williams-injuns

September 20, 2024

The notion of cyclical time was crucial to Native Americans. For them, sacred events recur again and again in a pattern that repeats the cycles of the celestial sphere.

Time does not progress along a linear path but moves in a cyclical manner so as to provide an enclosure within which events occur.

Past, present, and future all exist together because the cycles turn continually upon themselves.

The progression of time along a developmental path was a concept foreign to Native Americans until the Europeans forced them into history.

Thought:

“The ultimate meaning of the angry young man is not known. What is known is the shape of his greatest fear — that all of his efforts, from learning to speak to learning to write, to write well, to write badly, to write angrily, from learning to despise to learning to abominate, to abominate well, to abominate badly, to abominate abominably, to rant, to fulminate, to shout down the sea, to age, to age gracefully, to age awkwardly, to age at all, to think, to regret, to list himself in the newspapers under ‘Lost and Found,’ might culminate in this: a roaring, raging, crazy mad passionate bibliography.”

Donald Barthelme | “The Angry Young Man”