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Chapter Three Discordant Contemporary Rhythms 77 Introduction: Detachment as a Curse upon the Land A bone-chilling story is told by Leslie Marmon Silko as part of the fabric of stories, chants, myths, and poems that make up the novel Ceremony, about how there was once a contest of witches “in dark things,” which here means acts of truly horrifying power. In the story, most witches create disgusting or surprising objects. They are all topped by one witch whose sex and people remains unknown.This one witch merely tells a story, which by being told will set an unfolding of events into motion. (The power of stories is something we will examine later in this chapter.) The witch tells of a culture, whose people “grow away from the earth/then they grow away from the sun/then they grow away from the plants and animals (C, 135).” This embodies the power of the diabolical logic we have discussed, whose vision is abstracted away from the dance of senses and feelings to use vision only in its stripping away and cutting ability, to see objects out of context and connection, as merely separate objects. As Silko continues, “They see no life / When they look / they see only objects (C, 135).” In no longer feeling the interconnection as part of their sensing of things, and in removing themselves from the dance of vitality that runs among things, this people comes to make a distinction between themselves as animate and the inanimate world around them: “The world is a dead thing for them / the trees and rivers are not alive. The deer and the bear are objects / they see no life (C, 135).” Once separated from the pulsations of energy, of rhythm, and of kinship that run through all living things as announced within the swirl of the senses, one can’t feel not only the dance running through rocks, soil, and water, but also through plants, animals, and, ultimately, even one’s human dancing partners . All are objects, objects to be manipulated—as Silko says, “Objects to work for us / objects to act for us” (C, 137). The poem-chant continues to tell how a people cut off from feeling kinship and vitality feel something else: “They fear / They fear the world. / They destroy what they fear. / They fear themselves” (C, 135). When the world is made of objects, which seem at a distance, which seem to be alien in some way, and need to be subdued since they are opposing forces, the natural response is fear—fear they will not be controlled, they will hurt, or they will deprive me of what is needed or wanted. The tale descends into the depths of these fearful ways of confronting a hostile world and reaches the inevitable outcome: “They will kill the things they fear / all the animals / the people will starve. / They will poison the water/. . . Killing killing killing killing” (C, 136). The tale relates how both inadvertently and deliberately , a culture that sees the world in detachment, as separate and separated, as not being alive in the same way its people are, becomes a power of death, a people of unparalleled violence, eventually turned against itself too. Such a people would be a curse upon the land not only because they bring death to everything, but also because they are under a spell. They are not really aware of what they do.They can’t see or feel fully with the kind of vision, with the kind of thinking that they employ while under this spell.They lead to a “Whirling / whirling / whirling / whirling” (C, 138), which is both a vortex that threatens to spin all down into destruction, but also is a motion of intoxication and speed that is dizzying and disorienting. Silko’s charge against European and American culture and its Plato—to— modern heritage we have been discussing emanates from the ecological sense of her Native American perspective. It squarely gives us, as members of this culture, the responsibility for what we’ve done,how our ways of experiencing the world and how our own sense of self lie at the heart of this destructiveness, but it also doesn’t condemn us as a people or a culture. It sees we’ve have been in the grip of a spell: a way of seeing the world that spins mightily like a hurricane and doesn’t allow alternatives within its force field. Yet, everything has a place and a...

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