Poets

"And Mariano fell and was exhausted. Fransisco held his stride all the way... and even then he could have gone on running, for no reason, for only the sake of running on."

"Every six or seven years there is a great harvest of piñones far to the east of town. That harvest, like the deer in the mountains, is the gift of God."

"Now and then in winter, great angles of geese fly through the valley, and then the sky and the geese are the same color and the air is hard and damp and smoke rises from the houses of the town."

"...and Abel was running. Against the winter sky and the long, light valley of the landscape at dawn, he seemed almost to be standing still, very little and alone."

"There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting."

"The voice with which he greeted me was warm and deep, and the words spoken in a way which gave weight to every syllable. It was a voice which one might expect from a man who wrote and continues to write of the magical nature and power of language."

"The authors who really touched my heart, of course, are authors like Vine Deloria and Scott Momaday...I mean, I've never read a novel as compelling as House Made of Dawn......there's not a word, a phrase that he can use that doesn't just haunt me. That includes much of his prose."

"Momaday speaks with a deep resonance using cultivated speech, for he cares as much about language sounds as how his words look on the page."

"House Made of Dawn borrows its title from a healing ceremony centuries old. The novel tells of a young Jemez Indian named Abel from the Pueblo where Momaday grew up, the age of twelve through high school. Its prose rhythms, complex narrative points-of-view, and flashbacks assimilate experimental techniques in modern fiction and New World romantic themes. ...Abel's dislocations as a contemporary Indian fracture a voice that searches for consciousness. His ancestors were exiled from the plains by plague and taken in at Jemez. ...Abel was kidnapped from his grandfather and put into a government boarding school, drafted into a world war, and sentence to prison for ritual homicide, then relocated in the urban ghetto of Los Angeles. Past, present, and future—Indian life as-it-was, then estranged among whites, followed by a prolonged return—disjoint the narrative. School, war, prison, and the city are white institutions where the martyred son of the earth, the biblical , lives through the Indian nightmare of a machine come into the garden."

"Once into the novel... a perceptive reader may begin to realize that sophistication in House Made of Dawn is of a different order from that in canonized texts. It is a sophistication of "otherness," a discourse requiring that readers pass through an "alien conceptual horizon" and engage a "reality" unfamiliar... What has matured with Momaday is not merely an undeniable facility with techniques and tropes of modernism, but... the profound awareness of conflicting epistemologies... With Momaday the American Indian novel shows its ability to appropriate the discourse of the privileged center and make it "bear the burden" of an "other" world-view. Momaday's novel represents more fully than any Native American novel before it the "assertion of a different perspective.""

"if Indians are left out of every other class on the university campus, even where they are pertinent-for example, leaving Scott Momaday out of a class on twentieth-century American literature, something like that somewhere else there has to be a balance. There has to be someone somewhere else who is going to emphasize Scott Momaday to the exclusion of the ones who are emphasized in the other class. I hope that at some point that will become balanced. I hope that pretty soon an American literature class will just automatically include someone like Scott Momaday-and some of the other people: Charles Eastman, you know, the other writers in our history."

"The new images of the Indian in the public mind have emerged as a result of primitivistic longings in a society whose trust in limitless technological advance and a purely scientific, materialistic view of the natural environment is no longer secure. The Indian as keeper of mystical knowledge or as natural ecologist is an updated version of earlier images which reveals more about the state of the dominant society than about contemporary Indians. Ironically, Momaday himself has come close to falling victim to the temptation of image making in his contributions to the Indian-as-ecologist debate. This shows that Indians are not immune to adopting images created by mainstream American culture. On the whole, however, Momaday's work depicts the worlds of American Indians objectively and without racial bias."

"N. Scott Momaday has made himself readily available for interviews throughout his career. Among the recurrent issues raised in these conversations are Momaday's multi-ethnic experience, his view of the Indian's place in American society, his synthesis of native oral traditions and the Western literary canon, his concern for ecology and conservation, his theories of language and the imagination, the influences on his academic and artistic development, his work as a teacher and painter, and, of course, his own comments on specific works. Momaday's responses to queries on these topics are remarkably consistent."

"I have seen him gradually comprehending, accepting, and even asserting his Indianness. Actually, of course, his Indianness is as much assumed as inborn."

"I wouldn't be writing now if Momaday hadn't done that book. I would have died. (JB: What did it do for you?) ALLEN: It told me that I was sane-or if I was crazy at least fifty thousand people out there were just as nutty in exactly the same way I was, so it was okay. I was not all alone. It did that and it brought my land back to me."

"Myth is at the beginning and ending of all story, of all literature. (1990)"

"Favorite writers? Herman Melville. Norman McClain, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. (1982)"

"I believe in a supremacy of the imagination. And I believe that fiction is a superior kind of reality. What we imagine is the best of us. (1981)"

"I believe that I fashion my own life out of words and images, and that's how I get by. If I didn't do those things, I think that I would find my existence a problem of some sort. Writing, giving expression to my spirit and to my mind, that's a way of surviving, of ordering one's life. That's a way of living, of making life acceptable to oneself. (1981)"

"Exterior. Football field. Late afternoon. The game is over. CARLISLE 27. ARMY 6. The players of both teams—dirty, bloody, exhausted—mingle, shaking hands on their way to the locker rooms. Dwight Eisenhower, limping badly, makes a great effort to intercept . He extends his hand and seems to want to say something but doesn't. His silence is pure tribute. Thorpe takes his hand, regards him for a moment."

"Glen "Pop" Warner... has distinguished himself as a model of a successful coach... an eminent leader of men. ...He can take an ordinary team and make it extraordinary. In his team he has exceptional talent... And he has in arguably the greatest athlete of the twentieth century. But... his Indians have no "killer" instinct. They care more for honor and bravery than for winning. ...[A]n old man in the corner of the room ...listens ...This is ."

"YAHWEH Nothing will come of [evolution], as it has come from nothing."

"YAHWEH Poor Man, he had been trying so hard to talk, for such a long time. Then the children went out and played together. At the end of the day they had possession of language."

"YAHWEH [Poetry] is the highest of all languages... higher even than mathematics. It is on a plane with music."

"YAHWEH A story in which there is not the realization of grace is but a shadow, a shell, a thing without substance. Grace is the substance of story, albeit invisible and remote. Grace is the soul of story. ...Or perhaps a mask behind which there is no presence. ...only silence, a perfect stillness."

"URSET I dream of berries... I dream of high meadows to which my kin come in the spring and summer when the wind is fragrant with buckwheat and camas and sweet roots are thick and tangled in the loam. ...lusty sows sauntering in the fields of flowers and of their cubs at play. ...clouds gathering at the summits and of rain descending in curtains on the dawn. ...hawks casting the shadows of their flight upon sunlit steeps. I dream of the moon riding and of leaves quaking on pale, speckled limbs, and darkness rising like water to the moon."

"Something in me hungers for wild mountains and rivers and plains. I love to be on Bear's ground... And Bear is welcome in my dreams, for in that cave of sleep I am at home to Bear."

"In western I was shown articles of the bear fest... In the presence of these things I felt their power. In their presence I understood something about Bear's transcendent spirit, how... Bear dances on the edge of life and death, crossing over and back again."

"Bear is an impractical visionary. His eyesight is weak, but he sees beyond the edge of the world, beyond time..."

"Bear and I are one... My Indian name is Tsoai-talee, which in Kiowa means "Rock-tree boy." Tsoai, "Rock-tree," is in Wyoming. That is where, long ago, a Kiowa boy turned into a bear and where his sisters were born into the sky and became the stars of the Big Dipper. Through the power of stories and names, I am the reincarnation of that boy. From the time the name Tsoai-talee was conferred onto me as an infant, I have been possessed of Bear's spirit. The Kiowas... believe that... Bear is the animal representation of the wilderness."

"Riding is an exercise of the mind. I dreamed a good deal on the back of my horse, going out into the hills alone."

"I had a horse named Pecos... Pecos could outrun all the other horses in the village, and he always wanted to prove it. ...My ancestors, who were s, should have been proud ..."

"I came to know the land by going out upon it in all seasons... until it became the very element in which I lived my daily life."

"In the winter dusk I heard coyotes barking away by the river, the sound of the drums in the , and the voice of the village crier, ringing at the rooftops."

"The sun cast a golden light upon the adobe walls and the cornfields; it set fire to the leaves of willows and cottonwoods along the river; and a fresh cold wind ran down from the canyons and carried the good scents of pine and cedar smoke, of bread baking in the beehive ovens, and of rain in the mountains."

"I was embarked upon the greatest adventure of all; I had come to the place of my growing up."

"When my parents and I moved to Jemez I was twelve years old. ...The village and the valley, the canyons and the mountains had been there from the beginning of time, waiting form me."

"One autumn morning in 1946 I woke up at Jemez Pueblo. ...in the bright morning ...I found the last, best home of my childhood."

"... I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water... I am the farthest star... the cold of dawn... the roaring of the rain I am the glitter on the crust of the snow I am the long track of the moon in a lake I am a flame of four colors... I am the whole dream of these things You see, I am alive, I am alive I stand in good relation to the earth... the gods... to all that is beautiful... Mine is a... shield... there is [the dangerous] anger... boasting in it there is [the beautiful] yellow pollen... red earth in it. ... there is [the sacred] vision... remembrance in it. ... there is [the powerful] medicine... a in it. My life is this shield..."

"The dullimer is... one of two known to exist, the second... unearthed... at Coatepec in 1958... Mine is... the better example of the armorer's art, especially with respect to the amulet, a leather bracelet to which the dullimer can be affixed and... activated with remarkable dispatch... used, according to oral tradition, to fell even the great beasts of the jungle. ...[O]ne day I laid the dullimer to rest once and for all. I had a dream in which it seemed to me that I could decipher the ancient markings on the amulet: I, Chopetl, am grown weary of war; I have been deadly even to the gods."

"Consider this ritual formula from the : ... My voice thou restore for me. Restore all for me in beauty. Make beautiful all that is before me. Make beautiful all that is behind me. It is done in beauty... ...the achieves a remarkable stability, an authority not unlike that of Scripture."

"His is the wisdom of singularity because he is the most perfect existent in the human species. That is why the whole affair began with him and is sealed with him. For he was a prophet while Adam was between water and clay. Then, in his elemental configuration, he was the Seal of the Prophets. And three is the first of the singulars. Every singular beyond one derives from it."

"Every self-manifestation bestows a new creation and removes a pre-ceding creation. Its removal is the essence of annihilation (fanaa) in the passing self-manifestation and subsistence (baqaa) in the bestowal of the following self-manifestation."

"I take love as my religion wherever its caravans lead, for love is my religion and my faith."

"By the gate of your generosity stands a sinner, who is mad with love, O best of mankind in radiance of face and countenance! Through you he seeks a means (tasawassala), hoping for Allah's forgiveness of slips; from fear of Hime, his eyelid is wet pouring tears. Althought his gerealogy attributes him to a stone (Ḥajar), how often tears have flowed, sweet, pure and fresh! Praise of you does not do you justice, but perhaps, In eternity, its verses will be transformed into mansions. My praise of you shall continue for as long as I live, For I see nothing that could ever deflect me from your praise."

"“Bardesanes was also a great student of Indian religion, and wrote a book on the subject, from which the Platonist Porphyry subsequently quoted. But it is as a poet and writer on Christian theology and theosophy that Bardesanes gained so wide a reputation; he wrote many books in Syriac and also Greek ... [and] he was the first to adapt the Syriac tongue to metrical forms and set the words to music; these hymns became immensely popular, not only in the Edessene kingdom but wherever the Syriac tongue was spoken.”"

"Bardesanes’s faith was true after his master Valentinus, the founder of Gnostic schools in Alexandria and Rome, and orthodox Christians have cursed him bitterly for it. Ephraim of Edessa, a father of the Church, writing 120 years after his death, says that he died “with the Lord in his mouth and demons in his heart”. He accused Bardesanes of being a heretic and sophist, a greedy sheep-dog in league with the wolves, and a cunning dissembler practicing deceit with his songs. If this is what a Christian saint has to say about his theology, it is something of an irony that Roman Catholic scholars are so eager to accept his geography."

"O Nannaya, may your spirit be pleased, may your heart be at rest."

"My mother is like the bright light in the sky, a doe on the hillsides. She is the morning star, shining even at noon-time. She is precious cornelian, a topaz from Marhaci."

"Bukan maksudku mau berbagi nasib, nasib adalah kesunjian masing-masing."