numbso far so good and it does what I wanted it to in that it stops obsessive mental activity. valerian for instance does not do this. it makes me drowsy and obsessed which is worse because when you are obsessed you do not want your higher faculties offline until the obsessions are offline too. otherwise they sort of take over.
this Deloria book is interesting as hell and giving me fits at the same time. his claims are outrageous but that is not necessarily a bad thing and it seems that the consequences of his claims might not even require the claims to begin with but really the whole point is that the specificity of cultural experience cannot be universalized and may be rooted in traumatic catastrophe where funnily enough gods always emerge from the wreckage. what the catastrophe is is in some ways not important to the argument although its expression in the ensuing rituals carries with it its very specificity.
one thing I am trying to figure out is if the articulation of the human figure out of the land is itself traumatic and thus binding. there may be something very concrete going on that shows its trace in a mythology that obsessively repeats its narrativization at the site that resists articulation even as it engenders its possibility. there is the punctual trauma of the event and then there is the ongoing trauma of the primal Event of articulation wherein exposure to the very articulatedness of the other (be it human or otherwise) is disastrous to the point of inspiring belief in a providence that allows the singularity of the self to persist.
of course where I want to derail the project of self-reassurance is right there at the moment of cataclysm which inaugurates and disrupts signification and which calls the persistence of the self into extreme question. this is where a thought of destitution and exposure insists upon itself, itself which can never bring the circle full circle and reestablish the order of the Kingdom of the divine subject.
so you see I want Deloria to be talking my language but at times he talks a very different one and that may be very much the point. my encounter with this text may be traumatic all on its own.
