Vizenor Concordance: On IMAGINATION

“MacChurbbs easily provided a steady course of nicknames in my stories, and every native nickname was a tricky chance in creation stories.  He was a miniature puppet and mighty at the same time, with no bloodlines, no terminal divisions of identity, and yet he is an imagined shaman that roams in the memory of an imagistic poet and storier.  He told me to “free yourself from the customs of civilized measurements.  We are so big, and so little at the same time.  You have learned only one way to measure the world.  Puppets of imagination vanish in culture of terminal creeds.  Mockery and irony never expire, but some people exaggerate their presence and reach for cultural perfection through the exalted structures of possessive pronouns of the past.”” (2.5)

“MacChurrbs is a native shaman and trickster with no direct relations by sound or meaning to any other names or words, a puppet character of imagination who has teased and tormented me for almost eighty years.  He favored the literary creation of hand puppet parleys in Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade. There are fifteen hand puppet parleys in the novel, including Sitting Bull and Victor Hugo, Carlos Montezuma and Émile Zola, Chief Joseph and Voltaire, Apollinaire and Anaïs Nin, Charles de Gaulle and Maréchal Philippe Pétain, Gertrude Steine and Adolf Hitler, near the Place du Panthéon during the Nazi Occupation of Paris.” (2.5)

“The coureurs des bois of the mercenary fur trade and the kitschymen of the media, casino cultures, and digital simulations are the merchants of resistance with no natural hesitations or memorable stories.  The considerations are casual and repetitious, at best, and the stories are the mere enterprise of resistance.  The kitschymen are the simulations of natives with no sense of an actual presence, only the objects of mockery.  The kitschymen are noted as a native pretense not a presence, and with no gestures of imagination, no native mockery, or recognition of irony.” (3.4)