Momaday: Voice of the West

funding was provided by the corporation for public broadcasting to a grant from the pacific now network program planned and viewers like you us this summer in new mexico the bright letter i want you to see the very best is watched live to before in our day will come there are moments in that time when i move so we tend to myself but i wonder how it is possible to keep from flying apart and one to fewer than two a vibrant next i asked

creative writing is very frustrated i once heard a writer being interviewed on the radio and the interviewer asks the main question which seems to be required is it difficult to write and the writers said oh no please it's certainly not all you do is put a page in the machine and you sit there until beads of blood appear on your forehead that's that's right when mckeown surprise from my father was probably a very difficult thing in a way because it was his very first novel that he had ever written and the pressure you know when you wanna write something again to live up to something like that just be

unreal so everything he's written since then we need to use iras can pickle is compared to write i was take place this expression events do indeed take place they have meaning in relation to the things around them and a part of my life happened to take place no expectation possibly the brilliance of exhilaration about new mexican outside a club like that only surfaces so these

decisions producers so is it according to that ranging of dishonesty is every day on the skyline was no electricity for six hours of understand their heart the heart you learned to watch the level of the river and when the rain comes to face wyden

lost worlds that poison that ran about twenty five of them very long distance when i was twelve years old like alexander the great when i was given my first horse mine i discovered a new way to live i wrote a great deal in the next few years right formulated a very good idea of the horse mai mai kai welch ancestors would've approved on the back of my horse i have a different view of the world could see more of how it reached away beyond older rises i've ever seen and yet it was more concentrated in securities to and more accessible to my mind my imagination my mind looms up on the farthest edges of the earth could feel the full force of the planet

space there was nothing on the air like that was not pure exhilaration and nothing of time lets us is no more war or monument valley rent has this review just there is the center of an intricate geology a whole and unique landscape which includes utah

colorado arizona and new mexico the most brilliant colors and you know that they're having the most beautiful and extraordinary landforms and surely the oldest purest air ramos on the slope of the western slope of the name is ranger is a great volcanic depression and it is simply one of the great ballets in the morning some want the via ground who was down with the shadows of clouds and vibrant with remembering the great feature of the value is its size it was i was truly grateful such vast this makes for a move into kind of a

movie and that comprehends reality and where it exists my father was a full like iowa my mother use puppets as a small chills of small part cherokee in or otherwise french and english my english grandfather my mother's father did not like and it has made a terrible uproar about her bury my dad and my dad had been in glitzy his mentor and grandpa alice would say well you're probably are behind victoria kahn a while because of the bank can be glad and i resented that you know i knew it was something against my that and i think that they had a big drop i've written about my childhood in the names of about my parents

my parents were married in nineteen thirty seven it was necessary for them to live in the moment it is as far as they were concerned she was an outsider who insinuated herself set out to make a life in many ways her position was not unlike that you're happy when you're nineteen years before my mother stood up to the cuts was not going to be run over they're ugly stories from those days and they're beautiful stories my parents' courtship was a very stormy affair and indeed their married life extending as i write this across forty years this has been full of passion and most wonderful and often painful intensity and deep rare well scott there i guess gave his parents a little

trouble on he was growing up and being reared at home and is as anybody and alive my father was a painter and very good one and says it does as i think of it i like to think that i learned something from him it's very interesting about my father because as a person he has a very difficult time expressing himself emotionally to anybody it's through his his artistic forms it's through his painting it's through his writing through his poems and that's how he expresses himself said the dark on the underlying driven side of him doesn't come out when you're just sitting talking to him he's very pleasant he's very intellectual so it comes through in his paintings the start interesting wild things i'm going to express my spirit i do what i

want to do and sometimes perfectly whimsical you know i won't either made something that strikes me as being funny now created for a song stay as you're and there is always a struggle and it was very very evident in my grandfather and i think of my father you know when flights over here in the white man's world and one foot silver here in the cairo world is noticeable thanks leila because were mixed bloods we've never totally been accepted in either world and as is my father's cases well you know i mean he is such a literary genius that he writes almost on behalf of the native american people as a whole but at the same time not so because he's not

completely that in india to someone who thinks of himself as an indian there are certain things which entitle him to think themselves but that's basically it's not a matter of what the contents are speaking the language it is a matter of thinking of oneself an indian is someone who has run an understanding of a movie you as it's called an indian is someone who lives in terms of i mean who knows someone who isn't how in nature someone who has a very highly developed and the very rich oral tradition and a highly developed sense of humor they say in a native american culture that everybody has their own sort of animal spirit and down there's a place in wyoming called devil's tower and that's where the old

kyle a legend of the boy that turns into a bear it is when i was an infant by my parents to six months ago and when i came back to oklahoma to molokai well home old man and the tribe came to visit and he gave me my name my indian name which is rock tree boy so i taught me to commemorate my having been taken to this very sacred place and so i have ever since identified with the boy who turned into a bear my father really believes that he bears turned into a bear he comes and goes and he's very creative spirit you know i think i've done my best work when the bear has been close to me and girl you know i think some of my

my closest so my most of an ominous times sometimes are the greatest danger have also had to do with it the identification one of the ancient ancient themes love of literature of storytelling is man's search for his being his identity in the ancient child said is an artist a painter who who a contemporary theater lives in san francisco is quite a successful painter but in this so in this in this confrontation where

he'd most to qwest after his identity newell has brought down into work a condition of of existence that you could not imagine it's very painful it's like l and those are the couple of passages that refer to upset thought he must be going mad and there were moments when he was absolutely convinced of it there were such strange and disturbing visions and has had such impulses to file in such pain no one else question to simon says far as we knew and yet enough reason to do so but that did not console him and fight and then but for a room in his desperation victims debt and the more self destructive there was no longer a designer jeans existence his life was coming apart disintegrating he drank heavily his whole

being suffered a numbness a kind of progress i think set in the ancient how the characters is very autobiographical sits about dad i don't think that it it's about a particular time maybe in his life like when he was in san francisco that includes taking them hearings that he actually felt and experiences that here it hasn't been all peaches and cream and it hasn't all been wonderful it's been scary and it's been painful and it's been hard just like life is you know and you don't like to see somebody go through terrible times but that he can write about it and just be very open and honest with the world notices female voices who have lawyers he's really struggling with the air power that

point that is what brings him down the bear disabled same principle and roughed him up in a bare is do that they love to hit hard and so yeah that dampened the breakdown is because of the very struggling with a baritone people have come to my father and asked him about the ancient child in the character of grey and here said yes this is sort of modeled after jill and also after my grandmother and attach a great is so remarkable moment in in in my view and it was so much fun to conceive of that character and develop that she's a nineteen year old girl creature of scientology bright and beautiful and she's a medicine woman at the end of the novel raven has taken such absolutely true crime and there they live in her

mother's hotel and they live in a traditional navajo and together they find the great that kind of harmony trespass that his love for gray was a source of endless wanted to see the greatest thing about it was that it had no definition it was boundless he awoke she was naked in his arms sof and said good morning my dollars this is now my morning prayer i pray that today you'd be more deeply involving you were just before i pray that today you would give all the good that is in use freely to the world for a chance to accept all the good that has given to you you want to just describe this women love my father he says he's sort of a real ladies' man in a way because i'm the

women are just drawn to him as myanmar to my father is very much in here you think of him as being really a man you know he's a beer and go see my father crying i want to write to write for us that ink that challenges me and excites me and so when i work with a character like grades there is a satisfaction to that i like that oh all my wife is german choose a young

younger than i'd buy or eighty years and we have a twelve year old daughter it is my second marriage i was married before and have three daughters by that marriage into one of the great joys of my life has been being a father to four daughters before writing his autobiographical i want my writing to disturb people you know one and one of my favorite authors is kafka's was once reading in his letters and in one of them he says that we should be concerned with books that have happy endings that make us happy is that anybody can do that's it said i think a book should come like a blow to the head that should come like the death of a loved one book should be the acts for the frozen sea witness and i went on when i

read that i thought yeah so if that's that expresses my feeling about boy about writing and that's what i would like a book of mine to do it in house made of dawn abel who has returned from the second world war and trying to find his place in the traditional world cannot is relocated in los angeles though though his generation suffered more i think from this from this kind of dislocation that still going on so you know you can find people in major american cities indian people were having a terrible time making a living and so there's this kind of dislocation psychic dislocations and that's one of the things that marks the great cultural conflict between white he didn't have any place to stay the relocation people were looking around

i guess but they hadn't found a place you wonder how you can get yourself into the swing of it now it's better than anything you've ever had its money and clothes and having plans and going someplace fast but you don't know how to paint that is so much of it and that you can get hold of it because it's going on too fast a lot of things out of your mind or you're going to get all mixed up and got a ticket and soon got drunk once in a while and just forget about who you ought to think about getting out and going home you want to think that you belong to a blue is so he's beaten and left on a beach and los angeles is reached the very bottom when you know we tried to move he was a nom de plume of the effort to move brought new paint shop the massive effectively overhauled was wearing off in another

moment he began to wretch wanted to die in our region they still are mindless and so gradually be relaxed mccain ran his hands his hands were broken and that he had loved his body militants seeking to listen to my savior house made of dorn house made of evening lights house made of dark cloud house made of poland mayo deity you're offering i make restore my feet for me restored my legs for me to restore my body for me this very date take out your spell for me the world coffee there was blood in his throat and mouth you were shuddering golden thing so

far have his vision reached that the owl we saw it seemed to fly in his face and break apart torrential ghostly silence as it can fema returns to wallop talk to the traditional world and there is of course the crucial question of whether he can return and has he has he been too much consumed by the by the great conflict within him or his possible for him to return he was running and his body cracked open with payton he was running on he was running through exhaustion late poet his mind and you could see it last without having to think he could see the canyons in the mountains in the sky we could see the rain and the river and the fields beyond you can see the dark rooms a bomb he was running and under his breath he began to

sing there was no sound and he had no voice he had only the words of a song and they went running on the rise of the song house made of pollen housh made of dorm costs a good law believing in a movie funding was provided by the corporation for public broadcasting to a

grant from the pacific now network program planned and viewers like you