Ceremony: Thoughts on the drought and the medicine man

Explain why Tayo blames himself for the six year drought.

Tayo’s guilt for the six year drought traces back to a prior drought that, after six years of duration, ceased when a heavy wave of rain had done a little more than satisfy some crops.  As “jungle rain had no beginning or end,” it induced the soldiers with sweaty fevers, flooded their lungs to the point of choking, and saturated their boots until their peeled skin harbored green wounds.  After a massive flow of floodwater, Tayo and the corporal were forced to plow through a path of sludge while bearing the weight of a seriously wounded and infected Rocky.  It was at the point when the corporal slipped and nearly dragged his grip of Rocky’s muddy blanket into muck that Tayo began “praying against,” or “damning” the rain, as Silko explains. By the sixth drenching year, the weather had turned, as he had longed for, but to the parched opposite.  “Wherever he looked, Tayo could see the consequences of his praying,” starving, dehydrating animals dying.  He deemed himself to be the culprit as he “cried for all of them and for what he had done.”

 

Carefully re-read the pages that involve the old medicine man, Ku’oosh, p. 31-34. Explain the significance of how Ku’oosh speaks, chooses words, and of his point about the fragility of the world.

Struggling to make sense of the Old Ku’oosh, Tayo was bombarded with the medicine man’s regurgitated words of wisdom and talk of unfamiliar places, verbally offered to him in an outdated dialect.  Ku’oosh explained to Tayo that “the world is fragile,” and did so in a long, thorough process.  This is because, as Silko explains, the meaning of the word “fragile” holds “the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of the web.”  Because the term’s connotation is so complex, and “no word exists alone,” Ku’oosh defends his diction by providing a story for each word’s purpose.  From this, it is clear that Ku’oosh holds his message to be highly valuable, so much that every utterance in his narration had to be fully grasped.  Furthermore, the medicine man taught that this whole procedure was the project of humanity, a system that required “great patience and love.”