A Minute Meditation

Language is the stuff of the imagination.  The imagination is the creative aspect of language.  It enables us to use language to its highest potential.  It enables us to realize a reality beyond the ordinary, it enables us to create and to re-create ourselves in story and literature.  It is the possible accomplishment of immortality.

-- N. Scott Momaday --
from  The Man Made of Words

Can we imagine anything without words?  

N. Scott Momaday: on stories

Another quotation from N. Scott Momaday on storytellers and storytelling.  I think there are some ideas expressed in them that wouldn't be accepted favorably by modern critics, and, perhaps, by some not-so-modern critics and scholars. . 



  Stories are composed of words and of such implications as the storyteller places upon the words.  The choice of words, their arrangement, and their effect are by and large determined by the storyteller.  The storyteller exercises nearly complete control over the storytelling experience.

.  .  .  .  .

   Stories are true to our common experience; they are statements which concern the human condition.  To the extent that the human condition involves moral considerations, stories have moral implications.  Beyond that, stories are true in that they are established squarely upon belief.  In the oral tradition stories are told not merely to entertain or to instruct; they are told to be believed.  Stories are not subject to the imposition of such questions as true or false, act or fiction.  Stories are realities lived and believed.  They are true. 

-- N. Scott Momaday --
The Man Made of Words


Aside from John Gardner, I wonder how many critics, scholars, and readers will accept Momaday's statement that stories have moral implications.  

I'm not sure exactly what Momaday means by Stories are not subject to the imposition of such questions as true or false, act or fiction.  Stories are realities lived and believed.  They are true.   I think he suggests the stories somehow are not to be judged by our ordinary commonsense ways of thinking, but exist somehow in another place. 

Any thoughts?

A Minute Meditation

The storyteller is the one who tells the story.  To say this is to say that the storyteller is preeminently entitled to tell the story.  He is original and creative.  He creates the storytelling experience and himself and his audience in the process.  He exists in the person of the storyteller for the sake of telling the story.  When he is otherwise occupied, he is someone other than the storyteller.  His telling of the story is a unique performance.  The storyteller creates himself in the sense that the mask he wears for the sake of telling the story is of his own making, and it is never the same.   He creates his listener in the sense that he determines the listener's existence within, and in relation to, the story, and it is never the same.  The storyteller says in effect: "On this occasion I am, for I imagine that I am; and on this occasion you are, for I imagine that you are.  And this imagining is the burden of the story, and indeed it is the story."  

-- N. Scott Momaday --
from The Man Made of Words


N. Scott Momaday obviously possesses a different philosophy regarding storytelling than do many of his contemporaries.   Some commentaries I had read a short time ago imply that there is no such thing as a good book or a bad book, that there is no such thing as a good storyteller or a bad storyteller, that there are only good readers and bad readers.

Sheer unadulterated twaddle.

N. Scott Momaday: In the Bear's House, an overview

N. Scott Momaday
In the Bear's House


In the Bear's House is a rather unusual work, as will be seen from the Table of Contents I will provide shortly.  To be honest, I have only the briefest glimpse of what Momaday is doing here, but I find that what little I do see absorbing, as well as perplexing.  Rather than stumble about, confusing you and me even more, I will Momaday tell you in his own words what this book is all about.

"INTRODUCTION

Let me say at the outset that this is not a book about Bear (he would be spoken of in the singular and masculine, capitalized and without an article), or it is only incidentally about him.  I am less interested in defining the being of Bear than in trying to understand something about the spirit of wilderness, of which Bear is a very particular expression.  Even Urset, who is the original bear and comes directly from the hand of God, is symbolic and transparent, more transparent than real, if you will.  He is an imitation of himself, a mask.  If you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains on the other side.  Bear is a template of the wilderness.

I am acquainted with Bear,  indeed more than acquainted.  Bear and I are one, in one and the same story.  My Indian name is Tsoai-talee, which in Kiowa means 'Rock-tree boy.'  Tsoai, "Rock tree,' is Devils Tower in Wyoming.  That is where, long ago, a Kiowa boy turned into a bear and where his sisters were borne into the sky and became the stars of the Big Dipper.  Through the power of stories and names, I am the reincarnation of that boy.  From the time the name Tsoai-talee was conferred on me as an infant, I have been possessed of Bear's spirit.  The Kiowas--whose principal religious expression was the Sun Dance and whose most ancient blood memory was of the mythic darkness of a hollow log from which they emerged into the world--believe that the buffalo is the animal representation of the sun.  Bear is the animal representation of the wilderness.

.   .   .   .   .

Something in me hungers for wild mountains and rivers and plains.  I love to be on Bear's ground, to listen for that old guttural music under his breath, to know only that he is near.  And Bear is welcome in my dreams, for in that cave of sleep I am at home to Bear."

N. Scott Momaday
1998"



One comment:  Momaday does not mention that the Big Dipper is found in the Ursa Major or Great Bear Constellation.



Below is the table of Contents that follow the Introduction:

The Bear-God Dialogues
There are ten dialogues.  Some of the titles are  "You are, Urset. I am, Yahweh," "Berries," "Prayer,"
"Dreams," and "Baseball." 

The baseball dialogue is especially interesting for Cub fans.  Urset is the Bear and Yahweh is Yahweh.  Urset begins by telling Yahweh that his children want to play baseball.

YAHWEH
Baseball. . .Baseball?

URSET
Baseball.  You know, played with bats, a ball, gloves. . .

YAHWEH:
(exasperated)
Oh, for heaven's sake!  OF COURSE I know what baseball is.   I was a pretty fair shortstop in my day.  I taught Ernie Banks everything he knew, if I do say so myself.

URSET:
My children, my little brood of bears, they are forming a team. Their enthusiasm is boundless.  Why, they even have a name for themselves.

YAHWEH:
Don't tell me.  .  .the "Cubs."


URSET:
I really don't know why they can't be a football team.  They are bears, after all.  They are thick and furry.  And they are already accomplished at assault and battery.  It is their nature.  It is what they do.  But baseball!  Baseball is a game of swat, catch, and tag--better played by housecats."


.:

Poems
This sections contains nineteen poems, and I will post some of them in the future. 


Passages
Only two passages are included in this section:  "The Bear Hunt" and "The Transformation."


As you can see from the Introduction, In the Bear's House is a very unique work.  One of the major themes that I've managed to grasp is the relationship Momaday has with wilderness and his thoughts on the significance of wilderness for all of us.   


This is one of those works that I think requires at least another reading, and probably a couple of rereadings.  



The NFL team in Chicago is the Chicago Bears.
The following link will lead you to the Wiki article on Ernie Banks, probably the most popular Cub player of all time.. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Banks

A Minute Meditation

We exist in the element of language.  Someone  has said that to think is to talk to oneself.  The implications of this equation are critical.  Language is necessary to thought, and thought (as it is manifested in language) distinguishes us from all other creatures.

-- N. Scott Momaday --
from the Preface of The Man Made of Words


Is it true then that we can think only about something for which we have a word?  The appendix to George Orwell's 1984 contains a thoughtful essay on this. 

N. Scott Momaday and Emily Dickinson

The following excerpt comes from N. Scott Momaday's The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages.   The chapter title is "A Divine Blindness:  The Place of Words in a State of Grace."   I have often found Dickinson's poetry to be puzzling and enigmatic, but this poem confounds me completely.

I am publishing this excerpt because of Momaday's first comment on the poem:  "This poem, written about 1866 by a then obscure woman poet in the Connecticut Valley of western Massachusetts, is one of the great moments in American literature."  I know what that means, but I can't relate it to Dickinson's poem.  Perhaps you will do better.

The excerpt--poem and commentary:

     "When the subtitle "The Place of Words in a State of Grace" occurred to me, in the back of my mind was this poem by Emily Dickinson.

                            Further in Summer than the Birds
                            Pathetic from the Grass
                            A minor Nation celebrates
                            Its unobtrusive Mass.

                             No Ordinance be seen
                             So gradual the Grace  
                             A pensive Custom it becomes
                             Enlarging Loneliness.

                             Antiquest felt at Noon
                             When August burning low
                             Arise this spectral Canticle
                             Repose to typify

                             Remit as yet no Grace
                             No Furrow on the Glow
                             Yet a Druidic Difference  
                             Enhances Nature now   
                          


    This poem, written about 1866 by a then obscure woman poet in the Connecticut Valley of western Massachusetts, is one of the great moments in American literature.  The statement of the poem is profound;  it remarks the absolute separation between man and nature at a precise moment in time.   The poet looks as far as she can into the natural world, but what she sees at last is her isolation from that world.  She perceives, that is, the limits of her own perception.  But that, we reason, is enough.  This poem of just more than sixty words comprehends the human condition in relation to the universe:

                              So gradual the Grace  
                             A pensive Custom it becomes
                             Enlarging Loneliness. .


But this is a divine loneliness, the loneliness of a species evolved far beyond all others.  The poem bespeaks a state of grace.  In its precision, perception, and eloquence it establishes the place of words within that state.  Words are indivisible with the highest realization of the human being."



As I wrote above, I recognize that Momaday considers Dickinson's poem to be of supreme significance, but I cannot relate his words to the poem.

Any thoughts?


Poem 1068
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
edited by Thomas H. Johnson

A Minute Meditation

The white blossoms of pear trees and the slashes of red earth in the grasses, the brown rivers high and roiling.  The sky is the very blue of serenity, and the horizons are so far away as to exceed the reach of vision.  But here, just here, is a small bird hopping.

-- N. Scott Momaday --
from Again the Far Morning:  New and Selected Poems


This quotation is from the section of the book titled "Notebook."   There are a number of entries in the section, some of which I recognize as related to poems in this book, but I don't recognize this one.  However, it is one of those statements that cause me to read and pause and reread and reread again, but I am never sure why. 

Is the bird simply a distraction or is Momaday making a point here,  one which I'm missing?

N. Scott Momaday: The Ancient Child, a novel

N. Scott Momaday
The Ancient Child

As I began reading this work, I was reminded of Momaday's, The Way to Rainy Mountain, which I posted on several years ago.  That work had a three part structure.  Each section began with a Kiowa legend, myth, or story and this was followed by a bit of factual information which related to the myth or legend.  For example, Momaday related a story about a famous arrow maker and this was followed by factual information about arrow-making among the Kiowa. The third part was a personal reminiscence by Momaday.

The Ancient Child  has four interwoven narrative threads: one is a Kiowa legend; the second is a bit of Western lore, part true and part myth; the third the story of a Kiowa/Navajo medicine woman; and the fourth the story of a Kiowa who was orphaned at eight, adopted by whites, and grew up far from the reservation and his people.

It took a while, but gradually, most of the threads merged or I could see the possibility of a merging. However, there is still one narrative thread that I haven't quite been able to meld with the others, so I will have to reread it to see what I have missed.


Momaday begins with an epigraph that provides a clue as to the nature of the work:

 "For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at the end."     -- Borges --


And the cast of characters provides more clues.

Characters

LOCKE SETMAN,  called Set, an artist
GREY, a young medicine woman, a dreamer

HENRY McCarty, Billy the Kid, a notorious outlaw
KOPE'MAH, an old medicine woman
BENT SANDRIDGE, Set's adoptive father, a retired man, humane and wise
LALA BOURNE, a beautiful, ambitious woman
SET-ANGYA,  an old Kiowa man, Chief of the Kaitsenko Society, a Lear-like man, a man who carries about the bones of his favorite son                

THE BEAR, himself,  the mythic embodiment of wilderness
OTHERS, as they appear





THE BEAR, one of the four threads
                                                Prologue

Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother.  Suddenly the boy was stuck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet.  His fingers became claws, and his body was covered with fur.   Directly there was a bear where the boy had been.  The sisters were terrified; they ran, and the bear after them.  They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them.   It bade them climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air.  The bear came to kill them, but they were beyond its reach.  It reared against the trunk and scored the bark all around with its claws.  The seven sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper. 

         
 
                      Kiowa story of Tsoai (Kiowa for rock tree)

Tsoai, the great stump of the tree, stood against the sky.  There was nothing like it in the landscape.  The tallest pines were insignificant beside it; many hundreds of them together could not fill its shadow.  In time the stump turned to stone, and the wind sang at a high pitch as it ran across the great grooves that were set there long ago by the bear's claws.  Eagles came to hover above it, having caught sight of it across the world.  No one said so, but each man in his heart acknowledged Tsoai and the first thing he did upon waking was to cast his eyes upon it, thus to set his belief, to know that it was there and that the world remained whole, as it aught to remain.  And always Tsoai was there.



This must be a true story, for I have seen Tsoai.  It is as it is described: it sits all alone on the plains, and there is nothing like it anywhere near it.   I have camped out there and it is so.  And many others have seen it, even those who have never been there, as it was prominently featured in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  We call it Devils Tower and it is found in Wyoming.

Side Note:  The Sioux Nation has recently requested that the name be changed to Bear Lodge, saying that to associate it with the devil is misleading and insulting
.  


BILLY the KID
Born Henry McCarty, he sometimes called himself William H. Bonny,  but he is  best known as Billy the Kid. We are given both factual information and Grey's interactions with Billy the Kid.  Grey's interactions are actually dreams or visions in which she interacts with Billy, and at one time she helps Billy escape jail. 


LOCKE SETMAN  (SET)
He is a Kiowa whose parents died, and he was placed in an orphanage.  He was adopted by Bent Sandridge and grew up in San Francisco.  At the beginning of the novel, he had never returned to the reservation.  I wonder about the name of his adopted father and haven't been able to come up with anything significant.  As he is described in the Table of Contents, he is a wise and humane individual..

Set developed his talent for painting and became quite popular for his unique style and subject matter.  Unfortunately, as his popularity increased, he listened more and more to his agent, to art dealers, and to the buying public and gradually began doing less and less of what he wanted to paint.  Now he is depressed and lost, feeling that he has betrayed his talent and it is lost forever. 


GREY
She is a medicine woman and a dreamer  (these dreams are more like visions than dreams though).  Her father was a Kiowa and her mother Navajo.  Her basic language is English, but she knows some Kiowa and Navajo and knows much about both cultures, especially Kiowa lore and healing..  I bring her up last, not because she is the least important, but for the very opposite reason.  She is the most important human character in the novel for she is the central core that unites the novel. It is her visions of Billy the Kid and her knowledge of Kiowa medicine and lore that brings the three threads of Billy the Kid, the Bear, and Set together.

While she unites the three narratives in her, I still don't quite understand the relationship of her visions/dreams of Billy the Kid to the other two.  What I do know is that Momaday has a personal fondness for Billy the Kid.   I am now reading another work of his, In the Presence of the Sun, and it  contains a section called "The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid."  This section fills 30 of the 145 pages in the book, and it contains poems, some stories, and personal reminiscences about his interest in Billy the Kid. 

It Is Grey who is responsible for bringing Set to the reservation and connecting him with his Kiowa heritage. She does this for one simple reason.  She is a medicine woman and she knows she is the only one who can help Set face the problems that are coming to him.   And, those problems have to do with the Bear.

This is my first, but certainly not my last reading of this work.  The Ancient Child is not a simple, feelgood work.  There is evil here, as there always is in that other world we call real.  The best way to conclude this preliminary commentary is to end the way N. Scott Momaday began--with Borges' epigraph:

               "For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at the end."  

N. Scott Momaday: "The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee

In their own way, poems teach the reader.  Frequently they teach the reader something about the reader, sometimes about the subject of the poem, and sometimes about poetry itself.  Some poems are relatively straightforward in that one can get an idea of what the poem is about early on and finds no surprises when one reaches the end.  Others?  Sometimes one has an idea of the poem and suddenly one line changes the way one views the poem and frequently forces one to go back and read it again.  Robert Frost does that, regularly, and so regularly that I now read his poems and wait for the turn near the end. 

This is one of those poems that at the end suddenly produces a surprise. It is by N. Scott Momaday, and  I thought I knew what the poem was about, but that line near the end changed my view of the poem.


The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star 
I am the cold of the dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive

-- N. Scott Momaday --
from In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems


What do you think?  Is there a line that changed your idea about the poem?  Did you go back and read it again?  Do you think this is a major or a minor change?   Does it add something or take away something or does it really make no difference to you? 

N. Scott Momaday: The Bear

Words are names.  To write a poem is to practice a naming ceremony.

              These figures moving in my rhyme,
              Who are they?  Death, and Death's dog, time.     

And to confer a name is to confer being.  We perceive existence by means of words and names.  To this or that vague, potential thing, I will give a name, and it will exist thereafter, and its existence will be clearly perceived.  The name enables me to see it.  I can call it by its name, and I can see it for what it is.

-- N. Scott Momaday --


The Bear

    What ruse of vision,
escarping the wall of leaves,
    rending incision
into countless surfaces,

    would cull and color
his somnolence, whose old age
    has outworn valor,
all but the fact of courage?

    Seen, he does not come,
move, but seems forever there,
    dimensionless, dumb,
in the windless noon's hot glare.

    More scarred than others
these years since the trap maimed him,
    pain slants his withers,
drawing up the crooked limb.

    Then he is gone, whole,
without urgency, from sight,
    as buzzards control,
imperceptibly, their flight.
 

The quotation and poem are from
-- N. Scott Momaday --
In the Presence of the Sun:  Stories and  Poems



About the Author:
"N. Scott Momaday is a poet, novelist, painter, playwright, and storyteller.  He resides in the American Southwest, and he is Regents Professor of the Humanities at the University of Arizona (in Tucson).  Among his numerous awards are the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Premio Letterario Internazionale 'Mondello.'  He is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He walks long distances, and he rides an Appaloosa mare named 'Ma'am.'  At his best he cooks.  He is justly famous for a recipe named 'The Washita Crossing Soup,' the ingredients of which are, in his words, 'simple, sacred, and secret.'   He is a bear."

Taken from the back cover:
In the Presence of the Sun:  Stories and Poems is a collection of poems, stories (obviously), paintings,  and illustrations by N. Scott Momaday.  They represent thirty years of work, from 1961 to 1991.  "Momaday's voice is ancestral and contemporary, profoundly American and genuinely universal.  Here, at his best, is a truly distinguished poet, storyteller, and artist.

The 500th

According to the blog counter, this is my five hundredth post.  When I first began some four years ago, I had no goal or target to shoot at.  I just started posting and assumed that I would eventually lose interest or burn out or get interrupted by fate or some chance event.  I even wondered whether I would be able to come up with enough material to make more than a few posts.   I still may burn out or lose interest some day, and fate may still interrupt me, but I definitely won't run out of material.   One day years from now I may even reach 1000, maybe.

This does give me an opportunity to do something I've been thinking about for some time--compare the list of my favorite posts and the posts, according to the Blogger Stats, that have received the most visits.  I've often wondered how much overlap there really is.



The Ten Most Visited Posts (according to Blogger Stats)

N. Scott Momaday      The Way to Rainy Mountain
May 23, 2010             2422 visits

Shirley Jackson           "The Lottery"
June 27, 2010             1286 visits

Brian Aldiss               "Super-Toys Last All Summer"
March 25, 2011         679 visits

Robert Frost              "Storm Fear"
Feb. 3, 2011              521 visits

Alfred Bester             "Fondly Fahrenheit"
August 14, 2008        442 visits

Thomas Mann           The Transposed Heads
Nov. 3, 2011             428 visits

Robert Frost             a terrifying poet?
Sept 16, 2008          182 visits

Friedrich Durrenmatt    The Pledge, novel and film
Jan. 16, 2009              165 visits

Theodore Sturgeon      Three By Theodore Sturgeon
Jan 16, 2010                151 visits

Tales of Times Past     Japanese medieval stories
March 6, 2011           148 visits


It's a rather mixed collection.   I don't see much of a pattern here, except for some slight predominance of SF and fantasy, but that may be due to a predominance of posts about SF and fantasy.  I haven't really ever taken a genre census. 



The following is a list of some of my favorite posts.  I'm not certain exactly why they are.  Maybe some day I will be enlightened.  They are in no particular order.


The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam  --a series of posts, one for each quatrain in the first edition which has 75 quatrains.  I'm now up to Quatrain LXII, so I have thirteen to go to finish the work.

Kim Stanley Robinson:  four or five posts about his "Three Californias" series:   The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge. Each of the three novels depicts a different future for Orange County, California--a post holocaust future, a continuation of the cold war and the dominance of the military-industrial complex in the US, and an ecological/environmental oriented future, respectively.

Blade Runner--five versions of the film.

Shirley Jackson--"The Lottery"

Gregory Benford--The "Galactic Center" series:  six posts, each of which is about the six novels in the series, which is one of the greatest SF series (if not the greatest) ever written,  in my view anyway.  It begins in the late 1990s on Earth and ends somewhen about 35,000 (yes, thirty-five thousand) years in the future around the black hole at the center of our galaxy..

N. Scott Momaday:  The Way to Rainy Mountain,  part history of the Kiowa people, part legends of the Kiowa people, and part personal history of Momaday. 

The Rashomon posts, several posts about the film by Akira Kurosawa and the stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa that formed the basis of the film.

The Maltese Falcon:  a post discussing the three versions of Dashiell Hammett's novel, The Maltese Falcon.

William Hope Hodgson:  The Night Land, a post about one of my favorite fantasy novels.

King Kong:  a post comparing the three versions of the film.

Ikiru: a post discussing one of my favorite films, directed by Akira Kurosawa.

Robert Frost  a terrifying poet?--a slightly different view of the poet

Robert Frost: "For Once, Then Something"


Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost:  "Hap" and "Design"

and others.


Not much overlap is there?

I've enjoyed the ride so far, so I guess I'll stay with it for a while longer.

And thanks, to you and the others who have visited me here and had something to say about what you read here.  Hearing from you is important and I think most every blogger would agree with me.

Something to think about

The native vision, the gift of seeing truly,
with wonder and delight into the natural world,
is informed by a certain attitude of reverence and
respect. It is a matter of extrasensory as well as
sensory perception. In addition to the eye, it
involves the intelligence, the instinct, and the
imagination. It is the perception not only of
objects and forms but also of essences and ideals.

N. Scott Momaday
Kiowa

N. Scott Momaday: The Way To Rainy Mountain

N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain is a slim volume, less than 100 pages in length. It's a very unusual work, and one that has stayed with me for many years now. My first copy, a paperback edition, disintegrated in the Tucson heat, and I was forced to replace it several times, until I discovered a hardbound copy. I guess I can stop buying replacement copies now.


HEADWATERS

Noon in the intermountain plain:
There is scant telling of the marsh--
A log, hollow and weather-stained,
An insect at the mouth, and moss--
Yet waters rise against the roots,
Stand brimming to the stalks. What moves?
What moves on this archaic force
Was wild and welling at the source.


The book begins with the poem given above. Next is the "Prologue" and the "Introduction." This is followed by three sections: "The Setting Out," "The Going On," and sadly, "The Closing In." A brief epilogue concludes the work. I find it difficult to explain the attraction of the work, so I think I will just let the book talk for itself.



The Prologue begins:

The journey began one day long ago on the edge of the northern Plains. It was carried on over a course of many generations and many hundreds of miles. In the end there were many things to remember, to dwell upon and talk about.

. . .

For the Kiowas the beginning was a struggle for existence in the bleak northern mountains. It was there, they say, that they entered the world through a hollow log. The end, too, was a struggle, and it was lost. The young Plains culture of the Kiowas withered and died like grass that is burned in the prairie wind. . . But these are idle recollections, the mean and ordinary agonies of human history. The interim was a time of great adventure and nobility and fulfillment.

Prior to reading the book, I had imagined that the title referred to some sort of Edenic spot, perhaps even a mythic Garden of Eden, but Momaday in the "Introduction" soon corrected me. The first paragraph of the "Introduction" begins--

A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil's edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. . . Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion or objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun."


The three middle sections are unique in that each section consists of a number of short chapters which are two pages long, and each chapter is comprised of three passages. Each of the three passages presents a different perspective. The first passage is a myth or a legend or a tale of the Kiowa people. The second passage is a fact or an observation that relates to the myth or legend or story in some way. The third and final passage is a reminiscence by Momaday, either of his own experience or one that relates to his family, and which links up the two previous passages. The three perspectives, then, present a picture, that like a hologram, is three-dimensional and can be viewed from several points.

For example, Chapter II of the first section tells of the time the Kiowas went hunting and killed an antelope. One of the 'big chiefs" came up and claimed the udders (a delicacy) for himself. At this another "big chief" insisted on having the udders for himself. An argument ensued and one of the chiefs "gathered all of his follows together and went away." They were never heard of again.

In the second passage of Chapter II, Momaday tells us that "[t]his is one of the oldest memories of the tribe. There have been reports of a people in the Northwest who speak a language that similar to the Kiowa."

The third passage is a personal memory of Momaday's when he "remembered once having seen a frightened buck on the run, how the white rosette of its rump seemed to hang for the smallest fraction of time at the top of each frantic bound--like a succession of sunbursts against the purple hills."

And again, in Chapter III, in the first passage we learn the story of how the Kiowas first got the dog, long before the horse. In the second passage, we get a stronger sense of the importance of the dog when we learn that the "principal warrior society of the Kiowas was the Ka-itsenko, 'Real Dogs,' and it was made up of ten men only, the ten most brave" in the tribe.

In the third passage, Momaday writes

There were always dogs about my grandmother's house. Some of them were nameless and lived a life of their own. They belonged there in a sense that the word "ownership" does not include. The old people paid them scarcely any attention, but they should have been sad, I think, to see them go.

But the horse was also extremely important to the Kiowa for it gave them the freedom to move that they had never had before. In one of the last chapters of the book, we read

Once there was a man who owned a fine hunting horse. It was black and fast and afraid of nothing. When it was turned upon an enemy it charged in a straight line and struck at full speed. . .But, you know, that man knew fear. Once during a charge he turned that animal from its course. That was a bad thing. The hunting horse died of shame.

In the second passage, Momaday tells us of Gaapiatan, his grandfather, who sacrificed a fine horse as a offering in hopes that he and his family might escape a smallpox epidemic.

Momaday, in the third passage, then sums up by saying he thinks he knows what was in Gaapiatan mind--that he will give up something he values highly if his family might be spared.

As you can see, it does have a beginning, middle, and end and can be read that way, but I also open it up randomly and enjoy. One more point, interspersed throughout are stark, spare, and striking black-and-white illustrations by Momaday's father, Al Momaday.


In the epilogue, the Kiowa golden age, according to Momaday, lasted little more than 90 years. "The culture would persist for a while in decline, until about 1875, but then it would be gone, and there would be very little material evidence that it had ever been." Momaday writes that there were still a few who remembered, but he wrote this in the late 1960s, over 40 years ago. I doubt if there are any who are now still alive. Perhaps today Momaday himself is a significant resource of information for he has known some who had direct experience of the Kiowa culture in its last days.

The book concludes with the following poem:


RAINY MOUNTAIN CEMETERY

Most is your name of this dark stone.
Deranged in death, the mind to be inheres
Forever in the nominal unknown,
The wake of nothing audible he hears
Who listens here and now to hear your name.

The early sun, red as a hunter's moon,
Runs in the plain. The mountain burns and shines;
And silence is the long approach of noon
Upon the shadow that your name defines--
And death this cold, black density of stone.


The Way to Rainy Mountain is a remarkable book, but the only way to experience it is to read it. I hope some will sit down and take it up some time. It's well worth the hour or so.