SEVENTH POINTER

Hyemeyohsts Storm's l972 rendition of Cheyenne lore (SEVEN ARROWS) remains in focus here. These Indians were never fully subjective to this civilization's confusion by books. This was true too, relatively speaking, of my fisherman father and his hill kin. They all point our way back to nature as the best instructor in some final analysis.

My idea now is to synthesize a fuller view of civilization, including earthier brethren, to warn against verbal excesses. Thus everyone can learn a lot from anthropology about the aspiration to be fully human. We have failed to notice, notably, much that tribal art reveals about physical reality.

I have been influenced as an artist by its grotesquely gorgeous motif: rendered especially among ecstatically "dioneysian" Indians of the Pacific northwest and fierce headhunters of New Guinea. They have carved abstractly from wood the (anthropomorphic) imagery of man and beast which can actually be seen—at sub-surface levels—as an architectural skeleton of world scenery. (This archetypal motif is evidently what Plato called FORM.)

Adobe Canyon
(My California home 30 years ago)

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My favorite places in the Missouri Ozarks long retained a frontier character as some last bulwark against over-civilization. A beautiful area traditionally known as "Booger County" comes to mind. (It is portrayed impressionistically a little later.) And of course the ancestral Stone County has been featured as a formative influence throughout this website.

Doc's House
(Great grandfather Thomas Jefferson McCord of Galena)

Note ("Catalogue" excerpt entitled "Tales of the River"): The stories unfolding here in words and pictures are presented in the direct style of Stone County, Missouri. Of course it should be acknowledged that the oldtimers there were additionally notorious for a certain conversational embellishment. Folklorist Vance Randolph's collections of their tall tales have periodically tickled the nation under such titles as WHO BLOWED UP THE CHURCH HOUSE? and WE ALWAYS LIE TO STRANGERS. Actually the funniest of these mountain liars had a granite honesty bred from tough-minded frontier realism. One could usually tell when they were pullin' your leg. Accordingly I am extending their style to the telling of surprising tales in reverse: toned down rather than embellished, and painstakingly geared to ranges of plausibility within scholarly coordinates.

Stone County

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