The Ten Rules of Being Human

The Ten Rules of Being Human are as true as they are good life lessons. #1, #6, and #7 can be categorized as physical truths because #1 looks at the body, #6 speaks about people’s preferences towards locations, and #7 explains the looks that we can have about other people. We keep our body until we die, no matter how much we like or hate it (#1); “here” and “there” don’t have much difference between them when we find ourselves wanting to be at another “there” when we are at a certain “here” (#6); when we love or hate people, those people become mirrors of the qualities we love or hate about ourselves (#7). #2, 3, 4, and 5 may be called the learning truths because of the lessons they portray. We are constantly learning lessons in life (#2); there are no mistakes in life, only the failed attempts that are part of the ultimate solution (#3); the lessons we learn come at us many times in various ways until we finally learn it and move on to the next lesson (#4); as long as you live, you constantly learn lessons (#5). #8, 9, and 10 can be called personal truths because they portray essential truths a person should know about himself/herself. Life is only what you see and make of it and what you do is up to you (#8); all the answers you will ever need come from you and your own experiences (#9); even if your soul may live, you will eventually forget all these rules when you die (#10). If I was asked if there was any rule I would remove from the list, I would not remove any but I would add a new rule, nonetheless. It was a great little quote in a swimming pool at East Stroudsburg College: “Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional.” Feeling small amounts of pain is completely unavoidable, but having to feel anything further is avoidable as long as you can make sense of what can potentially cause you pain to that extent. But sometimes, people don’t realize that and hurt themselves anyway, and that is just a natural part of being human.

Pros and Cons Part 1

So far in Ceremony, one specific detail about the story confuses me, and that is the breaks and transitions between the present and past in the story. For example, there are instances in which the present may show Tayo taking care of his animals or riding his mule, and then suddenly the story shifts to a past event for Tayo before, during, or even after the war. The events are mostly used correctly to illustrate a point about Tayo or someone/something else, but sometimes they appear in the story unexpectedly and without warning, and I require a minute or two to try and put the pieces of Tayo's chronological puzzle in the right places and place myself in the correct position in the puzzle. How should I be able to notice an important detail about Tayo in the past or present if I am constantly thrown between both of them?

One that I did notice and actually like, on the other hand, was the inclusion of old Native American rituals and ideas into the conversations about and modernized look of the the present-day world. This mainly comes into play when Tayo has trouble first getting over his sickness. Of course if he is sick, then someone should do something about it, but I find it odd that old Grandma (unknown if they are actually related so far) first suggests bringing an old medicine man. Maybe the point of it was to try and get him to remember his heritage or maybe his younger days and have that hopefully get him to feel better, but I can't say for sure. Anyway, the medicine man talks to Tayo about his experience in the war in addition to healing him, and then Tayo thinks about how the medicine man would react to the images of men killed with bullet wounds and mortars. Being a person who mainly believes in the old traditions, the medicine man would have only believed that the only ways a man could die was through old age, disease, or having an upfront confrontation in battle and losing. Tayo thinks that, if the medicine man was in his place on the front lines, he would see all those corpses and believe they were all killed by upfront confrontation. I find this to be an interesting way of looking at a modernized world, and I am pretty sure that I will see more of this as I progress through the story.

Drought of ideas

         *  In my second reading session with Ceremony, I came across an interesting little poem that was somehow linked to Tayo. The poem tells what I think is part of a tale, but I am not sure if the tale will have an ending or if it really is a tale. But I digress. The poem tells of two sisters, Reed Woman who spends all day playing and bathing in a river, and Corn Woman who works all day in the crop fields. Corn Woman becomes furious with Reed Woman and scolds her for doing nothing but playing in the river, and Reed Woman goes away. However, Reed Woman was responsible for the rain in the summertime, so when she goes away and stops playing in the river, she takes the rain away with her and all the plants dry up and die, leaving the people and animals hungry and parched.

            The story may be interesting, but what does it have to do with Tayo? Well, during his time in the war, the weather must have been really rainy because, when he was praying, he only prayed for dry air and an end to the rain. He was even irritated by it enough to damn it. When he came back from the war, there was a drought in his homeland for the past six years. Coincidence or not, Tayo believed he was to blame for the absence of rain in his homeland for so long, leaving his animals at home with a decreasing supply of fresh food. They could have had a worse situation, however; they could have had to feel everything that Tayo had to feel when he returned from the war.

Let the Ceremony Begin!

                In the beginning of Ceremony, a novel written by Leslie Marmon Silko, I was introduced with three short poems, the first two of which include the ideas of thinking and stories. The first poem shortly talks about what could be three primal gods, their creation of everything, and what one of those gods is thinking about now; the second poem briefly explains the dangers of belittling stories. At first glance with these two poems, I thought that the story would be told in first-person, but I was soon corrected when I began the actual story. The third poem, on the other hand, only says a single sentence in four lines: "The only cure I know is a good ceremony, that's what she said." I wasn't sure at first, but I thought that third poem would show itself within the story at some point. In some way, I also believed that poem made sense with a look at our Christian religion: when we are sick, we look towards God to help us get better and, in some cases, we receive the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. We go through a ceremony so that we may be cured of our illnesses.

                 When the story begins, the curtains open up on a man named Tayo who is having a nightmare. From how much I read my first time, he is likely suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, possibly from being in a war. The narrator shows a symptom a PTSD through an event during his time at war. I do find it odd, however, that Tayo hallucinates and sees a friend of his (of all people) in place of a dead Japanese soldier. Since he and his friend are African American, they would probably look nothing like the Japanese man, so how can Tayo see his friend, even if he is hallucinating, in place of someone so completely unlike them? I, having no experience whatsoever with anything like heat or dehydration-induced visions or mirages, have absolutely no idea how something like that can happen.