Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft by Natalie Goldberg

Author:Natalie Goldberg [Goldberg, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453224571
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-07-25T22:00:00+00:00

I knew that animal! Ah, so there was something familiar here. Then I suspected I would return to this book. I saw that reading Silko might stretch me but I wouldn’t break. The book did echo something I knew and this gave me an entry point, even if Silko’s structure challenged my expectations. But I wasn’t quite ready yet, I’d been living in fertile, wet Minnesota for six years.

When I picked up Ceremony again three months later, I was ready for it. I think I had been unconsciously preparing myself. Does this mean, if you don’t live in New Mexico, you can’t read it? No. The book gives you New Mexico—not only in what it says but in its structure. We enter the mind of Silko, who has lived here all her life, so it’s actually better than a trip to Taos. When we travel we’re worried about the hotel, the right clothing for the weather, altitude sickness, drinking enough water for an arid climate, the bus schedule, our flight. We have fresh in us the children’s baby-sitter, their lunch money, the snowstorm in Boston when we left. We are concerned about the right tee-shirt, the right piñon incense, the right turquoise necklace to bring home as souvenirs. But here with this book we have Silko. She’s been through it all: the thirst, the wind, the hail, the true poverty and redemption of the land. In her it has been digested: she can take us on a much deeper journey. And isn’t that what we all truly long for on vacation? To refresh our mind, to really go somewhere new, to take our life down a new and undiscovered path.

I said I unconsciously prepared myself for Ceremony after putting it down the first time, but how did I prepare myself? I settled into the knowledge that I was about to go on a journey when I read the book, a powerful one, and I was going to come much closer—face-to-face—with the place where I already lived, New Mexico. And to experience this kind of intimacy I had to be open, willing to step out of the limits of myself and sink into a story different from mine. I had to be willing to travel the author’s path, winding in a way I was not used to.

If you’ve ever gone to Laguna Pueblo, west of Albuquerque, you’ve looked out at vast sky and huge undeveloped space. It makes sense that the structure of Silko’s book would be different from that of an author who lived in Manhattan all her life. Something different formed the cells of her mind, not to mention that she lived in a Native American culture based on the connection to this land. I was entering new territory and I had to breathe someone else’s breath.

There are no numbered chapter breaks in Ceremony. The story is one continuous whole—past and present, chant, incantation, invocation, even good and evil. I once paged through a first edition and found a

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.