Ghost Dances: A review

Hello, all. It's been fairly busy around here as the new semester approached and has now arrived and, moreover, combined with a dearth of much of anything "interesting" to pass along in this space. However, some engaging books, films and music have arrived here at the Meridian manse, and I will be posting about them in the next few days and weeks.

A word about the review below: About a month ago, a PR person at Little, Brown emailed me to ask if I would like to read and post a review of Ghost Dances on my blog. I said Sure, and not too long afterward an advance copy arrived in the mail. I'm not entirely sure how or why Little, Brown picked us for this honor, but ours is not to question why.

What follows is a tinkered-with and expanded-upon version of my review on Amazon.

Image found here.

Josh Garrett-Davis, Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains

I want to begin by saying that I really wanted to like this book. Why it never really caught on with me is something I've given a lot of thought to. All memoirs by their very nature are self-centered, so that's not the problem with this book. But most memoirs are written by people who, at least according to the texts they write, have arrived at a point in their lives from which they can survey their pasts and be able to discern a path to their respective presents. The center, whatever we may think of its particulars, is fixed. Josh Garrett-Davis' book, however, is very upfront about the fact that he so far isn't able to do this in his life and that Ghost Dances is his gathering up of autobiography and various historical and literary narratives from the Great Plains that, in their common themes of migrating to and from that place, lead him to realize that, as he puts it, "I belong to that country precisely because I don't belong there: The currents in and out, the streams and storms and contamination, define the ocean of grass" (9). Well, fine. But--for me, at least--the end result is that, with all this literal and figurative coming and going, Garrett-Davis--and, thus, his book--are not so much self-centered as de-centered. His picking and choosing of Plains narratives and his constant claiming to identify bits of his biography with those narratives, no matter how tenuous the connections, finally don't cohere for the reader, because they never seem to cohere for him. They speak to him; he wants them, in some sense, to speak for him; but finally the reader is asked to accept that all these narratives add up to a whole because Garrett-Davis says so, and not because the reader can discern that they do independent of Garrett-Davis' claim. And there are long stretches here, as when he recounts reunions with distant relatives, which he clearly finds moving and important for him and which I respect for those reasons but which I otherwise find tedious.

I confess that a large part of my frustration with this book arises from my having read this spring another, far superior book about the Great Plains area, William Least-Heat Moon's PrairyErth, a book whose method Garrett-Davis' book seems to draw on at times (both, for example, share the idea of creating a Commonplace Book for their respective subjects). While reading Ghost Dances, I often asked myself why PrairyErth is so clearly a better book. I think the answer is that Least-Heat Moon's book is so firmly rooted in its geographical location of Chase County, Kansas--which also happens to be near the geographical center of the 48 contiguous states. It thus becomes a kind of commonplace book about all of us in our commonality as Americans and not of a county of around 600 people an hour from Wichita and two hours from Kansas City. Meanwhile, though Least-Heat Moon is clearly present in his book, he is not its subject. People speak in their own voices; they tell the stories they want to tell. He is their scribe--he's in search of a sense of this place and not of himself. Garrett-Davis' book, though, never acquires a sense of center beyond that of the person writing it who is himself searching for his own center.

Ghost Dances works best for me in those moments when Garrett-Davis stays out of the way of the stories he tells. For example, he relates well the material about the titular Ghost Dances, a subversive movement among Indians in the final decades of the 19th century (of which the massacre at Wounded Knee is the best-known of those events). Also, he seems genuinely moved by the material on the buffalo that he includes in his book. In the end, though, this book doesn't read like a completed book but like a collection of notes for a book. Which, again, I understand is part of its point. But just because it succeeds on its own terms does not mean that it must perforce succeed for the reader.

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"Full of many things except boundaries": Aloneness, Transcendentalism, and PrairyErth

Room for the Sky, taken somewhere in Chase County, Kansas, by Dave Leiker. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

As mentioned in my most recent post, I've begun reading William Least-Heat Moon's PrairyErth. What follows is a particularly compelling snippet of writing from it. It'd be quite easy to create post after post consisting of such snippets--Least-Heat Moon has this way of turning on a stylistic dime from literally and figuratively pedestrian writing (he's a strong advocate, as you'll see in a bit, for spending as much time on foot in the Flint Hills as possible) to turning the landscape he sees into a metaphysical vastness that, if not the equal of Emerson, certainly is a worthy participant in the Transcendentalist tradition.

Still, PrairyErth's version of Transcendentalism has an edge to it that Emerson's doesn't. In Chapter I of Emerson's essay "Nature," Emerson describes landscapes as "charming" (in a book in which the author quotes a 19th-century pioneer woman as saying that the word "prairie" is too pretty a word to describe the Flint Hills, I'm willing to bet that "charming" will not put in an appearance in PrairyErth as part of a description of landscape) and says things like "The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relationship between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them." (Cue "Zippity Doo Da.")

I find myself wondering how Emerson's "Nature" might have looked if its author had lived in the prairie.

But that same first chapter of "Nature" also finds Emerson saying, "But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars." Emerson here means "alone" in the sense of one's being at a remove from people and people's ideas ("a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society") in order to begin to perceive one's essential bond with Nature. There's plenty of aloneness in PrairyErth, too, but whatever Emersonian sensibilities Least-Heat Moon's aloneness might have are tempered by Naturalism's understanding of Nature as, at best, indifferent to human beings (Stephen Crane's "A Man Said to the Universe" is all you need to read about that). So, we end up, in the end, with a passage like this, in which Least-Heat Moon delivers a quiet but firm response to Emerson's famous "transparent eye-ball" moment in a clearing in the woods:

Hiking in the woods allows a traveler to imagine comforting enclosures, one leading to the next, and the walker can possess those little encompassed spaces, but the prairies and plains permit no such possession. Whatever else prairie is--grass, sky, wind--it is most of all a paradigm of infinity, a clearing full of many things except boundaries, and its power comes from its apparent limitlessness; there is no such thing as a small prairie and more than there is a little ocean, and the consequences of both is this challenge: try to take yourself seriously out here, you bipedal plodder, you complacent cartoon. (82)

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"Some old compass in the blood": On PrairyErth and place

Skyline of Cottonwood Falls, the county seat of Chase County, Kansas. Click on image to enlarge. The courthouse is the oldest government building in continuous use in Kansas. Image found here.

The origin myths of ancient cultures, including our own Judeo-Christian one, are as much about the land as they are about anything else. This is also true of that new-ish, caterwauling, still-naïve culture we call "American," a culture still groping for its own myth (not a history--we already have that), what Emerson called an original relationship with the universe. Thoreau says somewhere in Walden that, though nodding with Emerson when he says that no one can own the landscape, wherever he (Thoreau) might sit down the landscape would radiate from him accordingly. William Least-Heat Moon finds himself on a hill in Chase County, Kansas, and realizes he's not too far away from the geographical center of the 48 contiguous states; he looks around at the prairies and realizes that it was in just such a place, among the tall grasses on another continent, that some hominids learned to walk upright in order to survive and, in so doing, took the far more significant figurative steps toward becoming human beings.

I've just begun reading Moon's PrairyErth, his "deep map" study of Chase County, Kansas, which is located about 40 miles northeast of Wichita in the heart of the Flint Hills. It is a much longer version of what John Graves is doing for the upper reaches of the Brazos in his book Goodbye to a River (which I posted on here), and it is another in a long line of American books about specific places whose beginning is Walden but, really, could just as justifiably start with Cabeza de Vaca's Castaways, the extraordinary narrative of Cabeza de Vaca and four companions as they wandered for eight years (1528-1536) through southern Texas and northern Mexico before being rescued by fellow Spaniards. It's a line, moreover, that could easily include numerous works of fiction as well as non-fiction--Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels and short stories are as much about place ("my little postage-stamp of native soil," he famously called his fiction's subject) as they are about people. Maybe more so. Least-Heat Moon, meanwhile, notes that Chase County's north-to-south-oriented rectangle is shaped like any given page of the very book the reader holds, its major rivers and creeks running through it like the splayed fingers of the reader's hand, palm placed on the right-hand side of the page. There's something distinctly American--and, well, human--in that image of the hand on the page forming a map of the place, the (con)fusion of the artificial and the topographical, the complication of the familiar meaning of the term "man-made."

As I said earlier, I'm not too far into PrairyErth; in some ways, it's a little foolish to post on it at this stage. Already, though, I wonder if the book could use a little updating: Least-Heat Moon writes of the locals' resistance to a national park that would preserve one of the last sizable stands of tallgrass; that park is now open and developing, a cooperative venture between the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy. Cottonwood Falls seems to be undergoing a bit of a renaissance in its downtown; the same Emma Chase Cafe is now open daily; every Friday night, locals gather there for an informal sing-along (the Mrs. and I were fortunate enough to have participated in this a few years back). But in another sense, these sorts of things--the way things are/were, nostalgia--aren't the book's real subject. THAT subject is impressing upon the reader that in this place, once one realizes that all that is there are the four ancient elements, then one can truly begin to see it as it is, rather than what it lacks.

As this blog's long-time friend Randall Sherman of the (for now) suspended Musings from the Hinterland once eloquently put it somewhere in one of his numerous comments at my place, "Place matters, dammit!" Yessir. The roots of the prairie grasses grow as deep as 8 feet. They would not long survive if this were not so. Too many of us these days lack that deep understanding of the idea of rootedness, or even of feeling called back to the place of our own origins, what Least-Heat Moon so eloquently calls "some old compass in the blood." Maybe, just maybe, we would do well to get those bearings.

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