Novels

"If the novel should really disappear, it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers but because it exists in a world grown alien to it." (Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel)

Skins, Whiteclay, Alcoholics and Alcoholism

Alcoholics need to stop drinking. There is nothing easier to say or to accomplish. We all have our own way. Some take the steps. Other's take the waters. Some just white knuckle it and end up being sober a-holes everyone avoids or hands a cold one.

There's nothing poetic about pissing your pants and waking up somewhere you don't remember going. Before they knew me, someone told me, "alcoholics tell the best stories." Someone else answered, "that's 'cause they're liars."

Lately I've been following the popular debate about Whiteclay. The heat got turned up with Ms. Sawyers's report and the Lakota response "We're more than that!" I watched the youth's response first. I don't have a television, but their video was making its way around the electric circuit. Then I spent a day slowly dragging my way through Sawyer's original segment on You Tube. I made notes, sent out several inquiries, planned an essay for my blog K'é. Frustrated I destroyed what I had done, threw out my notes and here I am writing about the same ole shhht. I can't shake it. More important I can't loose myself from the magnet of mass media that relentlessly pulls me towards it: should we boycott the brewers? how do we deal with Whiteclay? How did we come to this? Why these people? What can we do about them?

I am one of them.

I come back to the fact that alcoholics need to quit drinking. Keep it simple. No one can do it for you.

If you want to talk about Pine Ridge, Whiteclay or Indians you need to talk about colonization. And who wants to talk about that?

Adrian C. Louis does.

For starters read his novel: Skins

Make the commitment to open it and read it. Don't watch the movie! (If you really need to see Eric Schweig watch Big Eden, you won't be disappointed.)

Where to find it: Louis's Website or Ellis Press

Read the novel.

Kundera's words challenge—writers and readers. Can we sustain the energy and the care necessary to follow where a writer leads. If we follow them into their world, our world may take the shape of something we are, at our core, afraid of. The novel's world may ask more from us than we care to give, even in waking moments. A good reading involves stepping into the novel's language and being changed.

"I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality." (Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed)

Read the novel. Put yourself among the people of Pine Ridge, not above them, or beneath them, but face them as the human beings they are.

Kundera wrote, "If the novel should really disappear, it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers but because it exists in a world grown alien to it," in 1986. In the same paragraph he asked "Hasn't it already mined all its possibilities, all its knowledge, and all its forms?. . .Isn't it more like a cemetery of missed opportunities, of unheard appeals?"

Kundera is especially tuned to the appeals of: play, dream, thought and time.

Louis's work makes several appeals, appeals to metaphysics and personhood. What constitutes a person? And what shapes our place in the cosmos? His world is familiar to me, and still I am changed. Yet I have not answered the question: has our world grown alien to it? To answer that we must look intimately at specific novels and our willingness to allow them space in our lives—paying for them, reading them, considering them sincerely enough to allow them the power to change who we are and how we live. In effect giving ourselves over to them in a way utterly impossible via electronics or propaganda documentaries.