N. Scott Momaday is a novelist, a poet, and a painter.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction
for his novel House Made of Dawn in 1969.
He has taught at several universities,
including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, and Moscow
University.
He currently teaches at the University of Arizona.
Writers at Work is very happy to present N. Scott Momaday.
[APPLAUSE]
I know that this has been advertised
as a reading of fiction but I would
like to begin by reading a poem or two.
These are fairly recent poems.
We'll start with an epitaph.
I don't know if you write epitaphs or not.
But I swim and swimming is surely
one of the most boring activities that
has ever been devised.
And I do this for exercise.
It's rather good exercise.
But it is unspeakably boring.
And in order to combat this deadly boredom,
I began, while I was going through the motions
and looking down at the stripe at the bottom of the pool,
composing epitaphs.
And I discovered that it's a very good way
to combat boredom.
And it's a little bit like eating peanuts.
Once you get started writing the damn things you can't stop.
And so here are some examples of epitaphs that I've
composed while completely wet.
[LAUGHTER]
He drove himself and was undone and left
no stone unturned but one.
[LAUGHTER]
Kind of grim, huh?
[LAUGHTER]
It can also be called an epi-grim.
[LAUGHTER]
She died a beauty of repute.
Her other virtues in dispute.
[LAUGHTER]
He worked hard and was rewarded.
His reward is here recorded.
And this is the one I like best.
Here lies a lady sweet and chaste.
Here lies the matter, chaste makes waste.
[LAUGHTER]
Enough of that, huh?
Frequently I write in the-- in a mode
that I think of as an American Indian expression, by
and large.
Much of my writing comes out of Native American oral tradition.
There are such things as charms.
And some of you will know what charms are, particularly
in the Anglo-Saxon maybe.
Charms are verbal equations which are uttered in the belief
that the utterance will produce some physical change
in the world.
In American Indian tradition, the charms
are used basically for the acquisition of power.
A charm, for example, is uttered in order
to reduce an enemy to helplessness.
Here are some things I have written that [AUDIO OUT]
upon charms, American Indian charms.
My child, can you reach those berries, the red, and blue,
and purple berries?
They are delicious, perhaps.
Here is another one.
The bear is coming.
There are pitiful cries.
There are knives for mourning.
The bear is coming.
There are bones all about.
There are entrails on the ground.
The bear is coming, someone very old has said so.
And another.
At the very sight of my horse, at the very sight
of my trappings, at the very sight of my shield,
you are afraid.
Aren't you?
I read these things you understand out
of some spirit of generosity.
And I don't want you to repeat them because they're
very dangerous things.
They must be handled with care.
This is the last one.
The wind is cold, isn't it?
The moon is dark, isn't it?
The plain is wide, isn't it?
Death dances at the base of that hill.
Just two more poems and then I'll read some other things.
Well here is a poem called If It Could Ascend.
I behold there the far faint motion of leaves.
The leaves shine and they will shiver down to death.
Something like a leaf flies 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.
For the last 10 years or so, I've taught at Stanford
and lived in San Francisco.
And two or three days a week, I drove down
to Stanford, a distance of about 35 miles.
And our apartment in San Francisco
is on the corner of Beech and Fillmore Streets.
It's in the Marina, if you know the city, between--
on the bay --between the Golden Gate Bridge
and Fisherman's Wharf.
And we have a bay window on Fillmore Street.
And if you look north from the bay window,
the bay is there just a block or so down.
And you see the most wonderful ships passing by at all hours.
And you hear the foghorns.
Sometimes the USS Coral Sea goes by
and then fills that whole gap of Fillmore Street at the end.
It has a crew of 3,000 men.
And it's a wonderful thing to see.
But if you look the other direction,
south, you [AUDIO OUT] Fillmore Street.
Fillmore Street ascends from the Marina
to the top of Pacific Heights.
And there at the very top is the intersection
of Broadway and Fillmore.
And on my way to Stanford I drove up that hill,
up Fillmore, to the very top, to the top of Pacific Heights.
And one day, as I was driving to Stanford
and I was climbing that hill up to the top of Fillmore
and Broadway, my imagination went wild.
I don't know how to account for that.
But it happens.
It happens every once in a while.
And I thought, what a wonderful place for a buffalo drive.
And I played with that idea for a time.
Now what if--
I began thinking, what if one day the good citizens of San
Francisco should wake up and hear in the distance
this bawling and this thunder?
And they look southward.
And there, somewhere down on the Peninsula,
is this great red cloud of dust rising into the air.
And it turns out to be some lost remnant
of the great southern herd, maybe 50,000, 60,000 animals,
all bearing hard upon the city of San Francisco.
They do.
They come into the city and crush automobiles,
knock lampposts over, take the corners
off buildings, trample women and children.
They follow the line of least resistance,
which would be Van Ness Avenue.
They come northwards along Van Ness.
And somehow at Broadway they are [AUDIO OUT] and they make
a left--
they hang a left turn.
And they flow up Broadway to the intersection
of Fillmore and Broadway.
And there, on the southwest corner of the intersection,
is an old man on an old horse.
And he waves them down.
And they [AUDIO OUT] down Fillmore Street,
past Cow Hollow, and into the bay.
Isn't that terrific?
[LAUGHTER]
This is called the Great Fillmore Street Buffalo Drive.
Insinuate the sun through fog upon Pacific Heights,
upon the man on horseback, upon the herd ascending.
There is color and clamor.
And there he waves them down those great hump backed animals
until, their wild grace gone, they lumber and lunge.
And blood blisters at their teeth.
And their hooves score the street.
And among boulders, they settle on the sea.
He looks after them, twisted round upon his sorrow.
The drape of his flag now full and formal, ceremonial.
One bull, animal representation of the sun,
he dreams back from the brink to the green refuge
of his hunter's heart.
It grazes near a canyon wall along a ribbon of light,
among redbud trees, eventually into shadow.
Then the hold of his eyes is broken.
On the farther rim, the grasses flicker and blur.
A hawk brushes rain across the dusk.
Meadows recede into mountains.
And here and there are moons like salmon berries
upon the glacial face of the sky.
All right.
That's enough poetry.
Let me read you something from my favorite of my books.
It's called The Way to Rainy Mountain.
And it's a hard book to classify I'm told and I believe it.
It's basically a collection of Kiowa folk tales
to which I've added commentaries of two
kinds, an historical commentary and reminiscence,
a kind of memoir, personal reminiscence.
There's one that I'd like to read you.
It's number three in the collection.
This is the way it goes.
Before there were horses, the Kiowas had need of dogs.
That was a long time ago when dogs could talk.
There was a man who lived alone.
He had been thrown away and he made his camp here and there
on the high ground.
Now it was dangerous to be alone but there were enemies
all around.
The man spent his arrows hunting food.
He had one arrow left and he shot a bear.
But the bear was only wounded and it ran away.
The man wondered what to do.
Then a dog came up to him and said
that many enemies were coming.
They were close by and all around.
The man could think of no way to save himself.
But the dog said, you know, I have puppies.
They are weak and they have nothing to eat;
if you will take care of my puppies,
I will show you how to get away.
The dog led the man here and there, around and around,
and they came to safety.
This is the commentary.
The first commentary, 100 years ago the Comanche Ten Bears
remarked upon the great number of horses
which the Kiowas owned.
When we first knew you, he said, you
had nothing but dogs and sleds.
It was so.
The dog is primordial.
Perhaps it was dreamed into being.
The principal warrior society of the Kiowas
was the Koitsenko, Real Dogs.
And it was made up of 10 men only, the 10 most brave.
Each of these men wore a long ceremonial sash
and carried an arrow.
In time of battle he must, by means of this arrow,
impale the end of his sash to the earth
and stand his ground to the death.
Tradition has it that the founder of the Koitsenko
had a dream in which he saw a band of warriors outfitted
after the fashion of the society being led by a dog.
The dog sang the song of the Koitsenko
then said to the dreamer, you are a dog,
make a noise like a dog, sing like a dog.
They were always dogs about my grandmother's house.
Some of them were nameless and lived a life of their own.
They belong there in a sense that the word ownership
does not include.
The old people paid them scarcely any attention
but they should have been sad, I think, to see them go.
Let us tell you a little story about that,
a story about that story.
One day, a couple or three years ago,
I was speaking to a class of sixth graders
at the Hebrew Academy of San Francisco.
I was telling them stories and I happened to think of this one.
And so I thought it would be nice to recite
the story about the man who was saved by a dog.
And I got to that part of it.
The second sentence, which says, "That was a long time ago
when dogs could talk."
and the little girl in the front row looked up at me
and she said, those were the days.
[LAUGHTER]
I will never forgive her.
The story was ruined.
I couldn't-- I couldn't go on.
I really believe that if she grows up,
if she's allowed to grow up, she'll
become an actress, a great scene stealer.
I want to read you one more of these,
one of the last one in fact.
East of my grandmother's house, south of the pecan grove,
there is buried a woman in a beautiful dress.
Mammedaty, they used to know where she is buried
but now no one knows.
If you stand on the front porch of the house
and look eastward towards Carnegie,
you know that the woman is buried
somewhere within the range of your vision
but her grave is unmarked.
She was buried in a cabinet and she wore a beautiful dress.
How beautiful it was.
It was one of those fine buckskin dresses
and it was decorated with elk's teeth and beadwork.
That dress is still there under the ground.
Aho's high moccasins--
Aho was the name of my grandmother.
Aho's high moccasins are made of softest, cream-colored skins.
On each instep there is a bright disk
of beadwork, an eight-pointed star, red and pale blue
on a white field, and there are bands of beadwork
at the soles and ankles.
The flaps of the leggings are wide and richly ornamented
with blue, and red, and green, and white, and lavender beads.
East of my grandmother's house, the sun rises out of the plain.
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.
The Way to Rainy Mountain was the second of my books.
The first was a novel called House Made of Dawn,
which was published in 1960.
And it is the story of a young Indian man, a Pueblo man,
who returns from the Second World War and tries to resume
his former traditional way of life but cannot because he has
been psychically disoriented.
And so the story then is about his disintegration.
His name is Abel.
Early on in the novel there is a passage
in which Abel sees eagles flying above the Valle Grande.
The Valle Grande being the largest caldera in the world,
if I'm not mistaken.
It's a great valley in North Central New Mexico, very close
to Los Alamos.
And I want to read you the passage about the eagles.
He was not thinking of the eagles.
He had been walking since daybreak
down from the mountain where that year
he had broken a horse for the rancher John Raymond.
By the middle of the morning, he was
on the rim of the Valle Grande, a great volcanic crater that
lay high up on the western slope of the range.
It was the right eye of the Earth held open to the sun.
Of all places that he knew, this valley
alone could reflect the great spatial majesty of the sky.
It was scooped out of the dark peaks
like the well of a great gathering storm, deep umber,
and blue, and smoke colored.
The view across the diameter was magnificent.
It was an unbelievably great expanse.
As many times as he had been there in the past,
each new sight of it always brought him up short
and he had to catch his breath.
Just there, it seemed a strange and brilliant light lay
upon the world and all the objects in the landscape
were washed clean and set away in the distance.
In the morning sunlight, the Valle Grande
dappled with the shadows of clouds
and vibrant with rolling winter grass.
The clouds were always there, huge, sharply described,
and shining in the pure air.
But the great feature of the valley was its size.
It was almost too great for the eye to hold,
strangely beautiful and full of distance.
Such vastness makes for illusion, a kind of illusion
that comprehends reality and where it exists there is always
wonder and exhilaration.
He looked at the facets of a boulder that lay balanced
on the edge of the land.
And the first thing beyond, the vague misty field out
of which it stood, was the floor of the valley itself,
pale and blue green, miles away.
He shifted the focus of his gaze and he could just
make out the crossed dots that were
cattle, grazing along the river in the faraway plain.
Then he saw the eagles across the distance,
two of them riding low in the depths
and rising diagonally towards him.
He did not know what they were at first
and he stood watching them.
Their far silent flight erratic and wild in the bright morning.
They rose and swung across the skyline, veering close at last.
And he knelt down behind the rock,
dumb with pleasure and excitement,
holding onto them with his eyes.
They were golden eagles, a male and a female
in their mating flight.
They were cavorting, spinning, and spiraling
on the cold clear columns of air and they were beautiful.
They swooped and hovered, keening on the air
and swung close together, fainting
and screaming with delight.
The female was full-grown and the span of her broad wings
was greater than a man's height.
There was a fine flourish to her motion.
She was deceptively, incredibly fast.
And her pivots and wheels were wide and full-blown.
But her great weight was streamlined
and perfectly controlled.
She carried a rattlesnake.
It hung shining from her feet, limp and curving out
in the trail of her flight.
Suddenly, her wings and tail fanned
catching full on the wind.
And for an instant, she was still
widespread and spectral in the blue
while her mate flared passed and away,
turning around in the distance to look for her.
Then she began to beat upward at an angle from the rim
until she was small in the sky and she let go of the snake.
It fell slowly, writhing and rolling, floating out
like a bit of silver thread against the wide backdrop
of the land.
She held still above, buoyed up on the cold currents.
Her crop and hackles gleaming like copper in the sun.
The male swerved and sailed.
He was younger than she and a little more than half as large.
He was quicker, tighter in his moves.
He let the carrion drift by.
Then suddenly he gathered himself and stooped,
sliding down in a blur of motion to the strike.
He hit the snake in the head with not the slightest
deflection of his course or speed,
cracking its long body like a whip.
Then he rolled and swung upward in a great pendulum arc,
riding out his momentum atop of his glide.
He let go of the snake in turn but the female
did not go for it.
Instead, she soared out over the plate nearly out of sight
like a moat, receding into the haze of the far mountain.
The male followed and Abel watched
them go, straining to see, saw them veer once deep
and disappear.
I want to read next a passage from The Names.
I wrote an autobiographical book entitled The Names.
And it is about some of my affairs.
It goes back about five generations
on both sides of my family.
And it is about my growing up in the Southwest.
I left it off at the age of 17.
Originally I had planned to carry it much farther along
and indeed I wrote deathless passages about my adulthood,
teaching in Santa Barbara, lying back in California.
You know.
But when I came to the--
when I came to that point where--
point upon which I left my home of Jemez Pueblo
to go east to school at the age of 17.
When I came to that point, I realized that I
had written a whole thing.
And so that's where this book ends.
And who knows if I will write again about my life
after this point.
I don't know about that.
But there is a passage here, which I'm especially fond of.
The passage that is about my Uncle James.
We called him Jimmy, my father's brother.
He was a strange man, very sick man.
He died of acute alcoholism.
And I knew him when I was small and along with my cousins
I played dirty tricks on Jimmy.
He was a convenient kind of victim.
But when I grew older, I came to realize that he loved me.
He loved me very much and he was very good to me.
And so when I wrote about him I tried to do so with love.
This is the passage.
I need to explain that Aho is my grandmother, Jimmy's mother.
And the boy in the passage is yours truly.
James was slouched at the oval table,
his right arm lying under his absent gaze on the oil cloth,
his right hand hanging down from the edge,
the fingers curled slightly, the thumb
extended, almost to his left thigh, his head hanging.
And across the table sat Aho, his mother, composed.
Her hands interlaced in her lap, her feet
crossed, her eyes partly closed and downcast,
shown in the lamplight.
And she was chewing gum.
In her pensive moments, she almost always
chewed gum, slowly, exactly, as if with her back teeth
to regulate her thoughts.
James thought of the boy, his nephew,
it was his concession to the boy that he had seen him
through the day, had led him around the empty spaces of time
in the morning and afternoon, especially the late afternoon
when the shadow stood still.
They had walked down to the town,
had looked into the wide street, had carried out their business
like men of the world in the post office, in the bank,
had eaten ice cream, had bought the good toy gun.
They had gone along together or their paths
had crossed many times through the day.
Through the day, the day had come down to the night
and the boy was asleep, safe and sound.
Now, a knot would draw very tight
inside the man, the thought, just the thought of being drunk
had a physical effect upon him, a giddiness, a kind of euphoria
in which his body seemed to grow lighter and more supple.
And at the same time, there was a kind of resistance in it,
in the flesh and blood, the body's own anticipation
of impairment and pain, of dehydration
and the sharp contraction of the brain.
His eyes went very dry.
And his tongue and sweat broke out at his head
and at the palms of his hands.
He saw his mother out of the corner of his eye.
Aho did not provoke him except that the patience in her
pressed upon him like a weariness.
It lay between them as a long distance or an interval
that he could not comprehend.
She was entirely composed.
Painter should have loved her in her composure
then in the lamplight.
Momently, the light shivered in her hair, so lowly
that it seemed barely to emanate there.
Her head, her face, her shoulders, her bosom
were ample and round.
Nothing, neither the corners of her eyes and mouth,
nor the folds of her flesh and the shadows
that were set upon her hardened to an edge or an angle
or a flatness anywhere.
Her skin was dark and yet her face
was so radiant against the shadows and the deeper darkness
of her hair and her dress, that her whole expression was
laid out and defined there, fashioned upon the broad round
bone of her skull, which was prominent just
now in the strange quality of the light.
Her eyes were half closed and neither
did the lamp's reflection, which guttered there,
seem any way hard and precise but soft and transparent.
The painter should have wondered how to indicate such a thing.
He should have had to work a great illusion
into a single point, something more a matter of texture
than of color perhaps.
He should have had to bring his artist's hand and his artist's
eye so close together as to be one in the same thing.
She seemed very wise and very strong.
And her strength seemed to consist in rest.
She seemed simply to know how to be comfortable in the world.
James had never been able to tell what she was thinking.
The painter should not have been able to tell.
He should have had to work his brush across a riddle.
When he went out, the moon had only just appeared.
It was huge and thick and darkly colored at his back, absorbent.
He scarcely knew it was there but he was screwed tight
upon his thirst and he walked again along the highway.
He did not hear the crickets that had
begun to crackle everywhere.
And later, on his way back, the moon
was high and colorless, a perfect spot
on the murky midnight.
He stumbled in his joy and stupor,
knowing not yet what he yearned for,
knowing only that he was alive to the night
and strangely exhilarated.
He saw the dead silver dog stealthy in death
and he walked a wide way around it.
He wanted to say serious things but laughter grew up in him.
His laughter rang out, rolled along
the black bank of the creek below the gray grass,
the undulant weight of the wichitas.
Oh God, he thought, the clamorous night.
He could hear everything distinctly now,
the rasping of the crickets and the frogs, the wind turning,
leaves sliding upon leaves, a motor in the far distance,
the echo of his laughter dying away and beyond that
the laughter of God.
God's laughter, it was all so beautiful to hear.
And he opened his eyes wide and looked all around
and everything shown in his sight.
And it was all so beautiful to see.
He was involved in the light and chanted.
He said, God.
Spoke the name of God, let his teeth
clenched and he felt himself whirling in the light.
The light was like frost on the hills.
It lay out in a great round hollow of the plains
as far as he could see, shifting and quaking
slowly, tumbling like a fog.
Then the beauty was too much and tears came to his eyes
and he kept saying the name, God, God, God,
until he choked on it.
And through his tears he saw the moon, red, and blue, and green.
A shaft of light like a bolt struck down in the meadow,
not a stone's throw away, among chinaberry trees.
There were deep colors in it.
And it was brighter than the moon
and it took his breath away.
And he wanted everyone to see it, especially the boy.
Look, look, he thought, how God has drawn the sky with light.
Light was laced among the willows.
It set a brightness like fire up on the grass
and it rose and floated like smoke.
It defined clouds in the sky and it
radiated from the clouds like fractures in glass
like spider webs.
Suddenly he knew how small he was, how little he mattered
in the laughter of God.
Not at all really, he knew it once
that this moment, the blink of an eye held more beauty
and wonder than he could know.
He had not enough life to deal with it.
He could only suffer the least part of it.
He could only open his eyes and see
what he could see of the world.
And again he laughed together with God.
And he thought, wait a moment God.
Give me a moment.
I have a moment and it is too big for me and I cannot hold it
in my little hands.
You God, you give me the night and the world.
It is a good joke.
And God we laugh but I have seen how
you draw the sky with light.
[APPLAUSE]