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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/588234.Ceremony?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Ceremony" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1176060093m/588234.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/588234.Ceremony?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Ceremony</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/29581.Leslie_Marmon_Silko">Leslie Marmon Silko</a><br/><br/>
  <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/10990622?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
  rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>	<br/>	I loved the smooth montage of time in this book. It is so natural and instinctive, just like real life. At least in my life, I perceive time in content-based manner. I cannot remember happenings based on their dates because they don’t feel important. This perception of time is characteristic of seeing time as memory. It is different from seeing time as a linear progression of repetitive containers (month contains 30-odd days, one day contains 24 hours, one hour contains 60 minutes…). I feel this way of looking at the world is a key to being human being. It promotes a kind of instinctive phenomenology that gives us self-reflection, self-awareness. Quantity and quality are not on the same axis despite the notion that they are opposite poles of one attribute – product of a fixed amount of resources. What I am trying to say is that I am troubled by the abstract constructions in this world that substitutes for something in my instinctive nature. It is the same thing as when in the book Josiah said thus; “Cattle are like any living thing. If you separate them from the land for too long, keep them in barns and corrals, they loose something. Their stomachs get to where they can only eat rolled oats and dried alfalfa. When you run them loose again, they go running all over. They are scared because the land is unfamiliar, and they are lost. They don’t stop being scared either, even when they look quiet and they quit running” (page 74). Biologically the fixed diet of cattle decreases the variety of bacteria aiding in their digestion. In the cattle guts, there is no more diversity, flux of bacterial “seasons.” This sterile state of stasis is wholly dependent on the way the cattle are taken care of. When farmers raise cattle without understanding them as animals, but just for the meat, to them the cows are no more than empty, repetitive containers of meat, milk. In long term, adaptability fades away from their genes because they are outmoded in such environment. But it’s important to hold from claiming this practice unnatural, unwholesome and against nature. It is perfectly natural because they exist in nature. It’s just a process of change in their existence from roaming animals to captive animals, a shift from a being of the land to a being of captors.<br/>	Can’t you find familiarity in the above quote? Don’t you think we are a bit like the cattle? Here is a proof: More and more of us are scared even when we are quiet. More and more feel a general sense of doom, a lost feeling that something somewhere is horribly wrong. And for this fear we call anxiety disorder, many of us turn to alleviating the symptom with chemical diets. To Tayo and his peer, “liquor was medicine for the anger that made them hurt, for the pain of the loss, medicine for tight bellies and chocked-up throats” (page 40) from a war over abstract constructions with invisible (too fast to see) bullets that maul down soldiers as randomly as statistics. I have instinctively felt there is some truth to anxiety, that there is something real in the fear that people dismiss as imbalance of brain chemistry, blaming failure of flesh. I have felt that we are fearful because we are lost, that the anxiety is the anxiety of our plant, that it’s the way it communicate with us of its impending doom that we are causing. Of course this thinking is from reading too much science-fiction books. But it is a kind of gut feeling, and like all inspired literatures the human mind created, this feeling seem to be have metaphorical validity. The last part of the book was a good example of this trust in personal gut feelings. Tayo “arrived at a convergence of patterns; he could see them clearly now. The stars had always been with them, existing beyond memory, and they were all held together there.”…”They had seen mountains shift and rivers change course and even disappear back into the earth; but always there were the stars” (page 254).
  <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/62249?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

YangYi's review
rating:

I loved the smooth montage of time in this book. It is so natural and instinctive, just like real life. At least in my life, I perceive time in content-based manner. I cannot remember happenings based on their dates because they don’t feel important. This perception of time is characteristic of seeing time as memory. It is different from seeing time as a linear progression of repetitive containers (month contains 30-odd days, one day contains 24 hours, one hour contains 60 minutes…). I feel this way of looking at the world is a key to being human being. It promotes a kind of instinctive phenomenology that gives us self-reflection, self-awareness. Quantity and quality are not on the same axis despite the notion that they are opposite poles of one attribute – product of a fixed amount of resources. What I am trying to say is that I am troubled by the abstract constructions in this world that substitutes for something in my instinctive nature. It is the same thing as when in the ...more
I loved the smooth montage of time in this book. It is so natural and instinctive, just like real life. At least in my life, I perceive time in content-based manner. I cannot remember happenings based on their dates because they don’t feel important. This perception of time is characteristic of seeing time as memory. It is different from seeing time as a linear progression of repetitive containers (month contains 30-odd days, one day contains 24 hours, one hour contains 60 minutes…). I feel this way of looking at the world is a key to being human being. It promotes a kind of instinctive phenomenology that gives us self-reflection, self-awareness. Quantity and quality are not on the same axis despite the notion that they are opposite poles of one attribute – product of a fixed amount of resources. What I am trying to say is that I am troubled by the abstract constructions in this world that substitutes for something in my instinctive nature. It is the same thing as when in the book Josiah said thus; “Cattle are like any living thing. If you separate them from the land for too long, keep them in barns and corrals, they loose something. Their stomachs get to where they can only eat rolled oats and dried alfalfa. When you run them loose again, they go running all over. They are scared because the land is unfamiliar, and they are lost. They don’t stop being scared either, even when they look quiet and they quit running” (page 74). Biologically the fixed diet of cattle decreases the variety of bacteria aiding in their digestion. In the cattle guts, there is no more diversity, flux of bacterial “seasons.” This sterile state of stasis is wholly dependent on the way the cattle are taken care of. When farmers raise cattle without understanding them as animals, but just for the meat, to them the cows are no more than empty, repetitive containers of meat, milk. In long term, adaptability fades away from their genes because they are outmoded in such environment. But it’s important to hold from claiming this practice unnatural, unwholesome and against nature. It is perfectly natural because they exist in nature. It’s just a process of change in their existence from roaming animals to captive animals, a shift from a being of the land to a being of captors.
Can’t you find familiarity in the above quote? Don’t you think we are a bit like the cattle? Here is a proof: More and more of us are scared even when we are quiet. More and more feel a general sense of doom, a lost feeling that something somewhere is horribly wrong. And for this fear we call anxiety disorder, many of us turn to alleviating the symptom with chemical diets. To Tayo and his peer, “liquor was medicine for the anger that made them hurt, for the pain of the loss, medicine for tight bellies and chocked-up throats” (page 40) from a war over abstract constructions with invisible (too fast to see) bullets that maul down soldiers as randomly as statistics. I have instinctively felt there is some truth to anxiety, that there is something real in the fear that people dismiss as imbalance of brain chemistry, blaming failure of flesh. I have felt that we are fearful because we are lost, that the anxiety is the anxiety of our plant, that it’s the way it communicate with us of its impending doom that we are causing. Of course this thinking is from reading too much science-fiction books. But it is a kind of gut feeling, and like all inspired literatures the human mind created, this feeling seem to be have metaphorical validity. The last part of the book was a good example of this trust in personal gut feelings. Tayo “arrived at a convergence of patterns; he could see them clearly now. The stars had always been with them, existing beyond memory, and they were all held together there.”…”They had seen mountains shift and rivers change course and even disappear back into the earth; but always there were the stars” (page 254)....less

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