Tag: Ceremony

Olson in the Underworld

We do not enter the Underworld unaccompanied.

Nor can we follow Olson there without facing what shadows him: his appropriation of Indigenous symbols, roles, and names.

In a talk given at Gratwick Highlands in Pavilion, NY on November 16, 1963 — a gathering still warm from psychedelic ritual — Olson recalls the way the psilocybin entered him:

“The moment the peanuts affected me, I started talking longhouse talk. And created, because I was the responsible person… I was the tone, I created the tone for the evening. And it was absolutely a pure ceremonial set.”
(Muthologos, p. 39)

He saw himself, he says, as a “peace sachem,” a chief presiding over a longhouse rite.

This is Olson in redface.

It is not a metaphor. It is an act of ceremonial appropriation, grounded in an unexamined fantasy of indigeneity — an image drawn from settler desire, not communal responsibility.

And yet — and yet — Olson’s own account troubles easy dismissal. He is not mocking the role. He is not play-acting without affect. He is inhabiting something. Something passed to him through psilocybin’s mycelial brain, some fragment of buried myth, misread and re-embodied.

Still: this does not absolve him. It implicates him more deeply.

What does it mean when a white poet, freshly under the influence of a sacred plant, begins to identify not only with Indigenous ceremonial forms — but with authority? With chieftainship? With “tone”?

Heriberto Yépez, in The Empire of Neomemory, names this clearly. Olson’s act, he writes, is not just cultural appropriation but colonial fantasy: the poet as settler-shaman, one who claims access to a buried mythic layer while ignoring the living realities of the peoples whose cosmologies he mines.

It is not accidental that Olson claimed the role of curandero during Arthur Koestler’s ill-fated trip — a session that ended, absurdly, with Olson towering over the frightened writer, toy gun in hand. The irony is almost mythic: the self-appointed guide becomes, in Koestler’s eyes, a threat. The poet becomes a monster.

And still, Olson doesn’t retreat. He continues to correspond with Leary and his circle. He continues to reflect on the mushroom as a truth-pill, a love feast. He continues to write from the trance.

This section of our series is not meant to cancel Olson, nor to excuse him. Rather, we bring it here to name the conflicted terrain of settler psychedelia — the space where poetic vision overlaps with colonial fantasy. The space where mushrooms are consumed without regard for the lineages that protected and passed them on.

Consider: the mushrooms that reached Olson passed through María Sabina and her Mazatec kin. Through Mexican curanderas and cross-border crossings. Through networks of theft and transmission. Through bodies and rituals severed from their epistemologies.

Olson himself lived in Mexico for a time — months in Lerma, letters to Creeley that would later form the Mayan Letters. He encountered the ruins. He listened to the stones. He spoke of postmodernity as a return to the archaic. And in doing so, he gathered a cosmology — but not the responsibilities that came with it.

We can still read Olson. Still admire the breath and the ambition. Still learn from the Typhon he names. But we do so now from a different position — from within a Library that holds multiplicity and accountability together.

Let this post, then, serve as an act of reckoning and reorientation.

Let it be known: the psychedelic road is not immune to conquest. But in walking it with care, we may come to unlearn the fantasies we’ve inherited — and instead learn to listen.

Thursday November 12, 2020

Students and I read Parable of the Sower together. Despite having read the novel several times now, I remain uncertain of my feelings regarding the starward longings of the book’s protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina. Does outer space function for her as did the North Star for Frederick Douglass? Are indigenous people present in this vision? Perhaps those stories are not Lauren’s to tell. A student from Albuquerque recommended a book called The Green Glass Sea during our discussion of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Her grandfather moved the family to New Mexico, she said, for work related to the Manhattan Project. “They did some bad stuff there,” she noted. The “green glass sea” is the name given to the crater blasted into the desert by the first atomic device. The Ellen Klages book recommended by my student describes Los Alamos from the perspective of two female characters — children whose parents were scientists involved in the bomb’s creation. The book is in fact written for children. It’s an award-winning work of children’s literature. Given my student’s family connection to the story, I hope she pairs the book with Silko’s Ceremony for her final paper. Stepping away from my desk, I head downstairs and talk with Sarah. The two of us discover we own a freezer in the basement. We have a laugh about how “brat” is one of my go-to words when I’m angry. If so, it’s presumably a mannerism I “picked up” or “inherited” as a child. “Nasty Matt Calls Others ‘Brat'”: let us change that. Let there be no outbursts of anger. Recall instead childhood’s fonder moments. Enjoy. Relish the smell of homemade tomato sauce as it cooks on the stove.

Monday October 26, 2020

Note how Leslie Marmon Silko situates the writing of her novel Ceremony in a particular place. The book conjures the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, though it was written, as Silko states in the book’s preface, “750 miles north of Seattle” in Ketchikan, Alaska. Silko moved to Ketchikan “from Chinle, Arizona in late spring of 1973” (xi). Silko describes for us the room where she wrote the book so that, when we read the poem “Ceremony” that opens the novel, it is her that we recognize as the creation-figure “Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman” (1). It is she who, with her sisters “Nau’ts’ity’i and I’tcts’ity’i,” “created the Universe / this world / and the four worlds below” (1). So begins the ceremony of Ceremony. Silko is a writer of mixed ancestry — a borderlands figure stuck between cultures, as the Chicana cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa would say. See Anzaldúa’s famous book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza — a work that, like Ceremony, mixes poetry and prose. Ceremony‘s protagonist Tayo is another such figure. Raised on the reservation but of mixed ancestry.

Friday October 23, 2020

Books can present themselves as sacred works: “received word.” They can also serve as ceremonial objects containing the teachings of ancestors. Authors share mythoi and logoi. Exchanges occur cross-culturally. Histories are understood to unfold within and share the form of religious myths. History is the latter’s translation and dissemination across space-time. These myths and histories can be mixed and sampled, played with a difference by the storyteller, as they are by Ishmael Reed in Mumbo Jumbo. Stories can be intercut with myths as the two rhyme across time. Stories become circles within circles, as in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.

Monday July 20, 2020

What happens when Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo is read alongside Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony? Both texts mingle mythoi and logoi. They tell tales and give accounts. Healers figure centrally in each novel. In Ceremony, we encounter medicine men like Betonie; in Mumbo Jumbo, we encounter PaPa LaBas, the novel’s “HooDoo psychiatrist” protagonist. Both characters rebel against Western teachings. Their cognitive maps are anti-colonial assemblages containing ancient wisdoms retained by their people — tools used to survive and resist in the age of Empire. Armed with these maps, protagonists interpret America as the work of evil magicians operating in secret across hundreds or even thousands of years. Healing requires use of sacred practice: a counter-magic of indigenous rites and ceremonies, story and dance.

Saturday July 11, 2020

Indigenous people possess a knowledge of the land that settler people lack. Land is part of their being — their idea-systems, their stories, their practices. Much has been taken from them, but they survive, they persist. The way they do so, individually and collectively, is through creation and performance of ceremony. Hoops, star maps, sand paintings: these are architectures used to shelter acts of healing. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, we encounter the hogan and the kiva (238). A “kiva” is a room used by Puebloans for rites and political meetings. The room is circular and underground. In Ceremony, a tribal council of old men use a kiva to counteract the influence of the world of the “destroyers” — evil magicians who try to bring on the end of the world through what Silko calls “the witchery.” Capitalism, colonialism, primitive accumulation — all are tools devised by the destroyers. History is understood as the handiwork of an occult, esoteric conspiracy of grand, cosmic, spiritual proportion. All of that may be no more than a “poor person’s cognitive map,” as the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson once said — but it’s one that works, one that allows Tayo and his people to survive. Silko’s ambitions are grand. She weaves into her narrative an awareness of its proximity to Los Alamos and Trinity. When reading, one finds oneself wondering about the meaning of the Manhattan Project as an event in Native American history and cosmology. Native Americans have seen their lands mined, bombed, cut down with US weaponry for centuries. The US tested weapons on native land in the deserts of New Mexico; they then used those weapons against Japanese civilians in 1945. Silko’s protagonist Tayo finds himself caught in that narrative; he and his brother fought the Japanese during their service in the US army during WWII. Tayo returns from the war sick about the loss of his brother Rocky — but sick as well with shame about having left the reservation to serve in the white man’s army.

Friday July 10, 2020

Leslie Marmon Silko’s prose is rich with description of inner and outer landscapes. Her 1977 novel Ceremony couples an anguished, grieving, war-wounded protagonist with a loving, persevering attention to and care for the land and its people. In her telling of the story of Tayo’s ceremony, Silko conjures before us the space, the territory, the land in and around the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. A couple appears at a key moment in Tayo’s narrative. They go unnamed during this encounter, yet they provide Tayo with the assistance and safekeeping he needs to prevail in his quest to recover his dead uncle’s stolen cattle. Silko floats the idea that this couple might exist in “time immemorial.” They’re indigenous spirits, we might say, who descend and lend a hand. Whatever we make of the ontological status of these beings, they produce effects of a positive sort in the lifeworld of the protagonist. Later in the novel, however, Tayo reconnects with the woman. She tells him she’s a Montaño and that he can call her Ts’eh. Yet her knowledge, and the advice she offers, suggests that she’s not quite of the same substance as Tayo. One suspects that one is reading a kind of ghost story.

Thursday July 9, 2020

There are many concepts and themes I hope to discuss with students when reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s powerful, transformative first novel Ceremony. Tayo, the novel’s Laguna Pueblo protagonist, occupies being, relates himself to land and people, under the burden of a tragic history. But his story tells of healing and survival through belief and practice of indigenous ways of life. Tayo worries that he cursed the rain and caused a drought while watching his brother Rocky die beside him in combat in the Philippines. The book enacts a ceremony to heal him. We can think of the novel here as a form of medicine, prescribed by the medicine man Betonie. I wonder, though: Is a medicine man a shaman? Medicine people are sometimes referred to as “traditional healers.” They lead ceremonies. A review from a 1936 issue of Nature magazine warns against confusing medicine men with “shaman and priest-magicians.” The medicine person’s “theory and practice,” writes the reviewer, “are based on psychology and theology rather than on pathology and pharmacology.” Despite these possibly specious differences in method, though, the figure is like the shaman in that it acts as the tribe’s go-between with the spirit world. The only major difference, as I understand it, is that shaman perform this function among tribes of northeast Asia. The term has been imported injudiciously, in other words, into North American ethnographic writing from elsewhere — so in discussions of Ceremony, it’s important to maintain a distinction between these figures, while nevertheless noting their similarities.