This post started out to be about two things. The first is a book by Louis Owens called Bone Game and the second is a documentary called Genghis Blues.  I’ve known about Owens for a long time, and love his books. I rarely re-read but there are a few books that have comforts for me that reach so deep that re-reading seems mandatory. I have also known about Tuvan throatsingers for some years and have some CDs. There is even an article about it in Scientific American. I had, however, never heard of Paul Pena (horrifying I know) and never seen the movie Genghis Blues.  There was something about it, something that so strongly made me think of Owens that I dreamed about them last night and so here I am, figuring it out at the keyboard.

Owens writes the most gloriously beautiful worlds that are nevertheless coloured over by sadness. His narrative worlds are living, earthy things and his characters are damaged, serious, powerful in a quiet way, and funny. Indian in other words.

By genre the books are mysteries but are also considered fantasy. This last is largely because the stories are based on American Indian reality, which includes forces like dreams that cross time, history as a living energy that directly effects the present and shapes the future, and most importantly, the narratives include living people who can see and interact with the past in ways that influence the progress of the present as it becomes what will be.  What makes this “fantasy” is that these forces are presented and understood as (for example) long-dead gamblers (bone game is a kind of gambling game) who want to reclaim their riven world from those (in this case a sadistic Spanish priest) who destroyed it. Such spiritual beings are active participants in the worlds that Owen creates.

Genghis Blues is about the meeting between musician and singer Paul Pena and musician and throatsinger Kongar-ol Ondar. What I found immediately compelling about the story is the ease of the fit between Pena and Ondar. Both are men of grace and humor; both are men who seem to inspire love and deep admiration and despite the vast differences between their respective worlds, they are, in fundamental ways, the same.

It’s this familial sense: this recognition of an interior private world that is nevertheless based on deep and constant human connection; a world that is grown in the medium of inextricably linked laughter and sadness, story and music as expected, as a public expression of what it means to be a normal person in the world, and a fluid sense of the aliveness of time and space. This is common between Paul, Kondar-oh and Louis.

There are also the cultural links between the Tuvan world and the world of American Indian cultures.  There are many similarities and these resonated for me while I was watching the film. One thing that stood out for me as a connection was the ease and honesty by which Tuvan’s dealt with the necessity of death as part of human life. There is a scene where a sheep is killed. It is to become food for the group. The killing, the death, isn’t hidden away, but is something that happens in the middle of the group; the death is both a simple ritual and a mundane part of how-it-is-to-be-us. This kind of practice tends to keep people connected to the costs of how they live.  A good thing I think.

But really what made the connection for me between the Indian world that I know and the Tuvan world, was how they took Paul in and how they treated him.  All through the film there are the hands gently touching and guiding. That’s so Indian I can hardly contain myself. And the scenes of strangers: the faces, non-threatening, happy to accept someone new, welcoming, interested, calm, simply happy and contented. They gather round Paul, he is asked to sing for them, and they just stand and listen – attentively, calmly, happily. And then they laugh and clap and let him move on.

All the neediness that is celebrity culture seems absent. Not that there aren’t celebrities in Indian country or in Tuva. Clearly Kongar-oh is a celebrity, for example. As was Louis Owens.  It’s what that means that is so fundamentally different. In the dominant parts of non-Indian North America, to be a celebrity means that you have people salivating after you. It means that you have what others want. It means that you are both idolized and despised. You become your character instead of your self. Such deep human disconnect tends to be forestalled within cultures and groups that are founded on intense and wide ranging connection — where no one will ever forget (this is not about forgiveness, by the way – another big cultural difference) how you have behaved in the past and to whom you are connected.

Let me see if I can explain that. Take Owens’ books.  His worlds are based on the inextricable connections between what was done in the past and what will become of the present and future. They are based on the connections between people – it’s as if family members (in the broad sense) are really a single organism; like aspen trees they appear distinct, and in some ways function separately, but are really extensions of the same being, the same root. The books are all based on the idea that human beings live as part of and within the living world that is the environment. (Think of us humans as aspen leaves (along with all the other the animals), the plants as the branches and the air, rocks and waters as the trunks of the aspen colony and the earth as the whole colony/tree.) When your phenomenological world is based upon such structures then there is no escaping the recognition of history and no way not to belong – no forgetting – and whatever hell or heaven you find yourself in, you belong to it.

This can work wonderfully well to support human beings when the cultural and environmental systems are functional and largely intact. Even in the face of much depredation, such as experienced by American Indian people both past and present, if enough of the people and land remains, the tendency is to adapt, to come together again and laugh as well as cry, to keep going. Such tenacity is to be admired I think; it is the core of what makes us such an evolutionary successful species, so adaptable to stressors. Nevertheless, such cultural predispositions mean that you are changed by the past. You can never simply “get over it,”  because history doesn’t simply vanish even if one closes one’s eyes to it. The consequence for a survivor in a culture where the acknowledgement of and respect for the power of the past is central is that laughter is forged with grief.

Imagine aspen trees as sentient. Now imagine all are destroyed but three lone trees. What it is to be those three trees would be devastating because so much of what it is to be an aspen is the colony. Now imagine that the destruction was reversed, yet those three trees retained the memory of what had been done. It would change everything, for everyone, even the trees that don’t remember what was done. That’s what connects Paul, Kondar-oh and Louis. It’s also what makes their various arts luminescent, enlivening and deeply moving.