The Hammock Papers: Flunked.

22 November 2018

Flunked.

Morelodge, Wounded Knee, 1890

There's a danger in our lush society that the artist won't be taken seriously. For people as a whole it's been a fabulous system, but it's shit on certain people and continues to do so. I asked a group recently -- and they got very angry when I brought this up -- to try to explain to me the difference between apartheid and the Indian reservation system as it's been maintained by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't any. I went around to a half-dozen reservations last year and if you think these Indians are any better off than the blacks in Soweto, you're full of shit. Some people think we got their land fair and square because of the Dawes Act. Well sure, but none of those Indians had M.B.A.s. Red Cloud had never been in a bank. ReadMari Sandoz's book on Crazy Horse. I visited the actual murder site and it was closed because of budget restrictions! I was the only one there. All the tourists were over in the cavalry horse barns, which I wanted to get a bunch of Sioux to invade and torch. Can't you see them -- a thousand mounted Sioux -- riding out of the hills to destroy Fort Robinson? I think that's a magnificent idea. I'd be glad to join up as a nickel-plated Indian for that one. That area of our history is just ugly, ugly.

I know this lawyer who worked for nine years as a volunteer at Pine Ridge. One night about three A.M. -- we were drinking -- he took me downstairs. Way back in the corner was a safe, and in the safe was a little pouch that belonged to this old woman. In the pouch was was a stone that Crazy Horse had given to her mother, and this guy showed it to me, and he let me touch it. It was such a strange thing. You know, when the Sioux were being driven hither and yon by the Army until Crazy Horse's daughter died of pneumonia, he lay next to her on the burial platform for three days and three nights.

Am I supposed to think that Ronald Reagan is as interesting as Crazy Horse, when he's not? What does it serve us to take these people seriously and not listen to what Black Elk said? And of course there's a grandeur in that area so hopelessly lost. Think of being a Sioux and knowing that. I can't imagine anything more painful than being an American Indian. It's a mystery to me how we could be so generous in defeat to the Japanese and the Germans, and yet so neglect and disregard the Indians.

Our doom as a nation will be unveiled in the way we have treated the blacks and Indians, the entire Third World. Washington is a flunked Passion Play.

Jim Harrison

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL