Ghost Dances by Author

Author:Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

After I left, landing ultimately, like Cather, in New York City, I often went back to visit places where I lived as a child and to explore new ones. In Red Cloud, Nebraska, I slept in a tent at an RV park, a pilgrim in this literary Bethlehem, with the roar and clang of a demolition derby as an evensong. I’d seen the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie and the stained-glass windows she donated to Grace Episcopal Church and her little Rose Bower with the sloped ceiling. I did and did not want to see the sparkling scrim of art over it all, or to imagine her as a punk rocker, a constructive rebel perhaps lonely in her hungers. Were her and her friends’ DIY theater productions like our Elks Lodge shows? Cather turned out to have two sustained (if not sexual) relationships with women as an adult out in Pittsburgh and New York. I wonder how those proclivities shaped her view of Red Cloud, much as I wonder if any of Pierre’s suicides were gay. Was she silent and alone behind the punk exterior? Did she take the loneliness of this great, mythic landscape and turn it inside out, into bluster and self-regard?

Even back then, after her brash defense of Investigation (and vivisection) to the Red Cloud audience, young Willa backed off a bit and restored wonder to her equation. I imagine her bold but still girlish voice taking a pause after asking about vivisection, “Ah, why does life live upon death throughout the universe?”

Then she finished, “The most aspiring philosopher never hoped to do more than state the problem; he never dreamed of solving it…. Our intellectual swords may cut away a thousand petty spiderwebs woven by superstition across the mind of man, but before the veil of the ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’ we stand confounded, our blades glance and turn and shatter upon the eternal adamant.” A less than punk rock note to end on, but anyway, amen. Amen, Willie.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.