October 30, 2008
-
ART WARS, continued:
From the MountaintopKatherine Neville, author of perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century, The Eight, has now graced a new century with her sequel, titled The Fire. An excerpt:
“Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior
century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a
pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree
trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like
an octagon– patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge– with many-paned
windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural
compass rose.
……..
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado
Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high
mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like
this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus– which the Diné call
Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created
by First Man and First Woman.Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east;
Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid,
yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked
out the four corners of Dinétah– ‘Home of the Diné,’ as the Navajo call
themselves.And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was
standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four
states– Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona– come together at right
angles to form a cross.”
Related material
(Oct. 14, 2004):The EightLest the reader of the previous entry mistakenly take Katherine Neville’s book The Eight
more seriously than Fritz Leiber’s greatly superior writings on
eightness, here are two classic interpretations of Leiber’s “spider” or
“double cross” symbol:
Aristotle:
The 4 elements and
the 4 qualities
(On Generation and
Corruption, II, 3)
The eight-rayed star may be taken
as representing what is known
in philosophy as a “universal.”See also
