by Win Blevins
As suddenly as the energy came, it left. My arms relaxed. Something in me wanted to look around for my great-grandfather, but I knew he was not here in that way. I saw that the first light had put away the Morning Star. Soon the Sun would ease over the horizon far to the east, across the Great Plains.
I rejoiced. In my mind I thanked Wi, the Sun, for all his blessings upon the earth, and all living creatures.
When Wi appeared, I cried aloud, “Pila maye,”—thank you—and sank to the ground, arms shaking, body exhausted.
After a couple of minutes I stretched out on the bed of sage, head properly touching the pole, and pulled the robe over myself. The dawn was cold, and I was shivering. Under the robe I cradled the Pipe against my chest. And soon it began to thrum.
I do not mean a sound, but a kind of vibration, or perhaps just an emanation. Somehow, I could feel energy radiating from the Pipe.
My shivers shifted into shaking, my whole body quivering and flashing hot and cold under the robe. I began to wonder if I was getting sick. And then I began to see. Or rather I began to hear.
I heard the song again, the song I heard the month before, when I had thrown away my job and I sat in the car, stupefied and sun-dazzled. Again it was a chorus of scores or hundreds of voices, again men’s, women’s, and children’s voices mixed together, and again without words. Part of my mind realized—sitting in the car that day, I had a first glimpse. I actually saw beyond, in a kind of hint, that day.
Maybe that helped make me so crazy I tried to throw away my life that night.
Most of my mind now began to see as well as hear, and it was something entirely different from the time in the car, not vague or fragmented—everything was unnaturally clear, sharp, and brightly colored. I saw a park of grassland, richly green and watered with myriad small creeks that flowed out of the timbered hills on all sides. Somehow everything was peaceful, imbued with harmony and serenity. Clumps of buffalo dotted the valley. Small clusters of deer, does and fawn, browsed among the groves of aspen. Wolves played near a creek, cuffing each other and tumbling playfully. Most important, people, Indian people lived in villages of tipis right among the animals. Children played with coyotes. A mountain lion and two cubs walked comfortably around a group of tipis. Everything was in harmony, as though the buffalo did not eat the grass, and the people did not eat the buffalo.
I was transported instantly, in a swoosh more magic than flying, from one village to another, and saw big changes. The people wore different clothes. In the first village the tipis were white canvas, and the people wore a mixture of clothes made of hides and of cloth. But in each village I flashed through, everything got older. The tipis were of buffalo hide, the clothes of deer skin. Soon cooking pots disappeared, replaced by bows and arrows, spears, and war clubs. Soon the people did not display beadwork on their clothing but quillwork, and the women did not wear small bells on the moccasins, but the dew claws of deer.
Further up, near the head of the valley, the people lived in brush huts, and wore clothing that looked inexpressibly ancient.
The strongest impression I had, though, was of infinite harmony, peace, and happiness. It was like everything was a movie about a lost world of unspeakable beauty and perfect happiness, a Shangri-La of Indian people, and joy danced in the air.
But all the people of all times were there.
And the song, I could hear the song, but I could not make out the words. Only the repeated phrase, as before, “The father says so, the father says so.”
The valley drifted away, it faded to nothing, and I was left with the song only. I could hear the melody with aching clarity, and I could hear the moccasined feet making the only drumbeat that existed, soft, soft, and they sounded like the heart of Mother Earth beating, eternally, eternally, eternally.
What the hell? I thought.
Then suddenly I felt confused. I was aware of the buffalo robe again, hairy and itchy, and felt that my body was still a little cold beneath it. I popped my eyes open.
Then I realized. What I had seen and heard beyond was gone.
I felt a pang of yearning for the sun, for its warmth, and threw the robe off and stood up.
I saw beyond. That felt very good, though I had no idea what I had seen, or what its meaning might be.
The seeing is gone. I had ended it. Or had it evaporated on its own, like dew before the sun.
It was incredibly clear. And I knew I was awake the whole time—it wasn’t like a dream at all. It was so real that for a moment I thought it was this physical world, not the spirit world.
Spirit world! Those words brought me a shiver of doubt. Foolishness! Imagination! Ghosts and goblins and children’s bogeymen!
I brought back a memory of what I saw. True, I didn’t understand it, not a bit. But it was real, absolutely real. I could not explain. I pictured myself taking my doubt, like a suspicious package that has come in the mail, and setting it aside for someone else to open, an expert, some other time.
I felt a rush, a fever of excitement. I raised the Pipe before me, began stepping slowly to the east, and raised my voice in the traditional prayer. “Wakantanka onshimala ye oyate wani wachin cha!” Great Mystery, have pity on me that my people may live!
All the second day, riding on the excitement of having seen something beyond, anything, I walked from the center pole to the east, then the south, then the west, then the north, holding my Pipe high and praying to Wakantanka.
I saw nothing more.
Sometime after the sun passed the midpoint, though, I got tired, sleepy, weak. My mind began to beg for food and water. I laid down on the bed of sage and rested. There I prayed for strength to endure the hunger and thirst, the heat and cold, and whatever else might come. The hot sun felt good, and I soon dozed a while.
I rose. I prayed, I lamented, I asked for a vision.
I saw nothing, not even a bird flying close enough to name.
Dark came. I laid down under the robe and closed my eyes, waiting for the vision that might come, or the dream that would bring me news from the other world.
I saw nothing. When I woke, I could not remember dreaming.
The third day I passed in Praying and asking for a vision. This day I felt indifferent to hunger and thirst. Often I lost concentration, though. My mind wandered off into the world I came from, to people I wanted to see, to tasks I had to do, to talks with friends….
Stand up and pray! You are here to seek a vision.
I already got my vision! Leave me alone!
I threw myself into a frenzy of prayer, which became genuine as I gave my energy to it.
Late in the afternoon I laid down to rest.
When I woke up, the wind was chill, and gray clouds were gathering. I stood up and forced myself back to my duty, to walk forever to the four directions and cry for Wakantanka’s pity. But my enthusiasm was gone, my spirits sapped. My feet inched feebly in each direction.
This is your last night on the mountain. Pray!
Doubt came back to me. Why am I doing this? Why am I not eating and drinking? This is ignorant, this is superstitious. Idiotic!
My mind reminded me that I had seen beyond, but my mind also undercut that. You imagined an Indian paradise. So what? It’s just a fantasy. Go get lost in fantasy with the other old-timers, the ones waiting for the buffalo to come back.
Around sunset the clouds got darker, they bunched up dark, like dirty gray rags all knotted together. They seemed to be piling up right on Bear Butte, for in all directions the sky was a lighter, gentler gray. The clouds looked threatening, and I thought it might snow.
I got afraid of snow and cold. I laid down on the sage and wrapped myself in the buffalo robe. The nights here were cold enough without snow.
I watched the gray clouds. Though they never blew away to the east, sometimes they seemed to squirm slowly, to twist and writhe in place. I imagined I heard the mutterings of old women in pain. I knew, though, it must be the rumble of thunder.
I stare
d into the clouds for maybe an hour, chill, but not yet cold. After a while the chill deepened, and I began to shiver.
In the shivering I lost track of time. Time, that big boss that runs the white world. Time, which pushes you hither and yon like dust in front of a broom. The world has never known a people so absorbed with time—your digital watches are accurate to a fraction of a second, and in a century will gain or lose less than a minute.
Here’s a weirdness: Though you are persnickety about seconds and minutes—the radio station sold ads by the second, and timed the news to come on just as the sweep hand re-e-e-ached TWELVE!—you whites are insensitive to the larger, grander motions of time made by the natural world. Normally you do not know whether the tide is in or out, the moon new or full. Though you speak of the seasons incessantly, you are only half alive to their signs, to when cows are calving, when ice rims the creeks, when the willows are green and supple and when dry and brittle. And you are not alive to the great movements of the constellations in the sky, different in summer than winter, different in early evening and early morning. Most of all you know nothing of Timelessness.
I say all this with a shamed face. I have lived that way myself, almost my whole life. Early in my life Grandpa told me about the place where the world does not crank like a mechanism but is at rest, the still point of the turning wheel. He tried to make me a gift of this awareness, but I received it in an offhand way, not understanding its value.
Somehow I stopped shivering. I dozed a little. Now, in full dark, the clouds were harder to see, just a mottled grayness above me. I drifted in and out of sleep.
Gradually I became aware that I was hearing something.
A low rumbling, or mumbling. Like rockfall, or an avalanche, heard from afar. Like the clouds rubbing against one another in low voices. Like people moaning. Like the basso bawl of a big wind. A low, restless sound, writhing in the currents of air, twisting, twisting, turning, churning, over and over and over and over moaning, groaning, howling, mumbling.
The Pipe, held on my chest, seemed to quiver faintly to the rumbling.
I felt like I’d lived in that low chorus of sound forever. I stirred and squirmed, my body swayed slowly. I was like grass in a stream, and the moans made my body undulate, as the current does the green blades. The moans were the fluid I lived in, my water and my air in one. Gently, rhythmically, I waved to the liquid sounds of a low, distant misery. The Pipe and I both vibrated gently, almost imperceptibly, to the sounds.
Now I wondered for the first time if the moans were human. The road we walk on Earth is a trial, and maybe, somehow, I was hearing one of the human responses to it, maybe I was hearing our ancestors and ourselves in pain, maybe I was hearing all the human people, past, present, and future, and we were all, in a mass, in one great consent, giving voice to human suffering.
In the darkness and the shadows black silhouettes stirred in a low huddle and moaned in a chorus, and of the moaners I was one. I uttered moans, and I became moans, and my soul itself moaned, was Moan.
I felt sleet striking my face, and I opened my mouth to it, thirsty, and it was blood, it was the chilling bloodshed of eons past and eons yet to come, it has human suffering, and I did not want it, but I opened my mouth wider and wider and drank it in.
The sleet ceased, and I wormed my way deeper into the buffalo robe, cold, bloodied, heavy with the misery of thousands of generations of human beings.
We moaned. Of the millions of people writhing in misery, moaning out misery, I was one.
Perhaps there was music beneath this human expression, the universe thrumming in accompaniment to our misery, or in harmony with it, but my ears could not quite bring in the music, it eluded my hearing, tantalizing me.
One more time the moans surged, not low now, not from far away, not at all away, but here, within our mass, within us, beside me, inside me. Not moans but howls, great rendings of anger and agony. They bubbled within me like hot springs, they churned, they boiled. Tears burst forth upon my face, hot, scalding tears with no solace. I cried them out as well, and the voice of agony ripped out of me like hot lava. It tore my chest and my throat, but I could not stop it. I did not want to stop it, I wanted to roar, I wanted to rip myself….
The soundless music changed, and I felt a stirring within me, something new, a possibility….
The tears felt soft now. The voices moaned, but there was sweetness somehow in the moan, and acceptance.
On my chest the Pipe felt warm.
The world turned itself inside out. Everything was quiet. I was quiet. All around me was nothingness and around the nothingness was silence, utter silence, as in outer space, or ultimate inner space. I could not tell the quality of the silence, whether it was healing or frightening. I drifted.
Still. I am still. I can feel Earth beneath my body. I am among the people. Yet something is wrong, something is awful, something is terrifying.
I am in a landscape that seems like a huge painting that has the feeling of ceremony. It is nearly half or more abstract. Though Emile paints no abstracts, it is somehow a painting he would do, his style. The entire lower half of the painting, more than half, is white, an endless, cold, opaque white. The upper middle is thick, violent slashes of red through the white, jagged humps. Above the slashes is a black deep as raven wings spiked with big, bright, icy blue-white splotches in the shapes of stars.
For reasons utterly unknown to me, the painting is terrifying beyond terrifying.
I yelped in panic. I woke up. I sat up, grabbing the edge of the robe, and felt sleet cold on my hands. While I had been seeing beyond, in the ordinary world sleet fell. My fingers shook, and my body quivered, not from cold.
I lay back. I breathed deep. I drifted. Time passed. Yes, Time.
After a long while I looked at my hands, and sleet was under my fingernails. Now I felt the cold of South Dakota as winter approached.
I sat up in the robe in my circle on Bear Butte. Sticks marked the four directions. I pared the sleet from beneath my fingernails, then put one hand on the center pole.
I was returned to the normal world, the realm of Time.
Exhausted, I covered myself and dozed.
Later I stirred, opened my eyes, sat up. A small wind buffeted my face. The air was clear, no sleet. The clouds had unraveled themselves, and they strung toward the east. Directly overhead stars glittered.
I lay back. I had seen beyond. I shivered with excitement, and with fear. I have seen beyond.
What had I seen? Why did I see one vision and hear another? What did they have to do with each other? What did they mean?
This you will discover through counsel and prayer, I told myself.
But I saw beyond. Pila maye, I murmured. Thank you, Tunkashila, for opening the eye of my heart.
I squiggled in my blanket, searching for comfort. I murmured thank you again.
I turned my mind back into the place beyond, and felt the low moans begin to lift me. I felt afraid now, but beneath the fear was a tranquillity.
I put the moans away, got comfortable, closed my eyes, and asked for sleep.
When I woke, the Morning Star stood in the east, Venus, promising love.
I saw beyond.
Yes, but what did I see?
Today was my last day on the mountain. Some time this afternoon Emile would come and get me.
I will spend the day in rejoicing and thanksgiving.
I faced the east and lifted my Pipe high.
When the sun rose, the source of all energy on Earth, I raised my voice in a heartfelt cry. Pila maye, Tunkashila.
Thank you, Grandfather.
PART FIVE
Toward Wounded Knee
What Does It Mean?
We crawled naked into the sweat lodge. Pete sat next to the entrance, and I sat across the door from him. I was feeling … hell, I didn’t know.
Emile wasn’t here, Chup wasn’t here. Pete had fed me a little. This sweat was for me to tell the medicine man what I saw on
the mountain, and for him to help me understand it.
I am going to pull a veil over Pete’s prayers, and my own. It’s enough to say that we gave thanks that I saw beyond, and asked for help in understanding what came to me.
After the first round, while we cooled off in the air from the open door, I told Pete what I heard the second morning and saw the third night on Bear Butte, like the sound of heaven and the sight of hell.
I spoke in the Lakota language, and a miracle came to me. My tongue changed. Gone was Blue the jivey DJ. Yet the voice that emerged from my body did not belong to Joseph either, the one who went to college and came back shorn of wisdom. Nor to the young Bud. I spoke with a tongue that was new to me, or perhaps long forgotten. This was the voice intended for me by Spirit from my birth, strong, confident, reverent, centered in the sacred. Right now I was aligned with the Powers that were willing to help me.
I told what I saw beyond, almost all of it, keeping back small bits for myself alone. (Yes, I have also kept some from you.) The voice stayed with me and bore me up.
Pete heard my story with rapt attention, and I took support from the solidness, the lack of anything fanciful, in his brown eyes. He said nothing.
“Close the door!” he said, and I did. We dove once more into the dark, the steam, the heat, and our cries for pity.
This round was my turn to pray. I will not tell you my words, but I will tell you what is more important, the unfortunate voice that spoke them. The new, strong voice was suddenly, incomprehensibly, gone. I prayed in the voice of Bud, Joseph, Blue, or some mixture of them. My voice pled for understanding, but it asked from weakness. The throat the words came through belonged to the man who had spent years in disguise as the radio showman, Blue. The mind that formed those words was the good Indian, the Indian who wanted to be educated, who wanted a good job, who wanted success, who wanted to throw out the old ways and bring on the new, who wanted to be a white man. My heart was the empty heart of the Indian who sought not the old strengths but the powers of the diploma, the job, the reputation, which are no powers—for nothing others can grant or withdraw is true power. So I knew I did not yet have a grasp of my new voice, my new self. I was given only a glimpse, and tantalizingly, it disappeared.
