Beautifully Negotiated Concessions

Ars. Artis.Arte.

His name was Sesostrie Youchigant. He was the last known person alive who could speak Tunica with any degree of fluency — and he hadn’t spoken it to another soul in nearly twenty years.

There was no one left to speak it with.

When Mary Haas arrived in Louisiana in 1933, she was a 23-year-old graduate student with notebooks, a sharpened pencil, and a conviction that what was happening in that room mattered. The academic world around her largely disagreed.

Native American languages were routinely dismissed as unworthy of serious study. Scholars were not being sent south to sit with aging tribal chiefs and write down sounds that English had no alphabet for. The languages were considered already gone — a matter of history, not linguistics.

Mary understood that history was precisely the problem. History was what happened when no one showed up in time.

She showed up.

Session after session, she listened. Youchigant spoke Tunica — haltingly at first, reaching back across two decades of silence, recovering words the way you recover a half-remembered song. Mary wrote everything down.

~ Echoes of The Past

Tell me, dear reader: in your own quietest, unobserved moments, when the social theater darkens and the applause dies away, do you find yourself standing upon the firm, granite rock of your own authorship, or are you merely adrift on a raft of beautifully negotiated concessions?

~ Olesia Alexandrovna Manakova

I like stories where unlikely people show up and change history by doing something they judge important in spite of expert advice. And the more unlikely the person the better. There’s a lot of pressure in our human societies to make our lives on that raft of negotiated concessions, beautiful or not.

We don’t realize how deep those concessions are rooted in us. They are ever present, because received wisdom is ever present and the minds that promote it are in the majority. One question we might ask ourselves is are we an unlikely person, and if not, why not?

Have we been colonized and converted to a system that insults our soul, but, because the process began so early we have no reference point, we don’t suspect it? This is life, everything is normal, there’s no better way, we think.

You might even ask whether this pressure to keep us confined to a narrow perspective benefits someone, or even a class of someones. We can’t help but notice that some people have freedoms and privileges that are unusual and enviable, and others don’t. In fact, most others don’t.

One of the rarest privileges, actually, is a broad and deep perspective, but it’s rare precisely because you have to fight for it. It’s a strange fact about most people that they won’t fight for it, that they don’t want to disturb themselves.

Being stable and comfortable in the society that exists, whatever that society happens to be, is the goal. It’s more concrete and less upsetting than fretting over questions that can never be answered.

Paige Bradley

As a child I was puzzled by adults who refused to question the life we’re presented with and were offended by those who had the temerity to do so. I had both examples as parents. My father was offended by alternative or unconventional thinkers, but my mother encouraged my explorations even though she was pretty conventional herself.

As you grow into yourself it’s essential to get the best possible grasp on your actual situation. You really have to discover the truth of yourself and the soil you’re growing in. It’s not easy in a society that wants you to believe things that don’t serve you.

And of course, as a young person you want to establish yourself.

The unspoken question is always there, how much do you have to learn to succeed? But is learning a process of changing your fundamental self, that self you only see through a glass darkly? Is it any wonder we get lost and confused ?

Ars. Artis. Arte.

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Meditations On Living (6 book series)

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by David Price