As I went on my nature walk the day before yesterday, I decided to be particularly adventurous and go out in search for more wildlife (since in previous blogs I've mentioned my incredible luck of wildlife finding me). I started to search around Abbott Park, hoping to all of Mother Nature that I'd catch some delicate creature in the act of eating a meal. Or maybe even perhaps some rare bird specific to the autumn season, actively keeping the food chain in motion.
Unfortunately, while purposefully trying to find life; I was unable to do so. Sad days...
However, as I read through Ceremony for today I couldn't help but become amused by how many animals are referenced throughout the book - especially the imagery of Buzzards, Hummingbirds and flies.
At around pages 94-97, there is an intriguing moment in the book when Tayo enters into a bar and reminisces about all the fond memories that he once had in the bar. To him, every inch of that bar carries sentimentality as he looks over little details, such as the old stove, plaster on the walls and the bent floorboards. His disappointment sets in as he realizes that those fine communal days at the bar are over.
The most interesting about about this section though aren't specific just to the bar and the memories that Tayo ties to them, but rather the poem that seems to bookend his feelings.
On page 97 the poem reads that, "Fly started sucking on/ sweet things so/ Hummingbird had to tell him/ to wait:/'Wait until we see our mother.'/ They found her./They gave her blue pollen and yellow pollen/hey gave her turquoise beads/they gave her prayer sticks.
'I suppose you want something', she said./ 'Yes, we want food and storm clouds.'/'You get old Buzzard to purify/ your town first/ and then, maybe, I send you people/ food and rain again.'
Fly and Hummingbird/flew back up./They told the town people/that old Buzzard had to purify/the town. (P.97).
The imagery in this poem really struck me because it speaks to one of the main themes of the book - which is to reshape their once tight-knit community through the land (which is reminiscent of how Leopold conveyed his ideas about community through nature).
The mixture of Tayo's memory in tandem with the poem serves as a way for Silko to stress the importance of creating and maintaining a community. When Silko writes about Tayo's memories first and the poem second, she creates a parallel of how the community was before - a strong one, to a dying community in need of "purification" by way of an old Buzzard. This all seems very similar to how Leopold used the image of the mountains and wolves as a way to illustrate life before and after people turned away from natural traditions (or how his perspective changed from being a trigger happy hunter, to a respecter of the land).
In addition to the communal message, it seems to me that Silko wants the Buzzard to represent the Native American spirit that the people once had and the hummingbird and the fly are the almost powerless spirits that the people currently have; which in turn reinforces the differences between the community in the past to the one in the present
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