Current mood:

contemplative

A passage
that convinced me that I am not an intellectual. People who have read the sequel to Pirsig's all too famous book might recognize this. Don't bother reading it if you don't plan to read the book. Nothing can be more innocuous than a surface reading of this passage...

" In a society that thoroughly distrusts authority of any sort, he had native personal magnetism that singled him out in any group. In a society that exalts moderation and the easiest way, he was turbulent and could act violently upon occasion. In a society that praises a pliant personality that "talks lots"- that is, that chatters in a friendly fashion- he was scornful and aloof. Zuni's only reaction to such personalities is to brand them as witches. He was said to be peering through a window from outside, and this is a sure mark of a witch, At any rate he got drunk one day and boasted that they could not kill him. He was taken before the war priests who hung him by his thumbs from the rafters till he should confess to his witchcraft. This is the usual procedure in a charge of witchcraft. However he dispatched a messenger to the government troops. When they came his shoulders were already crippled for life, and the officer of law was left with no recourse but to imprison the war priests who had been responsible for the enormity. One of the war priests was probably the most respected and important in recent Zuni history and when he returned after imprisonment in the state penitentiary he never resumed his priestly offices. He regarded his power as broken. It was a revenge that is probably unique in Zuni history. It involved, of course, a challenge to the priesthoods, against whom the witch by his act openly aligned himself.

The course of his life in the forty years that followed this defiance was not, however, what we might easily predict. A witch is not barred from his membership in cult groups because he has been condemned, and the way to recognition lay through such activity. He possessed a remarkable verbal memory and a sweet singing voice. He learned unbelievable stores of mythology, of esoteric ritual, of cult songs. Many hundreds of pages of stories and ritual poetry were taken down from his dictation before he died, and he regarded his songs as much more extensive. He became indispensable in ceremonial life and before he died was the governor of Zuni. The congenital bent of his personality threw him into irreconcilable conflict with his society, and he solved his dilemma by turning an incidental talent to account. As we might well expect, he was not a happy man. As governor of Zuni and high in his cult groups, a marked man in his own community, he was obsessed by death. He was a cheated man in the midst of a mildly happy populace.

It is easy to imagine the life he might have lived among the Plains Indians where every institution favoured the traits that were native to him. The personal authority, the turbulence, the scorn, would all have been honoured in the career he could have made his own. The unhappiness that was inseparable from his temperament as a successful priest and governor of Zuni would have no place as a war chief of the Cheyenne; it was not a function of the traits of his native endowment but of the standards of the culture in which he found no outlet for his native responses."