I read Ceremony first and totally missed the point until I spoke with K and he contrasted her deadpan delivery and weirdly aimless characters with what I expected, which was a Western heroic story in Western heroic language. What I mean is that I had more or less written off the book because I found its language uninteresting, almost slack, until K asked me to read it differently, as the product of a tradition that used/s stories to explain relationships and communities, rather than the exploits of individuals that are the main thrust of the Western Classical and Romantic traditions, as well as the modern bildungsroman, etc. This helped a great deal, and I ended up actually coming to appreciate the book. I read the last few chapters in funny Native American mental accent. That really helped. I ended up seeing the book as a radical proposal: the same Western obsession with narrowly-understood causality, the engineer's bias, that gets us into all these hopeless wars cannot be the same bias that cures the surviving soldiers of the psycho-spiritual damage they suffer in acting as war machines. What will cure them is a return to a holistic view, in which all people, even Japs, and all systems, even the most high-tech, are inter-connected in one big whole. So when Mr. Protagonist hallucinates his uncle's voice coming from the dead Japanese soldier, he enters a period of insanity inaccessible to the Western doctors who try to cure him, because his insanity is actually an overwhelmingly intense moment of realization that in killing a stranger, he has killed his most beloved family. His way out of the near-death this realization induces is to awaken, through a kind of meandering ceremonial odyssey that defies causal explanations, into a new understanding of universal oneness, in which all violence results in universal tragedy.
Almanac of the Dead, however, seems to dwell in the insanity itself, and offers no curative realizations or ceremonial healing. Maybe LMS proposes that all damage is universal, but all healing is individual? Because each damaged being needs to start inside the insane illusion of isolation and individuality? I don't know much about Native religion or practice or concepts of mental health, etc, so I may be misapplying the language of Buddhism [in its concern with oneness] here. Almanac feels more and more like a litany of depravity. Each character is described as occupying some point along a continuum of moral hollowness, in which the demands of each isolated id displace what I think LMS believes is the original Native wisdom, in which all is one and individual being is an illusion. So, the great sin of the West that so oppresses Native people is our narrowly causal tendency to get what we want by extracting it from the Earth and from poor, mostly brown, people. Ingenuity and force replace wisdom and elegance, more or less, and the people who fail to apply their minds to novel solutions and their strength to extractive industry get clobbered, and become marginalized in a culture that fails to understand or value their accumulated wisdom. I find myself wishing her illustrations of hollowness and depravity had been rendered with a ton more humor and gentleness. Her white characters are caricatures of vacuity, turpitude, and selfishness. Do we really need extreme examples to understand the fall of the West? Torture and snuff videos? Bestiality? Tucson? I don't think so. Emptiness is a spiritual condition that creeps up on most people, the natural result of a life spent grasping for what is not freely given, using specialized forms of ingenuity to force what we want from the world. It is not a blanket condition that blinds all eyes to all kinds of goodness. I think LMS has a point to make, and I think I more or less agree with it, if I understand her correctly [hard to say], but I think she makes a fatal rhetorical mistake: the extremity of her examples allows us corrupt Western readers, or white readers, to see the problem narrowly: evil people are doing this to us. A more helpful narrative might suggest that all of us, even those of us too bland to keep Basset hounds as sex slaves and too unimaginative to find amputation videos titillating are complicit, in our ignorance, in an unsustainable extractive economy. This is, after all, an economic condition we're talking about, and foisting the blame onto a [hopefully] small population of degenerates seems to me to make LMS guilty of what she's ranting at us about: too-narrow conceptions of causality, simplistic good-vs.-evil narratives, and a bizarrely glib undergraduate African-American Studies- type demonization of the "snow people" undermine her argument and alienate me, her white, only-moderately complicit reader.
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