On the Rez
It was early fall, 2001, and I was at the Rosebud Indian reservation to teach a class in Non-Violent Civil Disobedience. The man who'd invited me, Tim Rice, was a young Lakota activist. He'd picked me up from the bus station and hustled me to the Rez. On the way, he told me that before I could teach, I had to be purified in a sweat lodge ceremony, and that construction of the lodge was already underway, and that we were to help.
We pulled over a rise, and there was a crew of men busy gathering wood and assembling a frame of lightweight saplings.
Tim took me out to gather wood. As we worked, an elder came over to him, and he excused himself and went off a few feet to speak to the elder. They spoke in low tones, looking at me occasionally.
Finally, Tim came back and said: “We would like to include you in our peyote ceremony tonight. Have you ever taken peyote before?”
“No, but I’ve taken mushrooms once or twice, but hallucinogens tend to scare me, make me feel out of control.”
“I understand. However, this will not be the case today. You’ll be with friends, and I’ve been instructed by those that have gone before that you must be initiated into the Peyote Road. Can you agree to this?”
I was surprised, humbled, and a little taken aback. ‘Those that have gone before?’ Was this one of the elders who had done the ceremony many times, or was he on the phone to his ancestors? The ambiguity was tantalizing.
“Sure. Only, I have no idea what I’ll feel, see or do. Can you make sure I’m safe?”
“No worries, man. You’ll be protected, both from yourself ... and from the Others,” he added cryptically.
Before the Sweat, he asked me to make tobacco wish offerings. These are little pouches of fabric full of tobacco. You fold them, then tie them closed, then tie them to a tree, or more commonly to the roof of the sweat lodge, as an offering to the Great Spirit.
“But this is very important, Andrew: before you make these offerings, I want you to meditate. Find the one thing you need in this life, the one thing missing, and ask that it be given to you so that you can be made whole. And ask that it be given gently, because the Great Spirit can be ruthless. Sometimes men have not survived their wish. And sometimes the Great Spirit has pulled them from the wheel of life, because they did not fully accept what they’d been given. Many have been sent back to start over again in a new body. That is why you must be sincerely focused, and fully prepared to receive and honor the gift, which is often not entirely pleasant. In fact, it can seem like a burden, but it is still a gift.”
“I don’t know what to ask for. I mean, I’m honored that you’ve chosen to include me in this ritual, and I respect it very much, but I’ve never been much of a spiritual guy, you know what I mean? I never meditate; I’ve got a short attention span and a hyperactive mind. I... I don’t feel worthy of this.”
“Don’t worry. There are many, many ways to be spiritual. Not all spiritual beings are ascetic priests or monks, meditating all day. Chinua Achebe, Marie Curie, Goro Yamaguchi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leo Szilard, Tatanka Iyotake, Chief Seattle, Pablo Neruda, Rachel Carson, Vine DeLoria—there are thousands and thousands from cultures all over the world. All of these beings were or are spiritual, as spiritual as any Lakota Roadman. And like any of us, they were or are imperfect. In fact, they were probably all a little bit crazy. Some were egotistical, some obsessed, some even cruel or selfish or cowardly at times.
“Spirit takes many forms, and we are imperfect vessels for it. But it’s yearning to grow within you, Andrew. It’s asking that you prepare a place for it, and also that you accept that you are worthy of being a vessel, a tinder-root for Spirit to burn within.”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I sat and sat for about an hour, waiting for a message of some sort. Nothing. I went back to Tim:
“I’m lost. I can’t seem to focus, to know what it is that’s missing, what to ask for. The only thing I can think of is a soul mate. I’ve never met someone I want to spend the rest of my life with. If I did, I think my life would be pretty complete.”
“Good enough. Like I said, being spiritual doesn’t mean being ascetic. Wanting love and trust in your life is a perfectly good goal. So start making the wish offerings. Try to think of nothing other than making each offering perfectly. I mean absolutely perfectly. Take your time and focus on that to the exclusion of everything else, and see what comes.”
I found a quiet place in a nearby gully, cut off from the wind, and out of sight and sound of the warriors preparing the lodge. I sat cross-legged with my pouch of tobacco, clutch of strings, and bag of fabric squares, and set about making the best offerings I could.
At first I didn’t do so well. My fingers felt strangely thick and uncoordinated. The air was cold, and my hands were stiff. But gradually, warmth suffused them, and then my entire body, as a quiet rhythm of pinching, folding and tying asserted itself. Soon, my hands picked up speed, then rapidly worked of their own accord, seemingly without volition, and I sat and watched them almost as an outside observer.
I don’t know how long this went on. I only knew that when I finally stopped, it was because I’d run out of fabric. A pile of several hundred offerings lay in front of me in the gathering gloom of twilight. The day had fled as my fingers had flown, and I was surprised to find that evening was coming on fast.
I put all of the offerings into my bag and started up the slope back towards the lodge. The wind picked up, and I could hear the shouts and murmurs of the lodge crew in the distance. I passed a small, lonely tree, withered and almost bent double by years of harsh winter wind and snow. It seemed to stop me in my tracks. I don’t know why, but as I vacantly stared at it, I put my hand in the bag and rummaged around in it. Finally, my hand seemed magnetically attracted to one particular offering, and I pulled it out and tied it to one of the tree’s wizened branches.
Suddenly, I was vibrating all over. A light exploded in my head and the world turned upside down. I looked up into the cloudless purpling sky and felt as if I were about to fall into it. In that moment, a thought rang in my head, as if a mouth inside my skull had yelled it. The sound seemed to start in the center of me and ring out of my ears, my eyes, my skin. I felt a painful blow to the center of my brow, like I’d been viciously punched, and fell down.
The voice in the center of my skull said:
With this voice
I will heal one wound
Then sculpt another
When that wound is deep enough
When it has nearly
Cloven you in two
You will scythe
The field of remorse
And burn the stubble black
You must let fire bloom
On your fields
And make yourself sturdy in the heat
I lay sprawled on my back, groaning. An immense pressure, like an enormous boot was bearing down on my brow, pinning my head to the ground like a moth pinned to a board.
“Wh … what do you want? What do you mean?” I asked aloud, my voice croaking, coming out in gasps, squeezed by the pain.
But there was nothing, only stillness. And in that instant, the pain was gone, the pressure released, and I heard the wind. I realized that since I’d put my hand into the bag, I’d heard nothing, nothing other than the voice. Every sound in the world had been stilled. And I hadn’t felt anything, smelled anything either. I’d been cut off totally. When my hand had entered the bag, only my eyes had still continued to function, viewing the world as one might view a silent movie.
The cessation of this stillness, the onrushing surge back into the world of sense, the sound and feel of the wind on my face, the smell of burning wood and hot stones—it was all almost as overwhelming as the voice had been. I felt staggered once more. I got up slowly and continued up the hill, my heart hammering.
I found Tim and told him what had happened, what the voice had said. He somehow looked excited, grave, and a bit frightened all at once.
All he said was “Good! Now, let’s prepare the lodge.”
“Good? That’s it?”
“Yep. Now help me with this hide.”
Not knowing what else to do, I helped put skins onto the roof with trembling hands. And finally, it was time to enter the lodge.
We sweated for what seemed like hours, the super-heated steam scalding our lungs and pulling the toxins from our bodies. I was as weak as a puppy by the time we crawled out into the dark and bitterly cold night.
Forgoing dinner, we gathered under the stars about two hours later for the peyote ritual. Only men were present.
Tim took me aside as the elders got ready and the Roadman prepared the sacrament. “Some of the people here in Rosebud follow the Half-Moon ritual, which is more traditional, though still infused with post-contact ideas. And some follow one called Cross-Fire, which is very Christian, and very nationalistic. We follow one called Tinder-Root, which still retains the Lakota warrior spirit, but rejects the post contact, Christian overtones. It is our own pagan creation, and there are only about 20 practitioners, all of whom you see here.
“Of course, peyote only came to us at the end of the 19th century. It’s an import from Mexico. We have no ancient tradition for it. But while it’s useful to venerate traditions, you’ve got to let them evolve with the changing world, and so we’ve adopted it. Only men are allowed. Some of the women who came to teach with you are upset that I invited you and not them, but men and women have their place in this world. We revere women, and they revere us. They have some ceremonies that we’re forbidden to participate in, and we have ours. Are you ready?”
I was cold. My mouth was dry and there were goose bumps all over my body. “Yes.”
I looked at the sky as the gourd rattles were handed to each of us. Each star shone like a fine, unwavering point of light. The planets glowed, and the moon was huge and impossibly bright.
We sat in a circle. There was singing, we rattled our rattles, and a large gourd filled with a thick broth of peyote was passed from person to person. Finally it came to me. Just as I raised it to my lips to drink, light exploded in my head once more, and the voice rang again, and both Tim and one of the elders jumped as if goosed.
No!
Your time will come.
But for now
This field must lay fallow.
Before I could react, Tim struck the gourd from my hands like lightning. It landed and splashed the sacrament to the ground. A gasp arose from the men seated around me, and some glared at Tim and started to speak loudly. But the elder, William Two Bulls, waved for silence.
“This ceremony will continue without our friend, brother Andrew. The Great Spirit has spoken, and Belief in Rain acted properly to prevent a mistake from happening. He and I received a message that Andrew was to receive the sacrament, but apparently we misinterpreted it. He is to receive it, but not now. Please, Andrew, go to your teepee and sleep. We will discuss this tomorrow.”
I rose up, waved goodbye to the men, nodded to Tim, and started off in the darkness, confused and disappointed. As I walked away, I heard Two Bulls continue:
“Belief in Rain, thank you for your quick action. Now, brother Ten Trees, please retrieve the gourd, and sanctify it once more so that we may continue.”
I walked under the preternaturally clear sky, dazzled by the Milky Way and all the stars wheeling slowly overhead. But despite the beauty, I was bitterly disappointed. Though initially bemused, I’d felt honored to be selected to join in. More than that, the huge voice in my head was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, and I wanted very much to take part in the ceremony in hopes that I’d learn more about it and myself, my path.
I’d experienced something totally outside my logical Western upbringing and training, and it excited and unnerved me. Empirically, something had happened. Oh, the first voice could have been written off as a hallucination. But that second time, Tim and Two Bulls had certainly heard something and reacted to it. There was obviously a world underneath, a world never visible to me before. Now I’d seen a shard of it, glistening, strange, terrifying, and I wanted to see more. But, apparently, the time wasn’t right, and there was no way I was going to argue with that vast and terrible voice that had rung my skull like a bell.
In the morning I went to see Tim, but he and all of the other participants were nowhere to be found. I taught my afternoon class and waited. Finally Tim came around towards dinner time.
”Ho, Andrew.”
“Ho Tim. Can I ask how the ceremony went?”
He frowned. “We, all the men, seemed to share a common dream. We saw men playing in the sand like babies. Children leading their parents. Other children, abandoned and crying, dirtying themselves. We saw great plumes of smoke and piles of bodies awaiting cremation. We don’t know what any of this means, but we do know that there is a great evil coming.”
“What about me, the voice, the ceremony? What does it mean?”
His furrowed brow deepened. “Andrew, something started yesterday, but I don’t know what it is. The Great Spirit has seen fit to use you as a sharp tool. It won’t be easy, but you must allow it, because it is a great honor. You will be repeatedly dulled by challenges, grief, combat perhaps, sharpened in showers of sparks and annealed in fires and waters. You will suffer, like any great edge. You’ll be given a glimpse of heaven, and you will live for a time in hell. I can’t say any more, other than it’s clear both to me and to Two Bulls that the time is not ripe for the sacrament. All I can say is: prepare. Prepare for joy and pain. Prepare to become a warrior, in whatever fashion makes sense to you. There are many ways of the warrior. I cannot point you to yours, your destiny. I can only say, remember what the voice said. After your time in heaven, you will be grievously wounded in order to be made strong. And then … I don’t know.”
“But …”
He waved me to silence, then oddly, strode over to me and engulfed me in a bear hug and kissed my neck fondly. “No, Andrew, I can’t say any more. Finish your time here and go back home. Spirit will awaken you when it’s time. Goodbye.” And he strode off.
I didn’t see Tim at all after that. He neither lectured, nor attended my classes, which saddened me. After a week of teaching and sweat lodges I left Rosebud for good.
I got back on September 7th. Less than a week later, 9-11 happened, and two days later, at a vigil for the victims, I met Nina Ohanyido, the woman who would become the love of my life.
© Samuel Claiborne 2019
It was early fall, 2001, and I was at the Rosebud Indian reservation to teach a class in Non-Violent Civil Disobedience. The man who'd invited me, Tim Rice, was a young Lakota activist. He'd picked me up from the bus station and hustled me to the Rez. On the way, he told me that before I could teach, I had to be purified in a sweat lodge ceremony, and that construction of the lodge was already underway, and that we were to help.
We pulled over a rise, and there was a crew of men busy gathering wood and assembling a frame of lightweight saplings.
Tim took me out to gather wood. As we worked, an elder came over to him, and he excused himself and went off a few feet to speak to the elder. They spoke in low tones, looking at me occasionally.
Finally, Tim came back and said: “We would like to include you in our peyote ceremony tonight. Have you ever taken peyote before?”
“No, but I’ve taken mushrooms once or twice, but hallucinogens tend to scare me, make me feel out of control.”
“I understand. However, this will not be the case today. You’ll be with friends, and I’ve been instructed by those that have gone before that you must be initiated into the Peyote Road. Can you agree to this?”
I was surprised, humbled, and a little taken aback. ‘Those that have gone before?’ Was this one of the elders who had done the ceremony many times, or was he on the phone to his ancestors? The ambiguity was tantalizing.
“Sure. Only, I have no idea what I’ll feel, see or do. Can you make sure I’m safe?”
“No worries, man. You’ll be protected, both from yourself ... and from the Others,” he added cryptically.
Before the Sweat, he asked me to make tobacco wish offerings. These are little pouches of fabric full of tobacco. You fold them, then tie them closed, then tie them to a tree, or more commonly to the roof of the sweat lodge, as an offering to the Great Spirit.
“But this is very important, Andrew: before you make these offerings, I want you to meditate. Find the one thing you need in this life, the one thing missing, and ask that it be given to you so that you can be made whole. And ask that it be given gently, because the Great Spirit can be ruthless. Sometimes men have not survived their wish. And sometimes the Great Spirit has pulled them from the wheel of life, because they did not fully accept what they’d been given. Many have been sent back to start over again in a new body. That is why you must be sincerely focused, and fully prepared to receive and honor the gift, which is often not entirely pleasant. In fact, it can seem like a burden, but it is still a gift.”
“I don’t know what to ask for. I mean, I’m honored that you’ve chosen to include me in this ritual, and I respect it very much, but I’ve never been much of a spiritual guy, you know what I mean? I never meditate; I’ve got a short attention span and a hyperactive mind. I... I don’t feel worthy of this.”
“Don’t worry. There are many, many ways to be spiritual. Not all spiritual beings are ascetic priests or monks, meditating all day. Chinua Achebe, Marie Curie, Goro Yamaguchi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leo Szilard, Tatanka Iyotake, Chief Seattle, Pablo Neruda, Rachel Carson, Vine DeLoria—there are thousands and thousands from cultures all over the world. All of these beings were or are spiritual, as spiritual as any Lakota Roadman. And like any of us, they were or are imperfect. In fact, they were probably all a little bit crazy. Some were egotistical, some obsessed, some even cruel or selfish or cowardly at times.
“Spirit takes many forms, and we are imperfect vessels for it. But it’s yearning to grow within you, Andrew. It’s asking that you prepare a place for it, and also that you accept that you are worthy of being a vessel, a tinder-root for Spirit to burn within.”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I sat and sat for about an hour, waiting for a message of some sort. Nothing. I went back to Tim:
“I’m lost. I can’t seem to focus, to know what it is that’s missing, what to ask for. The only thing I can think of is a soul mate. I’ve never met someone I want to spend the rest of my life with. If I did, I think my life would be pretty complete.”
“Good enough. Like I said, being spiritual doesn’t mean being ascetic. Wanting love and trust in your life is a perfectly good goal. So start making the wish offerings. Try to think of nothing other than making each offering perfectly. I mean absolutely perfectly. Take your time and focus on that to the exclusion of everything else, and see what comes.”
I found a quiet place in a nearby gully, cut off from the wind, and out of sight and sound of the warriors preparing the lodge. I sat cross-legged with my pouch of tobacco, clutch of strings, and bag of fabric squares, and set about making the best offerings I could.
At first I didn’t do so well. My fingers felt strangely thick and uncoordinated. The air was cold, and my hands were stiff. But gradually, warmth suffused them, and then my entire body, as a quiet rhythm of pinching, folding and tying asserted itself. Soon, my hands picked up speed, then rapidly worked of their own accord, seemingly without volition, and I sat and watched them almost as an outside observer.
I don’t know how long this went on. I only knew that when I finally stopped, it was because I’d run out of fabric. A pile of several hundred offerings lay in front of me in the gathering gloom of twilight. The day had fled as my fingers had flown, and I was surprised to find that evening was coming on fast.
I put all of the offerings into my bag and started up the slope back towards the lodge. The wind picked up, and I could hear the shouts and murmurs of the lodge crew in the distance. I passed a small, lonely tree, withered and almost bent double by years of harsh winter wind and snow. It seemed to stop me in my tracks. I don’t know why, but as I vacantly stared at it, I put my hand in the bag and rummaged around in it. Finally, my hand seemed magnetically attracted to one particular offering, and I pulled it out and tied it to one of the tree’s wizened branches.
Suddenly, I was vibrating all over. A light exploded in my head and the world turned upside down. I looked up into the cloudless purpling sky and felt as if I were about to fall into it. In that moment, a thought rang in my head, as if a mouth inside my skull had yelled it. The sound seemed to start in the center of me and ring out of my ears, my eyes, my skin. I felt a painful blow to the center of my brow, like I’d been viciously punched, and fell down.
The voice in the center of my skull said:
With this voice
I will heal one wound
Then sculpt another
When that wound is deep enough
When it has nearly
Cloven you in two
You will scythe
The field of remorse
And burn the stubble black
You must let fire bloom
On your fields
And make yourself sturdy in the heat
I lay sprawled on my back, groaning. An immense pressure, like an enormous boot was bearing down on my brow, pinning my head to the ground like a moth pinned to a board.
“Wh … what do you want? What do you mean?” I asked aloud, my voice croaking, coming out in gasps, squeezed by the pain.
But there was nothing, only stillness. And in that instant, the pain was gone, the pressure released, and I heard the wind. I realized that since I’d put my hand into the bag, I’d heard nothing, nothing other than the voice. Every sound in the world had been stilled. And I hadn’t felt anything, smelled anything either. I’d been cut off totally. When my hand had entered the bag, only my eyes had still continued to function, viewing the world as one might view a silent movie.
The cessation of this stillness, the onrushing surge back into the world of sense, the sound and feel of the wind on my face, the smell of burning wood and hot stones—it was all almost as overwhelming as the voice had been. I felt staggered once more. I got up slowly and continued up the hill, my heart hammering.
I found Tim and told him what had happened, what the voice had said. He somehow looked excited, grave, and a bit frightened all at once.
All he said was “Good! Now, let’s prepare the lodge.”
“Good? That’s it?”
“Yep. Now help me with this hide.”
Not knowing what else to do, I helped put skins onto the roof with trembling hands. And finally, it was time to enter the lodge.
We sweated for what seemed like hours, the super-heated steam scalding our lungs and pulling the toxins from our bodies. I was as weak as a puppy by the time we crawled out into the dark and bitterly cold night.
Forgoing dinner, we gathered under the stars about two hours later for the peyote ritual. Only men were present.
Tim took me aside as the elders got ready and the Roadman prepared the sacrament. “Some of the people here in Rosebud follow the Half-Moon ritual, which is more traditional, though still infused with post-contact ideas. And some follow one called Cross-Fire, which is very Christian, and very nationalistic. We follow one called Tinder-Root, which still retains the Lakota warrior spirit, but rejects the post contact, Christian overtones. It is our own pagan creation, and there are only about 20 practitioners, all of whom you see here.
“Of course, peyote only came to us at the end of the 19th century. It’s an import from Mexico. We have no ancient tradition for it. But while it’s useful to venerate traditions, you’ve got to let them evolve with the changing world, and so we’ve adopted it. Only men are allowed. Some of the women who came to teach with you are upset that I invited you and not them, but men and women have their place in this world. We revere women, and they revere us. They have some ceremonies that we’re forbidden to participate in, and we have ours. Are you ready?”
I was cold. My mouth was dry and there were goose bumps all over my body. “Yes.”
I looked at the sky as the gourd rattles were handed to each of us. Each star shone like a fine, unwavering point of light. The planets glowed, and the moon was huge and impossibly bright.
We sat in a circle. There was singing, we rattled our rattles, and a large gourd filled with a thick broth of peyote was passed from person to person. Finally it came to me. Just as I raised it to my lips to drink, light exploded in my head once more, and the voice rang again, and both Tim and one of the elders jumped as if goosed.
No!
Your time will come.
But for now
This field must lay fallow.
Before I could react, Tim struck the gourd from my hands like lightning. It landed and splashed the sacrament to the ground. A gasp arose from the men seated around me, and some glared at Tim and started to speak loudly. But the elder, William Two Bulls, waved for silence.
“This ceremony will continue without our friend, brother Andrew. The Great Spirit has spoken, and Belief in Rain acted properly to prevent a mistake from happening. He and I received a message that Andrew was to receive the sacrament, but apparently we misinterpreted it. He is to receive it, but not now. Please, Andrew, go to your teepee and sleep. We will discuss this tomorrow.”
I rose up, waved goodbye to the men, nodded to Tim, and started off in the darkness, confused and disappointed. As I walked away, I heard Two Bulls continue:
“Belief in Rain, thank you for your quick action. Now, brother Ten Trees, please retrieve the gourd, and sanctify it once more so that we may continue.”
I walked under the preternaturally clear sky, dazzled by the Milky Way and all the stars wheeling slowly overhead. But despite the beauty, I was bitterly disappointed. Though initially bemused, I’d felt honored to be selected to join in. More than that, the huge voice in my head was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, and I wanted very much to take part in the ceremony in hopes that I’d learn more about it and myself, my path.
I’d experienced something totally outside my logical Western upbringing and training, and it excited and unnerved me. Empirically, something had happened. Oh, the first voice could have been written off as a hallucination. But that second time, Tim and Two Bulls had certainly heard something and reacted to it. There was obviously a world underneath, a world never visible to me before. Now I’d seen a shard of it, glistening, strange, terrifying, and I wanted to see more. But, apparently, the time wasn’t right, and there was no way I was going to argue with that vast and terrible voice that had rung my skull like a bell.
In the morning I went to see Tim, but he and all of the other participants were nowhere to be found. I taught my afternoon class and waited. Finally Tim came around towards dinner time.
”Ho, Andrew.”
“Ho Tim. Can I ask how the ceremony went?”
He frowned. “We, all the men, seemed to share a common dream. We saw men playing in the sand like babies. Children leading their parents. Other children, abandoned and crying, dirtying themselves. We saw great plumes of smoke and piles of bodies awaiting cremation. We don’t know what any of this means, but we do know that there is a great evil coming.”
“What about me, the voice, the ceremony? What does it mean?”
His furrowed brow deepened. “Andrew, something started yesterday, but I don’t know what it is. The Great Spirit has seen fit to use you as a sharp tool. It won’t be easy, but you must allow it, because it is a great honor. You will be repeatedly dulled by challenges, grief, combat perhaps, sharpened in showers of sparks and annealed in fires and waters. You will suffer, like any great edge. You’ll be given a glimpse of heaven, and you will live for a time in hell. I can’t say any more, other than it’s clear both to me and to Two Bulls that the time is not ripe for the sacrament. All I can say is: prepare. Prepare for joy and pain. Prepare to become a warrior, in whatever fashion makes sense to you. There are many ways of the warrior. I cannot point you to yours, your destiny. I can only say, remember what the voice said. After your time in heaven, you will be grievously wounded in order to be made strong. And then … I don’t know.”
“But …”
He waved me to silence, then oddly, strode over to me and engulfed me in a bear hug and kissed my neck fondly. “No, Andrew, I can’t say any more. Finish your time here and go back home. Spirit will awaken you when it’s time. Goodbye.” And he strode off.
I didn’t see Tim at all after that. He neither lectured, nor attended my classes, which saddened me. After a week of teaching and sweat lodges I left Rosebud for good.
I got back on September 7th. Less than a week later, 9-11 happened, and two days later, at a vigil for the victims, I met Nina Ohanyido, the woman who would become the love of my life.
© Samuel Claiborne 2019
Narrated by Samuel Claiborne
Narrated by Samuel Claiborne
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Hello Samuel. Welcome back to The Strange Recital—this time narrating your own work rather than someone else's.
SC: Well thanks for having me. It’s especially fun to be narrating one of my own pieces.
TN: And thanks for participating in our experimental interview technique that avoids the degraded audio quality of the phone.
BR: Yes, an amazing invention by Tom that allows a conversation to be simulated via the projection of thoughts into our studio from several distant locations.
SC: It does appear that you’ve invented a system that avoids the problems of time and space during a pandemic. I think a Nobel Prize may be in the offing.
TN: That’s not such a bad idea actually… Well we’ve just heard a section from a novel for which I understand you've been seeking publication. Does this come near the beginning of the book? Give us a brief summary of the rest of the story.
SC: This section comes fairly early in the book. It’s hard to do an entire synopsis but the basic idea is that there is a worldwide epidemic of something called Non-Organic Dementia, or NOD, and when someone gets NOD they nod out into either a sort of catatonic state or a very agitated demented state. This epidemic is not actually being caused by any organic source like a disease or virus but rather a corporation, a racist right-wing corporation has discovered that human memory does not actually reside in the brain—that the brain is more like a transmitter and a receiver to a large storage space that all beings that are capable of thought of any type, all of their instinctual and learned memories reside. They call it The Workspace. They’ve learned how to hack it. They are selling a super fast, super cheap storage device and every time somebody backs up their family photo collection on to this cheap device they are literally erasing someone else’s memories.
TN: Hmm…dastardly.
BR: So here we are right now in pandemic quarantine. It seems there's a strange prescience in your novel: it may not be about a virus but it is about a worldwide deadly affliction with an invisible cause, a metaphor for what's happening today. Are you a prophet of some sort?
SC: It’s actually kind of funny. I’m sort of an amateur epidemiologist, so I was telling my children and other members of my family, and anyone who would listen in late January that we were all going to be working from home and needed to stock up on food and such. But that’s just because I am a worrier and a science geek. All these people losing their memories and becoming basically helpless is happening because of corporate greed in the book. They’ve basically mixed in a pogrom against non-white people with a profit motive and come up with this device that erases people that they can also sell and make money off of. Perfect vertical integration I guess late-stage capitalists would call that. I mean, I don’t think the book is prescient. I don’t think I’m a prophet but the biggest resonance in the book is probably really about how greed threatens all human existence.
TN: I’m wondering about your thoughts on the subject of how Native American culture has so often been portrayed through the lens of the Noble Savage mythology—which at its worst is not only incorrect but racist.
SC: Oh I just love this question. I have had so many arguments with people who definitely place Native Americans on some kind of pedestal. And Native Americans in all of the Americas have practiced infanticide. There’s been rape. There’s been war. There’s been torture. There’s been slavery. There’s even been massive environmental damage. The potlatch ceremony in the Pacific North West eventually morphed into a sort of “keeping up with the Jones’s” frenzy, where each tribe would throw more salmon and stuff off a cliff into the ocean, as a figurative gift to the other tribe to show that they had so much food that they could even waste it. I really think white guilt that makes any person of color somehow more environmentally sensitive, more connected to the Earth is totally racist. People are people.
TN: Yeah.
BR: The word “spiritual” is used quite a bit in this excerpt. It’s one of those words that people assume they share a definition of, but they actually have their own ideas of its meaning. I like the way you state that there are many different ways to be spiritual and maybe that answers my question, but maybe not. Whenever I encounter that word, just like with the word “God”, I find myself wanting to ask, “What exactly do you mean?”
SC: Well you’re certainly not making this very easy. That’s a really big question. You know it’s funny because when I was a boy I would have considered myself really believing in some sort of divinity and then I went through a period where I really became a lot like my father, who was an atheist and a science writer, and wasn’t even an agnostic and I think being an atheist is just as foolish as being a true believer since we never really know. For me… I do believe in something I call the divine. I’m not sure what it is but I know it when I’m in touch with it, and whether I am doing my healing work, or doing writing, or doing music, or doing almost anything creative where I get out of the way and my ego gets out of the way—what some people would call “The Zone” and I feel that creative energy surging through me… that exalted state, just being in the throes of creation, is God to me.
TN: Let’s get into that fuzzy area between so-called truth and fiction, which means you’re not obligated to answer truthfully, or at all. Have you been to the Rosebud reservation, done a sweat lodge ceremony, or used peyote?
SC: Yes in 1978, or ’79 I did some volunteer work at the Rosebud Reservation. Some of this stuff derives from experiences I had there but probably the biggest sweat lodge experience I ever had was when I asked the Great Spirit to make me less inhibited—this was the first sweat lodge I ever went to after Rosebud, after being a teenager—I was thirty-two years old, and two weeks later had an accident that left me paralyzed from the neck down for a while with a type of brain damage called Disinhibition. So that’s one reason that I say that you have to ask the Great Spirit to be gentle.
BR: Yeah. Wow.
SC: I have never done peyote. I have done mushrooms. I would not ever do anything like LSD because I really believe in connecting to the spirit of a plant, so if I were ever going to do a hallucinogen again, which is unlikely, it would be something made out of a plant, not out of a chemistry set.
BR: As I head into senior citizenhood, I suspect I’ll never get to it, but more psychedelic experience with teacher plants is one of the things I want most. In an alternate universe, I may have followed the Terence McKenna path. But life gets in the way.
TN: Well you could always micro-dose. Albert Hoffman did that.
BR: I may be micro-dosing now.
TN: Yeah, well it certainly looks that way sometimes. Anyway, let’s talk about the journey to publication. Where are you along that road?
SC: Well, that is a very difficult road. I have worked and worked and worked on this book for years. Worked with a great editor. I finally came to see that I needed an editor, which was a big bit of growth for me. And I’ve written a book that I think is a great demographic. It’s politically and culturally interesting. It’s got interesting science, it’s got a lot of interesting philosophy and metaphysics in it. It’s got some, you know, hard sort of action-based men’s ‘adventurey’ kind of stuff in it and it’s also got some very lyrical, poetic and sensual stuff in it. And it’s a hundred and fifty thousand words, and apparently you cannot get an agent interested in any book over a hundred thousand words unless you are already a known commodity as a writer. So I’ve written many, many pitch letters and I even… I bought a course in how to get an agent and then I even paid for a couple of sort of, you know, private consults with agents and they were all like “well the book needs to be under a hundred thousand words”— which it’s not going to be. For me to break through as a first time author with a book this large is difficult. Publishing these days is apparently a numbers game, so when you think of all the great books that would never have been published if there had been, right up front “We don’t care how good your writing is. We’re not even going to bother reading it. If it’s over a hundred thousand characters we’re done here.” This is the new model and it’s pretty damned depressing.
BR: Yep, things are bleak in the age of extreme capitalism. But for what it’s worth, as I’ve told you before, I think your novel has a lot of commercial potential. My impression is that there’s a very big audience for near-future sci-fi with a transformational component.
SC: I’m with you Brent. I think this book has a lot of commercial potential, both as a book and… originally I saw it as a movie and I really came to see what a great TV series it would be instead. Science Fiction used to sort of be a dirty word but there’s been so much more literary Science Fiction written lately that people have started to look at it differently, and this is a very literate book. It’s a book that has some very evocative, sensual, poetic language and it’s also got some really geeky science in it. I don’t know if it’s something for everyone. It’s the kind of book I love to read. They always say write, you know, write the book you love to read.
TN: Best of luck with it. And also, thank you for contributing the interlude music for this episode as well. You’re a composer and multi-instrumentalist.
BR: A bit of a Renaissance man, like Tom…
TN: Steady.
BR: Tell us a little about your other musical efforts.
SC: Well thanks for using my music as well. That’s an old piece that I did with a partner, musical partner—Jennifer Lowman. We had a duo together called Loons in the Monastery for many years and that’s one of my absolute favorite pieces that you guys picked out, so I really appreciate that. Yeah, my music really ranges from super sparse, experimental—maybe some of it would be called avant-garde, or sometimes what they call modern classical music, which is they call it new music. And then I also veer from there straight into rock and roll. My last album was a pretty loud, raucous album of experimental music and rock and roll. Some of the rock and roll songs were very personal, some were very political. The album before that was extremely quiet, sparse, improvised, totally improvised piano music.
TN: Well that’s all we have time for in this episode. Thanks for joining our virtual, sheltering-in-place conversation, Samuel.
SC: Thanks for having me guys and thanks for showcasing this work—both the excerpt from the novel and the music. It’s really an honor and I appreciate it a lot.
BR: Tom, are you recording what I’m thinking right now?
TN: Yeah and I agree. You’re thinking that we should have a virtual, long-distance beer together sometime in the not too distant past. Am I right?
BR: Hello Samuel. Welcome back to The Strange Recital—this time narrating your own work rather than someone else's.
SC: Well thanks for having me. It’s especially fun to be narrating one of my own pieces.
TN: And thanks for participating in our experimental interview technique that avoids the degraded audio quality of the phone.
BR: Yes, an amazing invention by Tom that allows a conversation to be simulated via the projection of thoughts into our studio from several distant locations.
SC: It does appear that you’ve invented a system that avoids the problems of time and space during a pandemic. I think a Nobel Prize may be in the offing.
TN: That’s not such a bad idea actually… Well we’ve just heard a section from a novel for which I understand you've been seeking publication. Does this come near the beginning of the book? Give us a brief summary of the rest of the story.
SC: This section comes fairly early in the book. It’s hard to do an entire synopsis but the basic idea is that there is a worldwide epidemic of something called Non-Organic Dementia, or NOD, and when someone gets NOD they nod out into either a sort of catatonic state or a very agitated demented state. This epidemic is not actually being caused by any organic source like a disease or virus but rather a corporation, a racist right-wing corporation has discovered that human memory does not actually reside in the brain—that the brain is more like a transmitter and a receiver to a large storage space that all beings that are capable of thought of any type, all of their instinctual and learned memories reside. They call it The Workspace. They’ve learned how to hack it. They are selling a super fast, super cheap storage device and every time somebody backs up their family photo collection on to this cheap device they are literally erasing someone else’s memories.
TN: Hmm…dastardly.
BR: So here we are right now in pandemic quarantine. It seems there's a strange prescience in your novel: it may not be about a virus but it is about a worldwide deadly affliction with an invisible cause, a metaphor for what's happening today. Are you a prophet of some sort?
SC: It’s actually kind of funny. I’m sort of an amateur epidemiologist, so I was telling my children and other members of my family, and anyone who would listen in late January that we were all going to be working from home and needed to stock up on food and such. But that’s just because I am a worrier and a science geek. All these people losing their memories and becoming basically helpless is happening because of corporate greed in the book. They’ve basically mixed in a pogrom against non-white people with a profit motive and come up with this device that erases people that they can also sell and make money off of. Perfect vertical integration I guess late-stage capitalists would call that. I mean, I don’t think the book is prescient. I don’t think I’m a prophet but the biggest resonance in the book is probably really about how greed threatens all human existence.
TN: I’m wondering about your thoughts on the subject of how Native American culture has so often been portrayed through the lens of the Noble Savage mythology—which at its worst is not only incorrect but racist.
SC: Oh I just love this question. I have had so many arguments with people who definitely place Native Americans on some kind of pedestal. And Native Americans in all of the Americas have practiced infanticide. There’s been rape. There’s been war. There’s been torture. There’s been slavery. There’s even been massive environmental damage. The potlatch ceremony in the Pacific North West eventually morphed into a sort of “keeping up with the Jones’s” frenzy, where each tribe would throw more salmon and stuff off a cliff into the ocean, as a figurative gift to the other tribe to show that they had so much food that they could even waste it. I really think white guilt that makes any person of color somehow more environmentally sensitive, more connected to the Earth is totally racist. People are people.
TN: Yeah.
BR: The word “spiritual” is used quite a bit in this excerpt. It’s one of those words that people assume they share a definition of, but they actually have their own ideas of its meaning. I like the way you state that there are many different ways to be spiritual and maybe that answers my question, but maybe not. Whenever I encounter that word, just like with the word “God”, I find myself wanting to ask, “What exactly do you mean?”
SC: Well you’re certainly not making this very easy. That’s a really big question. You know it’s funny because when I was a boy I would have considered myself really believing in some sort of divinity and then I went through a period where I really became a lot like my father, who was an atheist and a science writer, and wasn’t even an agnostic and I think being an atheist is just as foolish as being a true believer since we never really know. For me… I do believe in something I call the divine. I’m not sure what it is but I know it when I’m in touch with it, and whether I am doing my healing work, or doing writing, or doing music, or doing almost anything creative where I get out of the way and my ego gets out of the way—what some people would call “The Zone” and I feel that creative energy surging through me… that exalted state, just being in the throes of creation, is God to me.
TN: Let’s get into that fuzzy area between so-called truth and fiction, which means you’re not obligated to answer truthfully, or at all. Have you been to the Rosebud reservation, done a sweat lodge ceremony, or used peyote?
SC: Yes in 1978, or ’79 I did some volunteer work at the Rosebud Reservation. Some of this stuff derives from experiences I had there but probably the biggest sweat lodge experience I ever had was when I asked the Great Spirit to make me less inhibited—this was the first sweat lodge I ever went to after Rosebud, after being a teenager—I was thirty-two years old, and two weeks later had an accident that left me paralyzed from the neck down for a while with a type of brain damage called Disinhibition. So that’s one reason that I say that you have to ask the Great Spirit to be gentle.
BR: Yeah. Wow.
SC: I have never done peyote. I have done mushrooms. I would not ever do anything like LSD because I really believe in connecting to the spirit of a plant, so if I were ever going to do a hallucinogen again, which is unlikely, it would be something made out of a plant, not out of a chemistry set.
BR: As I head into senior citizenhood, I suspect I’ll never get to it, but more psychedelic experience with teacher plants is one of the things I want most. In an alternate universe, I may have followed the Terence McKenna path. But life gets in the way.
TN: Well you could always micro-dose. Albert Hoffman did that.
BR: I may be micro-dosing now.
TN: Yeah, well it certainly looks that way sometimes. Anyway, let’s talk about the journey to publication. Where are you along that road?
SC: Well, that is a very difficult road. I have worked and worked and worked on this book for years. Worked with a great editor. I finally came to see that I needed an editor, which was a big bit of growth for me. And I’ve written a book that I think is a great demographic. It’s politically and culturally interesting. It’s got interesting science, it’s got a lot of interesting philosophy and metaphysics in it. It’s got some, you know, hard sort of action-based men’s ‘adventurey’ kind of stuff in it and it’s also got some very lyrical, poetic and sensual stuff in it. And it’s a hundred and fifty thousand words, and apparently you cannot get an agent interested in any book over a hundred thousand words unless you are already a known commodity as a writer. So I’ve written many, many pitch letters and I even… I bought a course in how to get an agent and then I even paid for a couple of sort of, you know, private consults with agents and they were all like “well the book needs to be under a hundred thousand words”— which it’s not going to be. For me to break through as a first time author with a book this large is difficult. Publishing these days is apparently a numbers game, so when you think of all the great books that would never have been published if there had been, right up front “We don’t care how good your writing is. We’re not even going to bother reading it. If it’s over a hundred thousand characters we’re done here.” This is the new model and it’s pretty damned depressing.
BR: Yep, things are bleak in the age of extreme capitalism. But for what it’s worth, as I’ve told you before, I think your novel has a lot of commercial potential. My impression is that there’s a very big audience for near-future sci-fi with a transformational component.
SC: I’m with you Brent. I think this book has a lot of commercial potential, both as a book and… originally I saw it as a movie and I really came to see what a great TV series it would be instead. Science Fiction used to sort of be a dirty word but there’s been so much more literary Science Fiction written lately that people have started to look at it differently, and this is a very literate book. It’s a book that has some very evocative, sensual, poetic language and it’s also got some really geeky science in it. I don’t know if it’s something for everyone. It’s the kind of book I love to read. They always say write, you know, write the book you love to read.
TN: Best of luck with it. And also, thank you for contributing the interlude music for this episode as well. You’re a composer and multi-instrumentalist.
BR: A bit of a Renaissance man, like Tom…
TN: Steady.
BR: Tell us a little about your other musical efforts.
SC: Well thanks for using my music as well. That’s an old piece that I did with a partner, musical partner—Jennifer Lowman. We had a duo together called Loons in the Monastery for many years and that’s one of my absolute favorite pieces that you guys picked out, so I really appreciate that. Yeah, my music really ranges from super sparse, experimental—maybe some of it would be called avant-garde, or sometimes what they call modern classical music, which is they call it new music. And then I also veer from there straight into rock and roll. My last album was a pretty loud, raucous album of experimental music and rock and roll. Some of the rock and roll songs were very personal, some were very political. The album before that was extremely quiet, sparse, improvised, totally improvised piano music.
TN: Well that’s all we have time for in this episode. Thanks for joining our virtual, sheltering-in-place conversation, Samuel.
SC: Thanks for having me guys and thanks for showcasing this work—both the excerpt from the novel and the music. It’s really an honor and I appreciate it a lot.
BR: Tom, are you recording what I’m thinking right now?
TN: Yeah and I agree. You’re thinking that we should have a virtual, long-distance beer together sometime in the not too distant past. Am I right?
Music on this episode:
Archangel, composed and performed by Samuel Claiborne with Jennifer Lowman, under the name Loons in the Monastery.
Used by permission of the artist
