Dakota: A Spiritual Biography

by Kathleen Norris

In Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris mentions that much of the western prairie meets the old definition of a frontier: fewer than two people per square mile. Her book is a report from that frontier, and it captures well the beauty and the isolation, the spirit of an "empty" place.

Dakota is a collection of essays that form a cohesive whole. The writing is clean and easy, and frequently moving. The book is rooted in the western desert prairie, and tells about rural Dakota, towns and people, isolation and change; it is oddly wound up with ascetism, monasteries, and monks. It is religious enough to make both a humanist and a fundamentalist think. In the end, it is a personal book, about the spiritual values and influences that Norris has found in a small town on the prairie. It is a little off-subject from the books I usually review, so I'm not going to try to summarize further, but let me offer a few quotes that might give you a sense of it:

We are interrelated in a small town, whether or not we're related by blood. We know without thinking about it who owns what car; inhabitants of a town as small as a monastery learn to recognize each other's footsteps in the hall. Story is a safety valve for people who live as intimately as that; and I would argue that gossip done well can be a holy thing.

...the emptiness is full of small things, like grasshoppers in their samurai armor clicking and jumping as you pass.

With small towns shrinking and services eroding, many Dakotans retain an appalling innocence about what it means to be rural in contemporary America. The year we lost our J.C. Penney store, young people were quoted in the town's weekly newspaper as saying they'd like to see a McDonald's or a K-Mart open in its place. Somehow they have not grasped that in modern American capitalism, which they defend vociferously in the annual American Legion Auxiliary essay contest, the market is everything. Since there is no market here, nothing that counts demographically, we don't exist.

...I have a shadow, a clown on stilts who stretches across the road, down along the ditch and into the field, dark as a crow. Around my shadow is a nimbus of light; I walk in grass tipped with gold.

It was the Plains that first drew me to the monastery, which I suppose is ironic, for who would go seeking a desert within a desert? Both Plains and monastery are places where distractions are at a minimum and you must rely on your own resources, only to find yourself utterly dependent on forces beyond your control...

It's hard to talk about western Dakota without mentioning Jell-O.

If Norris juxtaposes odd topics like prairie, monastery, and small town, she does so beautifully. And after all, she is writing her own Spiritual Geography, and, I guess, she can write it exactly the way she chooses. I am happy she chose to write it.

© 1996, Greg Tillman.

latest update: May 30, 2001
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