Bear

Can he be a bear? Can he be a plant? N. Scott Momaday was named for the bear as a child because of a visit to Rock Tree. As Rock Tree Boy he turns into a bear. "I have this bear power. I turn into a bear every so often. I feel myself becoming a bear, and that's a struggle that I have to face now and then" (Conversations, ed. by Schubnell, 90).

His entry in childhood by way of myth, he later, mid 20's, adopts. "I suspect it is that part of man which is subhuman. Primitive. Most people cannot recover nature. At one time, we lived in nature. But somewhere along the way we were severed from nature. And we cannot any longer comprehend the creatures of nature. We don't know about them as we once did. But this boy is an exception. He turns into a bear; that means that he reconstructs that link with nature. You could talk about the bear as being the underside of his existence" (91). Momaday says Bear is a particular of wilderness. Shown here is the backside of Bear. Want to see its face? Be glad as Moses to see the Back (Exodus 33.23).

Bear is the piano, Mountain the pianist, Wilderness the composer. With the huge participation of prairie and herds in The Way To Rainy Mountain echoing in my mind I got Momaday's Conversations at the Ohl Gallery at a showing of his bear monotypes. These monotypes formed the covers of The Ancient Child and In the Bear’s Name. Touch the wilderness preoccupies the American. I’d not have understood without experiences of  bear in the Mogollon and White Mountains before the time we camped with dogs or be writing this without having formed a bear out of clay, felt the  profoundity of its being.  Momaday believes it destiny. “Bears are hard to control," he says, they don’t give themselves easily to any domination.” (Conversation, 15). There was nobody there the day I took him House Made of Dawn to sign. I asked him to draw a picture with his signature. He asked “of what?” “Anything at all.” He made a bear.

Bear is immobile, fixed, "there."
Bear is big, bigger, dimensionless.
Bear sinks back without motion.
Bear is too big to see, too big to move, but Bear looks back.

Meditate that when you think you see Bear but don't. It sees you.

That's the way of Bear, in the shade, going away, turning to look. Bear, mountain, wilderness sees you, but you are never very sure what you are looking at, what the wilderness stands for. For if the bear stands for the mountain then the wilderness stands for something the same, hunted in the dappling camouflage shade that turns away as it looks. After the hunt, he carries the bear on his hunting horse like a rabbi carries the scrolls.  "In the early morning he rode into the town...and he rode stone-faced in their midst" (89). In all this lies the “burden of primordial memory” (Conversation, 20) for “I am violent. Or I can be. I have been at times. I understand violence. I understand that it can happen. On the other hand I’m opposed to it. It sickens me” (35). “There are people in the world who would not wish to be in the world, were not Bear there as well. These are people who understand that there is no wilderness without him. Bear is the keeper and manifestation of wilderness. As it recedes, he recedes” (In the Bear's House, 10). The Kiowa believe that the buffalo is the animal representation of the sun. Bear is the animal representation of  the wilderness (9-10).

Seeing Mountain Through Bear

He tells of Ur-bear, All Bear, One Bear, the Bear of Bears. In the principle of vitality, “I am a bear,”  I hear, “I am a man,” but shorn of perjury. “You accelerate your activity…feel greater kinship with the animal world and the wilderness" (Conversation, 16)…"a great potential for disintegration" (17).  In the Bear’s Name says that “I am less interested in defining the being of Bear than in trying to understand something about the spirit of wilderness of which Bear is a very particular expression…if you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains on the other side. Bear is a template of the wilderness” (9). Seeing mountain through  bear is the essence of this. "Even Urset, who is the original Bear...is symbolic and transparent, more transparent than real" (9). What is on the other side of the see- through bear? "He is an imitation of himself, a mask. If you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains on the other side" (9).When he says “I have been possessed of Bear’s spirit” (9), it is not animism or idol, but the One thing, the One being, should you learn that name in its best picture: “Let me say at the outset that this is not a book about Bear (he would be spoken of in the singular and masculine, capitalized and without an article), I am less interested in defining the being of Bear than in trying to understand something about the spirit of wilderness” (9). If possible he makes you love Bear more.


My Ears Had Heard Of You But Now My Eyes Have Seen

Humility must not fail  against the natural. Bear represents wilderness the way dark and light in plain and mountain represent a greater. The forces that exploit fear this thing that's not, the mind that's not, greater than themselves. Behemoth and Leviathan said early what Bear says late. "My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen" (Job 42.5)! "Will the wild...consent to serve" (39.9)? The landscape of stars, bears, wilderness and eagle (“Eagle Alone,” Conversation, 91) thought it would not end. Momaday Grandfather says all creation, "calls for a willing suspension of disbelief" (36).

 "The timber stood around a pool of light, and the bear was standing still and small at the far side of the brake, careless, unheeding. He brought the rifle up, and the bear raised and turned its head and made no sign of fear. It was small and black in the deep shade and dappled with light, its body turned three-quarters away and standing perfectly still, and the flat head and the small black eyes that were fixed upon him hung around upon the shoulder and under the hump of the spine" (In the Bear's House, 88).

We haven't seen the spirit of wilderness, but we have seen  Bear. "It did not emerge, appear:  it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him. Then it moved. It crossed the glade without haste, walking for an instant into the sun's full glare and out of it, and stopped again and looked back at him across one shoulder. Then it was gone. it didn't walk into the woods. It faded, sank back into the wilderness without motion as he had watched a fish, a huge old bass, sink back into the dark depths of its pool and vanish without even any movement of its fins" (Faulkner, Go Down Moses, 209).

Cited

Charles L. Woodard. Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989.
N. Scott Momaday. In the Bear's House. NY: St. Martin's Press. 1999.