Because I'd heard the rest of the Story, I couldn't be really happy and thankful on Thanksgiving Day. On the contrary, there was a part of me that became really sad and really angry every fourth Thursday in November, whenever I remembered the Story.
But today I'm happier and more thankful than I am other days, because I heard one particular person is happy and thankful today, even in the midst of many days of much sadness and much anger.
I thank her for that. And I'm thankful for her. And that she lived to tell her Story. May her tribe increase. And may her Story become part of ours and our childrens'. Because it is.
This song/prayer (that's become part of our Thanksgiving Day tradition as kind of a carol) seems fitting:
Counterclockwise Circle Dance (Ly-O-Lay Ale Loya)
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Been thinking about this ever since...
In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop the evil.
According to the stories my ancestors told, it was the *good* person who kept his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. Their heroes had to find that secret place and assume the heart as their own in order to stop the evil.
And yet it's apparent, as one of our poets has pointed out, it remains "true of the normal heart" that "the error bred in the bone / Of each woman and each man / Craves what it cannot have, / Not universal love / But to be loved alone."
So I'm thinking, well, no wonder. I think we need to get our Stories straight.
Theme and variations. The Dakota legend strikes me as a variation of the vampire theme - immortality through heartlesness.
Western folklore is replete with the plight of the frozen, sequestered, or bewitched heart that only the hero can thaw, free, awaken.
Could Auden be suggesting that our natural souls (and who can blame them, really) is the deepest, stoniest well of all?
When I was one and twenty
I heard a wise man say
give crowns and pounds and guinneas
but not your heart away.
Of course the advice is ignored and the protagonist is well on his way to heartbreak, mortality, life. "Grace only works on those it finds dead enough to raise." Love slays, and saves.
When it comes to the affairs of the heart, any sort of advice, wise or otherwise, will invariably be heard by one so ensnared as a double-dog-dare.
Yeats says this, probably when he was two and forty:
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
Hell of a punchline, don't you think?
So tell me, please: Does Yeats expect a "No no never let it be!" or is it just me?
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