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
Showing posts with label the Bear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the Bear. Show all posts
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Monday, October 31, 2016
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."
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."
Monday, September 1, 2014
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.
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.
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