not native fruit

dalva and crazy horse

My husband has read the Mari Sandoz book Crazy Horse: the Strange Man of the Oglalas two or three times and has always encouraged me to read it as well.  So, finally, just a few weeks ago I took out Larry McMurty's book, Crazy Horse: A Life on CD's from the library and was able to hear it being read while commuting through the park to work - about a 45 minute trip - twice a week, and also while driving on any other little errands or visits.  It was only three disks and went fast.

In the meantime, I was reading a memoir called Off to the Side by an author named Jim Harrison, whom I'd never heard of, but then I don't keep up with the NY Times Best Sellers List.  I have a more Daoist approach and let the Dao brings books to me. :-) And this is an example of how that process works!  I still haven't finished the memoir, but I liked it so much that I decided to try one of Harrison's novels, and as luck would have it, Dalva was the first novel to come into my hands.  And who is one of the featured characters of the major sub-plot?  Crazy Horse.  So the story of Crazy Horse, and his friend He Dog, and the military outpost of Fort Robinson - all of this was fresh in my mind as I read Dalva.  I've visited Fort Robinson once, by the way, knowing nothing of Crazy Horse's death there, but feeling averse to 'the energy' as they say.

Anyway, Dalva is a masterpiece of writing, most of it first-person narrative with a female voice (Dalva's), told in flashbacks to adolescence and other stages of life from a 45-year old standpoint.  The central section of the book is narrated by a crazy professor who is researching the journals of Dalva's great-grandfather, an early comer to the Sand Hills area of Nebraska, and someone sympathetic to the Sioux, in fact an agonized witness to their demise.

I find it interesting that I've characterized the professor, Michael, as 'crazy' and that this was also the appellate of Crazy Horse.  Harrison mentions that for the Sioux the word 'crazy' really meant something closer to 'enchanted' or 'magical.'  Well, the professor's academic mind is something like fly-paper, everything sticks to it, and his personal mind is very mobile, not being undergirded by a strong character.  He is thoroughly opportunistic, desperate and needy, but talented!  Harrison does a marvelous job in capturing the chaos of someone like Michael.  In fact, all of Harrison's characters are rich, nuanced and feel thoroughly authentic.  Despite Michael's failures, Dalva and her family are very kind to him, protective and nurturing, rather like the attitude of the Sioux towards those they regarded as 'crazy', such as Dalva's great-grandfather, a johnny-appleseed-Methodist Minister whome they saw as 'too strange to kill.'

Much of the book takes place in natural settings around the Niobrara River, the kind of country I just love and tried to depict in my own novel, Desert Sanctuary.  Harrison recreates the vitality of life lived close to nature.  Anyone who has ever experienced such a life will be grateful to him for this book, and other readers will appreciate the window onto a life that is still available here and there in the west.

What an incredible book!  And what a wonderful coincidence to have read McMurty's Crazy Horse: A Life just before reading Dalva.

jim harrison

i've discovered a new author i like a lot.  jim harrison has written poetry and fiction set usually in the areas in which he grew up (Michigan, Minnesota, northern mid-west states) or where he maintains a second home today in the southwest, Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California.  his writing reminds me a bit of louise erdrich, and i'll say more about that later.

I discovered jim harrison by (uncharacteristically) reading a mystery novel set on the north coast of California (one of my favorite places on earth) by Janet LaPierre who has one of her characters, Verity Mackellar, mention that she is reading a good memoir called "Off To The Side."  So, I googled that title, and discovered that it is a real book, by author Jim Harrison.

I began to read the memoir, and wasn't sure whether or not I was going to connect.  His voice is very masculine, his concerns seemed at first not to relate to me - a friend said his concerns were very regional, midwestern - booze, dames, and hunting.  But I found that I really did enjoy his style of self-disclosure, his way of communicating something honest, yet occasionally diverting, in the sense that he can surprise me with a turn of phrase, and not just a knack of phrasing but a nice juicy sliver of insight.  I began to feel this guy is like some kind of Americana wisdom-bum combining the likes of Erich Fromm, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac and Carl Sandburg - if you can believe such an ungainly combination - plus something that is characteristically himself.

The more I read, the more I liked.  And so I soon went out and picked up one of his novels, an early one called Dalva, written, I believe, in 1988. 

This is when I began to see the similarities to Louise Erdrich.  I began thinking to myself, is this a style of writing that is somehow organically produced by the north-country?  I was thinking 'he is like the male version of her, and as an author, she is the native-american-part-white voice to his white-american-part-native voice.'  in other words, erdrich, who is part-German and part-Ojibway, and writes both parts brilliantly (imho), specializes perhaps in the native-american perspective in her literature.  i'm assuming harrison is part-Sioux because he always includes part-Sioux characters in his novels, (although i don't recall if he mentioned it in his memoir, however, it seems likely to me, given things he writes about his father's people).  Based on my own experience with home-grown variety native-american people (as differentiated from hollywood-style or even AIM-style "indians"), I would say that both of these authors write the white, the native-american and the mixed characters very very well, and offer us something of a perspective that I seem only to find in literature that combines these two American influences quite consciously.

This indicates to me a degree of authenticity.

Let it be said, simply, that i am very happy to have found jim harrison's work, and to put it on my shelves next to Louise Erdrich's.  Oh, and by the way, just out of curiosity, I googled 'jim harrison + louise erdrich' and found that others see similarities in these two writers too! 

I may write more about harrison in the near future, as there are some specific topics he gets into, in Dalva, that I find interest me personally.

tracks by louise erdrich

so far, this novel has been the most difficult of them all for me to read and enjoy.  partly because it is much more about the native community living out 'in the wilds' (on their allotment lands) in their traditional manner.  it's interesting, of course, but isn't something i relate to as much, personally, except in terms of the backpacking i've done.  also, i never enjoy reading about witchcraft - probably because it makes me feel anxious - and there is some of that in this book. there is an amazing moose-hunting scene, and i have to say louise erdrich makes another time and place come alive most convincingly.  history and anthropology never read better.   but i found it extremely difficult to see this family lose its land.  i knew all along that it was coming, and it was just wrenching and agonizing when it came.  still, i think that if i'm going to immerse myself in learning about this part of our history (and i find i can use the word 'our' in a very inclusive sense after all), there is nothing for it but to endure the pain.  the more i learn about our indigenous forms of spirituality - and i am grateful to my ancestors for guiding me back to them and showing me how to make the connections - the more i can see how they could - possibly - survive all that pain.  not that everyone has done so, by a long shot.  but i can see the way.  it is really quite amazing. 

now i am reading 'the crown of columbus,' a book Erdrich wrote with her former husband who is now deceased.  this book is interesting in a whole other way, and i'll write more about it when i've completed it.

daoist wisdom of the ordinary

Here is something I really liked from "Daoist texts with commentary by Thomas Cleary" (with my own comments in [ ] brackets). 

“Ordinary expressions and common sayings accord with the path of sages; you should turn to them for careful research.  If you use everyday activities to search in reverse, everything in the world turns to jewels.” [This reminds me of how I felt about the Book of Proverbs when I was 21-22.]

“The Tao is not far from people;  what people consider the Tao is far from people.  [This was true in Catholicism too.  People thought the mystics were so extraordinary that there was no way on earth we could have any of their experiences.  We grew up with that bias and discouragement.]  The Tao is essence and life is the eternal Tao, the eternal Tao is the Tao of daily life; it’s just that while people use it daily they do not know it.

“If you carefully investigate the principles, you do not need to read a thousand classics and ten thousand texts; there are great revelations of the celestial mechanism right in ordinary expressions and common sayings.  For example, good people are called really genuine, truthful, conscientious, reasonable, respectable, aware of proper proportion, aware of when to go forward and when to withdraw, circumspect, perceptive, having their feet on the ground; bad people are said to be inhuman, lacking conscience, and unreasonable – they hurt others to benefit themselves, are self-deceived, violate nature and reason, take suffering for pleasure, take the false for the real, pick up one thing and forget another, without knowing death and life, without knowing good and bad, only knowing one and not two, only aware of the existence of themselves and not that of others.”  (p. 156, The Taoist Classics, Volume Two, from ‘Understanding Reality.’)

the beet queen by louise erdrich

this book is the sequel to Love Medicine and chronicles the tale of three children abandoned by their mother in a rather comical fashion, of how they separate and eventually come back together again over the course of forty years.  it also the story of three women and a child - two cousins, an in-law and her daughter - living in a farming village in north dakota.  the native americans in this story are more or less peripheral, yet powerfully portrayed, and there is one main character, the part-native gal, Celestine, who becomes an in-law to the two cousins.  while i didn't enjoy this novel as much as love medicine, i will say that l.e. writes at times some of the most outrageously funny material i've ever read, including the scene where Aunt Mary teaches her niece's first grade teacher a lesson, and another scene that must be the funniest death scene ever written (probably) - and not disrespectfully so - I would imagine the deceased would never have wanted it any other way.

love medicine by louise erdrich

i've just finished reading Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich.  this was her first novel, i believe, and as such, it is rather raw yet extremely beautiful and powerful at the same time.  this book has got to be a classic.

part of the reason i feel it has been so important for me to read, is because it's given me a chance to process a lot of my feelings about the native american element in my own life: my feelings of loss, because my life took me away from 'native america' for so many years and yet has brought me around full circle back to it.  so there is wonder, grief, regret, joy and appreciation in the experience for me.

also, this book allows me to vicariously live the life i might've lived - or something close to it, since our tribe does not have any reservations anymore - if my coloring had been a little different so that i was more obviously a part of our group, or if my mother had given me more instruction in the correct etiquette to observe.  i really do understand why she may have hesitated to tell me the truth in the first place.  you had to be there, perhaps, to know what i mean.  but the book allowed me to imagine what may have happened in the lives of Angie, Philip, the Hammonds, Andersons, Strausses and Moores.  It allowed me to remember Ronny R, Christine K, the Scul---ys, and others.  not that i would have wanted to have their lives, because, in fact, they were very difficult.  i've had my problems too, but i've also had the way out.

in the book, there is a character who doesn't know his parentage.  he's been adopted and raised by the woman who is really his great-aunt, a woman known for taking in strays.  the reader is clued in from the beginning as to who his mother is, so the reader knows he really is a part of the family, but the character doesn't learn the identities of his mother and father until the end of the book. his process, while somewhat different from mine, is also somewhat similar, and i found it helpful to walk through that process with him. 

one of the important lessons for me in his story is to recognize, along with him, that the child (of his mother) who was acknowledged has had a very tough road to tread, while he, who was her secret child, slipped under the radar and was allowed to live his own life, be his own self, and find his own way back to his parents and ultimately to himself.

i found the whole book really healing for me to read.  not always easy, by any means.  but extremely rewarding.  i highly recommend it to anyone interested in native american lives, or just in human life, or simply in the most masterful level of writing.

rilke/niels lyhne/danishness?

In "Letters to the Poet As A Young Man" Rilke recommends that his student read the nineteenth-century Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen in order to meet the master of contemplative literature.  So, of course, I had to check Jacobsen out.  Our local library had in its possession his novel Niels Lyhne (pronounced Nils Lu-na), so I checked it out.  And as promised, it is one of the most precious, ruminative pieces of self-absorbed fiction anyone, even Marcel Proust, could ever desire.  It is absolutely beautiful, as well.  So attentive, so in tune with the silence of the contemplative life.  I've only just begun it, thumbed through and read a few paragraphs here and there, so I can't say much more about it just now.

I'm not sure if this is really something ethnically Danish, or if it's more symptomatic of the nineteenth century, generally.  The nature-writing is superb.  Not grandiose, as much American nature writing is, but homey.  Not ecstatic waterfalls, but cottage gardens. 

Sometimes I wonder if my contemporaries among the Danes 'rebelled' against this melodic sweetness and love of nature.  It still shows up in some of their films, like "Italian for Beginners," "Mifune," and others - urbane Danes rediscovering their rustic roots.  Maybe that phase of rebellion against the past is over, over there, because after all, over here there is a kind of revival of Bertram-style nature writing, for example, Thirteen Moons.  The pendulum appears to have swung yet again.  Thirteen Moons, by Charles Frazier is lyrical, descriptive, attentive, contemplative - all my favorite things, by the way. 

Sometimes I feel like my husband and I have not made such a great adjustment to 'modern times.'  We seem to be holdovers from the nineteenth century, and now we're living in the twenty-first.  Not sure if this 'backwardness' is related to being part native american and delaware moor, two cultures self-identified with the past, yet embedded in the present-day just like everyone else.  Sometimes we think it's the spot we live in, here in Berkeley, on the grounds of former native american settlements.

I've heard it said that many Danes are surprised and perhaps a bit discomfited that American Danes seem to be stuck in an image of 'danishness' that belongs to the nineteenth century.  That's when they left Denmark to emigrate to America, and Denmark has become 'frozen' for them as it was at that moment in the past.  Every year there are various festivals of Danishness that celebrate the 'Denmark that was.'  This disparity in self-image creates a rift with contemporary Danish Danes.  These are some of the strange facts of ethnicity.

For an example of sentimental, nature-loving, nineteenth-century Danish Lieder, try picking out the tune of "Vandring i Skoven" (music notated in a previous post, Wandering in the Forest.)

little miss by the day

"The older I get the more convinced I become that the most fascinating persons in this world are those elusive souls whom we know perfectly well but whom we never, as children say, 'get to meet.'  They slip out of countries, or towns - or rooms even - just before we arrive, leaving us with an inexplicable feeling of having been cheated or something that was rightfully and divinely ours.  That's the way I still feel about little Miss By-the-Day.  Perhaps you, too, have been baffled by the will-o'-the-wispishness of that whimsical young person.  Perhaps you, too, tried to find her but never did.

"She sounded so casual and commonplace when I first began hearing about her that I let her slip through my fingers.  She was just a little seamstress who had a 'vairee' odd way of speaking; it was quite a long time before I realized that everybody who spoke about her was unconsciously trying to imitate her drawling voice.  And then I noticed that everybody who mentioned her smiled dreamily and wondered where on earth she'd come from.  I kept hearing, just as you probably did, odd scraps of things she had said, droll adventures in which she had figured, extraordinary and fantastic tales about the house in which she lived.  And presently, when it was too late, I found myself listening to regretful murmurings of scores of baffled persons who couldn't find out what had become of her.  She suddenly vanished, leaving nothing behind her save her delectable house."

Little Miss By-the-Day was a novel by Lucille van Slyke, published 1919 by Frederick A. Stokes Co in New York.  It belonged to my mother and I discovered it among our books as a child and probably read it when I was about ten.  It's the story of a French girl of old New Orleans, who's parents (of course) die, and she is taken away from their grand old mansion by her grandfather to another manorial dwelling that has become quite ramshackle somewhere in the country-side.  While there, she nurses her aged ailing grandfather, and recreates her mother's gardens, based on her mother's original plan for the gardens in a book which she finds among her mother's things.

Later, after her grandfather has passed away, she becomes aware that she has inherited the old mansion in New Orleans, travels there and finds it has been subdivided into rooms and apartments and let out to immigrants.  (Immigrants always seem to get short shrift in our country, and they do in this book too.) She is not pleased, but moves into one of the apartments and takes work as a seamstress by-the-day in order to be able to pay off back taxes and fines to fully repossess the house.  Slowly she is able to regain possession of her house bit by bit. 

In her travels she finds destitute poets and sculptors and other artists and brings them home with her, ensconcing them in rooms in her mansion and trying to encourage them not to give up hope, to keep writing, sculpting, drawing, whatever.  She adds little touches around the house that she knows will cheer them up.  She has a certain something about her that some people at her various day-jobs notice while others do not.  In the end she restores her home, creates a community of happy successful artists (quite an accomplishment! lol) and is reunited with her long-lost love.

I was simply mermerized by this book as a girl, and have read it several times as an adult.  To me, as a healer, it is such a great book about healing! I feel that I learned the value of patience and time and process and synchronicity from her finding of her mother's garden plan and her ability to reconnect with her lost mother by recreating her garden.  Then she applies what she knows to her next challenge which is 'out in the world' - the restoration of her family's house to a place that protects and nurtures artists.  Gad, I loved this book!  Just had to tell you about it.

Also, might mention that it seems like I am doing something similar in my own life, which is really just too weird!

harry potter

I went with my eighty-three year old friend, Elizabeth, to see 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' the other day, after having just re-read the book preparatory to beginning the new one.  (I've since finished re-reading 'The Half-Blood Prince' - is it Sirius? - and will begin the new book this weekend.)  We both enjoyed the film production.  My friend has been a therapist for many years, and I have the theological and pastoral counseling background, as well as my own healing work, so we approached the film from those angles. 

Up until this most recent re-reading and viewing, I was starting to feel that the books were getting 'too dark' - but now I realize I was wrong about that.  These books are just the most phenomenal creation!  Nearly every fairy-tale motif and folk-fantasy is represented within their pages, and the psycho-spiritual wisdom is simply astounding.  Not to mention the author's grasp on the psychology of the young, as represented by Harry in particular.  In fact, what she was doing in these later books escaped me until I re-read them.  So glad I did! 

the prayer hut

“As it was, the hut felt just right: flimsy, isolated, almost furtive, a place to pray truly, a theft of time from a greedy world.  A place where prayer still felt like what it really was, something dangerous.  “Is not my Word like a fire?  saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?”  He had drifted; you always drifted.  Mike found his breath and rode it into the flame again, and memory sweltered and cracked in that soft fire, into shards of regret and bewilderment, benediction and dread: the mystery, the burning knot, the impossibility of self and world.  The slipshod walls of scrap and junk sighed and settled like a hearth; the fear within him burned and burned, and he sat at the heart of the fire it fed and breathed cool air. "

from The Monk Upstairs, by Tim Farrington, HarperSanFrancisco, 2007