifice we are now facing—the sacrifice of clarity, the
inability to salvage meaning from the third world for the sake of Theory.
It's not simply the penis that has gone up in smoke. Chapin's rendering of
this problem in a truly baffling footnote serves as one of the great illustrations
of Nervous System poetics. It reads:
The word 'penis' is a mistranslation of nuspane, which means 'hummingbird,'
This error was made because both nusu ('worm') and pane ('frigate
bird') are common euphemisms for 'penis' in colloquial Kuna [which is
different to the spirit-language sung by the curer]. The correct correspondence,
however, is nusu ('worm') + aipane ('to move back and forth').
Thus: 'the worm that moves back and forth ' or 'hummingbird.' 51
to
And he goes on to say that he questioned his informants repeatedly as to
the possibility that nusupane meant penis. At first they were amused; later
they were impatient.
Mimetic Worlds: Invisible Counterparts
So much for the (mis)representation of the male organ as it slips from
colloquial Cuna to the language of the spirit, the spirit world being, according
Homesickness & Dada
to Cuna ethnography, the invisible replication of the material world. It is this
massively important quality of the Cuna world, its replication in spiritual
realms, that allows for magical power—the power of mimesis. For by acting
on spiritual copies, as in the song, the shaman can affect material reality. "In
this wav one evidently can say," wrote Baron Nordenskiold in the 1930s,
after lengthy discussion with the Cuna Ruben Perez in the Ethnological
Museum in Gothenburg, "that everything, people, animals, plants, stone,
things made by man etc., have invisible counterparts which we sometimes
see in dreams and which leave the body or at least for the most part leave
it when it dies." "Kven when we awake," he added, "we can sometimes
feel manifestations of this invisible world, in the warmth of the sun, the
noise of thunder, in music, etc." More self-assuredly, Chapin explains from
his fieldwork in the San Bias islands fifty years later:
The world as it exists today has a dual nature: it is composed of what is
termed 'the world of spirit' and 'the world of substance.' The world of
spirit is invisible to a person's waking senses, yet surrounds that person
on all sides and resides inside every material object. Human beings, plants,
animals, rocks, rivers, villages, and so forth, all have invisible 'souls' which
arc spiritual copies of the physical body.
And he points out that the purba or "soul" of a human being is, "in its general
form and appearance, a representation of the body in which it lives. The
purba of a man with one leg, for example, also has only one leg."
The healing chants are themselves mimetic with this mimetic world of
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invisible counterparts. They create word-copies of the spirit-world, itself a
replica of the material world, and thus, as Joel Sherzer so neatly puts it,
"The subsequent narration of actions and events, addressed to the spirit
world, causes their simultaneous occurrence in the mirror image physical world"
(emphasis added).
Yet there is deep-seated mischief afoot here. For while every material
thing has its spirit double visible to the specialists, and it is this doubling
which provides the basis for both misfortune and curing practice, the fact
of the matter is that the spirit world is characterized by its tremendous
capacity for trickery, transformation, and fantasy. Chapin notes, for instance,
that "while all the inhabitants of the spirit world are able to change their
shapes at will, and are therefore sometimes seen as animals, plants, or
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