Rhetoric's Earthly Realm by Bernard Alan Miller

Author:Bernard Alan Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Kairos;Rhetoric;Sophistry;writing;philosophy
Published: 2021-11-19T14:18:52+00:00

Acts of sacrifice make sacred the earth. Language and the sacred are indivisible. The earth and all its appearances and expressions exist in names and stories and prayers and spells.

—Momaday, Man Made of Words

I once taught on an Indian reservation in North Dakota and was myself taken to school there to learn some lessons in cultural vitality and endurance from American Indians. It was back during the time of the nation’s bicentennial, and agreeably enough the anniversary of the Custer battle as well, so that event became the focus of one of our class discussions. And then in the midst of it, a student who hadn’t said a word all semester, a guy by the name of Carry Moccasin, abruptly announced, “I was there.”12 He was a real “long hair,” so traditional he seemed to spook even the other Indians in class, but I was so pleased he finally had something to say that I was well into my account saying I was there too, trying to engage him further in the discussion by telling him of my visit to the Little Big Horn the previous fall. “No, you don’t understand,” he said. “I was there. I rode with Chief Gall. We killed Custer and those others.”

I waited for the rest, some point or follow up—a thesis of some sort—but nothing came. It just didn’t seem to be that kind of a story. Now, I have always been of the opinion that “reality” is a vastly over-rated commodity in any event, but this was utterly beyond the pale. Call it illusion or the persistence of the oral tradition, too many medicine men and too many stories passed on and believed from the time of Custer and well before, this was the mentality of racial memory at work, even though an extraordinarily eerie demonstration of it.

I cannot say whether Carry Moccasin was sincere or putting me on, but that confusion, too, would be in keeping with the work of racial memory. But there was an aptness to the experience, an integrity typical in an environment where ideas of the sort I have been discussing seem to have a way of being distinctly matters of common sense and practice. A similar ease and directness seems to be the case with Momaday’s paradigm of racial memory, and I use it here to flesh out some of the more mysterious characteristics that Heidegger attributes to both doxa and kairos. I wish to reiterate this connection and others of the same sort, pressing the analysis even further, to a point where Saying, listening, and language—their interactions and correlations—are brought into clearer relief by focusing on certain aspects of Momaday’s thought. Especially in his novel, House Made of Dawn, the unity of language and physis is rendered, if not with the same precision, with much greater vitality than Heidegger is ever able to muster. But for both Momaday and Heidegger the ultimate source of “Saying” lies in this unity, and in Momaday it is

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