_Indians and Entertainment_
We go to the theatre to be entertained. It may be _The Potters_, it may
be Max Reinhardt, _King Lear_, or _Electra_. All entertainment.
We want to be taken out of ourselves. Or not entirely that. We want to
become spectators at our own show. We lean down from the plush seats
like little gods in a democratic heaven, and see ourselves away below
there, on the world of the stage, in a brilliant artificial sunlight,
behaving comically absurdly, like Pa Potter, yet getting away with it,
or behaving tragically absurdly, like King Lear, and not getting away
with it: rather proud of not getting away with it.
We see ourselves: we survey ourselves: we laugh at ourselves: we weep
over ourselves: we are the gods above of our own destinies. Which is
very entertaining.
The secret of it all, is that we detach ourselves from the painful and
always solid trammels of actual existence, and become creatures of
memory and of spirit-like consciousness. We are the gods and there’s
the machine, down below us. Down below, on the stage, our mechanical or
earth-bound self stutters or raves, Pa Potter or King Lear. But however
Potterish or Learian we may be, while we sit aloft in plush seats we
are creatures of pure consciousness, pure spirit, surveying those
selves of clay who are so absurd or so tragic, below.
Even a little girl trailing a long skirt and playing at being Mrs.
Paradiso next door, is enjoying the same sensation. From her childish
little consciousness she is making Mrs. Paradiso, creating her
according to her own fancy. It is the little individual consciousness
lording it, for the moment, over the actually tiresome and inflexible
world of actuality. Mrs. Paradiso in the flesh is a thing to fear. But
if I can play at being Mrs. Paradiso, why, then I am a little Lord
Almighty, and Mrs. Paradiso is but a creation from my consciousness.
The audience in the theatre is a little democracy of the ideal
consciousness. They all sit there, gods of the ideal mind, and survey
with laughter or tears the realm of actuality.
Which is very soothing and satisfying so long as you believe that the
ideal mind is the actual arbiter. So long as you instinctively feel
that there is some supreme, universal Ideal Consciousness swaying all
destiny.
When you begin to have misgivings, you sit rather uneasily on your
plush seat.
Nobody really believes that destiny is an accident. The very fact that
day keeps on following night, and summer winter, establishes the belief
in universal law, and from this to a belief in some great hidden mind
in the universe is an inevitable step for us.
A few people, the so-called advanced, have grown uneasy in their bones
about the Universal Mind. But the mass are absolutely convinced. And
every member of the mass is absolutely convinced that he is part and
parcel of this Universal Mind. Hence his joy at the theatre. His even
greater joy at the cinematograph.
In the moving pictures he has detached himself even further from
the solid stuff of earth. There, the people are truly shadows: the
shadow-pictures are thinkings of his mind. They live in the rapid and
kaleidoscopic realm of the abstract. And the individual watching the
shadow-spectacle sits a very god, in an orgy of abstraction, actually
dissolved into delighted, watchful spirit. And if his best girl sits
beside him, she vibrates in the same ether, and triumphs in the same
orgy of abstraction. No wonder this passion of dramatic abstraction
becomes a lust.
That is our idea of entertainment.
You come to the Indian and ask him about his. He hasn’t got one.
The Indians dance around the drum, singing. They have their great
spectacular dances, Eagle dance, Corn dance. They have the dancing,
singing procession between the fires at Christmas. They have their
sacred races, down the long track.
White people always, or nearly always, write sentimentally about the
Indians. Even a man like Adolf Bandelier. He was not a sentimental man.
On the contrary. Yet the sentimentality creeps in, when he writes about
the thing he knows best, the Indian.
So it is with all of them, anthropologists and myth-transcribers and
all. There is that creeping note of sentimentality through it all,
which makes one shrug one’s shoulders and wish the Indians to hell,
along with a lot of other bunk.
You’ve got to de-bunk the Indian, as you’ve got to de-bunk the Cowboy.
When you’ve de-bunked the Cowboy, there’s not much left. But the Indian
bunk is not the Indian’s invention. It is ours.
It is almost impossible for the white people to approach the Indian
without either sentimentality or dislike. The common healthy vulgar
white usually feels a certain native dislike of these drumming
aboriginals. The highbrow invariably lapses into sentimentalism like
the smell of bad eggs.
Why?--Both the reactions are due to the same feeling in the white man.
The Indian is not in line with us. He’s not coming our way. His whole
being is going a different way from ours. And the minute you set eyes
on him you know it.
And then, there’s only two things you can do. You can detest the
insidious devil for having an utterly different way from our own great
way. Or you can perform the mental trick, and fool yourself and others
into believing that the befeathered and bedaubed darling is nearer to
the true ideal gods than we are.
This last is just bunk, and a lie. But it saves our appearances. The
former feeling, of instinctive but tolerant repulsion, the feeling of
most ordinary farmers and ranchers and mere individuals in the west,
is quite natural, it is only honesty to admit it.
The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way
of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal
to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united.
They are not even to be reconciled. There is no bridge, no canal of
connection.
The sooner we realize, and accept this, the better, and leave off
trying, with fulsome sentimentalism, to render the Indian in our own
terms.
The acceptance of the great paradox of human consciousness is the first
step to a new accomplishment.
The consciousness of one branch of humanity is the annihilation of the
consciousness of another branch. That is, the life of the Indian, his
stream of conscious being, is just death to the white man. And we can
understand the consciousness of the Indian only in terms of the death
of our consciousness.
And let not this be turned into another sentimentalism. Because
the same paradox exists between the consciousness of white men and
Hindoos or Polynesians or Bantu. It is the eternal paradox of human
consciousness. To pretend that all is one stream is to cause chaos and
nullity. To pretend to express one stream in terms of another, so as to
identify the two, is false and sentimental. The only thing you can do
is to have a little Ghost inside you which sees both ways, or even many
ways. But a man cannot _belong_ to both ways, or to many ways. One man
can belong to one great way of consciousness only. He may even change
from one way to another. But he cannot go both ways at once. Can’t be
done.
So that, to understand the Indian conception of entertainment, we have
to destroy our own conception.
Perhaps the commonest entertainment among the Indians is singing round
the drum, at evening, when the day is over. European peasants will sit
round the fire and sing. But they sing ballads or lyrics, tales about
individuals or individual, personal experience. And each individual
identifies the emotion of the song with his own emotion.
Or the wild fishermen of the Outer Hebrides will sing in their intense,
concentrated way, by the fire. And again, usually, the songs have
words. Yet sometimes not. Sometimes the song has merely sounds, and a
marvellous melody. It is the seal drifting in to shore on the wave, or
the seal-woman, singing low and secret, departing back from the shores
of men, through the surf, back to the realm of the outer beasts that
rock on the waters and stare through glistening, vivid, mindless eyes.
This is approaching the Indian song. But even this is pictorial,
conceptual far beyond the Indian point. The Hebridean still sees
himself human, and _outside_ the great naturalistic influences, which
are the dramatic circumstances of his life.
The Indian, singing, sings without words or vision. Face lifted and
sightless, eyes half closed and visionless, mouth open and speechless,
the sounds arise in his chest, from the consciousness in the abdomen.
He will tell you it is a song of a man coming home from the bear-hunt:
or a song to make rain: or a song to make the corn grow: or even, quite
modern, the song of the church bell on Sunday morning.
But the man coming home from the bear-hunt is any man, all men, the
bear is any bear, every bear, all bear. There is no individual,
isolated experience. It is the hunting, tired, triumphant demon of
manhood which has won against the squint-eyed demon of all bears. The
experience is generic, non-individual. It is an experience of the human
blood-stream, not of the mind or spirit. Hence the subtle incessant,
insistent rhythm of the drum, which is pulsated like the heart, and
soulless, and unescapable. Hence the strange blind unanimity of the
Indian men’s voices. The experience is one experience, tribal, of the
blood-stream. Hence, to our ears, the absence of melody. Melody is
individualized emotion, just as orchestral music is the harmonizing
again of many separate, individual emotions or experiences. But the
real Indian song is non-individual, and without melody. Strange,
clapping, crowing, gurgling sounds, in an unseizable subtle rhythm, the
rhythm of the heart in her throes: from a parted entranced mouth, from
a chest powerful and free, from an abdomen where the great blood-stream
surges in the dark, and surges in its own generic experiences.
This may mean nothing to you. To the ordinary white ear, the Indian’s
singing is a rather disagreeable howling of dogs to a tom-tom. But if
it rouses no other sensation, it rouses a touch of fear amid hostility.
Whatever the spirit of man may be, the blood is basic.
Or take the song to make the corn grow. The dark faces stoop forward,
in a strange race darkness. The eyelashes droop a little in the dark,
ageless, vulnerable faces. The drum is a heart beating with insistent
thuds. And the spirits of the men go out on the ether, vibrating in
waves from the hot, dark, intentional blood, seeking the creative
presence that hovers forever in the ether, seeking the identification,
following on down the mysterious rhythms of the creative pulse, on and
on into the germinating quick of the maize that lies under the ground,
there, with the throbbing, pulsing, clapping rhythm that comes from
the dark, creative blood in man, to stimulate the tremulous, pulsating
protoplasm in the seed-germ, till it throws forth its rhythms of
creative energy into rising blades of leaf and stem.
Or take the round dances, round the drum. These may or may not have
a name. The dance, anyhow, is primarily a song. All the men sing in
unison, as they move with the soft, yet heavy bird-tread which is
the whole of the dance. There is no drama. With bodies bent a little
forward, shoulders and breasts loose and heavy, feet powerful but soft,
the men tread the rhythm into the centre of the earth. The drums keep
up the pulsating heart-beat. The men sing in unison, though some will
be silent for moments, or even minutes. And for hours, hours it goes
on: the round dance.
It has no name. It has no words. It means nothing at all. There is no
spectacle, no spectator.
Yet perhaps it is the most stirring sight in the world, in the dark,
near the fire, with the drums going, the pine-trees standing still, the
everlasting darkness, and the strange lifting and dropping, surging,
crowing, gurgling, aah--h--h--ing! of the male voices.
What are they doing? Who knows? But perhaps they are giving themselves
again to the pulsing, incalculable fall of the blood, which forever
seeks to fall to the centre of the earth, while the heart, like a
planet pulsating in an orbit, keeps up the strange, lonely circulating
of the separate human existence.
But what we seek, passively, in sleep, they perhaps seek actively, in
the round dance. It is the homeward pulling of the blood, as the feet
fall in the soft, heavy rhythm, endlessly. It is the dark blood falling
back from the mind, from sight and speech and knowing, back to the
great central source where is rest and unspeakable renewal. We whites,
creatures of spirit, look upon sleep and see only the dreams that lie
as debris of the day, mere bits of wreckage from day-consciousness.
We never realize the strange falling back of the dark blood into the
downward rhythm, the rhythm of pure forgetting and pure renewal.
Or take the little dances round the fire, the mime dances, when two
men put on the eagle feathers and take the shield on their arm, and
dance the pantomime of a fight, a spear dance. The rhythm is the same,
really, the drums keep up the heart-pulsation, the feet the peculiar
bird-tread, the soft, heavy, bird-like step that treads as it were
towards the centre of the earth. But there is also the subtle leaping
towards each other of the two shield-sheltered naked ones, feathered
with the power of the eagle. The leaping together, the coming close,
the circling, wary, stealthy avoidance and retreat, always on the same
rhythm of drum-beats, the same regular, heavy-soft tread of moccasined
feet. It is the dance of the naked blood-being, defending his own
isolation in the rhythm of the universe. Not skill nor prowess, not
heroism. Not man to man. The creature of the isolated, circulating
blood-stream dancing in the peril of his own isolation, in the
overweening of his own singleness. The glory in power of the man of
single existence. The peril of the man whose heart is suspended, like
a single red star, in a great and complex universe, following its own
lone course round the invisible sun of our own being, amid the strange
wandering array of other hearts.
The other men look on. They may or may not sing. And they see
themselves in the power and peril of the lonely heart, the creature of
the isolated blood-circuit. They see also, subsidiary, the skill, the
agility, the swiftness, the daunting onrush that make the warrior. It
is practice as well as mystery.
Or take the big, spectacular dances, like the deer dance, the corn
dance. The deer dance in the New Year. The people crowded on the roofs
of the pueblo: women, children, old men, watching. The two lines of
men, hunters, facing one another. And away at the stream which comes
running swiftly from among the cotton-wood trees, the watchers,
watching eagerly. At last, over the log bridge, two maidens leading the
animals: two maidens in their black shawls and wide white deer-skin
top-boots, dancing with a slow, delicate-footed rhythm, facing out,
then facing in, and shaking their gourd rattles delicately, marking the
rhythm as the drums mark it. Following the maidens, all the animals:
men in two columns, and each man an animal, leaning forward each on two
slim sticks which are his forelegs, with the deer-skin over him, the
antlers branching from his head: or the buffalo hide, from whose shaggy
mane his bent head peers out: or a black bear, or a wolf. There they
come, the two long lines of wild animals: deer, buffalo, bear, wolf,
coyote, and at the back, even tiny boys, as foxes, all stepping on
those soft, pointed toes, and moving in slow silence under the winter
sun, following the slow, swinging progress of the dancing maidens.
Everything is very soft, subtle, delicate. There is none of the
hardness of representation. They are not representing something, not
even playing. It is a soft, subtle _being_ something.
Yet at the same time it is a game, and a very dramatic naive spectacle.
The old men trot softly alongside, laughing, showing all their
wrinkles. But they are experiencing a delicate, wild inward delight,
participating in the natural mysteries. They tease the little boys
under the fox-skins, and the boys, peeping with their round black eyes,
are shy and confused. Yet they keep on in the procession, solemnly,
as it moves between the ranks of the wild hunters. And all eyes are
round with wonder, and the mystery of participation. Amused, too, on
the merely human side of themselves. The gay touch of amusement in
buffoonery does not in the least detract from the delicate, pulsing
wonder of solemnity, which comes from participating in the ceremony
itself.
There you have it all, the pantomime, the buffoonery, the human
comicalness. But at the same time, quivering bright and wide-eyed
in unchangeable delight of solemnity, you have the participating in
a natural wonder. The mystery of the wild creatures led from their
fastnesses, their wintry retreats and holes in the ground, docilely
fascinated by the delicacy and the commanding wistfulness of the
maidens who went out to seek them, to seek food in the winter, and who
draw after them, in a following, the wild, the timid, the rapacious
animals, following in gentle wonder of bewitchment, right into the
haunts of men, right into the camp and up to the hunters. The two long
lines of wild animals delicately and slowly stepping behind the slow
gyration of the two dark-fringed maidens, who shake their gourd rattles
in a delicate, quick, three-pulsed rhythm, and never change their wide
dark eyes, under the dark fringe. It is the celebration of another
triumph, the triumph of the magical wistfulness of women, the wonderful
power of her seeking, her yearning, which can draw forth even the bear
from his den.
Drama, we are told, has developed out of these ceremonial dances. Greek
drama arose this way.
But from the Indian’s ceremonial dance to the Greek’s early religious
ceremony is still a long step. The Greeks usually had some specified
deity, some particular god to whom the ceremony was offered. And this
god is the witness, the essential audience of the play. The ceremony
is _performed_ for the gratification of the god. And here you have the
beginning of the theatre, with players and audience.
With the Indians it is different. There is strictly no god. The Indian
does not consider himself as created, and therefore external to God, or
the creature of God. To the Indian there is no conception of a defined
God. Creation is a great flood, forever flowing, in lovely and terrible
waves. In everything, the shimmer of creation, and never the finality
of the created. Never the distinction between God and God’s creation,
or between Spirit and Matter. Everything, everything is the wonderful
shimmer of creation, it may be a deadly shimmer like lightning or the
anger in the little eyes of the bears, it may be the beautiful shimmer
of the moving deer, or the pine-boughs softly swaying under snow.
Creation contains the unspeakably terrifying enemy, the unspeakably
lovely friend, as the maiden who brings us our food in dead of winter,
by her passion of tender wistfulness. Yet even this tender wistfulness
is the fearful danger of the wild creatures, deer and bear and buffalo,
which find their death in it.
There is, in our sense of the word, no God. But all is godly. There
is no Great Mind directing the universe. Yet the mystery of creation,
the wonder and fascination of creation shimmers in every leaf and
stone, in every thorn and bud, in the fangs of the rattlesnake, and
in the soft eyes of a fawn. Things utterly opposite are still pure
wonder of creation, the yell of the mountain-lion, and the breeze in
the aspen leaves. The Apache warrior in his war-paint, shrieking the
war-cry and cutting the throats of old women, still he is part of the
mystery of creation. He is godly as the growing corn. And the mystery
of creation makes us sharpen the knives and point the arrows in utmost
determination against him. It must be so. It is part of the wonder. And
to every part of the wonder we must answer in kind.
The Indian accepts Jesus on the Cross amid all the rest of the wonders.
The presence of Jesus on the Cross, or the pitiful Mary Mother, does
not in the least prevent the strange intensity of the war-dance. The
brave comes home with a scalp. In the morning he goes to Mass. Two
mysteries! The soul of man is the theatre in which every mystery is
enacted. Jesus, Mary, the snake-dance, red blood on the knife: it is
all the rippling of this untellable flood of creation, which, in a
narrow sense, we call Nature.
There is no division between actor and audience. It is all one.
There is no God looking on. The only god there is, is involved all
the time in the dramatic wonder and inconsistency of creation.
God is immersed, as it were, in creation, not to be separated or
distinguished. There can be no Ideal God.
And here finally you see the difference between Indian entertainment
and even the earliest form of Greek drama. Right at the beginning of
Old World dramatic presentation there was the onlooker, if only in the
shape of the God Himself, or the Goddess Herself, to whom the dramatic
offering was made. And this God or Goddess resolves, at last, into
a Mind occupied by some particular thought or idea. And in the long
course of evolution, we ourselves become the gods of our own drama. The
spectacle is offered to us. And we sit aloft, enthroned in the Mind,
dominated by some one exclusive idea, and we judge the show.
There is absolutely none of this in the Indian dance. There is no God.
There is no Onlooker. There is no Mind. There is no dominant idea. And
finally, there is no judgment: absolutely no judgment.
The Indian is completely embedded in the wonder of his own drama. It is
a drama that has no beginning and no end, it is all-inclusive. It can’t
be judged, because there is nothing outside it, to judge it.
The mind is there merely as a servant, to keep a man pure and true to
the mystery, which is always present. The mind bows down before the
creative mystery, even of the atrocious Apache warrior. It judges, not
the good and the bad, but the lie and the true. The Apache warrior in
all his atrocity, is true to his own creative mystery. And as such,
he must be fought. But he cannot be called a _lie_ on the face of the
earth. Hence he cannot be classed among the abominations, the cowards,
and the liars: those who betray the wonder.
The Indian, so long as he is pure, has only two great negative
commandments.
_Thou shalt not lie._
_Thou shalt not be a coward._
Positively, his one commandment is:
_Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder._
Evil lies in lying and in cowardice. Wickedness lies in witchcraft;
that is, in seeking to prostitute the creative wonder to the individual
mind and will, the individual conceit.
And virtue? Virtue lies in the heroic response to the creative wonder,
the utmost response. In the man, it is a valiant putting forth of all
his strength to meet and to run forward with the wonder. In woman
it is the putting forth of all herself in a delicate, marvellous
sensitiveness, which draws forth the wonder to herself, and draws the
man to the wonder in her, as it drew even the wild animals from the
lair of winter.
You see this so plainly in the Indian races. Naked and daubed with clay
to hide the nakedness, and to take the anointment of the earth; stuck
over with bits of fluff of eagle’s down, to be anointed with the power
of the air, the youths and men whirl down the racing track, in relays.
They are not racing to win a race. They are not racing for a prize.
They are not racing to show their prowess.
They are putting forth all their might, all their strength, in a
tension that is half anguish, half ecstasy, in the effort to gather
into their souls more and more of the creative fire, the creative
energy which shall carry their tribe through the year, through the
vicissitudes of the months, on, on, in the unending race of humanity
along the track of trackless creation. It is the heroic effort, the
sacred heroic effort which men _must_ make and must keep on making.
As if hurled from a catapult the Indian youth throws himself along
the course, working his body strangely incomprehensibly. And when his
turn comes again, he hurls himself forward with greater intensity, to
greater speed, driving himself, as it were, into the heart of the fire.
And the old men along the track encourage him, urge him with their
green twigs, laughingly, mockingly, teasingly, but at the same time
with an exquisite pure anxiety and concern.
And he walks away at last, his chest lifting and falling heavily, a
strange look in his eyes, having run with the changeless god who will
give us nothing unless we overtake him.