The poetic force of TEN BEARS' style of speech ...
"I was born on the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing
to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures,
and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within
walls." ...
"I want no blood upon my land to stain the grass. I want it all clear and
pure, and I wish it so, that all who go through among my people may find
peace when they come in, and leave it when they go out."
Pirsig describes his direct style....
"Here were the straight, head-on, declarative sentences without stylistic
ornamentation of any kind, but with a poetic force that must have put the
sophisticated bureaucratic speech of Ten Bears' antagonists to shame. This
was no imitation of the involuted Victorian elocution of 1867!"
But it wasn't just in their WORDS, it was in their ATTITUDE...
"This directness and simplicity was in the way they spoke, too... It always
seemed to come from deep within them. .. It wasn't just the way they
pronounced their words. It was their attitude - plain spoken, he thought.
...PLAINS spoken."
It comes directly from the HEART because its in their BONES...
"The web grew wider and wider. They were NOT imitating. If there's one thing
these people didn't do it was imitate. Everything was coming straight from
the heart. That seemed to be the whole idea - to get things down to a point
where everything's coming straight on, direct, no imitation." (Do these
terms fore-shadow ideas about DQ or what?)
But its not just words, attitudes and hearts, its in their very way of
LIFE...
"From that original perception of the Indians as the originators of the
American style of speech had come an expansion: The Indians were the
originators of the American style of LIFE." (emphasis is Pirsig's)
And Pirsig tells us what the Indians think of the spider's way of
talking....
"To the Indian, whites SEEMED like spiders when they talked. They sat there
and smiled and said things they didn't mean, and all the time their mind was
spinning a web around the Indian. They got so lost in their own web-spinning
thoughts they didn't even see that the Indian was watching them too and
could see what they were doing."
Because anything that doesn't come from the heart is a kind of lie...
"But these well-mannered circumlocutions of aristocratic European speech are
"forked-tongue" talk to the Indian and are infuriating. They violate his
morality. He wants you to either speak from the heart or keep quiet."
****************************************************************************
It seems to me that the POETIC FORCE of Ten Bear's speech is a power that
arises naturally out of his authenticity. His culture and religion demanded
this honesty and lack of pretension. He talks straight from the heart,
directly and without any imitation. His speech is direct because he is
direct. You can tell who he is by the way he talks. And that's fine with
him, he's not trying to hide anything....
"I was born where the wind blew free and there was nothing to brake the
light of the sun."
Ten Bears isn't talking about the weather so much as the state of his being.
He's talking about freedom. And you already know where I think it comes
from...
"The majority opposition to peyote reflected a cultural bias, the belief,
unsupported by scientific or historical evidence, that "hallucinatory"
experience is automatically bad. Since hallucination are a form of insamity,
the term, "hallucinogen," is clearly pejorative. Like early descriptions of
Buddhism as a "heathen" religion and Islam as "barbaric," it beg some
metaphysical questions. The Indians who use it as part of their ceremony
might with equal accuracy call it a "de-hallucinogen," since it's their
claim that it removes the hallucinations of contemporary life and reveals
the reality buried beneath them."
"...where there was nothing to break the light of the sun."
very relaxed, DMB
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