Scott Momaday catches the feeling of seeing nothing that one experienced in the eyes of so many of the dancers at Santo Domingo: “A few days ago she had seen the corn dance at Cochiti. It was beautiful and strange. It had seemed to her that the dancers meant to dance forever in that slow, deliberate way. The dancers had looked straight ahead, to the exclusion of everything, but she had not thought about that at the time. And they had not smiled. They were grave, so unspeakably grave. They were not merely sad or formal or devout; it was nothing like that. It was simply that they were grave, distant, intent upon something that she could not see. Their eyes were held upon some vision out of range, something away in the end of distance, some reality that she did not know, or even suspect. What was it that they saw? Probably they saw nothing at all, nothing at all. But then that was the trick, wasnt it? To see nothing at all, nothing in the absolute. To see beyond the landscape, beyond every shape and shadow and color, that was to see nothing. THAT was to be free and finished, complete, spiritual. To see nothing slowly and by degrees, at last; to see first the pure, bright colors of near things, then all pollutions of color, all things blended and vague and dim in the distance, to see finally beyond the clouds and the pale wash of the sky---the none and nothing beyond that. To say beyond the mountain, and to mean it, to mean, simply, beyond everything for which the mountain stands, of which it signifies the being. Somewhere, if only she could see it, there was neither nothing nor anything. And there, just there, THAT was the last reality.” N. Scott Momaday, from House Made of Dawn”
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 04:28:31 +0000
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