David Rothgery

Sabbatical Presentation (4/26/02) 

“Centers” 

Once, long ago, I went looking for my Center. I did not advertise it. There were those who had already begun to wonder about me.  A colleage suggested I start in the Center Building. But some concepts are too elegant to ignore.  “Center” is one such concept. 

My introduction to it was a film in which the word is never heard-- Little Big Man (based on the novel by Thomas Berger).  The main character, played by Dustin Hoffman,  is Jack Crabbe as a white man, Little Big Man as an Indian. Time and again, when he was most in need of it, he would return to his “center”--the tipi of his Cheyenne grandfather Old Lodgeskins.  Whenever Jack was not in the tipi, when he was selling snake oil, gunfighting as the “Soda Pop Kid,” trying to earn enough money to satisfy his termagant wife Olga, scouting for Custer’s cavalry, or fighting white men as a Cheyenne brave, he was dissolute, disoriented, disillusioned, anxious, addictive, and absurd, but when he returned each time to Old Lodgeskin’s tent, he would immediately be at peace.  “Hello, Grandfather,” he would say with a smile.  “Hello, my son,” his grandfather would answer, and they would sit in a kind of supreme serenity, until it was once again time for Jack to leave the tent and get caught up in the maelstrom of the world.

But it wasn’t till many years later--in reading John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks-- that I understood the phenomenon of Jack and his grandfather in the tipi as a “center” and began to explore and appreciate all that was contained in that word.  Lamenting not only the failure of the ghost dance--a months-long desperate attempt to bring back the dead (the slain fathers, uncles, brothers, and sons)--but, more tragically, the ensuing  slaughter of his people at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890, Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux holy man and visionary, remarked: 

When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the    butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the    crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young.  And I    can see that something else died there in the bloody snow and was buried    in the blizzard.  A people’s dream died there.  It was a beautiful dream.

And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth--you see    me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is    broken and scattered.  There is no center any longer. . . . (276)

There is no center any longer. . .” Had he been less metaphorical, he might have said:

 More of our Sioux people are dead than alive.  Our culture is being destroyed.   The buffalo are almost gone. The land that was our is no longer ours. Too many  of our  children no longer have fathers, our sisters no longer have brothers, our  wives no longer have  husbands. We do not know where our future lies, what  of our past will survive, etc. 

But if “center” as he used it is a metaphor, it is one which requires a greater rather than a lesser care in the examination of its meaning because it may define an essence, a reality, more comprehensively, more acutely than any lengthy, objective, literal description.

Some 100 years after the Wounded Knee tragedy, a scientist--a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to be more precise--wrote of a plight far less poignant, less urgent, but which, even so,  speaks to the same sense of frustration, of not-knowing our (all of humanity’s) “fit” in the universe expressed by Black Elk.   Steven Weinberg, in his Dreams of a Final Theory,  starts with a piece of chalk..    Beginning with the question of “Why is the chalk white?”  he works his way through a series of “Why” questions in physics, chemistry, and biology till he comes to the ultimate question which is the Why? pertaining to a final theory explaining all the rest: to a master-plan (a God?)--something other than randomness and chaos.  He writes in the prologue:

Our present theories are of only limited validity, still tentative and     incomplete. But behind them now and then we catch glimpses of a final    theory, one that would be of unlimited validity and entirely  satisfying in    its completeness and consistency. We search for universal truths about    nature, and, when we find them, we attempt to explain them by showing    how they can be deduced from deeper truths.  Think of  the  space of    scientific principles as being filled with arrows, pointing toward each    principle and away from the others by which it is explained.  These    arrows of explanation have already revealed a remarkable pattern:  they    do not form separate disconnected clumps, representing independent    sciences, and they do not wander aimlessly--rather they are all     connected, and if  followed backward they all seem to flow from a     common starting point. This starting point, to which all explanations may   be traced, is what I mean by a final theory.

A “common starting point.”  A beginning.  Perhaps even . . .  a “center”?  But Weinberg admonishes us that we do not yet have a final theory, nor are we likely to discover it soon. And, he wonders, “when we have our final theory, what will happen to science and to the human spirit?”

Thus, the title of his final chapter is no surprise--“So Is There a God?”--pointing clearly to Weinberg’s grasp of the implications.  A final theory explains not only the universe, but, the human spirit that gropes to understand that universe. His conclusion?--

. . . though we shall find beauty in the final laws of nature, we will find no   special status for life or intelligence. . . .no standards      of value and morality.  And so we will find no hint of any God who cares    about such things. (250)

A Native-American holy man who sees visions, a Nobel Prize physicist who   declares, “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless”  (255).  Indeed, the universe of physicists such as Weinberg, Hawking,  and Wheeler, may not even admit of a “center” in the spatial and temporal sense because it may very well be infinite. Where does one find a center in infinity?  To Weinberg, “the insights of the philosophers seem murky and inconsequential compared with the dazzling successes of physics and mathematics” (168).   What then would he say of mysticism, of vision quests?  Of the kind of “centers” for which Black Elk yearns?

Weinberg is not a visionary, nor was Black Elk a physicist. But were Black Elk alive and were the two to meet one day along the road, I can’t help but think there would be the profoundest respect between them.  Between two--seekers.

In my search for “centers,” I’ve come across many such seekers--a Wilder Penfield who reminded neurologists that the brain was not the mind, a Loren Eiseley who saw star throwers when other biologists saw only starfish, a Viktor Frankl whose psychology focused on a “will to meaning” rather than “a will to function,” a Steven Weinberg, whose physics recognizes the need of the human spirit to ask the big questions.

I met these seekers in libraries. But there were others, and this is some of what they told me about centers.

           Mircea Eliade (in the classic study of  the The Sacred and the Profane)--

The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world.  In the    homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is    possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany    reveals an absolute fixed point, a center. . . . It is for this reason that    religious man has always sought to fix his abode at the “center of the    world.”  If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded--and no world    can come to birth in the homogeneity and relativity of profane space.     The discovery or projection of a fixed point--the center--is equivalent to    the creation of the world. . . .  (21-22).  

Lao-Tzu (The Way and Its Power)--

  More words count less

Hold Fast to the Center. (V, 7) 

Wei-Ming, Tu (Centrality and Commonality )--

“Centrality. . . is that state of mind wherein one is absolutely     unperturbed by outside forces. But it is more than a psychological    concept of equilibrium since it is not so much an achieved ideal as a    given reality.  (WEI-Ming, TU, Centrality and Commonality, 20) 

Arthur Amiotte (in “The Road to the Center”)--

In the mythic beginning of the Lakota world, its sacred and temporal    dimensions were one, and the Lakota still recognizes himself as a     microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm.  If he can  live in concert with    the holy rhythm of that which causes all life to move, he is then assisting    in the ongoing process of creation.  To maintain his participation in this    process, he needs annually to make the journey to the Center of the    World, which is the place of his beginning and the origin of all things.    ( 246) 

N. Scott Momaday (in The Man Made of Words)-

  You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is    because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything    tries to be round.  In the old days when we were a strong and happy    people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and    so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished.  The flowering    tree was the living center of the hoop. (Black Elk, quoted 25) 

Elaine Jahner (in “Spiritual Landscape”)--

The actual crying for a dream occurred in isolation usually atop a high    butte or hill.  Upon arrival at the chosen place, the seeker ritually prepared   an area of earth making it a “center of the earth.” (202) 

Dennis and Barbara Tedlock (Teachings from the American Earth)--

The center of the axis. . . is the point  where all the specific attributes of    the four directions meet.  The male and female, warm and cold,     benevolent and harmful oppositions of the North-South, East-West    axes are joined into one whole at the center.  By having passed through    the cycle of the four directions, the child is prepared  to enter the center    which  is more than the coming together of all the earthly qualities, for   these qualities themselves come down from the upper world and up    from the underworld through this point. . . .  The center is the focal    point of another axis as well. . . . This is the axis of transcendence which    is attained through the vision quest and which constitutes the real    birth of man.  (Ridington and Ridington 198)

Dennis Tedlock’s analysis of the Zuni storyteller is entitled Finding the Center.

And V.S. Naipaul, who this past year won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a book with the title Finding the Center in which he notes that the people of the Ivory Coast were, like himself, “trying to find order in the world, looking for the center. . . ”  (ix).  

Even in the field of physics there are those, such as Amit Goswami, a former professor of physics of the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at the University of Oregon, and now a senior resident research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, who believe that consciousness, not matter, is the primary “stuff” of the universe and is the only way out of the inconsistencies of quantum mechanics and “von Neumann’s chain,” and, therefore, the proper direction to go for arriving at the “final theory” that Weinberg seeks. Goswami writes of “exalted experiences,” “quantum jumps”. . .to a “new, never-before-manifested [state] of possibility” described by T.S. Eliot as “the still point” (194,225-227).  

Indeed, though “center”--the psycho-social-spiritual-figurative “center” drawing metaphorically on the spatial-mechanical-physical-mathematical “center”-- is to be found most explicitly in Native American and Eastern religions, but it is virtually everywhere and its significations converge around certain shared properties. “Centers” are more of

Enlightenment/Wisdom/Insight than Ignorance

Order/Balance/Unity/Oneness/Interrelatedness than        Chaos/Disunity/Randomness

The Sacred than the Profane

Harmony/Peace/Imperturbability than         Anxiety/Disturbance/Confusion

Silence/Stillness than Noise/Activity

Death/Rebirth than Life/Exile

Immortality/Transcendence than Mortality

The Ineffable/Wordless than the Explainable/Language

The Profound than the Superficial (Meaning)

The Beautiful (including art) than the Ugly 

Such properties can become our vectors--our center “principles” or universal truths which, much as Weinberg’s point to “a common starting point,” can point us a way to go, to think, to act.

I tried this out not long ago, using the events of a three-day period as my vectors.  Each being, in effect, a piece of chalk [since, as Weinberg points out, it should be possible to start with any object--a dog, a dress, a tree--and end up in the same common point]. What does a final theory look like?   What, indeed, is a “Center”? Or: “Is there something we might call a Center?”

Certainly I was not trying, with my three-day experiment,  to prove the existence of any tangible center, but rather to demonstrate to my own satisfaction that any event could be evaluated by way of the properties for centers I delineated earlier.  That is, along various axes to know which vectors to trace, which was the proper direction if one were to move in the direction of a center rather than away from it.  Disparate,  everyday events--seemingly disconnected happenings--beneath which might lie some fundamental truth that connects them all. Some “Center,” if you will.  Of course, however rational I was trying to make it sound--searching for vectors in events (vectors pointing to some Center in the universe)-- it would not have been wise of me to share my experiment with others.

In any case, over the three-day period August 8-10, 2000, I followed the usual routine of  life--eating, sleeping, shopping--noting which events more distinctive in nature occurred.   The events I chose varied from having to take my daughter to a violin recital and reading more of a novel I’d started (Grace Notes), to accidentally running over a squirrel and overhearing a man say ugly things to his wife (or girl friend) and child outside Fred Meyers.  All in all I looked at some 14 events.

I then grouped my 14 events by way of one or more of the properties of “centers”--i.e., more of Order/Balance/Unity/Oneness/Interrelatedness than. Chaos/Disunity/Randomness; more of Silence/Stillness than Noise/Activity; more of Enlightenment/Wisdom than Ignorance, etc.--not only to, first, be certain that some property of “Center” was indeed an essential dimension of that event, but to help determine which action, thereby, would be most appropriate were I to act upon the event in the direction of  the Center (even if “Center” is regarded as a hypothetical construct).  To illustrate, as I mentioned, I accidentally hit a squirrel which dashed beneath my right rear wheel.  He made it across the street and halfway up the tree before falling, and was still alive when I put him in my car to decide what to do with him.  Before I got three blocks, he was dead, and I set him in a small grassy crevasse along the side of a road near a middle school.. I grouped this event in the Unity/Oneness category--i.e., that the squirrel and I were a part of the same oneness, and therefore I should act both to save the squirrel and, failing that, to demonstrate my respect for the squirrel in how I took care of it after death.

Whatever the pretensions to a scientific method, this analysis represents at least a mapping out of a seeker’s journey.  And if a center is not the meaning of life, its properties suggest an essence which moves us into a more profound understanding of the universe than everyday experiences do.

Later in my study I began to look at events which occurred outside the domain of my life--that is, ones whose occurrences I was aware of only through the newspaper or TV.  A movement into the less mundane, more exotic, more dramatic, perhaps.  Weinberg could have done the same by starting not with a piece of chalk but a rocket ship or an elephant, and he should still have been able to trace through all the theories known today.  Besides, no matter what event I chose, it should have had the same “center”--especially if it is truly the center. My reason for adding these outside events was to be certain that, among the ones I studied, some at least would represent the sort of thing which by its very nature repudiates the existence of a “center”--the sort of tragedy which gave rise to Black Elk’s original lament.  In tragedy, one surely loses any sense of a center--at least temporarily.  One event I added, for example, related to an incident which had occurred two years earlier and which I read about in a very brief newspaper article. A three-year-old girl by the name of Teresa Fuentes, of Warm Springs, Oregon, was the victim of a car accident.  Although in a car seat, her body whipped forward in the crash, breaking her neck and leaving her a quadriplegic for life, so that afterwards, she needed a ventilator to breathe and  24 hour-a-day care. It was the kind of tragedy that, like the massacre at Wounded Knee, does not seem to allow for, much less point to, any universal Center. And like Black Elk, I was tempted to proclaim: “There is no center any longer.”

In the face of such tragedies, who dares to play with a hypothetical construct called a  “Center”--a standard by which to evaluate events, a point by which to organize chaos?  Someone who believes a “Center” is not just a construct, but a real expeience. And those someones are not only Native American holy men.

Whatever models I have enlisted or properties I have discovered to give us a direction, I have left one out . Actual glimpses of a center can be achieved primarily, if not only, by indirection.  One may seek for it by setting out on a pilgrimage to a holy spot, or even aimless wandering; still, the seeker is most likely to find his or her own center by stumbling upon it.   By indirection..  Even the most methodic, deliberate attempt to find the center is doomed to failure if the seeker is not open to serendipity.  To the unexpected.  The not-so deliberate.

With ineffable questions, concepts, one may initially start with reasoned design, but must be willing to ultimately just grope (or even blunder) his or her way.

Indeed when I first began researching “center” in the Janus of the U of Oregon library, it gave me first a non-fiction book--a rather remarkable “journey through bereavement” by Jayne Blankenship, who, in response to her husband’s sudden death at age 31, took herself to a park, closed for the season, where she took “a random direction” into one of the gardens “grown high with. . . grass” where “it was silent” (except for birds calling) and “where dense planting hid her from the street,” and there she 

gagged over into the grass, arms limp at my sides, face pressed directly    into the ground. Slow heaving groans rolled through me.  I yielded to    them, hoping the earth would break and take me in, would push brown grit    and tongue, would stuff my throat, and close my ears against the thoughts.    Hoping the grass would close over the back of my head so that no one    would ever know that I was there. . .

Eventually, she imagines the park’s “desertion is her own,” that the “trees. . .released from time. . .[are] turned to stone” and imagines herself “dancing alone in the air, with stone trees all around.”

Ultimately her moment in the park becomes a moment of enlightenment, of peace.

A kind of. . .center.

It struck me how, in truth, “centers” are described rather frequently in literature. In some fiction, what is called an “epiphany” may also be a center.  I recommend the ending to Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing,” the vignette “             “ in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the final act of Edna Pontilier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.  But in non-fiction as well.  Consider this description from Elie Wiesel’s Night of a man who plays a violin in the midst of madness--a death march in the snow out of a Holocaust concentration camp.

The sound of a violin, in this dark shed, where the dead were heaped on    the living.  What madman could be playing the violin here, at the brink of    his own grave? Or was it really an hallucination?

It must have been Juliek.

He played a fragment from Beethoven’s concerto. I had never    heard sounds so pure. In such a silence. . . .

It was pitch dark.  I could hear only the violin, and it was as though   Juliek’s soul was the bow.  He was playing his life.  The whole of his life    was gliding on the strings--his lost hopes, his charred past, his     extinguished future. He played as he would never play again. (90).  

The properties are surely there--silence because words fail, peace, harmony, a sense of oneness with the universe that moves one beyond the immediate needs and sensations.  A kind of “quantum leap,” as Goswami, the physicist, says. They are often brief, but they are there.  If in the more mystical forms of yoga, centers of a sort are sought and reached by a lifelong discipline, in life and in literature they are most often “stumbled upon.”  That is, whatever seeking is occurring they usually happen by indirection.  When least expected--in extreme conditions of highest frustration or despair or expense of energy.

I dedicated part of my sabbatical to writing a collection of stories and vignettes about people who stumble into centers, and one of these describes my own writing of a scene in an unpublished novel I finished two years ago.  Although I will spare you the reading of the scene, I will tell you it is one in which a white seventh-grade boy and a black seventh-grade girl, in a snow-covered vacant lot near a downtown library in Ohio in February, 1952, stumble into a “Center.” In the process of writing it, I too stumbled into a “Center.”

I’m not sure if it was “my center,” or only my characters’ “center,” or a piece of “the Center” or perhaps all three.  Or if it even matters.  Only that it was made of the stuff  I’m looking for.  It was as though while chipping away at rock--shaping it to my artistic satisfaction--I’d come upon gold dust, and knew that it had to be part of a larger deposit.   My characters and I had, somehow, found ourselves in Old Lodgeskins’ tipi, where, as Berger’s Little Big Man says,

Looking at the great universal circle, my dizziness grew still. I wasn’t    wobbling no more. I was there, in movement, yet at the center of the    world, where all is self-explanatory merely because it is. (435) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Works Cited

Amiotte, Arthur. “The Road to the Center.” In I Become Part of It, D.M. Dooling and Paul Jordan-Smith,  eds.  New York: Parabola Books, 1989: 246-254.

Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York: Delacorte press, 1964.

Berlinski, David. A Tour of the Calculus. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harper  and Row, 1961.

Goswami, Amit. The Self-Aware Universe.  New York: Jeremy Tarcher Putnam, 1993.

Jahner, Elaine. “The Spiritual Landscape.” In I Become Part of It, D.M. Dooling and Paul Jordan-Smith,  eds.  New York: Parabola Books, 1989: 193-203.

Momaday, N. Scott. The Man Made of Words.New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.

Naipaul, Finding the Center. New York: Knopf, 1984.

Neihardt John. Black Elk Speaks. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1932.

Ridington, Robin and Tonia Ridington. “The Inner Eye of Shamanism and Totemism.” In

Teachings from the American Earth, Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock, eds.

New York: Liveright, 1975: 190-204.

Tedlock, Dennis. Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1999.

Tsu, Lao. Tao Te Ching. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, Trans. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Wei-Ming, Tu. Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung-Yung. Honolulu: U of  Hawaii P, 1976.

Weinberg, Steven. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam. 1960.