"So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives. I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.
It isn't a hiding place. It's a finding place."
(Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal)
Reviewers of Adrian C. Louis' Ceremonies of the Damned say it's a book about Alzheimer's and the loss of love. The poems are "tough-minded and moving." The book "elegant, crafty and a quiet victory."
I don't claim to understand Louis' work. I need it. It floats in troubled water. My constant refrain while swimming is "don't drown don't drown don't drown." I reach the edge and hold on. I can no longer swim in public pools and I'm afraid to take to the ocean. Still the waters overwhelm me. They are familiar. I think they are familiar to Louis.
The summer of 97 was cruel, or maybe it was the woman. I was teaching a summer class on American Indian Literature (full of the men I loved) and doing research for $10 an hour. I was also packing boxes for the impending move to Riverside California. The woman, my woman, got a job and we were taking it—together. For 5 years we had done everything (except write and file my dissertation) together.
Days before the move she left me for a man, well maybe not a man, but because she didn't know if this was all there was and if it was, well, maybe there was more. Maybe there would be more with him. "Lesbians." That was what she didn't want. She didn't want to be walking down the street and have someone yell that at her. It had happened before. She didn't want it to happen again. When they walked down the street people got out of the way. How could I compete with a six foot something Black man?
I haven't written, or talked about this, for fifteen years. I haven't avoided it. I haven't felt it necessary. The particulars of that end are an ugliness I chose to turn away from. But that summer I was teaching, and every day I had to stop crying and stand before a room of humans and say something.
I couldn't figure out why I assigned these men (Louis, Vizenor, Ortiz and Alexie). What was I thinking? So much violence. How would I survive? I thought I could illuminate the beauty within the violence. Hubris.
IT HAS COME TO THIS
Three days a week I imprison you
among the shrieking aged,
the palsied pukers, the damned
and abandoned, the certifiably insane.
I do this because I am weak
and I think I'm going crazy, too.
(Adrian C. Louis, Ceremonies of the Damned)
I have always refused to accept the notion that the damage has defined us, but that summer I realized I spent too much time fingering the hole of despair—my own and the collective. Fifteen years later I am only beginning to face the impact of mental illness on my soul. The relationship between that end and recent others. Seeking compassion for myself within rigorous honesty. Understanding that "Sometimes it's hard to comprehend that ceremonies of the damned are useless."
I know there is no alibi in being. We can be, more beautiful than broken.
Showing posts with label Adrian C. Louis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adrian C. Louis. Show all posts
23 July 2012
28 June 2012
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.
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.
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