Great Throughts Treasury

"We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves... The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined."

"At first she thought the writing would be easy. She was extremely confident in her ability to dream, to imagine, and she supposed that expressing her dreams in words, in writing, would be entirely natural, like drawing breath. She had read widely from the time she was a child, and she knew how to recognize something that was well written. She admired certain lines and passages so much that she had taken complete possession of them and committed them to memory. She could recite “The Gettysburg Address” and “The Twenty-Third Psalm.” She could recite “Jabberwocky” and Emily Dickinson’s “Further in summer that the birds” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” She knew by heart the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead,” and if challenged she could say in whole the parts of both Romeo and Juliet. And she knew many Kiowa stories and many long prayers in Navajo. These were not feats of memory in the ordinary sense; it was simply that she attended to these things so closely that they became a part of her most personal experience. She had assumed them, appropriated them to her being. But to write! She discovered that was something else again."

"They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting."

"There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it."

"In the white man's world, language, too -- and the way which the white man thinks of it--has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language -- for the Word itself -- as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word."

"Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to."

"To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space."

" I behold there the far, faint motion of leaves. The leaves shine, and they will shiver down to death. Something like a leaf lies here within me; it wavers almost not at all, and there is no light to see it by - that it withers upon a black field. If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, I would make a word of it at last, and I would speak it into the silence of the sun."

"Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence."

"Art is affirmation."

"Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk. For we are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth. It is the entity from which we are sprung, and that into which we are dissolved in time. The blood of the whole human race is invested in it. We are moored there, rooted as surely, as deeply as are the ancient redwoods and bristlecones."

"It is here that I can concentrate my mind upon the Remembered Earth. It is here that I am most conscious of being, here that wonder comes upon my blood, here I want to live forever; and it is no matter that I must die."

"Set imagined it was to please, but it was to astonish God that he painted. His presumption and arrogance were pronounced and dangerous, for they would certainly lead to the Sin of Despair, thence to death and nothingness. Bent said so, half in jest, only half. Rather, as Set himself said on occasion, he painted in vain, in order to relieve the terrible boredom of God. He expounded: God's boredom is infinite. Surely we humans, even with our etiquette and our institutions and our mothers-in-law, ceased to amuse Him many ages ago. What sustains Him is the satisfaction, far deeper than we can know, of having created a few incomparables - landscapes, waters, birds and beasts. He takes particular pride in the stars, and it pleases Him to breathe havoc upon the oceans. He sighs to the music of the desert at dawn. The eagle and the whale give Him still to ponder and admire. And so must he grieve for the mastodon and the archaeopteryx. And the bear - ah! He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God!"

"Once in our lives we ought to concentrate our minds upon the Remembered Earth. We ought to give ourselves up to a particular landscape in our experience, to look at it from as many angles as we can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. We ought to imagine that we touch it with our hands at every season and listen to the sounds that are made upon it. We ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. We ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk."

"In my lifetime, I have seen changes in the Indian world that are nearly unimaginable. At the turn of the 20th century, the Indian was literally headed for extinction. The death rate exceeded the birth rate, poverty and disease were pervasive, the prospects for survival--let alone a better life--were bleak. At the turn of the century, the Indian has not only survived , indeed he--and she--has become a viable, even necessary, factor in the life of the nation and of the world."

"There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one's life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them walked in them lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind's eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say, I am who I am because I have been there, or there."

"I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable. If we are to realize and maintain our humanity, we must come to a moral comprehension of earth and air as it is perceived in the long turn of seasons and of years."

"I ponder how He died, despairing once. I've heard the cry subside in vacant skies, In clearings where no other was. Despair, Which, in the vibrant wake of utterance, Resides in desolate calm, preoccupies, Though it is still. There is no solace there. That calm inhabits wilderness, the sea, And where no peace inheres but solitude; Near death it most impends. It was for Him, Absurd and public in His agony, Inscrutably itself, nor misconstrued, Nor metaphrased in art or pseudonym: A vague contagion. Old, the mural fades... Reminded of the fainter sea I scanned, I recollect: How mute in constancy! I could not leave the wall of palisades Till cormorants returned my eyes on land. The mural but implies eternity: Not death, but silence after death is change. Judean hills, the endless afternoon, The farther groves and arbors seasonless But fix the mind within the moment's range. Where evening would obscure our sorrow soon, There shines too much a sterile loveliness. No imprecisions of commingled shade, No shimmering deceptions of the sun, Herein no semblances remark the cold Unhindered swell of time, for time is stayed. The Passion wanes into oblivion, And time and timelessness confuse, I'm told. These centuries removed from either fact Have lain upon the critical expanse And been of little consequence. The void Is calendared in stone; the human act, Outrageous, is in vain. The hours advance Like flecks of foam borne landward and destroyed. "

"How shall we adorn Recognition with our speech?— Now the dead firstborn Will lag in the wake of words. Custom intervenes; We are civil, something more: More than language means, The mute presence mulls and marks. Almost of a mind, We take measure of the loss; I am slow to find The mere margin of repose. And one November It was longer in the watch, As if forever, Of the huge ancestral goose. So much symmetry!— Like the pale angle of time And eternity. The great shape labored and fell. Quit of hope and hurt, It held a motionless gaze Wide of time, alert, On the dark distant flurry. "

"And suddenly he had the sense of being all alone, as if he were already miles and months away, gone long ago from the town and the valley and the hills, from everything he knew and had always known."

"As I see him, that old man, he walks very slowly to the place where he will make his prayer, and it is always the same place, a small mound where the grass is sparse and the hard red earth shows through. He limps a little, with age, but when he plants his feet he is tall and straight. The bones are fine and prominent in his face and hands. And his face is painted. There are red and yellow bars under his eyes, neither bright nor sharply defined on the dark, furrowed skin, but soft and organic, the colors of sandstone and of pollen. His long braids are wrapped with blood-red cloth. His eyes are deep and open to the wide world. At sunrise, precisely, they catch fire and close, having seen. The low light descends upon him. And when he lifts his voice, it enters upon the silence and carries there, like the call of a bird."

"Before there were horses the Kiowas had need of dogs. That was a long time ago, when dogs could talk."

"Dwight Dicks was sullen. He and his son, Murphy, were cleaning out the stalls in the barn. Dwight was a large, rawboned man, standing well over six feet, with a huge, balding head and huge hands. His face was weather-beaten; he seemed always, day or night, to be looking into the sun, squinting, his great mouth forever open in a grimace that was almost like a smile; there were prominent gaps among his yellow teeth, and his large lips were parched and purple. His thick legs were spread apart, and he wheezed as he worked. Murphy was eighteen, almost as tall as his father, with a thick shock of reddish-brown hair and a bland, agreeable face. He was lanky, and his body was hard and corded with muscle. Although there were resemblances between them, it would have been hard to imagine that the boy might one day look like his father."

"A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things."

"Even as the singer sees into the immediate landscape, he perceives a now and future dimension that is altogether remote, yet nonetheless real and inherent within, a quality of evanescence and evolution, a state at once of being and of becoming."

"A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil's edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet."

"As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse."

"For the European who came from a community of congestion and confinement, the West was beyond dreaming; it must have inspired him to formulate an idea of the infinite. There he could walk through geologic time; he could see into eternity."

"For the Kiowas the beginning was a struggle for existence in the bleak northern mountains. It was there, they say, that they entered the world through a hollow log. The end, too, was a struggle, and it was lost. The young Plains culture of the Kiowas withered and died like grass that is burned in the prairie wind. . . But these are idle recollections, the mean and ordinary agonies of human history. The interim was a time of great adventure and nobility and fulfillment."

"He had been afraid of Bent, as he had been afraid of Sister Stella Francesca from the first. But then he loved her, for he was a child, and there was no one else to love."

"He beholds what is there; nothing of the scene is lost upon him. In the integrity of his vision he is wholly in possession of himself and of the world around him; he is quintessentially alive."

"He had tried in the days that followed to speak to his grandfather, but he could not say the things he wanted; he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it."

"He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God."

"I have deep roots in this Oklahoma soil. It makes me proud."

"Hold hard this infirmity. It defines you. You are old. Now fix yourself in summer, in thickets of ripe berries, and venture toward the ridge where you were born. Await there the setting sun. Be alive to that old conflagration one more time. Mortality is your shadow and your shade. Translate yourself to spirit; be present on your journey. Keep to the trees and waters. e the singing of the soil."

"Houses are like sentinels in the plain, old keepers of the weather watch. There, in a very little while, wood takes on the appearance of great age. All colors wear soon away in the wind and rain, and then the wood is burned gray and the grain appears and the nails turn red with rust. The windowpanes are black and opaque; you imagine there is nothing within, and indeed there are many ghosts, bones given up to the land. They stand here and there against the sky, and you approach them for a longer time than you expect. They belong in the distance; it is their domain."

"I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story."

"I have a pretty good knowledge of the Indian world by virtue of living on several different reservations and being exposed to several different cultures and languages."

"I am an Indian and I believe I?m fortunate to have the heritage I have. "I grew up in two worlds and straddle both those worlds even now. It has made for confusion and a richness in my life. I?ve been able to deal with it reasonably well, I think, and I value it."

"I simply kept my goal in mind and persisted. Perseverance is a large part of writing."

"I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian."

"I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me."

"I often think of old man Cheney, and of his daily devotion to the sun. He died before I was born, and I never knew where he came from or what of good and bad entered into his life. But I think I know who he was, essentially, and what his view of the world meant to him and to me. He was a man who saw very deeply into the distance, I believe, one whose vision extended far beyond the physical boundaries of his time and place. He perceived the wonder and meaning of Creation itself. In his mind?s eye he could integrate all the realities and illusions of the earth and sky; they became for him profoundly intelligible and whole."

"If coupling should but make us whole and of the selfsame mind and soul, then couple let's in celebration; we have contained the population."

"In fact Grey was nineteen. She stood not more than five feet five inches in height, but some quality of her posture made her seem taller. She was slender and supple, but her body was compact and strong. Her hair was long and thick and black, so black that it bore a purple sheen. Her eyes were striking; their color ranged from gray to green to violet. They were eyes out of an ancient myth, epic and holy; they might have been Callisto's eyes."

"In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken."

"In the distance there were the voices of children. The air was very still. Paulita Maxwell, Pete's eighteen-year-old sister, did not weep, could not, though her heart was breaking. She kept to the darkness, her eyes open wide, as if to see something there take shape, the invisible become visible. She felt her skin tighten and become as hard and brittle as pottery. She believed that if someone should touch her she would shatter."

"Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition."

"It was not an exclamation so much, I think, as it was a warding off, an exertion of language upon ignorance and disorder."

"Lola Bourne bought one of his paintings, an acrylic on paper entitled 'Night Window Man.' It was a strange piece, even to Set, and it was powerful. It was a bright green frame, a window, in which was a roiling blue and gray background, a thick, ominous depth; and from this there emerged a figure, a grotesque man with red hair and red dress, approaching. Set had begun with nothing but color in mind; it had taken form quickly and of itself, as it were. He thought well of it, but he supposed it would not sell."