OCR Text |
Show Cross Currents Page 22 Heritage Portrait Studio at Cortez Camera August 21, 1998 Ih e page sage The Sacred Place of Story Book review Reasonably Priced Portraits of Infants , Children , Seniors , Couples and Families By Can 565-400- 0 When its been one of those days, Treat yourself to an ice cold . . . Beer.. . Foreign & Domestic Plus . . . Wines Liquors Brandy Schnapps Whiskeys ALWAYS SPECIAL BEER PRICES! Convenient window drive-u- p West Slope Liquors 1404 E. Main Cortez, CO 565-736- . . . N. Scott Momaday loses his religion and then reconstructs it piece by piece in book of essays and stories, The Man Made of Words. Broken into three parts, the book explores the art of the A Call a friend. Four Corners Public Radio fL News Music Morning Edition All Things Considered National Native News High Plains News BBC World News World Cafe JazzSet Music Blend Grass is Bluer Thistle & Shamrock Grateful Dead Hour Straight Ahead tance through history. The second illustrates the necessity of place. The third is comprised of stories that use language and to their place fullest and most this strange three part More For a complete program guide call the book first seems to lack direction. The reader must trust Momaday, as he suggests in the introduction, telling us that these are the pieces of a whole, each one the element of an intricate but unified design. This unconventional design best befits a collection which spans 30 years of Momaday thought, amounting to the biography of his mind. Man Made of Words takes a strongly semantic stance, figuring that nothing exists beyond language and words. The first essay examines the Kiowa tale about an arrow maker who uses his native tongue to entrap and kill an enemy. Using this story as an analogy, Momaday illuminates the importance of language: The arrowmaker is preeminently the man made of words. He has a consummate being in language; it is the world of his origin and of his posterity, and there is no other. A Prairie Home Companion Fresh Air Car Talk This American Life New Dimensions Earth & Sky Native America Calling 970-563-02- 55 KSUT is all around the Four Comers on your FM dial: Durango 90.189.5 IgnacioBayfield 91.3 PagosaFarmington 105.3 Gallup KGLP 91.7 CortezMancos 89.5 Dolores 91.9 and member of first part is concerned with language and its impor- evolution, KSUT up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it ... He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk. In other words, Momaday is saying people have an obligation to know the earth intimate-hi- s ly, to have a place in the world. The linking of oral tradition to a sense of place breeds spirituality for this Pulitzer Prize winning author perfect extent. Because of 4 Dont drink and drive Chad Learch t ! e Kiowa Gourd dance soci- ety. Momaday says spirituality is something that is becoming thin and transparent in America. We must take steps to preserve the spiritual centers of our earth, those places invested with the dreams of our ancestors and the well being of our children. However, hes not suggesting we inherit his Kiowa ways. His essays show us paintings in the Altimera caves of Grenada. He takes us to the Orthodox Trinity Cathedral of Zagorske, Russia. He regales the Bavarian countryside. And he looks across Monument Valley at 5:00 in the morning. At each of these locations around the world, he finds a sense of place. He finds story and tradition. In the fine essay Navajo he writes, Where language touches the earth, there is the holy, there is the sacred ... I have a name; therefor I am. The third section in Man Made of Words is the summation of all that he has explored in this book. He sits us down and tells us stories. This is where Momaday finds his religion again. These short simple vignettes show the excep- tional craft for which Momaday is best known. They could easily stand of their own volition, without being in tow of the essays, but Momaday had a grander pose. After wading through the essays on language and place, the reader is led directly into Momaday s world of words, A world heavily soaked with a sense of place, a sense of the sacred, e Chad Learch is a poet, writer and worm who lives in Durango and works at Momaday, like most contemporary Native American writers, is relying heavily on the oral tradition as a tool for teaching and understanding the world. Through a world is created the world of an arrowmaker and the world surrounding the reader. This sense of place is a major factor in storytelling and is the point of the second part of Man Made of Words. Once in his life a man ought to con- his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself Marias bookshop. - h 30,000-year-o- Place-Nam- ld es pur-sto- book-centra- ry te |