Bear is a template of the wilderness” (Scott Momaday, Conversations, 9).Bear is a looking glass to see mountain, “if you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains on the other side.
“I am a bear,” Momaday says, which when I hear this I hear, “I am a man, unperjured.” “You accelerate your activity…feel greater kinship with the animal world and the wilderness," (Conversations, 16). “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… In the Bear’s House),
I don’t suppose I’d have been so interested without experiences of bear in the Mogollon and White Mountain wilderness before the time we camped with dogs or be writing this without having formed a bear out of clay and felt the profundity and joy of its squeezing. Inquiries finding out wilderness, touch it, “don’t give themselves easily to any domination.” Bears are hard to control (Conversation, 15).
I saw Bear at a bookstore signing. Nobody was there when I took House Made of Dawn (1968) to sign so I asked a picture with his signature. He asked “of what?” “Anything at all.” He drew a bear.
Conversations (1989) with Momaday is one way to enter. Participation with prairie and herds in The Way To Rainy Mountain includes bear, prairie, herds in all its lenses. I got Conversations at a showing of his Scot Momaday exhibited a series of bear monotypes at the Ohl Gallery. Some appear as covers for The Ancient Child (1989) and In the Bear’s House (1999).
Seeing mountain through bear, "even Urset, who is the original Bear...is symbolic and transparent, more transparent than real" (9). A see through bear, a mask, what on the other side? Bear is "an imitation of himself, a mask. If you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains" (9). “I have been possessed of Bear’s spirit” (9). He doesn't say Bear has possessed my spirit. What spirit is this? Who knows about it? To me it is not an animism, a primitive idol or a demon, but the One thing that possesses him. I have notes of it on scraps of paper on my desk, of the doe bearing fawn, they crouch down till they bear, the untied wild donkey's ropes, whose home is the wasteland, the salt flats. He sees wilderness through Bear and though wilderness this One, should you learn to name it: “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). So he says that while we have not seen the spirit of wilderness or even the wilderness, we have seen the bear. Somewhere else we have seen.
Like Elephant, I first encountered at circuses getting pickup loads of elephant manure for the Drug Garden, he makes me love Bear more. The intoxication is greater than the smell, the straw, the large beings, the air. You are very close to them and that memory lasts. Ur-bear, All Bear, One Bear in Momaday is a principle of vitality when he says
Asked to sign House Made of Dawn and then to draw a pic, Momaday drew a bear.
Seeing mountain through bear is the essence. "Even Urset, who is the original Bear...is symbolic and transparent, more transparent than real" (9). A see through bear, a mask, what on the other side? Bear is "an imitation of himself, a mask. If you look at him very closely and long enough, you will see the mountains" (9). “I have been possessed of Bear’s spirit” (9). He doesn't say Bear has possessed my spirit. What spirit is this? Who knows about it? To me it is not an animism, a primitive idol or a demon, but the One thing that possesses him. I have notes of it on scraps of paper on my desk, of the doe bearing fawn, they crouch down till they bear, the untied wild donkey's ropes, whose home is the wasteland, the salt flats. He sees wilderness through Bear and though wilderness this One, should you learn to name it: “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). So he says that while we have not seen the spirit of wilderness or even the wilderness, we have seen the bear. Somewhere else we have seen.
"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, "The Bear," 209).
Bear and Wilderness, is immobile, fixed, "there," bigger, dimensionless, sinks back without motion, too big to see, too big to move. It looks back. You think you see but you don't, but it sees you.:
"...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, "The Bear Hunt," 88).
That's the way of Bear, in the shade, going away, turning to look. Too big to see, somehow kindly, compassionate. It helps enormously to know that this is his attempt to perceive the spirit of wilderness. He calls it "ruse of vision," "seen he does not come," "dimensionless," "then he is gone" (In the Presence of the Sun (1992), "The Bear," 3).
The ruse of vision
Exactly so in the Mogollon, my little children as witnesses, Bear, wilderness see you. How does it feel? You are never very sure what you are looking at or what wilderness stands for among the shifting lights and shapes. For if Bear stands for wilderness then Wilderness stands for something the same that you hunt in the dappled camouflage of lakes, shade of forests, that turns away even as it looks at you. I live among you though you know me not. It is also a flower but the flower is not a defenseless being.
After the hunt, he carries the bear on his horse. "In the early morning he rode into the town...and he rode stone-faced in their midst" (89). He is like a rabbi after communion. Father Momaday's name for it is Great Mystery. In all this lies the “burden of primordial memory” (Conversations, 20) and the knowledge that he is wild, not tame, for “I am violent. Or I can be. I have been at times. I understand violence. I understand that it can happen." They, his morality, society reasserts itself, "on the other hand I’m opposed to it. It sickens me” (Conversations, 35). Botanists and biologists praise violence all their lives on their knees lest the spirit of wilderness take them. “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 Kiowas…believe that the buffalo is the animal representation of the sun. Bear is the animal representation of the wilderness” (9-10).
The audience for these thoughts allows that Kiowa are tolerable, but that a failure of humility against the Natural marks a certain presumptive thinking. Bear represents wilderness like wildebeests, however fears of darkness, light, animal and plain are buried, just like the botanists and biologists. The forces that exploit fear the thing 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). It is a numinous landscape of stars, bears and wilderness calls with eagle, hawk, bear, star, (“Eagle Alone,” Conversation, 91). You would not think that this could end, these flights. Momaday has said of all creation, "it calls for a willing suspension of disbelief" (36).
Bear is wily in his public appearances as if humility required him to seem not so sure. Grandfather teaches Urset One Bear yet one thing more with willing suspension of disbelief: "...grace. I do not know what is meant by grace. Where in the story is a place for grace?" So,
"Grace is the substance of story, albeit invisible and remote. Grace is the soul of story."
Urset: "It is a presence without its mask."
Yahweh: "Or perhaps a mask behind which there is no presence." Urset: "There is nothing?"
Yahweh: "A mask of words behind which there is nothing, only silence, a perfect stillness" (In The Bear's House, 37).
Wilderness
Wilderness tongue
tied on a leash,
You draw up like and pet,
opened its mouth
Which had cedar teeth,
Although the bones were subway tubes,
left a wake
like a plane down
with the nose
pierced,
a mud trail with spurred undersides.
Sheets of flame
Shot up from its hands,
smoke poured from
nostrils.
and snort up the snout,
my tongue tied Iron Hold,
Jaw hooked river.
Lightening spears the head.
Strip off the coat,
take away light,
You can clothe yourself.
Cited:
Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Charles L. Woodard. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989.
N. Scott Momaday. In the Bear's House. NY: St. Martin's Press. 1999.
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