I justify to myself being spendy at the gift shops of museums, national parks, other nonprofits, etc, as providing ‘support’. Either way both of us benefit and from a utilitarian perspective that is a good thing, questions about ‘true altruism’ or other abstractions aside. So I don’t sweat it too much.
I picked up American Indian Myths and Legends (editor/compilers Erdoes and Ortiz, Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library) book at the Joshua Tree NP gift shop. This is a book seemingly tailored to my interests–sociology, mythology, anthropology, a generous helping of annotations from scholars, a clean minimalist book cover that would pair in a lovely way with other volumes of the same series on my bookshelf, sturdy paperback. I do like the use of large blocks of pattern and the sidebar summary in this Pantheon printing; the entire effect is charming, gives a clean ‘universal’ impression, free from proprietary this or that or over-reliance on one person’s interpretation based on their illustration. Anyway, I’ve been picking through it between other books and I last night got to the portion on war-and-valor-related myths, the introduction of which mentions the coup stick, which triggered a memory that has not been unearthed for probably thirty years. Proust’s madeleines and involuntary memory again. I was familiar with this concept. I had heard about it, a time buried in the distant past. I had not since read about it, so I was inundated with that-timeness; I was for that moment a schoolchild in awe of the ways of others, so different from my own that they seemed inherently mystical.
The untouched memories
These are my memories before I taint them with further research, using the terms my memory uses (i.e. what I would have learned as a Texas schoolchild in the 90s):
A notion of a special “coo stick”. I visualize something like Sokka-from-Avatar’s war club, an embedded jewel the stick cups like a wave. A sense of an Indian warrior sitting straight and proud, very proper, on a horse, riding up to a white invader, tapping them gently on the head, and bolting. No sense of hurry or danger from the Indian. Serenity and poise, making a game of something the White man treats as deadly serious. A child’s budding sense of ‘are we the baddies?’ I am in a classroom. Classroom walls, the bright primary colors, construction-paper cutout headings on bulletin boards. When I visualize-read the term “coo stick” so Anglicized it further triggers the memory–this must be phrase I had only ever heard, specifically.
Rarity of experience
I grapple with involuntary memory quite a bit. That, in itself, is not infrequent for me. It is however unusual for me to access a bit of intellectual trivia that has not been touched, as far as I can sense, in decades, especially when it resides within the realm of things I regularly explore (in this case sociology/mythology/history etc), so I want to sit with it a while, turn it over in my hands, before I go off on a reading spree to update my knowledge.
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