The interview as a work of art

For two reasons, his interview was out of the ordinary. First, it was obvious before we even began to record that he'd actually read the book. I'm sure that if I were a radio guy, I wouldn't take the time to read every book I was reviewing on air; after all, there are certain obligatory questions you wouldn't even have to write out to remember: 

"Where did you get the idea for these stories?"

"What's your writing schedule look like?"

"Do you write on a notepad in a coffee shop or hammer away on a computer?"

"How old were you when you knew you wanted to write?"

Etc.

I don't doubt for a moment that one could do a fairly thorough job of interviewing a writer or two, or three or six or eighteen, with the very same list on the very same single sheet of paper.

The second reason this interview wasn't ordinary was that he had a chunk of the book in his hand, a chunk of a story on a couple of sheets of paper because he wanted me to read a long passage he'd chosen himself. I don't remember doing an interview with someone who actually wanted me to read. When first he brought up the idea, I thought he was kidding. 

He wasn't. I did. I read the passage he'd chosen.

And then it was over. "That ought to do it," he said, or something similar. I was surprised, not because it hadn't taken all that long--I knew he had more copy than he needed--but because he hadn't asked those standard questions, not one, not once. 

I'd read a long passage from one of the stories, and he nodded approvingly when it was over, even indicated he was moved--and honestly I think he was.  

The interview he created was broadcast this week. He took what he'd recorded and sculpted it into a work of art, really. He added the whoosh of passing cars and an endearing rendition of the kind of Genevan Psalm that rises from the story; and what the interview became, what it is--this news feature about a new book by a local writer--is just plain beautiful.

I know--I'm hardly objective. But listen yourself. It's about eight minutes long even though the music continues to play. 

Tell me I'm wrong, but I think it's just plain beautiful.

Here it is.  His name? Mark Munger, from KWIT, Sioux City, IA.

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Wasicu at Chankpe Opi: A White Man at Wounded Knee II

The Ghost Dance, a ritual of what Ian Frazier calls “the first American religion,” is only one of many causes which led to the massacre at Wounded Knee, but for people of faith it merits a closer look.

There was no dancing here on the night before the massacre, December 28, 1890, but for almost a year “the Messiah craze” had spread throughout the newly sectioned reservations, as unstoppable as a prairie fire. A committee of Sioux holy men had returned from Nevada, where they’d met Wovoka, the Paiute who’d seen the original vision. They returned as disciples of a new religion.

Wovoka designed the ritual from his own visions. Erect a sapling in the middle of an open area, like the one in front of us now—the tree, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, then banned by reservation agents. Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious. Show your humility—often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness of their selflessness.

Then dance—women and men together, something rare in Sioux religious tradition. Dance around that sapling totem, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude. Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges. Dance into frenzy. Dance into ecstacy.

Now look back down into the valley, and imagine three hundred men and women being slain by the spirit, most of them writhing in fine dust. Such mass frenzy made wasicu of every denomination or political persuasion shudder. To them, it seemed madness on a cosmic scale—hence, “the Messiah craze.”

The exultation of the Ghost Dance was the vision given to those who fell in frenzy. When they would recover their senses, each of them would reveal what he or she had seen, a collective vision: life would be good, rich, abundant, everything the coming of the wasicu had ended. Jesus Christ, rejected by his own, had heard the voice of the people’s suffering and would bring them joy.

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney in his rich study written already in 1896, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.” It was that simple and that compelling, a vision of heaven.

For me as a white man, a Christian, it is not pleasant to admit that in the summer of 1890, the sheer desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of their culture, created a tragically false religion that played a significant role in what we’ve come to call, simply, Wounded Knee.

Throughout the West, the whole First Nation danced. What was peculiar to the Sioux, however, was this solitary tenet: those who wore the ghost shirt or ghost dress—the prescribed apparel of the faith—could assume themselves impervious to bluecoat bullets. Dancers could not die. They were holy.

It would be dead wrong to assume that that belief or any other created by the Messiah craze was the single cause for the horror that happened here in December, 1890. Others are far more prominent: the disappearance of the buffalo, the unceasing trek of white settlers onto traditional Lakota land, a long history of broken treaties, distrust on every side, the searing memory of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and, perhaps most of all, the inability of two peoples to understand each other. When you look down on the shallow valley of the Wounded Knee, bear in mind that what happened here is the confluence of many motives, some of them even well-meaning, but all of them, finally, tragic.

_____________________

Tomorrow:  What it looked like, here at Wounded Knee

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Geometry assignment; March 3

We began our unit on circles today with an introduction to some new terms as well as a review of some calculations that the students have seen before in previous math classes.  Radius, circumference, area, diameter, center, secant, tangent, chord, and point of tangency were all discussed and demonstrated.  Working with congruent and similar circles and concentric circles were also aspects of this unit that students were introduced to.

Homework:  circle calculation worksheet #1-9 all;  section 9-1;  page 330;  classroom exercises #1-10 all

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Remembering Frederick Manfred--1912-1994 (viii)

On that first visit to Dordt College, I took Fred to the Dordt College chapel, which was being built just then. Construction crews were still all around, and the dust on the stage was a half-inch thick. Everywhere you looked there was canvas drop cloths, but the place was closed up and warm, cavern-like and spacious, a work-in-progress.

Down the center aisle we walked together, this huge man looking up and around, as if the unfinished ceiling was lined with stars. Together we stood, center stage, looking out over open stretches where eventually the pews would sit, and he was astonished, almost speechless.

“If you would have told me, when I was growing up,” he said, more reverentially than I could have guessed, “—if you would have told me that someday my people would have a beautiful place like this, right here in Siouxland, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

It was the “my people” that struck me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Through the years, I heard him, time and time again, refer to his ethnic and religious roots in very, very loving ways. 

"You won't find a bad preacher in my novels," Fred told me once upon a time. "They were good to me," he said. "They were the only ones around with libraries, and they'd lend me their books." I never did a study, but the chiselers and the crooks and the hypocrites in the Siouxland novels aren't preachers.

That night, the novelist Frederick Manfred came to the Schaap’s house for dinner, for the first time, the first of many. For several years after, I took van loads of students up to his house, just as I had gone when I was an undergraduate myself.

Fred was never happier than when he could entertain. My students found him and his passions astonishing.

Nothing pleased Fred Manfred more than similar kinds of visits to his alma mater, Calvin College, especially in the last decade of his life. He would talk about those trips for weeks ahead of time and weeks afterward. He felt lionized at Calvin, and the joy was almost too great for him to bear.

His Calvin pedigree was precious to him. He loved to tell the story of how, once when he was living in St. Paul, he’d attended a lecture at the University and asked a question of the speaker, an academic whose name or topic I don’t remember at all.

The man had immediately pointed. “You went to Calvin College. I can always tell questions that come from Calvin College alums. They ask questions nobody else asks.”

The unique shape of those Calvin questions he would have attributed, I’m sure, to Prof. Harry Jellema, the legendary professor of philosophy, a man he lionized himself.

He cherished his Calvin education, and was equally proud of the fact that he done very poorly in his freshman English class, failed it in fact, because he hadn’t written to the standards of course or the instructor, but then, neither was he particularly interested.

The Manfred oeuvre includes tales from his Calvin years. The best way to read those stories is in the trilogy Wanderlust, a fictionalized memoir (he called the form a “rume”) that includes more than his college experience. Those stories were published separately in three volumes: The Primitive (1949), The Brother (1950), and The Giant (1951). He is not a quick read.

His work flow went like this: start the morning up by reading through everything he’d written the day before, editing inflexibly, then go on for four hours or so, that’s all. He was more than happy to trumpet his skills as an editor, but then, even rebellious Calvinists can be woefully short-sighted. Almost everything he wrote was a tome.

Frederick Manfred, like another Calvin College novelist alum, Peter De Vries, was likely as much reviled as beloved by those who didn’t leave his and their ethnic and religious roots. Undoubtedly, the break he made from those he called himself “his people,” left scars. On the other hand, when Feik Feikema became Frederick Manfred, he also carried with him the longings of what was then, certainly, a clannish people for the kind of high profiled place Manfred gained in American culture, an aspiration to be truly and successfully “an American.” Lord Grizzily was much admired; for its success, Manfred was nominated for—and just about won—the Pulitzer. In his own way and in his own time, Feike Feikema “made it,” and many of his people were proud of him because of the way he step-laddered out of the ethnic ghetto.

But he came along at a time when leaving the tribe behind was neither simple nor sympathetic. Life among the Dutch Reformed, mid-20th century, was stifling to some, comforting to many—a significant force, an tribal identity one couldn’t leave without some heartache. We’re not talking simply about wooden shoes or tulips or scripture texts in the language of the old country, embroidered and framed and hung from a nail in the parlor; Frederick Manfred had those hangings, and he loved his heritage—no question. But that heritage has an undeniable faith component that Mr. Abma wondered about, as did others, even those within the clan who very much admired the novels Feik was writing.

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Geometry assignment; Feb. 10

We went over our radical expressions quiz to start the period today.  We then continued to review similar triangles and working with the geometric mean.

We will begin our work with right triangles and the Pythagorean Theorem tomorrow.

Assignment:  Geometric mean worksheet with similar triangles;  #1-12 all, evens on back

(I think during one of the periods, I said to do the odds on the back.  2nd period can choose to do even or odds, as I believe I forgot to mention which ones to do on the back.)

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Sunday Morning Meds--Snickers

“. . .but the Lord laughs at the wicked, 

for he knows their day is coming.”

Psalm 37

I don’t remember things like this happening when I was younger, but more and more these days it seems that the victims of violent crime are given opportunity in court, once the verdict is set, to let loose at the guilty.  It’s not an exercise I enjoy watching.  No matter how totally despicable and evil the crimes, the frequently emotional diatribes of the victims don’t offer much joy.  Venting may feel good, but most often, it’s not pretty because vengeance in the human spirit, no matter how understandable, is almost always unbecoming.  Furthermore, it's his--God's--not ours, right?      

Maybe if it was my daughter or grandson who was murdered, I would see it differently.  Maybe if I’d suffered as some have, I’d want to take a few shots myself.

I hope and pray I never find myself in that position.

It’s anthropomorphic, of course—this line in David’s psalm.  One can’t help but get the impression that a smirking God is exactly the kind of deity David would like to believe in because, after all, King David himself is snickering at the plight of the wicked.  The whole movement of this part of this psalm is to assert dramatically and unforgettably just exactly how far the righteous stand apart from the wicked: the meek get joy and bounty; the evil get hell.  That’s why God laughs.  He knows what it’s going to be like when he turns up the heat.

I love the image of God laughing, but I’m uneasy at why, in David’s description, in part because God seems, well, almost disinterested—as if the drama unfolding in front of him is theater, as if he’s even entertained by what goes on in his creation, a season-ticket holder at the pageant of this world’s ordinary life.

It’s impossible to say that God doesn’t do what David says he does in this verse, and therefore wrong to assume that this is simply poetic license.  I know enough of God to know that I don’t know it all.  Sometimes I rather like the Lakota idea of Wakan Tanka as “the Great Mystery.” 

And I am quite sure—because I’m human—that I could feel just like those murder victim’s mothers and fathers and husbands and wives, standing up there in front of the victim’s killer, wailing away.  I know I could feel exactly what David does. 

When the Allied liberators stumbled on the concentration camp at Dachau, what happened wasn’t pretty.  The skeletal prisoners—the living and the dead—were such a horrifying shock to the liberators that ordinary soldiers became cold-blooded killers.  There are reports of GIs giving prisoners their machine guns and simply allowing them to kill the hated, evil Nazi guards.  All of that—especially if you’ve seen boxcars loaded with corpses—is somehow perfectly understandable.  But was it right?

Does God giggle at evil men and women?  I honestly don’t know.  Maybe he does.

But I know that David’s giving him that human characteristic offers us—me too—some human joy.  When I conceive of the Lord God almighty acting just like me, it may well be easier to like him, but more difficult, I believe, to worship him. 

Here too, in this anthropological characterization, I wonder if we’re not finding out more about King David, God’s beloved, than we are God almighty, because I really do hope that my God doesn’t just snicker at sinners. 

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