SOURCE: "An Ignored Meaning of the West," in Western American Literature, Vol. III, No. 1, May, 1968, pp. 51-9.

[Lyon is the former editor of Western American Literature and author of the pioneering 1973 study Frank Waters. In the following essay, which was first presented in October 1967 at the annual meeting of the Western Literature Association in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he discusses Waters's understanding of the different ways in which the West's immense space affects individuals, noting Waters's belief in "its psychic effect upon a people."]

It has become a critical commonplace, and a valid one, that much of American literature draws meaning from the contrast between culture and wildness. This juxtaposition of the great wild land and its original inhabitants with the recently implanted Anglo-Saxon civilization (which may be used for purposes ranging from humorous to satiric to deeply philosophical) is perhaps nowhere more fruitful than in the literature of the American West. For sensitive writers who want to say something important about the quality of life in their culture, and for writers who have fitted themselves into the patterns of western nature (instead of observing from outside), the primitive operates somewhat like the sea of Melville—a constant of absolute truth, standing behind the surfaces [Herman] of new societies and available as a Thoreauvian "realometer."

This contrast is often worked in the terms of primitivism; and the Indian, the real westerner, naturally figures as a prominent reference point. This is the way John Mathews puts it in Wah' Kon-Tah:

… the ubiquitous white man, in his inscrutable desire to proclaim his presence, slaughtered wild life. The great stretches of prairie and the wild blackjack hills seemed to inspire in him consciousness of his inferiority, and he shouted his presence and his worth to the silent world that seemed to ignore him.

Where the Indian passed in dignity, disturbing nothing and leaving Nature as he had found her; with nothing to record his passage, except a footprint or a broken twig, the white man plundered and wasted and shouted; frightening the silences with his great, braying laughter and his cursing. He was the atom of steam that had escaped from the pressure of the European social system, and he expanded in this manner under the torch of Liberty.

We tend, I think, to discount this sort of writing in favor of less fervent comparisons, perhaps out of a guilty but submerged realization that the ecological sins Mathews summarizes are real and abundantly visible. More significantly, we simply have not conceived that we could learn anything important in a positive way from the Indian. I am speaking here of a general cultural bias and purposeful ignorance as well as a critical preference for sophistication. In opposition to this unquestionably dominant view I would like to offer a brief, didactic gloss; and I shall take as the basis for my discussion a theme that pervades the work of Frank Waters, who more than any other Western writer has seen through to the central philosophical contrast between Indian and White. I say "didactic" because I think Waters means this theme to speak directly and helpfully to our ascendant white civilization and because I think it does.

John Joseph Mathews' white man or somewhat milder variants of him are found in the strangest places. Even a poetic spirit like Thomas Wolfe, fresh from the friendly trees of the rolling hills of the East, reacted to the West like this [in a letter to Elizabeth Nowell (June 7, 1938), quoted from Joseph M. Flora, Vardis Fisher, 1965]:

What I saw … is the abomination of desolation: an enormous desert bounded by infinitely far-away mountains that you never get to, and little pitiful blistered towns huddled down in the most abject loneliness underneath the huge light and scale and weather and the astounding brightness and dimensions of everything—all given a kind of tremendousness and terror and majesty….

This selection can serve well enough as a type specimen of the discomfort most of us newcomer white easterners have felt in the immensities of the arid West—with such notable exceptions of course, as Joseph Wood Krutch and Edward Abbey. This is the tension that worked and works on us. Frank Waters describes it this way in The Colorado:

For to us … the haunting cry of space still and forever rings in our ears. The same vast loneliness engulfs us. We have spanned the horizons and the seas three thousand miles apart. Our towns dot the valleys, bestride the rivers, cling even to the mountainsides. Still tormented, we are driven forward and back by a gnawing restlessness. We can find no peace, no rest. The immense space conquered outside has only crawled inside us.

This compulsive conquering—restless movement betraying inner discontent and emptiness—is the way we work on Nature. The end result, in Frank Waters' words, is that "We cannot abide ourselves." That is the way Nature—our inner aspect of Nature—turns us back.

It is clear that Frank Waters opted out of this frenetic war and developed instead a sensitivity to the earth, and to use his phrase, "its psychic effect upon a people" [Masked Gods].

[In a footnote, Lyon continues: "In a letter dated February 5, 1968, Mr. Waters has interestingly elaborated this point: 'John Milton has stated in his South Dakota Review that my handling of Indian values with so-called mystical overtones arouses a great deal of resentment. I think he is right. Anything that remotely suggests what we call "occult" or "mystic" is anathema. This is natural for an excessively rational, pragmatic, and "practical" people like us. Of the long spectrum of living relationships we limit ourselves to that short fact-section admitted to our rational consciousness. A few of us relate to the animal kingdom, still fewer with "green thumbs" have made a connection with the plant kingdom, and very few indeed with the living earth itself. This restricted view accounts for our phenomenal rape of America, our destruction of "inanimate" nature for our material ends.'

'Mysticism is little but recognition of that large spectrum lying beyond our present small fact-section. Nothing mysterious at all. No spirits floating in the air. But because it lies outside our realm of observable fact we relegate it to fancy. And we positively can't stomach the beliefs of those who have achieved it—the Indian tribes we almost completely exterminated, and the peoples of the Far East, or those crackpots who write about them in their own terms.']

The people are the Indian tribes of the Southwest he has studied and lived with, and his sensitivity has deepened and clarified his insights into white western civilization. The pattern, perhaps simplified and no doubt foreshortened, goes like this: when man works close to the realities of rock and sky, earth and aspen, the mystic spirit of place inevitably flows into him. Once man gets past isolation, he achieves membership in the glorious plenitude and harmony of the wild earth. The white man's fragmented and fearful individualism and his drives against Nature are seen for what they are—a spiteful renunciation of membership. His acquisitiveness, speed of movement, domination—the whole spectrum of extrinsic non-values—fall into perspective when viewed as the behavior of a spiritual child who simply will not give up the egocentric and artificial creation, the self. This "self" is inevitably and contentiously opposed to the Other, the not-Me. This is one of the fundamental dualistic premises of western philosophy; and this dualism, in my opinion, is responsible for our typical white man approach to wild nature. It finds expression in the ultimate dissatisfaction Frank Waters talks about, the emptiness we will come to after we have conquered space outside ourselves. It may also explain a good deal about anthropocentrism and racism, as well as our breaking of Nature to patterns of short-term material benefit.

There is something to be said for another way of looking at the world. It is interesting to consider how Nature seems to one who has transcended the made-up dualistic categories of self and other and lost the itch to contend against the flow of things. Frank Waters' most fully developed white character, (both in the literary and philosophical senses) Helen Chalmers [from The Woman at Otowi Crossing], comes to this:

Every day now Helen's sense of its reality sharpened: that one great unity of all creation, imbued with one consciousness and enfused with one power, of which everything in the universe was an embodied part. Before its irreducible reality her illusions of temporal time, of individual separateness, vanished. There was no "dead" matter. Everything was alive, differentiated not in kind but only in the degree of sentiency with which it reflected this all-pervading consciousness…. Each cell, each atom and solar system repeated in its constant movement the same great in-breathing and out-breathing rhythm of the whole, the pulse of life itself.

Helen Chalmers has passed by three of the most cherished western white philosophical keystones: the idea of linear time, the idea of the separate self, and the notion that there are easily definable categories for living things and dead things. This is a beautiful adumbration of the mystic monism which animates Frank Waters' outlook. Now the immense West that awes a newcomer is Helen Chalmers' home, and space does not irritate her soul.

We cannot tell in explicit steps exactly how she got that way, but two details of her external situation are readily apparent: She is close to the earth, receptive, and she is close to the Indians who are still responsive to its rhythm. When she arrives at this spiritual level (which is comparative to Buddhist satori) she discovers that the withdrawn, mostly silent Indians around her have been living according to the harmony she has just now found. One old man, Facundo, recognizes her spiritual growth and nurtures it in a seemingly offhand way, like a guru who thinks it perfectly natural that people should come to see things as they, after all, are. In Masked Gods, to enlarge upon the East-West parallel, Waters draws on many likenesses between Oriental and American Indian mysticism to show that the perceptions of the basic truths are the same worldwide. This emphasis on the worldwide connection of mystical knowledge gives an interesting perspective on our own culture, making our dualistic preoccupations, our measurements and categories, seem like temporary aberrations. As a matter of fact, we may be beginning to perceive certain inadequacies in our old philosophical keystones ourselves, as Waters points out in discussing the insights of our physics pioneers, working (perhaps more than coincidentally) in the Four Corners area.

I say "perhaps more than coincidentally," but Frank Waters shuns the qualifier. The belief that a psychic spirit of place can be regenerating runs through both of what I think are Waters' best books, The Woman at Otowi Crossing and The Man Who Killed the Deer. As noted, Helen Chalmers loses her former concept of self, one that quite plainly suffices for most of us, in order to gain a splendid vision of unity. She attains, quite suddenly, an attunement with her environment, a relationship with Nature and the universe, that normally is accessible only through long meditation and concentration of psychic power. However, she does not therefore begin an explosively fruitful or productive life socially. And if the idea of timeless mystical unity seems rather simple or easily grasped on first reading, the difficulty Helen has in holding on to it ought to dispel this notion. There is a real distance to be bridged here. Helen provides excitement for a few, perhaps a disturbing sense of mystery for others; but from the ordinary day-to-day pragmatic point of view, her discovered truth does not seem valuable in her life with other whites. Her closest relationship, which was naturally based on the concept of separate self-ness, fades in the light of her new mystical insight. This probably tells more about the society in which she lives than about her insight, despite the halting attempts of some rationalistic people to comprehend a place for satori in the western world.

The case is different for Martiniano in The Man Who Killed the Deer. As we know, he begins the novel as a sort of "half-baked" white man. He has been sent to the white man's school and has picked up enough of the white man's sense of time and sense of individual selfhood to efface, temporarily as it turns out, his own Indian spiritual patterns. Martiniano's painful growth to the tribal demands is quite beautifully illuminated against a legal-spiritual conflict between the white man (Forest Service) and the Indians over the ownership and management of the immemorially sacred Dawn Lake. The meanings here, as in all of Frank Waters' books, are clearly drawn. Though the ultimate doctrine may be what we usually call esoteric, Waters is never arcane about it. He speaks plainly, in sequential language that anybody can understand, thus linking the two worlds of his experience. For instance,

Who knew what o'clock it was? There were no battered clocks, no dollar Ingersolls that kept time. The people likely couldn't read them anyway. They had no sense of time, these people. To them time was no moving flow to be measured, ticked out and struck at funny intervals. Time was all one, ever-present and indestructible. It was they who moved through it.

Or again,

Nothing is simple and alone. We are not separate and alone. The breathing mountains, the living stones, each blade of grass, the clouds, the rain, each star, the beasts, the birds, and the invisible spirits of the air—we are all one, indivisible. Nothing that any of us does but affects us all.

But it takes Martiniano a while to see this correctly. He does move from the doubting, cynical position of the white man to the faithful stance of a believer: "… little by little the richness and the wonder and the mystery of life stole in upon him."

But although he senses the living world, he still lacks a framework for his faith. He is still not a member of the tribe, and he retains a prideful selfness. After he fails to find the needed framework on the Peyote Road (which Waters apparently views here as an unnecessary and perhaps ultimately harmful short-cut) and after his pride is subdued in a public whipping and broken in a public failure to climb the ceremonial pine trunk, only then is Martiniano ready for membership. His readiness is signaled by his ability to respond to the earth rhythm which leads him to the injured son of his friend Palemon. There is a fitness, a fullness of reciprocity in his completion of the circle which Palemon began (early in the novel) by rescuing him. This corresponds nicely with Martiniano's final awareness of the wholeness of things. Thus, structurally and thematically, The Man Who Killed the Deer is a mandala.

In the end, of course, Martiniano achieves his spiritual rebirth; and he directly affirms his new-found values in determining that his son will go through the long kiva initiation. The mystical tribal unity, unity with all creation, will be perpetuated. At this point a theme which is also evident in Masked Gods and The Book of the Hopi, one which has obvious applications for us, is stated: the spiritual Indians, true to the cosmic rhythms of the American continent, at home in its wilderness and peaceful among themselves and with others, are the righteous remnant that could save us if we had ears for the message. The trader Rodolfo Byers, a man with primitivistic sympathies yet a well-guarded white consciousness, too, reflects:

But perhaps there would still be time … to learn from these people before they pass from this earth which was theirs and is now all men's, the one truth that is theirs and shall be all men's—the simple and monstrous truth of mankind's solidarity with all that breathes and does not breathe, all that has lived and shall live again upon the unfathomed breast of the earth….

There are a few interesting signs that perhaps we are beginning to comprehend at least parts of the message. William Eastlake, in a recent review ["The Forked-Tongue Syndrome," Book Week, New York World Journal Tribune (29 January 1967)] of a book on the Nez Percé, concluded a challenge to racism with the admonition, "Learn, Whitey. Learn." Racism is certainly part of the white man's problem, and Frank Waters does not shy away from it—his succinct descriptions of the Reverend Chivington at Sand Creek, just for one example, are a pretty chilling indictment. But I think that the philosophical insight that Waters portrays as central to the Indian mind encompasses the idea of tolerance and gives it a solid foundation. It is a deep brotherhood of spirit that goes beyond human beings alone and demands more than forbearance to learn. It is essentially Emerson's "Each and all"—a sort of native western transcendentalism.

In a time when a standard cliché-question is whether our technology will slowly render the earth totally polluted and uninhabitable or allow us to destroy ourselves more quickly in a bomb flash, Waters hopes [in "Two Views of Nature: White and Indian," South Dakota Quarterly (May 1964)] for an infusion of mythical and mystical intuitive truth, and a reconciliation between it and the White Way, leading to a "fuller perspective." This, he believes, can be the great contribution of the native Americans: at the last moment, seemingly, a psychic force and meaning of the place that have informed their lives through the ages may be the means of saving the conquerors from themselves. In our restless emptiness, out of our "extroverted rationality" and "monstrous materiality," says Waters [in his Mysticism and Witchcraft], we have built a civilization that by its quantitative standards is certainly impressive. But our showy surface culture is for him meretricious because of our fundamental spiritual lack.

It should be emphasized that Frank Waters is not advocating a blood-consciousness that will somehow erase the accretions of civilization and take us back to a more natural mythic past. He has described his approach [in Masked Gods] as "not in the romantic or academic tradition," and I take this to mean neither by heart nor by head exclusively. We should, to put it simply, find our own access to the Way, not imitate Indians. In this respect, Waters' criticism of D. H. Lawrence is illuminating. Lawrence's message, as Waters satirically paraphrases it, is "Why, go back to the old magic…. Back to the instinctual, the intuitive. Back to the deep, dark wisdom of the blood." Lawrence's mistake was that "he did not know enough about Indian ceremonialism." He had oversimplified the Indian Road of Life, had failed to realize that it accounts for the eternal push-pull between the conscious ego and the instincts, that it recognizes integration and harmony of these seemingly disparate elements as a stage in the growth of membership of the human being in the universe. Lawrence was too quick or too cultish in his primitivism, and Waters saw his novel The Plumed Serpent as a "pattern for one of the greatest holocausts in history," inflicted by madmen burning up with racist blood-feeling, a mythology of Aryan superiority. It is clear, then, that Frank Waters does not want us to learn regression.

Although he does not propose his ideas as a blanket solution, his best characters have won through to the connected, mystic brotherhood of the life stance he favors. To present a blueprint in the manner of a lecturer would be at least a partial denial of the insight itself.

Meanwhile, our bloodlessly rational (for its operators, that is) machine keeps on rolling. One of our national magazines, [Look, in a 30 May 1967] article titled "Our New Western Frontier," extolls our military activities and preparations in Asia, saying, "The Far East is now our Far West." Apparently the restless emptiness is still with us; in this respect we have not learned.

At that rate, under that philosophy, the circle of our way will remain uncompleted. It might even spiral regressively. Another possibility, explored in a soberly prescriptive vein by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, is that we could use chemicals to break down the imprisoning walls of the western ego and its rigidly dualistic formulations. But if Frank Waters has brought a true message out of what he calls "the crucible of conflict," the mystic core of the continent known as the Four Corners, chemicals are not needed. What he has to say about the Road of Life was formed under the influence of wilderness—high places in Colorado and the great sipapu of the Grand Canyon and the immense desert stretches, and it has been shaped in the presence of the ancient and peaceful harmony between the land and its original inhabitants. It seems to ring true with the spirit of the place.