Ruminations

2 January 1976 - 3 March 2026.

(Image source: Shagai (October 2007), by Yaan on Wikimedia Commons; manipulated through the decisions of a conscious sapient being using https://ezgif.com and https://www.lunapic.com/editor/)

For National Indigenous People’s Day.

Content notes: this poem portrays the processing of a dead buffalo in specific anatomical detail; the slaughter is not shown.

Carrie House, "Sweet Grass"

One morning I, Navajo, wake up in Tiwa country
Friend from Taos Pueblo tells me they just killed a buffalo
Ten people are standing around, looking at each other
I watch the tractor's rear wheels come up and off the ground
The operator soon notices and lowers the buffalo
A man cuts the buffalo open
Everyone looks around at each other
Someone asks, "Who here can butcher?"
Someone says, "She can, she's a Navajo!"
I say, "Is this why he drove me up here?"
I ask for a wheelbarrow and a galvanized pail is placed down
I say, "This is for Minnie Mouse, where is a wheelbarrow or two?"
A wheelbarrow and several big buckets arrive
Two men open the cavity and I put my head and arms in
Steam from the inside smells of sweet grass
I close my eyes and am overwhelmed by the sensation of being
in a mother's womb
I carefully pull everything out and onto the wheelbarrow and buckets
Everything is huge; the heart, the kidneys, the book, the liver....
My pocket knife is the sharpest knife in the group
One evening I, Navajo, eat buffalo in Tiwa country

The ecstatic line Steam from the inside smells of sweet grass reminds me of this account by the late Lakota medicine man John Fire Lame Deer:

In the old days we used to eat the guts of the buffalo, making a contest of it, two fellows getting hold of a long piece of intestines from opposite ends, starting chewing toward the middle, seeing who can get there first; that’s eating. Those buffalo guts, full of half-fermented, half-digested grass and herbs, you didn’t need any pills and vitamins when you swallowed those.

Which, in turn, recalls this quote from C.S. Lewis:

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.

Except that the reality Lewis seeks to recover comes by way of a white English boy’s exotic Wild West fantasy—-here, House’s narrative, like Lame Deer’s, stakes claim to the substance and significance and meat of her and her Tiwa hosts’ rightful buffalo, and of the mastery of traditional skills brought to its preparation.

(Brought to my attention by radiantfracture: https://radiantfracture.dreamwidth.org/310500.html; check out the link for his insightful commentary.
House’s is a Two-Spirit identity that it’s not my place to label; I’m using the words “she” and “Navajo” in deference to her own choices here.)

From Froborr on My Little Po-MO:

The other night, I was rereading Terry Pratchett's Night Watch, and I wondered: would Ferguson be as bad as it is if all cops were required to read the Watch books?

And the answer is, of course, yes, because the human ability to compartmentalize and justify via special pleading is infinite, but still, I can't help but think that things might be slightly better if the prevailing cultural image of cop-as-hero was more Vimes and less Dirty Harry.

In the process of looking for something completely unrelated, I happened upon woogledesigns' thoughts upon the nature (and, indeed existence [or rather non-]) of Doctor Who canon:

Here's what I think: The Doctor remembers every Doctor Who story ever told. Every episode, target book, comic strip and every game of companions and TARDISes you played as a kid. The universe he lives in has no record of it, because paradoxes and divergent dimensions and the time war have reset things. But the Doctor remembers and sometimes when he is sad it's because you've stopped being 8 years old and he can't run around the school playground with you anymore.

(And the comments proceed to kick around the Timey-Wimey Calvinball.)

An affirmation for kosaginolegion, dungeonwriter, dferguson, and anyone else out there who aspires to Make Stuff Up for fun and profit:

Maybe instead of saying, "you're not a fraud" to each other, we should say, "Yes you are! A con artist extraordinaire! In fact, you are pulling off the steal of the century by creating this completely made up THING and showing that it has value in an incredibly convincing way! You are making a Made Up Thing, Fantasy Whatever, In Your Head, Into Something That Will Look Like People Living Their Lives In A Room! or On Top of a Mountain! or in a desert or outer space or under the sea! If you keep at it, it will make people have weird dreams and maybe even make them choose specific real-life actions! They may even trade hard-earned dollars as a result of it, and as we all know, nothing makes anything more real than money! Go forth, young shyster, you liar, cheat and bullshit artist, and manufacture mass delusions!"

(Courtesy of ms_violet, by way of metaquotes.)

(My online time is frequently in short supply during the holiday season, so these acknowledgements are somewhat belated; however, January 6th seems an apropos day on which to honor both a scholar and an icon of Victorian genre fiction.)

ratmmjess  sets forth his lone New Year's resolution:

To always remember this:

It is not necessary to have been a tiger from the first and by nature in order to display tigerish qualities. Social conditions exist by which lambs may be converted into tigers. (1)

And Sherlock Holmes, courtesy of Tetradecimal on Journalfen, delivers an exquisite takedown of a particularly officious would-be Fandom Cop (2); a sample quote:

My dear Watson, there is no man so enamored of rules and regulations than he who has no authority to pronounce them.

(1)  http://ratmmjess.livejournal.com/221317.html

(2)  http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1235661.html