A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini

Like a compass needle that points north,
a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman.
Always.

You remember that, Mariam.

yet…

Kabul

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

Saib-e-Tabrizi – 17th century poet

Grief

excerpt from The Red Convertible,  a collection of short stories by Louise Erdrich
from "History of the Puyats"

If you know about the buffalo hunts, you perhaps know the one I describe, now many generations past, was one of the last.
…
As many witnesses told it, the surviving buffalo milled at the outskirts of the carnage, not grazing but watching with an insane intensity, as one by one, swiftly and painstakingly, each carcass was dismantled.  Even through the night, the buffalo stayed, and were seen by the uneasy hunters and their families the next dawn to have remained standing quietly as though mourning their young and their dead, all their relatives that lay before them more or less unjointed, detongued, legless, headless, skinned.  At noon the flies descended.  The bussing was horrendous.  The sky went black.  It was then, at the sun’s zenith, the light shredded by scarves of moving insects, that the buffalo began to make a sound.

It was a sound never heard before; no buffalo had ever made this sound.  No one knew what hte sound meant, except that one old toughened hunter sucked his breath in when he heard it and as the sound increased he attempted not to cry out.  Tears ran over his cheeks and down his throat, anyway, wetting his shoulders, for the sound gathered power until everyone was lost in the immensity. That sound was heard once and never to be heard again, that sound made the body ache, the mind pinch shut.  An unmistakable and violent grief, it was thought the earth itself was sobbing.  One cow, then a bull, charged the carcasses.  Then there was another sightto add to the sound never heard before.  Situated on a slight rise, the camp of hunters watched in mystery as the entire herd, which still numbered in the thousands, began to move.  Slightly at first, then more violently, the buffalo proceeeded to trample, gore, even bite their dead, to crush their brother’s bones into the ground with their stone hooves, to toss into the air chunks of murdered flesh, and even. soon, to run down their own calves.  The whole time they uttered a sound so terrible that the people were struck to the core and could never speak of what they saw for a long time afterward.

The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved, said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts.  The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things.  Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live.

What does that tell you about the great pain of the end of things  that lives in every family, here on the reservation?   The daughter,was of course, the warped result of all that twisted her mother.  She was  the hope, the poison, what came next, beyond the end of things.  She was the residue of what occurred when some of our grief-mad people trampled their own children.  And so the history of the Puyats is the history of the end of things.  It is bound up in despair and the red beasts lust for self-slaughter, an act the priests call suicide, which our people rarely practiced until now.

I want

this book The Red Convertible  …sigh

"With great delicacy, Erdrich handles the emotions of indelicate people, as they’re tripped up by the uneven terrain of their lives. Fittingly, she finds a metaphor for the human condition in a Northeastern forest: “In the woods, there is no right way to go, of course, no trail to follow but the law of growth. You must leave behind the notion that things are right. Just look around you. Here is the way things are. Twisted, fallen, split at the root. What grows best does so at the expense of what’s beneath.”

She’s one of my favorite authors

Follow. The. Rules.

from Fizz –

Follow. The. Rules.

Rules:

1. Grab the book nearest you. Right. Now.
2. Turn to page 56.
3. Find the 5th sentence.
4. Post that sentence in your comment.

My sentence is:

The porches of the Cheyenne reservation,

Sigh

Studs Terkel

One of Those…

virtually sleepless nights – so I started a new book – Crossing To Safety by Wallace Stegner -I think I’d heard of him before but never read anything of his works –

what a treat – N. Scott Momaday said that one most know the proper names of things – and Stegner does – at least  when he describes the country where I was born & partly raised – the Midwest – the northern Midwest – he had me walking through the woods again –

Another treat – he included a poem by one of my favorite poets – Robert Frost

"I could give all to Time except – except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with?  For I am There
And what I would not part with I have kept."

Excerpt from House Made of Dawn

by N. Scott Momaday

"Then he saw the eagles across the distance, two of them, riding low in the depths and rising diagonally toward him.  He did not know what they were at first, and he stood watching them, their far, silent flight erratic and wild in the bright morning.  They rose and swung across the skyline, veering close at last, and he knelt down behind the rock, dumb with pleasure and excitement, holding onto them with his eyes.

They were golden eagles, a male and a female, in their mating flight.  They were cavorting, spinning and spiraling on the cold, clear columns of air, and they were beautiful.  They swooped and hovered, leaning on the air, and swung close together,, feinting and screaming with delight.  The female was full-grown, and the span of her wings was grater than any man’s height.  There was a fine flourish to her motion; she was deceptively, incredibly fast, and her pivots and wheels were wide and full-blown.  But her great weight was streamlined and perfectly controlled.  She carried a rattlesnake; it hung shining from her feet, limp and curving out in the trail of her flight.  Suddenly her wings and tail fanned, catching full on the wind, and for an instant she was still, widespread and spectral in the blue, while her mate flared past and away, turning around in the distance to  look for her. The she began to beat upward at an angle form the rim until she was small in the sky, and she let go of the snake.  It fell slowly, writhing and rolling, floating out like a bit of silver thread, against the wide backdrop of the land.  She held still above, buoyed up on the cold current and her crop and  hackles gleaming like copper in the sun.  The male swerved and sailed.  He was younger than she and a little more than half as large.  He was quicker, tighter in hi s moves.  He let the carrion drift by; then suddenly he gathered hmself and stooped, sliding down in a blur of motion to the strike.  He hit the snake in the head, with not the slightest deflection of of his cours eor speed, cracking its long body like a whip.  Then he roled and swung upwardin a great pendulum arc, riding outhis momentum.  At the top of his glide he let go of the snake in turn, but the female did not go for it.  Instead she soared out over the plain, nearly out of sight, like a mote receding into the far mountain. The male followed , and ABel watched them go, straining to see, saw them veer once, dip and disappear."

Dragon Tree!!!

What some of my other onluine friends do – may I introduce you to Jim Calder –

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061502378.html?sub=new

http://www.voanews.com/mediaassets/english/2007_09/Video/wmv/TreeDragon_bb.wmv

http://www.carves4u.com/