Walking Against Traffic

My walk this week may not have been alone,and it may not have been in nature, unless one counts High St as nature. I guess it could be, if only you consider the clusters of apartments full of college students as colonies of some particular animal, and the road as the one connecting path and the cars as predators, but I digress. Now about this not walking alone bit: I realize that we're supposed to walk alone so we're silent, and I was mostly silent, listening to the drunken burps and noises and misplaced adjectives of my mostly inebriated friends as we looked for someplace to go. (DISCLAIMER: we were not on campus and all persons were of age) There was stumbling, swaying, and all the usual stereotypical drunken walking you can think of. I don't know what was talked about. It wasn't in any recognizable language or syntax, yet everyone understood one another. There was drooling. There was clumsy affection. There was loudness and lewdness.All that mattered was the road and walking beside it, not on it; there is the occasional car at 1am.We were animals. We were the animals of High St. This relates, bear with me.

So while reading Ceremony, I thought a lot about all the Native American literature I've read and how this compares or doesn't. Tayo is a fairly depressing human being to read about. The few rays of sunshine are the moments when he remembers happy times. One such moment, "Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind."(24). Well, yes, of course we resist. We don't want to die, so we have medicine. We don't want to rebuild after natural disasters, so we create walls and complex machinery to protect us. We don't want to accept that it happens on purpose, that Nature has a cycle that we can't see. We think we need to see everything to be above it. Wanting to be above and not part of requires separation; separation requires resistance.

Oddly enough, I remembered my drunken walk down the street with friends. We weren't human then, we were animals and unthinking. Is that why we were enjoying ourselves? There was no thinking about stress, or wondering where the next meal was coming from or trying to solve world hunger. There were no machines to rage against, only the alcohol that brought us to that baser state. Resisting is hard work, and we didn't work against anything that night. Did we sway like the wind, and become part of it in our drunkenness?

Sometimes I think human beings would be happier if we didn't try to think all the time. Most people, when looking for an escape, look to something that wipes out their brain: hard liquor, drugs, physical sports, adrenaline rushes. Berry wanted us to work with our hands so we could see and feel the end product. See and feel, not think about. We had to think to invent the factory. We had to think to make war. We had to think to globalize. We have to think to resist. Do we have to think to survive?