Momaday: ‘The Death of Sitting Bear’

 Among the elite societies of the world, the Kaitsenko, a group of warriors among the Kiowa, might have been the elite. Membership was limited to 10.

The poet N. Scott Momaday said each member wore a bandolier with a loop at each end.

The warrior wore one loop around his neck. In time of battle the other loop was secured to the ground by means of a sacred arrow. The Kaitsenko must stand this ground to the death.

Momaday’s poem “The Death of Sitting Bear” tells the story of the group’s leader. The poem has 12 sections, each of eight lines. It reads like a compressed epic.

The poem tells of Sitting Bear’s origins in the north where the hills are black. It tells of the myth that holds that the Kiowa people entered the world by coming out of a hollow log.

The poem tells of the great tragedy of Sitting Bear’s life. His son was killed in a raid in Texas. The grieving father journeyed far to collect the bones and bring them home.

Sitting Bear was captured and held at Fort Sill, Indian Territory. Here’s the old warrior speaking as he was being hauled in chains in a wagon, guarded by outriders. 

Singing my death song, I made strong medicine.

Gnawing my wrists to the bone I slipped my bonds,

Blood beading the bone, the color of watermelon.

Sitting Bear died fighting. In Momaday’s poem Sitting Bear lived consistently. His actions were in accord with the conception of what Kiowa culture held life should be. He lived, as well as a human can, an ideal.

Sitting Bear sang his own death song. In Momaday’s poem, this is how it ended:

I become the being I was at the mouth of the log.

Between birth and death is the way of the warrior,

And there is nothing at either end but a dream.

It’s a wonderful poem. If you don’t read the poets, maybe you should.

• Source: N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear; New York: Harper, 2020. The title poem of the book is on pp. 122-31. The quotations are on pp. 122, 128 and 130.

The powers of observation

 One of the world’s great essays is Guy Davenport’s “Geography of the Imagination.” He says: 

Imagination is the way we shape and use the world, the way we see it.

The essay is on how imagination is used in seeing. Davenport was one of those people who noticed things, who paid attention, who actively used his imagination to find things. The essay includes a section on Grant Wood’s famous painting “American Gothic,” a portrait of a farmer and his wife (if you follow Davenport) or daughter (if you follow the Art Institute of Chicago) in front of their house in Iowa.

Many of us have looked at the painting. Davenport taught me to see it.

Did you notice the Gothic spire in the background? It’s a protestant church steeple.

Did you see trees in the picture? There are seven, the number of columns in King Solomon’s Temple.

The house itself is balloon-frame construction, invented in 1833 by George Washington Snow. Plans for these houses in the Carpenter Gothic style were sold in pattern books. Houses in this style were built across the country. The bamboo curtains were sold through the Sears Roebuck catalog.

The essay speaks of eyeglasses, buttonholes, overalls, cameos and Scots shepherd’s jackets. If you want a lesson in noticing, this is where to start.

I was reminded of the essay by a photograph of a contemporary petroglyph in a Utah canyon. The image is of a young Navaho, posing between a saddlehorse and a pack animal.

E.T. Collinsworth, who has compiled a book on mules, looked at it and gave a description that was worthy of Davenport. Among other things, he said:

• The pack animal is a horse, not a mule. You can tell by the ears.

• T One of the world’s great essays is Guy Davenport’s “Geography of the Imagination.” He says: 

 

Imagination is the way we shape and use the world, the way we see it.

 

The essay is on how imagination is used in seeing. Davenport was one of those people who noticed things, who paid attention, who actively used his imagination to find things. The essay includes a section on Grant Wood’s famous painting “American Gothic,” a portrait of a farmer and his wife (if you follow Davenport) or daughter (if you follow the Art Institute of Chicago) in front of their house in Iowa.

Many of us have looked at the painting. Davenport taught me to see it.

Did you notice the Gothic spire in the background? It’s a protestant church steeple.

Did you see trees in the picture? There are seven, the number of columns in King Solomon’s Temple.

The house itself is balloon-frame construction, invented in 1833 by George Washington Snow. Plans for these houses in the Carpenter Gothic style were sold in pattern books. Houses in this style were built across the country. The bamboo curtains were sold through the Sears Roebuck catalog.

The essay speaks of eyeglasses, buttonholes, overalls, cameos and Scots shepherd’s jackets. If you want a lesson in noticing, this is where to start.

I was reminded of the essay by a photograph of a contemporary petroglyph in a Utah canyon. The image is of a young Navaho, posing between a saddlehorse and a pack animal.

E.T. Collinsworth, who has compiled a book on mules, looked at it and gave a description that was worthy of Davenport. Among other things, he said:

• The pack animal is a horse, not a mule. You can tell by the ears.

• The proportions of the saddlehorse were so carefully rendered that the artist must have been proud of it.

• The saddle, from swells to stirrups, is traditional Southwest. It might have been passed down by an elder.

• The Levi 501s are extra-long so they can be turned up and cuffed at just the right length to hang properly in the stirrup.

• The enormous wild rag is not for work on the trail but for attracting female attention. (I thought it was a bandana. But E.T. says a bandana is smaller and kept in the hip- pocket. A wild rag is worn around the neck and has many uses on the trail, including protecting the face from cold and blown dirt and filtering water from a muddy hole.)

• Everything about this fellow in the petroglyph suggests a skilled horseman except the hitches that secure the pack on packhorse. E.T. has said this more than once: “Boy Scouts and sailors tie knots. Packers throw hitches.” The hitches in the petroglyph are not up to the otherwise high standards of the rig and outfit.

Some people like to watch TV or go to movies.

I like to listen to someone observe and comment. It’s an art form.

• Source: Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981, p. 4.he proportions of the saddlehorse were so carefully rendered that the artist must have been proud of it.

• The saddle, from swells to stirrups, is traditional Southwest. It might have been passed down by an elder.

• The Levi 501s are extra-long so they can be turned up and cuffed at just the right length to hang properly in the stirrup.

• The enormous wild rag is not for work on the trail but for attracting female attention. (I thought it was a bandana. But E.T. says a bandana is smaller and kept in the hip- pocket. A wild rag is worn around the neck and has many uses on the trail, including protecting the face from cold and blown dirt and filtering water from a muddy hole.)

• Everything about this fellow in the petroglyph suggests a skilled horseman except the hitches that secure the pack on packhorse. E.T. has said this more than once: “Boy Scouts and sailors tie knots. Packers throw hitches.” The hitches in the petroglyph are not up to the otherwise high standards of the rig and outfit.

Some people like to watch TV or go to movies.

I like to listen to someone observe and comment. It’s an art form.

• Source: Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981, p. 4.

Alice Munro: ‘Amundsen’

 Alice Munro’s “Amundsen” is a love story — if cautionary tales count.

It’s the story of a smart woman who sees that the man she loves doesn’t have much capacity to love. Incident after tiny little incident allows her to see that. But she still wants love, still expects it, still feels that love is something that could come from him.

The Allies are closing in on Berlin. The narrator is a teacher who leaves Toronto to take up a job at a sanitarium for people with tuberculosis. He’s the resident doctor. Perhaps he’s a catch — or should be. But over and again, he shows her what he is and is not capable of. He’s stingy with his time, attention and hospitality.

Readers hope that she will come to her senses and run.

Most love stories are about endless possibilities. Munro’s story is about limits, the sad constraints of human personalities.

“Amundsen” is in Munro’s collection Dear Life. My edition begins with seven pages of blurbs from critics suggesting that Munro was a master of the short story. Her obituary appeared in Tuesday’s papers.

• Alice Munro, Dear Life; London: Penguin, 2012, pp. 31-66.

Toi Derricotte: ‘Tender’

 When I listed recommendations for one-night reads a couple of years ago, I mentioned Toi Derricotte’s Tender. I said it was a long poem, or a series of interlinked shorter poems, about slavery and its awful aftermath.

I can still remember when and where I first read it.

The Wise Woman was attending a three-hour seminar. I was her driver. While she was busy, I ducked into a coffeeshop and started reading a book from the public library.

What I remember is the astonishment, how time passed without my being aware of it.

My notion that I had read a single long poem might surprise the author. But Tender, which is in seven sections, seems like a whole in the way Song of Myself is one poem, not many.

The first section of Tender is about Elmina Castle, where enslaved Africans were held before the crossing to the Americas.

 

Where mothers were held, we walk now

as tourists, looking for cokes, film, the bathroom.

 

She had thought that the African-American tourists might bond with the African guides. She found, instead, a rift: 

 

those were rooms through which our ancestors

had passed, while the Africans’ had not.

 

The poem works out how violence divides and harms. It shows how violence continues, passed from generation to generation, how it routinely continues publicly, through social and political institutions, and how it can continue privately, from parent to child. In the section called “When my father was beating me,” a prose poem, she writes:

 

I beat my dolls for years, pounded and pounded and nobody seemed to notice.

 

The poem talks of hatred and the ways of healing from hatred. There’s much more, but this will give you a sense of what it’s about.

I’ve spent evenings in front of a TV watching things I don’t remember. I remember that evening vividly.

When I go the library, I check the poetry section.

You never know.

• Sources and notes: Toi Derricotte, Tender; University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. For the original note, see “One-night reads: Recommendations 3,” Oct. 31, 2021, pp. 6, 8, 14.

Guy Davenport: ‘Wittgenstein’

The introductions to Wittgenstein’s philosophy are a lot longer than his Philosophical Investigations, the book he hoped would stand for his mature thought. I think Guy Davenport got the main points in a five-page essay:

• Wittgenstein sometimes liked other philosophers’ questions, but he never considered their answers.

• He had no philosophical tradition. “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That’s what makes him a philosopher.”

• Wittgenstein’s central idea is that language is a game we learn to play. If you can imagine an anthropologist from Mars trying to learn the rules of a human language, connecting spoken language to behaviors, you might get an intuition of what language is like. You might also get a sense of what Wittgenstein’s philosophy is like.

• Wittgenstein thought that a healthy intellect would be unaware of itself. Thinking is about some thing, rather than about itself. He also thought that philosophy might be a kind of therapy to direct thought back into healthier channels.

• Wittgenstein, like Heraclitus, wrote in fragments. He left behind an enormous collection of notes.

• For all the difficulties people report in understanding Wittgenstein, he’s not abstruse. His writing his clear.

There you have it: a half dozen observations. I think they would help anyone trying to get the gist of an important thinker.

I’m thinking of Davenport because I recently found myself telling someone about his essays. I then wondered how often I’d done that through the years. Time and again, I’ve run across someone who is working on an interesting line of thought. I find myself thinking that person might be encouraged and aided on his or her own way by something Davenport wrote.

I recommend Davenport often to serious people working on serious ideas. It’s a measure of the value I put on Davenport’s work, I guess.

• Source: Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. The essay “Wittgenstein” is on pp. 331-35. The quotation is on p. 334. 

A second thought on learning Spanish

A couple of months ago, I ran across a story about how Thomas Jefferson claimed that Spanish was so easy he’d learned it in 19 days on a voyage to Europe.

Jefferson said he’d boarded the ship with Don Quixote and a grammar. Anyone could do it.

Of course, Jefferson was telling a stretcher, as the country folks used to say. (The material being stretched is the truth.)

But, if you’re wondering about yesterday’s note on Juan Goytisolo’s short story La Guardia, I had to try it, even though I knew better.

• Source: For the original note on Jefferson’s claim, “About learning Spanish,’ March 15, 2024.

Goytisolo: 'The Guard'

 Juan Goytisolo's story is about soldiers guarding prisoners in Franco's Spain. Goytisolo didn't like Franco, and the narrator, pulling his first guard duty, does not like Franco's Spain.

The narrator, with a submachine gun on his shoulder, is curious about a prisoner, an eccentric kid who is obsessed by soccer. The kid asks the narrator to bring him some newspapers — the ones with all the scores.

The narrator says almost nothing about himself. Others call him "sergeant." The lieutenant gives him a lecture on how the narrator and his kind — soft university types — have no understanding of what's below the cultured classes. It's ugly. Harsh discipline is needed.

The narrator learns the eccentric kid was a recruit, an ordinary soldier who believed that if he compiled and studied all the statistics, he could predict the winners of soccer games. He didn't embezzle exactly— he just borrowed an advance on his pay from military funds.

The kid placed a big bet and was astonished he lost. He "borrowed" more to recover his losses and make his fortune.

Some people are certain they know how things work: how soccer games are won and lost, and how governments should exercise authority. We human beings do not understand soccer well enough to reliably predict outcomes. We understand even less about just governance. 

The narrator looks at the future and is depressed. Some of us know how he feels.

• Source: Spanish Stories: A Dual-Language Book, ed. by Angel Flores; New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1987, pp. 260-75.

Jim Thompson: ‘The Grifters’

 I think the most interesting parts of Jim Thompson’s novel The Grifters, published in 1963, are about trust.

Thompson is good at showing how predators must have heightened powers of observation to survive. When you don’t trust other people, you don’t really have a capacity to care about them. You see them as prey to exploit or as larger predators to avoid. But while you don’t care about people, you must pay attention to them. If you don’t, you’ll miss a meal or be eaten. It’s the laws of nature at work.

The hero of this story, Roy Dillon, is a grifter. It’s part of his nature — or so it seems to me.

There’s a minor character, a barkeeper named Bert, who comes to see that Roy trusts no one. Roy is missing the faculty or apparatus that makes trust possible. Roy doesn’t trust and therefore can’t be trusted.

Roy doesn’t want to take advantage of Bert and would like to be friendly. But Bert will have none of it. He recognizes there’s something missing in Roy, and that this lack — this missing trait — is not an accident or a mistake but a part of Roy’s nature. It’s something that won’t change.

Hanging with Roy would be like hanging with a tiger who’s not hungry now but will be later.

If you’ve read much in this collection of notes, you might be curious about the sudden interest in classic noire. A friend posed some interesting questions about whether comparisons between Thompson’s book and Greek tragedy would hold up.

I read Thompson’s book, curious and grateful that I have a friend who asks such questions.

Aeschylus believed that when people misbehaved, the cosmos dropped a hammer on them. I think Aeschylus would have liked this story.

• Source and notes: Jim Thompson, The Grifters; New York: Mulholland Books, 2014.

Catching up on the news

 If you read only the national newspapers, you might be surprised by what other papers cover — by what those lesser lights consider news. I recently enjoyed The Stanford Daily’s account of a reading by Mary Ruefle, even though the article was a year old.

I’d somehow managed to get this far without knowing about Ruefle. The student newspaper helped me discover an interesting poet.

From the article I learned:

• That Ruefle wrote a poem called “The Bark,” about a dog barking in response to its echo over a lake. She compares the image to the process of making poetry.

• That Ruefle began her poem “Snow” with the line: “Every time it starts to snow, I would like to have sex.” It made me wonder whether we really need “prompts” for some natural processes, including writing.

• That Louise Glück, a professor at Stanford, introduced Ruefle with this: “One of the great American regionals, Mary Ruefle writes as a spirit newly hatched, without existing convictions or prejudices.” Glück died in October, a few months after the reading.

After reading the article, I read some of Ruefle’s poems. I’m now looking for her collection of prose poems, The Book, published last year.

But the point I’m trying to make is this: If you read only the national newspapers, you might get the impression that contemporary journalism consists of recording whatever Trump does on a given day and then soliciting commentary from a dozen pundits. I’m a great believer in local papers, including student newspapers. I like other perspectives on what’s interesting, what’s news.

• Source: Ellen Abraham, “Pulitzer Prize-Finalist Mary Ruefle enlightens with reading of snow-day inspired poetry”; The Stanford Daily, March 5, 2023. 

Why writers make notes

 Writers give a lot of reasons for keeping journals and notebooks. Thornton Wilder said he started a journal to get better control of his interests and “to harness his notions into paragraphs.”

He said he also wanted to create a habit and a relation between thinking and writing. As you might suspect, that line seems true to me.

This too was interesting: Wilder said he wanted “to collect from these records a reservoir of more codified ideas on which to base the judgments I am so often called upon for in conversation.” Good friends — friends who read and inquire and ask challenging questions — push you toward better habits of thinking.

• Source: The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939-1961; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

About these notes

 I suppose my friend Christopher is right: This collection of online notes is a kind of practice, a habit of daily meditation.

I’d call it “meditation,” except that so many people talk of meditation today as a way of “emptying” the mind, getting away from the endless stream of thoughts. I try to get in the middle of stream and catch at least one a day.

I guess that’s one thing I like about Joubert. He thought that thinking was a natural process. A mind produces ideas, just as a field produces flowers. Rather than suppressing these notions, he examined them. He found some to be useful, interesting, even beautiful.

 

The mind. It loves to produce flowers.

 

• The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, pp. 108.

Talking about writing with Joubert

 Paul Auster translated a collection of items from Joubert’s notebooks, including this one about collections:

Collections, thoughts. The man shows himself in them, if the author does not.

 

Joubert was musing about his own mind. What did the topics that kept coming up in his notebooks say about himself? Auster, in choosing the items for his brief collection from 50 years of notebooks, considered a similar question. What does the collection say about the collector? And what about us, the readers who like Joubert? People who like Joubert like to think about the topics he considered, including writing.

Here are five notes on the topic, written by Joubert, chosen and translated by Auster, admired by me:

 

It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas.

 

Speak for the ear and write for the memory.

 

Everything that is exact is short.

 

A work of genius, whether poetic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in one day.

 

When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do.

 

• The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, pp. 91, 102, 122, 99, 9, 101. For a note on Auster’s death, see “Paul Auster: 1947 — 2024,” May 2, 2024.

Medicine for the blues

  Everybody gets the blues. There’s no cure, but I think J.B. Priestley’s little book Delight is medicine.

Here’s the beginning of his essay — he called these short items “reflections” — on “Manly Talk”:

 

Bluff manly talk, with a big background of travel and adventure behind it, like the old Wide World Magazine; and with everybody pretending to be a Kipling character.

 

Priestley thought that the best place for this kind of thing was the smoking room of a small ocean liner. The best place I ever ran across was a cabin on a sawmill pond in East Texas, where a Pulitzer-Prize winner would talk about writing and good books, and his cousin, one of the world’s great storytellers, would turn steaks on the grill. And with everybody pretending to be a Hemingway or Faulkner character.

Priestley listed some of the main topics of manly talk: travels, fishermen, guns, eccentrics and drinking. But he missed bird dogs.

Maybe it’s just because I’m from the uncultivated part of the country, but I don’t see how you can write a piece about manly talk without having a bird dog wander through it.

And that’s why everyone who likes to write should write a version of this book: There are different delights, and different folks have different ways of finding them.

Priestley wrote 110 short pieces. I’m going to give it a try.

• Source: J.B. Priestley, Delight; New York: Harper & Row, 1949, p. 59. I’ve mentioned this book more than once. Last sighting: “J.B. Priestley: ‘Delight,’” April 24, 2024.

Fungi on the forest floor

 The new growth in the forest is spectacular. In places where I could see a quarter mile through the woods in winter, I can’t see 50 feet now. The foliage is dense. The leaves and blossoms, individually, are so delicate and lovely that I forget that collectively they weigh more than an aircraft carrier.

The leaf litter on the forest floor is deep, and I’ve been trying to learn something about basidiomycetes, a phylum of fungus. Many of species have the ability break down lignin and cellulose. 

Fungi have elongated cells, called hyphae, that can get between the cells of downed limbs and fallen leaves. The fungi secrete enzymes to digest and recycle the litter on the forest floor.

Keith Seifert, whose wonderful book is my guide, says that nearly 2,000 miles of hyphae can be found in a teaspoon of soil. I can barely imagine that.

So many of the natural processes that I see are just mystifying. I see evidence of them — but I just barely see, just barely understand. We human beings tend to make confident statements about our place in the universe. I’m constantly reminded how little I know about the place, much less my role and standing in it.

• Source: Keith Seifert, The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi; Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2022, p. 26.

Stone Mountain, early May

 The mountain laurel that was blooming everywhere a couple of weeks ago is fading. A few stands of Kalmia latifolia near the mountain are going strong. Most are past their prime.

The fragrance of honeysuckle is almost overpowering.

If you turn over leaves of lady ferns, genus Athuria, you’ll see orange-brown spots. They’re sori, bundles of spore sacs. The new fronds on the Christmas ferns, Polystichum acrostichoides, are uncoiling.

All the clovers are blooming. I can’t believe I haven’t noticed how many reds and purples are displayed by common red clover, Trifolium pratense. I saw some that I'd call lavender. I like the little fuzzy balls of yellow in hop trefoil, Trifolium campestre.

I found just a couple of blooming spiderworts, genus Tradescantia, in the woods. The ones I saw were on the border of blue and purple.

The showiest blooms are not on the mountain but down by the pond in Wade Walker Park. Virginia sweetspire, Itea virginica, is a shrub that has long spikes of cream-colored flowers. The biologists call them terminal racemes.

Growing by them were some blue toadflax, Nuttallanthus canadensis, which have spindly, grass-like stems that hold small flowers. Despite the common name, the flowers look purple to me. 

Paul Auster: 1947 — 2024

 The obituaries are talking about Paul Auster’s fiction. The notes about Auster in this collection have been about his nonfiction. Most are on his wonderful biography of Stephen Crane. One mentions Winter Journey, Auster’s account of getting old.

Auster did many things. Not least, he introduced me and many others to Joubert.

Auster was interested in lost books — books by writers who weren’t interested in publishing. Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno was written in the 1760s and published in 1939. Joubert, usually described as an aphorist, wrote for himself.

 

Neither a poet nor a novelist, neither a philosopher nor an essayist, Joubert was a man of letters without portfolio whose work consists of a vast series of notebooks in which he wrote down his thoughts every day for forty years.

 

Auster said Joubert (1) observed the world, (2) cultivated friendships and (3) meditated. Joubert’s notebooks became his work, a lab to work out his ideas.

It seems to me that Auster was observing a kindred spirit. Like Joubert, Auster did all those things.

• The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, p. ix.

Writers talking shop

 I like to read interviews with writers. I have a volume of interviews featuring famous writers published by The Paris Review. I have volumes featuring less famous writers from Texas and New Mexico. I have a collection of interviews given by a single writer, Margaret Atwood, through the years.

I might have a better grasp of the writing processes of William Stafford and Norman MacCaig than I do of my own. I like to listen to writers talk shop. That’s the way some of us learn.

But here’s Lilian Hellman:

 

They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talk about themselves.

 

A point granted to the devil’s advocate: It’s wise to be cautious.

But if I were going to give young writers advice, I would say listen to two poets, Stafford and MacCaig.

• Source: The Writer’s Quotation Book, edited by James Charlton; Wainscott, N.Y.: Pushcart Press, 1991, p. 95.