"Steam from the inside smells of sweet grass" is maybe my favorite line.
And one that reminds me of this account by the late Lakota medicine man John Fire Lame Deer:
In the old days we used to eat the guts of the buffalo, making a contest of it, two fellows getting hold of a long piece of intestines from opposite ends, starting chewing toward the middle, seeing who can get there first; that’s eating. Those buffalo guts, full of half-fermented, half-digested grass and herbs, you didn’t need any pills and vitamins when you swallowed those.
Which, in turn, recalls this quote from C.S. Lewis:
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.
Except that Lewis implicitly has in mind a white English child’s exotic Wild West fantasy—-here, House’s narrative stakes claim to the substance and significance and meat of her and her Tiwa hosts’ rightful buffalo, and of the mastery of traditional skills brought to its preparation.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2024-07-09 04:06 am (UTC)And one that reminds me of this account by the late Lakota medicine man John Fire Lame Deer:
In the old days we used to eat the guts of the buffalo, making a contest of it, two fellows getting hold of a long piece of intestines from opposite ends, starting chewing toward the middle, seeing who can get there first; that’s eating. Those buffalo guts, full of half-fermented, half-digested grass and herbs, you didn’t need any pills and vitamins when you swallowed those.
Which, in turn, recalls this quote from C.S. Lewis:
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.
Except that Lewis implicitly has in mind a white English child’s exotic Wild West fantasy—-here, House’s narrative stakes claim to the substance and significance and meat of her and her Tiwa hosts’ rightful buffalo, and of the mastery of traditional skills brought to its preparation.