I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society recently. I devoured it, which as lovely as it is, didn’t take very long. I felt comforted by the book, which is odd since it is about war and the effects it has on an occupied people. I’ve been thinking about it since and wanted just to give you some idea of how I’m thinking about it, since I haven’t come to any conclusions about this.
Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t buy presents. Not for anyone at all, but this year I am buying 1 (well strictly 2) for myself.  I am going to buy a copy of The Elegence of the Hedgehog – one in English and one in French.

I’ve wanted to improve my reading French for a while and the back-and-forth of two books is the easiest way for me to do that. I’ve waited until I could find a book that I wouldn’t mind obsessing over for a goodly time and after the first three paragraphs as an introduction to Renée the concierge I knew I had found my book.

Just the first three paragraphs – the young scion who found Marx – Oh! – that was enough. Such a deeply satisfying wit has Mme Barbery and since I am also unmarried, ugly and “plump” (which is a bit of an understatement), I feel I have found my natural place in the universe.

As soon as this last bit of writing is done for this term, I am going somewhere quiet, hole up and read.

As you all know xkcd is often deeply funny. This one seems to me to say a great deal about what kind of fantasy books are going to appeal to the next generation – and would have appealed to a few of us from the last.

I mean Narnia was fun if you could get around the whole powerful woman as a bad guy and carnivore as a good guy thing, but this one would have been so much better.

I’ve been thinking about a story by Rick Bass called “The Myths of Bears” (published in The Sky The Stars The Wilderness). Reading it brought Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to mind. Not because they are both about nature, but really because only one is really about the world. I liked Pilgrim but it isn’t really about this earth. It’s about being a Christian pilgrim wanting to transcend the world, or at least to reach that reality where the cyclic nature of our reality is gone, frozen in a space where it can be seen, appreciated perhaps, but not enjoined.

“The Myths of Bears” is in that sense its opposite. It is a harshly beautiful story that never even contemplates trying to escape the round that is life and death, beauty and ugliness. Rather it shows them as one thing, that death-life and beauty-ugliness are what the world, for us, is.
Read the rest of this entry »

Written in 1932 Allan Tate said “We lack a tradition of criticism. There are no points of critical reference passed on to us from a preceding generation. I am not upholding here the so-called dead hand of tradition, but rather a rational insight into the meaning of the present in terms of some imaginable past implicit in our own lives: we need a body of ideas that can bear upon the course of the spirit and yet remain coherent as a rational  instrument. We ignore the present, which is momently translated into the past, and derive our standards from imaginative constructions of the future. The hard contingency of fact invariably breaks these standards down, leaving us in the intellectual chaos which is the sore distress of American criticism. Marxian criticism has become the lastest disguise of this heresy.”

Oh yes. What a pleasure to read. The hard contingency of fact… Imaginative constructions of the future…

Like all those theories of Emily’s imagined lover, no real evidence, just a disbelief that her passion wasn’t aimed at a specific man or woman.

And like Frank Kermode who, wonderful critic that he is, saw this narrative need of ours to live in the apocalyptic story, to define ourselves by something that isn’t amenable to reason or evidence.

There is so much more in that essay. As I process what he had to say, I will post.

I was never able to read the Little House on the Prairie series, but when I came upon an article called Wilder Women: The mother and daughter behind the Little House stories, I took the time to read it before going to work.

I was glad I did, although I found it oddly depressing to have my sense of the perils of deprivation with respect to the human spirit so rewarded.

The Little House books always seemed to me to be an inaccurate reflection of what hardship actually makes of people. Those characters were always so good, so kind, and having lived around people in poverty and suffering from social and intellectual deprivation for much of my life, my experience is that whilst there are always flashes of kindness that come from even the nastiest of human beings, for the most part this kind of physical and social poverty makes of people’s spirits small bitter walnuts. I realize that makes me seem cynical and it may be so, but it could also be that I am correct in my assessment.
Read the rest of this entry »

I am at a dim sum restaurant. I am the only non-Asian person here. I have American Gods on the table. I have ordered taro and pumpkin in coconut milk with rice for lunch. Later I am going to see Angles and Demons at a small independent theatre nearby. What a miraculous thing such choice. Along the street here, just in one block, there is a Starbucks, a dim sum place, a modern Thai restaurant, a Korean bakery, a bar and pizza place, a theatre, a shop that sells lingerie that makes Victoria Secret look prudish, a small grocery store and a bank on the corner. Why did I choose the dim sum? Good question. Walking back from the bank I passed the pizza place and the bakery and then the Thai restaurant. As I passed the dim sum window I noticed the wall inside. Yellow stripes, tan relief, coordinated table cloths, bright, sunny, warm looking. My feet chose for me; when I got to the door I went in.
Read the rest of this entry »

One thing of deep interest to me is to concept of ownership amongst people whose life ways are still organized around mobility. Of course now, with all the changes brought by life on a Reservation, people own many things. Cars, for example, are important because it is hard to get groceries and get to Powwows and other events without a ride. Yet despite this cars are not treated with the reverence that they are often treated in other societies. People can own houses too, of course, but the same thing seems to be true. However, there is considerable pride in personal accoutrements—if there are Indian designed patterns, good Pendletons on the beds, a star quilt or two, pictures of Indian ancestors, necklaces, baskets, corn-husk bags, regalia—things that display historical continuity and contemporary vitality—things like that are of real value: there is emotional attachment that just doesn’t seem to be much present for the house itself.

The land and what it produces, which is very often the basis of Reservation wealth, is often tied to a family line and not really disposable wealth for the individual. The land is often in trust for those who come next in the family line. So for example, one piece of land can have twenty or more shared owners.

Tribal money: the Tribe is like a corporation that pays dividends to its “share-holders” those being tribal members. It earns the money by selling timber, running a casino, or other such industries and the money is divided up between all registered members of the tribe, the children’s money going half into an account that will not be accessible to them until they turn 18 and half going to their parents for things like school clothes and gifts. The details differ from tribe to tribe but the idea of community shared ownership and wealth dispersal is basically the same. So what individuals actually own are things that have cultural relevance and therefore some emotional attachment and some pride-worth—like the necklaces and regalia. Things that cam be owned in this more important way include stories, medicine items and songs. It is these last things—things I call keystone artifacts—that carry all the weight of custom that goes with the really important aspects of a people’s life.

So for example if something is taken without permission, like a car or a stereo, usually the person who has had his or her item taken may get mad but they will shrug. “It’s just a thing” is something I have heard a great number of times when things go missing. But in one case to which I was privy, where a person used another’s song in a ritual circumstance without permission, there was a huge furor, necessitating a dance to get us all together to take the affront to the spirits and many hours of prayer, dancing and singing to set it right.

A song is like a name: it is the key to one’s relationship with not only the spirits of the now-time and the land but it is also key to one’s relationship with the whole history (and therefore future) of the People. Imagine for a moment that your family name is one that belongs to the House of Windsor and you are British. That name would probably be of some import to you. In just the same way a song is an identifier of relationship, of belonging, of history. A song and also one’s stories are the place from which one’s life takes meaning and stealing them is the same as stealing the breath from one’s mouth. It is an act of inexcusable arrogance and contempt. This is, in part, why it is so awful when any person simply steals the patterns and ways of Indian people. It is like they are trying to steal the spirit or the soul. Imagine for a moment that the Shroud of Turin were actually Jesus’ shroud. Now imagine some completely uncontexted, unbaptized Christian-in-name-only borrowed it and used it as a ground tarp to hold some hastily invented para-Christian ritual. The outrage a committed Christian would feel is probably akin to what a Native American feels when he or she is told that non-contexted non-Indian people are holding a “traditional Sioux sweatlodge” or an “authentic Plains sundance.”

The core of any tradition is the web of relationships between the experiences, stories and traditions that connect the core (keystone) valuables of the people. These stories, traditions or experiences cannot simply be borrowed, anymore than a new genetic code can be borrowed. Change can happen and adaptation occurs but what a person grows with, what sets of experiences and values shape a person as a child are not fully eradicable. The fact that songs and stories form the core of real wealth and position in many tribal societies is not something that is easily shared. If you come into a society like this and have no connection with the songs and the stories then you have no position and since wealth like this cannot be bought, it is very difficult to become “visible” in the system.

I have always thought that the wonderful thing about experience is that it can never be false. What I decide the experience means can be false, what actions I take based on the experience can be helpful or harmful, but experience itself simply happens. For example, it is not the experience of rage or fear that is the problem, it is what is done or not done, what meaning is attached to the experience that causes the problems. Usually, of course, ascribing meaning to experience happens before we actually think. We hear a voice in our head and assume that it is, for example, either schizophrenia or some sort of other-worldly message. Most often we simply accept the story that traditionally goes with a specific set of events. We go further. We equate the story to the event, assessing and locking reality into place in a way that affects our capacity to perceive.

Storying for humans is a feed-back loop between the outer and inner worlds of lived experience. We hear a voice in our head, and it is not just an experience that could have several different stories attached, we become, in our own mind, the story that is being told, and then we judge ourselves by its rules. We forget that it is just a story. We forget that story works more like a verb than a noun. We get caught up in the nounness of the world; we have an experience of voices, we attach to the experience what we have been told it means, we judge ourselves by the story, and in that moment we have gone from a being experiencing to either a schizophrenic or a divine messenger.

Frank Kermode in his book The Sense of an Ending suggests that we live in perpetual crisis because of the way we, in our various non-indigenous Western cultures, structure the story of what it means to be human. Simply, because of this apocalyptic story we know what our lives mean because we already know the ending. The apocalypse of the western and middle-eastern religious worlds has become, instead, the tragedy of the personal—a sense of failure, of powerlessness in the face of the inexorable—but the sense of crisis has yet to dissipate. Apocalypse and tragedy is, for us, the same story but on a more individual scale, despite all the evidence that we have that the “end” never actually arrives. “We continue to assume…that there is a tolerable degree of conformity between the disconfirmed apocalypse and a respectfully modern view of reality and the powers of the mind. In short, we retain our fictions of epoch, of decadence and renovation, and satisfy in various ways our clerkly skepticism about these and similar fictions.”

It is the fact that we have told many stories about how things were originally perfect for us, how they changed for the worse turning us into aliens in our own garden, and finally how it all gets resolved returning us forever to a state of communion, that gives us rules by which we can guide our behavior as well as the behavior of others. The story gives us the courage to face all that we don’t know, don’t understand and don’t control and because of that we refuse to remember that it is, in fact, a story.

What resists—to the death sometimes—any reasonable light is the idea of a knowable ending. If one precognition of “the end” does not come true, if instead the next day there is just the grocer and the dirty laundry and the rent due, instead of questioning whether there will in fact be a clean-cut end to all the chaos and the merely contingent, we assume we just got the date wrong. We want to know how life turns out. If we don’t know, if we can never know, then maybe all the choices we have made make no sense, have no meaning, have no purpose. “Men in the middest make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle. That is why the image of the end can never be permanently falsified.” We story away the unknown and adjust the details as things change, make “adjustments in the interest of reality as well as of control.”

The not knowing, the places that story cannot penetrate, the intellectual dark, all that we can never know, is an immane universe—and that void, those places that we can never understand, never encompass, never realize, make of both the metaphorical and physical dark a scary place.