Temporal Coincidence and Blindness

“The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history. An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous existence.” (Anderson 26)

“But that had not prevented Calabazas from giving the one of his sarcastic lectures on blindness. Blindness caused solely by stupidity...” (Silko 201)

“Mosca pretended to gag on Calabaza’s lecture, then he laid his head on the dashboard and went to sleep. But Root sat leaning out the truck window, catching the cool, damp smell of the summer desert night. Being around Mexicans and Indians or black people, had not made him feel uncomfortable. Not as his own family had. Because if you weren’t born white, you were forced to see differences; or if you weren’t born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you were left to explore the world of the different.” (Silko 202)

Mirroring the rise of nationalism, there was a pervasive paradigm shift in the individual’s conception of temporality. Where before past and future existed simultaneously in a all consuming present, the new paradigm held the present as a temporal coincidence somewhere between the past and the future. In this, the present and more specifically, the individual’s experience of that present lost much of its significance. The present was no longer “the end of days” but rather relegated to a arbitrary measurement of clock and calendar. The moment was superseded by the infinite future.

With the present as temporal coincidence, society and the nation became ageless. The nation could live on indefinitely and each individual could hold onto this immortal entity to find some sort of perpetuity. This shift in thought process also carried an underlying faith in the normality of the system. That each individual in the society and state had full belief that every other individual in that “sociological organism” existed in the same “steady, anonymous, simultaneous, existence.” Having never even encountered the vast majority of Americans, an American citizen will yet assume that all other Americans are living, breathing, toiling, through the day as well. To this point, these assumptions seem wholly logical but the side effects of such assumptions can be irrational.

In believing every other person in a nation lives in the same present, individuals often conclude that most other people exist in a similar way to the them. This fanciful communal lifestyle is imagined as the norm, the normal. Individuals within majority groups especially fall prey to this line of thinking. the individual project himself onto society as a whole. Such attitudes lead to a dual blindness, the blindness of the other and the self. Groups are singularly categorized. Each individual turns into a type and carries all the baggage of that type.

In Almanac of the Dead, the reader is forced “to explore the world of the different.” There is a nothing mainstream about the multitude of characters in the novel. Arms runners, drug dealers, assassins, vietnam vets. Initially, a reader might try to place each characters or group of characters at the fringe of the sociological organism. However, there is not enough space on the edge. Like the narrative, nothing is easily boxed and everything shares a connection. As well, each character suffers from a mild to severe case of racial blindness (or prejudice). In this, a unique perspective is given to the reader. Just as the prejudices and blindness of a coked out blonde gets comfortable, the reader is thrown unapologetically into the mind of a exiled old Laguna Pueblo.

Embodied in the character of Root is the exploration of the different. He has lost his ties with the conventional ideas of society when he becomes physically crippled. He leaves the world of white America and is instead accepted into the world of Calabazas. Although he has not lost his blindness, Root is able to recognize the blindness that all the other characters are afflicted by. Yet where Root is limited by his inability to enter other consciousnesses, the reader is not.

The reader is denied blindness. No single perspective is allowed to dominate. Each gets a fairly detailed sorrowful and sordid past. Temporal concerns thrown out the window, the reader even gets to live these pasts. Old grudges and hates get built up by one character only to be demolished by the plight of another. So many lives and fragments are poured into this unforgiving and brutal text (of epic proportions) that personal assumption are steamrolled. Reader literally sees too much. Four hundred plus pages in, the reader must attempt apathy lest nightmares about corrupt Mexican police officers with cattle prods deny any sleep. One message is burned into the consciousness, individuals are not simple or similar.