What’s the problem with the question? For me the problems begin with the verb “is”. It’s usage in the sentence implies that there is an (one) answer, and that the answer when found will be a necessary and sufficient attribute of the noun “consciousness.” The sentence predisposes one to look for an object that is consciousness and to do so by finding its attributes.

There are so many answers to the question but what if we were to ask the question “What does consciousness do?” Would that change the set of answers? Almost certainly don’t you think?

Which seems to me to say what we are really addressing is not consciousness so much as the structure of the sentence. And this is not the point of asking the question.

If we were to see “consciousness” as just a word we use to speak to a rather fluid set of skills and abilities as those skills and abilities manifest in specific situations, then what would be the questions we would ask? What would be the fundamental assumptions? I suspect this last question is rather important having something to do with how language assumes itself to be to only means of communication open to human beings. I mean even Carl Jung assumed that the unconscious was a symbolic storehouse – that is the experiences we have are stored and activated as symbols – and symbols are very much linguistic artifacts.

Interesting to think about how many varied sets of questions and answers can be generated all around that single word “consciousness”. And if not a linguistically or symbolically structured set of events/actions/predispositions what then is that storehouse we think of as our consciousness and unconscious?

Call in my unconscious if you like. In a dream I had a year ago, nearly exactly, I landed in the sea with Alfonden (my non-verbal dream partner) amidst an enormous circle of sea life. Whales I think, but all I could see from the air as I descended were giant ovoid shapes, and once in the water, I could feel their mass below me but could see nothing but water and sky. Even the land was too far to make out. My eyes, you see, cannot discern what is there. I just know that it exists all around me. “Choosing” reading material is bit like that for me. I feel a sense of “there-ness” in a text, open it, begin reading and if it persists—that gut bump and slither—then I continue the process of attending to the words.  So I never know what I am going to read next; I don’t know where the whales will herd me.

What, you say, has this to do with Hillman? I found a copy of Salt and the Alchemical Soul and was so taken by the title that I ordered it from the library. After finishing Dream Animals (by Hillman) I checked my library account and found that Salt was ready for pick up. So I went to fetch it. There is an essay in Salt by Hillman, as well as one by Ernest Jones and a third by Jung. The whole book is a delight because it provides such good material for comparison of psycho-therapeutic “genres,” that it clarifies the bones (so to speak) of each approach. This seems to have been the purpose of the volume, and the introduction, which summarizes each approach, allows a broad overview of each of the three narrative worlds.

Reading the included essay by Hillman is instructive of his overall approach to the mind. It is a particularizing way of seeing the world. That is, each meaning can only really be said to exist in the interaction of its component elements in the environments which give rise to them. So there is no possibility of a steadfast symbolic meaning to any one image. Or there is, I suppose, but such a fixed approach is like pinning a butterfly to a board. All the flex and undulation of life must be absent for the “meaning” to coalesce. Hillman’s approach is a bit like Heidegger in a way: everything is bound to its time and place – or every “thing” is its time and place. I find this a powerful narrative and particularly persuasive. It’s a hard one though. One must become accustomed to paradox, multiplicity, the common intransigence of material nature with respect to human desire and uncertainty.

Reading Salt has broadened my reading of Dream Animals. There was a line in that book that caught me when I first read it, that now seems to have more body. He said, “animals as images.” Ooooooh, I thought—and the phrase ran right up into W.J.T. Mitchell and lodged there under his heart.  I mean what does that mean? And then of course, Hillman’s approach slaps you and says, don’t do that! Reducing it to a concept, to a sentence or phrase, eats the heart right out of it. Animals as images. Imagine.

Then there is a phrase in “Salt: a chapter in alchemical psychology” (the name of Hillman’s essay in Salt)—salt matters. Oh my is that ever wonderful, because what he means is not just that salt is important, but that salt creates matter – it matters mind – matters as a verb. The larger idea that salt is the body’s sensation (the sting of salt water in a wound, for example), a physically based metaphor that allows us to discern types of feeling, and therefore the trail to be followed to this particular moment of self-awareness, this is a wonderful story. It is one that provides us (our conscious selves) with the eyes needed to discern the particulars of each shape under the surface of the sea.  But it takes time and a willingness to follow the trail laid out by others, by the body—laid out by the history of stings and tears that experience makes. It is not a trail we (our conscious selves) can blaze. It requires a willingness to be led, but also to think along the way. It is not an abandonment of conscious life, but an inclusion of the unconscious as an equal partner. It is the recognition that we are not one, still and fixed, but many in constant motion, frolicking, leaping, hiding in the world at large.

So that’s today. Tomorrow?

To talk about this I need to tell you just a little about my “lineage.” A big part of my family are from the Salishan language group. Then there’s some Kootenai, some Blackfoot, some Shoshone, some Yakima and others too. Racially/ethnically I’m mostly Briton, with Jew, Gypsy, Saxon and probably some Welsh (if what I know of the family history is correct.) I’m not an Indian, I’m what, in Rez speak, would be called a “breed.” Then so are we all.

We humans are a travelling species and have been since we were properly not even human but Homo erectus. And I bet those “cousins” weren’t so different from us. When human women travel we tend to collect bodily secretions from some of those we meet along the way and when human men travel they tend to leave a decent sized sample of theirs for the edification of the locals. Some of those travel exchanges ended up as kiddies, and so our “breedness” is continued.

So that’s that. We travel, we exchange goods, ideas and bits of our selves and have been doing that from before we were human at all. And really, that kind of takes some of the “oh, so awful” out of the charge of cultural appropriation. And in Indian Country: I mean if you go to a big Powwow today you are going to see some Ojibwa dancing in a plains style outfit, to a drum that might be from one of the southwest tribes, and likely carrying some beadwork style that originated with the Cree (and they were mixed Indian and French.) So there is no “pure” anywhere. “Pure” is a narrative, an idea that has a BIG ideological baggage train behind it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts of human history.

However, there is something to be said about what Karen had to say about the sweat. The man that is the head of my family tells us that the sweat is to be used. He invites anyone who wants to listen to the spirits, who wants to heal themselves, to come and sweat. According to him there is no “wrong” way, except if you are “told” by the spirits what to do and you ignore that. There are no “rules” exactly—except for basic respect. That whole thing about the “right” way is largely from a specific set of cultures that are big on hierarchy anyway. And it is a political device that was born out of the need to survive white contact, but that’s another whole post and one I’m unlikely to write.

What’s true is that if you claim to be running an “authentic Sioux sweat”, I don’t care if you’re Sioux or not, you probably got it mixed up and I doubt your Aunty would approve. The sweat is a methodology, a known way of getting the body, the mind, the spirit, ready to listen to the songs, to the spirits, the animals, the other powers. It’s a technology for getting humans in the “place” where they can listen to what is already shouting in their ear. It’s like Zen. The “right” way to practice zazen is to sit still and listen. You don’t need a fancy anything, the seat cushion doesn’t have to be the right colour or the right size. Just so, the right way to do a sweat is to go in with respect for the wood, the rocks, the willow, the water, the fire, the blankets, your skin (I not glad to be around people who try to burn you out of a sweat as a kind of one-up-manship), the songs and each other. Go in with respect, sing, get hot and listen. Then come out and get clean. And don’t brag around about how holy you are, not even to yourself. That’s it.

What you don’t want to do is think that this makes you an Indian. It doesn’t. I don’t care how many lessons some Indian charged you for, or how many real Indian names you got in some weekend ceremony, none of that makes you Indian. It may be important, the names you got. Those times may have taught you wonderful things, but all that means is that you are what you are with some additional knowledge, and hopefully, wisdom. The presumption of so simple an identity change, the most egregious kind of identity theft, that’s really the only kind of “appropriation” you want to avoid. Mostly that’s because it is dangerous to you, because it is an illusion, but also, it is essentially and deeply disrespectful of the long-term alliance between the Earth of their homeland and the People who have listened to It for countless generations. And I would have thought being a Pagan is really about that respect, that alliance. Learn from it, sure. But don’t mock it by claiming it for your own. Build your own alliance. That way it’ll be real and true.

Last night I had a dream that perfectly answers the question (thinking takes some people a lot of time).

In the dream my black cauldron was 2/3 full of water. (I have a cast iron flat-sided cauldron that I use for anything casserole-like or chili-like. It’s essentially indestructible and can go on the stove top or in the oven.) In the dream case the pot has the traditional rounded sides, you know like a truncated pumpkin. On opposite sides of the dream pot there were two small cracks. Through those jagged fissures rose a vapour. On one side it was “spirit;” on the other it was “soul.”

Here’s what I knew inside the dream: it was just plain old water, nothing special despite the fact that it shimmered and didn’t leak out of the splits in the side. The water vapour coming out of both sides of the cauldron was identical. The reason one was called “soul” and one “spirit” had to do with point of view. That is for the person looking at the cracked pot, the right-hand vapour trail was “spirit” and the left-hand emanation was “soul.” So someone looking at their own leaks would reverse the naming. This, I understood in the dream, was the source of all the confusion about who had souls and who didn’t, because not everyone had such a faulty pot as to have two cracks.

Here’s what I did when I woke up and thought about the cracked pot. I laughed.  Not only do we get it wrong because we have a hard time recognizing that we have a point of view, but it’s a crack-pot theory, this “soul” and/or “spirit” stuff. It’s all just plain water that somehow sublimates—i.e. (to continue the dream metaphor) the fact that it looks like a ghost, doesn’t mean it isn’t water. At the top of this site there are some words: There is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means. I find that truly hilarious because in humans it’s such a recipe for disaster. Sort of like giving the three stooges a fire-station of their very own. Imagine the things they would do with that!

Side-splitting stuff huh?

In the mythology of the moon, the moon is wicked, for it is unreliable. The alchemists frequently quoted a psalm which says that in the darkness of the new moon the wicked shoot with their arrows at ethical just people, which means that the new moon protects thieves and the wicked when they attack the righteous. Thus the moon has all the wicked poison and unreliability typical of the anima in her original condition and also for feminine beings in general, not only the feminine in man, for in the feminine there is that catty, unreliable cunning, and rather doubtful ethics—one could call it the ambiguity of nature. The moon says that she is the waxing, moist, and cold moon and the sun is warm and dry, and when they are coupled in a balanced state, then she is like a woman open to her husband. (Alchemy, Marie-Louise von Franz, lecture 5)

Jeez Louise. Where do you start with shit like this?

My struggle with objectivity comes because I know Jungians know this is a symbolic system and not to be taken literally but they seem to be unable to separate the cultural and historical images of women (especially in men’s writing) from the “feminine” and also from women. One of the things that really gets to me is that Marie-Louise is an intelligent, well-read, and naturally thoughtful woman. I want her to know better than to posit herself as the mutable moon to Jung’s sun. I wanted her to look at herself as the foundation of what it means to be human and not look to Jung as the first cause.

Anyway…

Jung’s anima may have been catty. This means, of course, that he was catty since the anima is a psychological collection of traits not deemed appropriate for the role he was to fulfill in life (i.e. male, of a certain class, ethnicity, etc.) Why he would think his suppressed side was what women were is mind boggling. Well, we do know why don’t we? It’s because the culture thinks of women as badly botched men (which really hurts when it is a woman doing the culture’s work for it), and thinks of mind/spirit/masculine/feminine as somehow existent independently of its material matrix (i.e. the idea of an archetype and the collective unconscious/conscious).

See! I am really struggling with objectivity here—and at present I am not winning. I can feel the value of the Jungian system but this deep chasm of projection, of unwillingness to see women as complete and whole infects nearly the entire corpus of thought.  (This and the fact that von Franz is a god-fearer.)

She knows this stuff is anima projection. In lecture 4 there is a description of the psyche in symbolic history as related to steam or vapour.

In parapsychological reports, if a ghost appears there is first something like steam, or a nebula, so it can be said that one of the most archetypal ideas is that the psyche has to do with the quality of steam or vapour, which expresses the idea that it is somehow linked with, but not identical to, solid matter. There is probably a certain anima factor in it for this text was probably written by a man.

Steam, vapour, matter, moon – all thought of as feminine – described as “the wife,” the empty vessel to be filled with her lord’s light. The vapour is the psyche of matter, matter to be destroyed to release the constant, immaterial, unchangeable, pure psyche so she can marry her constant husband the sun. Meh.

The thing is there is a thread of truth in the alchemical system, but probably not the one you think. Take the white spirit (psyche) in the black earth (materia prima). Alchemy says this is the case (is it?) but then the fragile, imagistic insight gets filtered through the language (and therefore conceptual framework) of the time.

First the insight: Imagine there is a young girl with a black monitor on her ankle. She is terribly frustrated at its presence and wants it gone with a fierce desire. Because she can’t get it removed she lashes out in frustration trying to break everything black she can find.  What she doesn’t understand is that while it does restrain her, it is also the reason she exists at all and if she were to remove it she would cease to exist. It’s like a black candle with a white flame. Imagine the flame’s frustration that the candle follows her everywhere. The candle stalks her and she wants to be free. But she can’t be and as long as she cannot see the connection between her existence and the candle, then she will be frustrated.

Now the influence of the cultural myth of incorporeal permanence: replace the image of the young girl with a young boy. What did that do to your head?

Imagine there is a young boy with a black monitor on his ankle. He is terribly frustrated at its presence and wants it gone with a fierce desire. Because he can’t get it removed he lashes out in frustration trying to break everything black he can find.  What he doesn’t understand is that while it does restrain him, it is also the reason he exists at all and if he were to remove it he would cease to exist. It’s like a black candle with a white flame. Imagine the flame’s frustration that the candle follows him everywhere. The candle stalks him and he wants to be free. But he can’t be and as long as he cannot see the connection between his existence and the candle, then he will be frustrated.

Think about it. How does the gender of the character effect the way the story would go if this were the seed of some Tolkienian movie?

In addition to whatever you’ve discovered about how gender effects your narrativizing, how many of you think that there is a “psyche” inside “matter” or “body?” It certainly feels like that, at least most of the time; but my question is how much of that sensation of separation is a result of the cultural narrative reifying the existence of a divide?

To get back to the story: From the flame’s point of view, it sees itself as the flame, not as an addendum to the candle.  Easing the frustration would only be possible (so it is said) if the flame can come to see itself as  a emanation of the candle. This, I take it, is (metaphorically) what Katagiri is saying with respect to impermanence. But what if neither permanence or impermanence is the bottom of the universe? What if the “bottom” is the relationship between the wax and its shape, the wick and the presence of oxygen, of the heat trail, of the combustion? What I’m saying here is that positing the bottom of the human universe as either permanence or impermanence is a male thing to do. It comes from the structure and functioning of the male mind working in a world where they are not the only progenitors, which, apparently, the male mind finds annoying. (I know that this isn’t fair, but that is exactly the point.)

The Western mind (currently with a distinctive male bias) is traditionally built around a core narrative character that we know as god. We posit this character as the protagonist and pose it in opposition to the fluctuation and impermanence of either the earth or some personification of those qualities (gaia, satan, e.g.). Western cultural narratives: God is most often associated with being masculine; the earth is feminine. Even for those of us that don’t buy the literal truth of the narrative, it is really hard to get outside this sense of duality, of opposition, of the existence of a foundation which does not change, does not alter—and of our genderized version of the tale. Take the ethical question, for example. If there is no absolute standard then how do we know what is good? It’s a silly question really, but it is taken seriously because we really like that permanent vs impermanent narrative—and we like the idea of god/man vs earth/woman (well some of us don’t, but we’re the minority)—and that generates its own silly questions. Does a woman have an “anima,” for example. Such a question irritates me in much the same way as an argument I overheard recently between two men about the size of angels. Really, I did. And they were serious. In 2010! (I really, really wanted to ask them how they measured a metaphor, in inches or centimeters. But I didn’t.)

There is resistance to this basic (masculine) Western narrative of course. (Hopefully not futile.) Wicca is an example: goddess as the divine principle, the god as the one who sacrifices himself, who dies and is reborn each year. It is not simply a reversal of the absolute/impermanent narrative but a reworking of it built around the sense of life that comes with being female, and taking herself as the human norm. Not that this means she escapes the mistakes that come with fictionalizing facts. But at least it is a different story that starts with other presuppositions.

What am I suggesting? Jungianism without the gender tags. No anima, animus stuff, but a language reworked to deconstruct these paradigmatic  frameworks and give the young white flame a way of conceiving itself that does not also lock it into a hierarchy (neither the true life principle (soul/spirit/psyche), or as an emanation of the true nature of time and being, what Katagiri calls arising.

Come to think of it, that might be fun. Write an alchemical text for that express purpose. A witch’s alchemy! FFO!

Reading can be such a struggle. You’re given a whole cloth, and really what you need is the threads – even better the uncombed wool – the sheep? How far back do you go with the process of taking apart a thought system to get at its insight? And it isn’t better to leave it as it is – to take it “whole cloth.” If I had to do that then there wouldn’t be any philosophy that I could learn from because they all have these cultural fallacies and idiotic presuppositions. Especially with regard to the reification of male-felt gender categorizations. And of course that’s not the real problem is it? It’s that these categorizations are considered human when they’re not.

I don’t really care if Jung saw his catty side as female. All that means is that his world had associated the undesirable social position (relative powerlessness) as “naturally” female and also categorized cattiness as undesirable and then conflated the two.  The deal is to realize that that’s what you’ve done and not mistake a narrative for reality, and I do care that Jung wasn’t able to do that, and care even more that von Franz wasn’t able to either.

Why care? Partly because if one does that, mistake one’s own narrative for the human (or even material) truth then all kinds of people get caught under the tracks of that tank. And I don’t like blood baths, even if red is such a pretty colour.

Mid-morning feels like a tidal point in the day for me. I suppose it is the work-day coffee-break association but I do get this strong sense of expansion, relaxation and comfort when I take time around 10 just to watch the day unfold: Night terrors are past and the light is still growing, unfurling its green leaf to the sky.

Not sure what to make of the unconscious mix-up of compline and terce, apart from learning to experience sleep as the unfurling of the dark blossom of impermanence and the fluttering of its gentle ambergis shadow.

For me this is not the odd part. It seems clear that what passes for religion today is an accretion on the corpus of what passed for religion before.

What fascinates me about the study is the language, the underlying cultural assumptions, especially pertaining to gender. Given that gender and sexuality is critical to Payne’s analysis, his assumptions here seem important. For example: Discourse was published in 1786. Mary Wollstonecraft would publish A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. These were barbaric times. So it will not surprise you that the male part of procreation was considered the active part, and the female part passive. (a note: when he speaks of the “organ of generation” he means the penis)

The great characteristic attribute was represented by the organ of generation in that state of tension and rigidity which is necessary to the due performance of its functions. Many small images of this kind have been found among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, attached to the bracelets, which the chaste and pious matrons of antiquity wore round their necks and arms. In these, the organ of generation appears alone, or only accompanied with the wings of incubation,  in order to show that the devout wearer devoted herself wholly and solely to procreation, the great end for which she was ordained. So expressive a symbol, being constantly in her view, must keep her attention fixed on its natural object, and continually remind her of the gratitude she owed the Creator, for having taken her into his service, made her a partaker of his most valuable blessings, and employed her as the passive instrument in the exertion of his most beneficial power.

The female organs of generation were revered as symbols of the generative powers of nature or matter, as the male were of the generative powers of God. They are usually represented emblematically, by the Shell, or Concha Veneris, which was therefore worn by devout persons of antiquity, as it still continues to be by pilgrims, and many of the common women of Italy.

(The emphasis is mine)

Imagine suffering such an assumption. Rock on Wollstonecraft.

I may have reservations about Jung’s theories and the concept of humanity that results but I nevertheless feel a sense of reverence for The Red Book.  Partly it is the sheer beauty of the drawings. When its publication was announced and I went surfing looking for material on it, deciding whether I would buy a copy, I stumbled across a few example illustrations. From the first I knew I was going to drop the (then) $200.

So I did. The day it came I was home ill. During one of my breaks between waves of pain, I went up to the front yard with the dog and found that UPS had been. I found the package (huge) propped up in the open laundry room. When the dog was done we all went inside.

I sat down with the box and just held it for a while. I knew what it was and I was kind of awed at its heft. Bodes well for the interior heft I am currently seeking, I thought.

I got the scissors and opened the outer box only to find a slightly smaller inner box that was free of markings. An indiscript brown package.

Jung’s work, as is true of many of today’s magicians and alchemists, roots in and through the mythic imagination. There’s usually no question when you’ve found yourself connected to the master narratives: hackles, goosebumps, shivers and other bodily signposts shudder into awareness.

What I felt holding the blank brown box were the trembling fingers of the great silence, the inhuman void that I have always known as the wyrd. When I feel that prickle, I take it as bodily recognition of something potentially and powerfully connective. I got a quick sense of a new aspen sucker wiggling above ground and beginning the transformation of what had been fundamentally barren ground.

Anyway after a while I opened the inner box and lifted out The Red Book. I just sat and paid attention to what I was feeling. It was immediately clear that I was not going to open the cover. I just stroked it. Reminded myself of Hagrid and his book of monsters, but that is what it felt like.  I had just met a new friend, one that I knew I would be able to communicate with and that would, in its turn, communicate with me.  I knew that I had met something fundamentally non-human and I was glad to get the chance to share space.

The power to be momentarily deeply, viscerally aware of sharing space, that’s the sacred thing, the magic that powers transformation. Even though this is a book of a man’s exploration of his inner narratives, symbols, and images, there is a network of dense mythic and narrative root-stuff under what shows and, like the aspen root network, it is longer lasting than the things that grow up into the air from its earthly source. How this works seems of some import, yet the question has not been answered in any satisfactory way. I don’t think archetypes float in some plane any more than I can get behind Potinus’ emanations — but the evolutionary biomechanics of it? Waaaaay to soon to say. Still, mythic magic works on us and if we create a bunch of new narratives to explain it, what of it? Isn’t the creative process what makes being human so much fun?

All these days later I have yet to open the book. I am waiting for my hands to feel like meeting the first page. But despite the physical stillness of the material book, it is already moving around in my cavernous interior. I have, for example, been thinking about what makes this reverence of mine for Jung’s book any different from my recent JW visitor’s reverence for the Bible.

I don’t think there is any real difference, except that I know the red book is a mythic representation of self and she, I’m afraid, thinks the black book is representative of something other than human reality. But all the bodily awareness, the perceptual reactions, the consequent sense of connection, all this is identical.

But wait a minute!  I just said that I felt that what lies underneath the red book and provides it’s power to provoke sensory reaction is fundamentally inhuman and yet I am aware that what Jung represents is the human universe (not the larger material one out of which we sprout).  The only way I can reconcile the two things (both of which I feel as fundamentally true), is to understand that there are parts of what shape human existence that are essentially non-human.

At the biological level this is easy to see. There are, for example, these fascinating little buggers called mitochondria. They are part of us, we cannot exist without them and neither can much of the rest of life (human or otherwise) on the planet. Yet they are not human. I mean even my finger nail isn’t really human despite the fact that it is part of me, but mitochondria are really not human. (Go read about how they work and their history if you don’t believe me.) So imagine getting a quick peak at the world from the point of view of the mitochondria. What it means to be human doesn’t have any meaning at that level. What it means to be human can only exist at a state of complexity far distinct from that of the lovely mitochondria. The two realms are invisible to each other with respect to meaning. Not that we can’t understand how they work but that is not the same thing at all as describing what it means to be mitochondria. In fact, that last bit is really a nonsensical phrase.

There are these limits beyond which what it means to be human just has no purchase. Meaning itself begins to dissolve at these margins. Sacred objects, poems, mythic narratives are those that allow us to approach the limits of intelligibility and experience for ourselves where in us the wyrd pushes. That’s what The Red Book is to me, a pathway to the thin outer reaches of the wyrd. It is a bridge to that realm where I experience the fundamental meaningless of the world that supports me and paradoxically, it is by that very experience, that the potency of my power to generate meaning for myself is made evident. At the edge of death, life is the most precious.

So both human and inhuman — when, through the gifts of the evolved brain and body we reach into that dynamo that Jung called the collective unconscious we get zapped by the inhumanity of our origins. Whether through Jung’s “active imagination” or any of the other myriad perceptual techniques, we seem to connect to aspects of ourselves that have  a longer evolutionary history than has this current set of properties and skills that we define as “what it means to be human.” The contact of realms is always electric and if one is the studious type, sometimes transformative.

Contemporary alchemy. The transformation of awareness. That’s what Jung offers and make no mistake, this capacity humans have to make meaning out of drawings and words is our most sacred magic. The bodily shiver that comes with the contact with the other, even if the other is actually as aspect of self, that’s the instinct for the sacred. And one day, soon probably, I’ll get to open the cover and step across the threshold to the meeting ground.

Cool.

What I’d like to do is set someone I know free with some paints. I have no idea what ideas she’d come up with but I think I’d like a combination of the modes below.  The idea that a house should present a face to the world that says something about its dwellers seems deeply right to me. I wonder if I just paid for the supplies whether the landlords would get all huffy or they’d be like “wow, that’s cool.”  I mean really, the house is of less value than the land it sits on and I suspect that someday the house will get torn down and rebuilt for someone who is upwardly mobile in an deeply economic sense. And it occurs to me to wonder, if they painted their home with iconic representations of personhood, what would it look like?

I’ve lived here for nearly four years now and this is the first time I’ve gone. Partly that’s because I’ve been to severally really great museums and so now I tend to measure all new museums against their measure and that is really not very fair.  I spent, for example, a lot of time as a child in one of the Carnegie-Mellon museums, and in the British Museum and to tell the truth they’re pretty hard to measure up to.  And while the Royal BC Museum is really wonderful in many ways, it is not a museum with anywhere near the breadth of the C-MM or the BM.

Still, I liked what was there. They represent, for example, various parts of BC history and environment in permanent dioramas that do a really good job of giving a visual sense of what they variously represent.  There is also, on another floor, a First Nations exhibit (also permanent) that provides story, examples of art, culture, etc.  Now I find exhibits of First Nations a bit difficult.  There’s the history for one thing  – imagine Turks staging historical displays of the Armenians, or the Taliban leadership building a loving memorial to women, or a Nazi museum to all things Jewish.  That may seem a bit harsh, but there you go, that’s feeling for you. But for the shock…

So I go in, but feel like a rabbit ready to bolt.  I go through the first hall pretty quickly and end up in a life-sized coastal long house. When I go in it is a bit unsettling, like being in a totally empty National Trust home, where you know the family is gone, that they lost this because they could no longer afford to keep it up or some other tragic set of circumstances forced them to become unhitched from their past. I rushed through and wandered around in the next hall. I saw a potlatch exhibit that had the kinds of bowls and things that we give away at the Winter Dance. They even had the gold dishes, pretty close to what sits in the kitchen cupboards of the long house where the Dance is held. In a museum. As if it were past. (The next dance, the next use of those dishes in the cupboards is in about six weeks.)

So that was a bit eerie. Then I decided – what the hell – I’ll go back into the long house and sit for a bit. I chose a corner and just listened to what the place had to tell me.  (I could imagine the mix of Indians carving and the mixed crews that put up the exhibit, and all the different motivations that went into building that model. It effects the experience of a place knowing something of it’s history.) There is a background tape playing with some Indian singing his song, and it is pretty low so I had my eyes shut so I could hear better, and then my own song was really strong (it often is this time of year), so I was really still and quiet trying to hear both, when a loud voice said (with delight) “Oh look at that woman!” and there was a bright flash…

she took my picture…as part of the exhibit?…an Indian sitting in the long house.

No kidding.

Now I did have my braids looped today and I did have my head scarf on and it was pretty dark in there so maybe she thought I was a statue or something? But I don’t think so.  This has happened to me once before in a situation where there could have been no doubt that I was a live human being.

My physical response to the museum visitor/tourist was to ignore her. My emotional response was not so simple.  I felt outraged of course, but mostly I just found it funny, in a kind of dry ironic way. It made me think of the book by Dean MacCannell called The Tourist: A new theory of the leisure class that came out in the late 70s (I think). If you haven’t read it, there’s a review here.  Here’s what the reviewer says:

The thesis of The Tourist is that the tourist represents modern men in microcosm surrounded by commercial images and enticements, searching for meaning and life in new experiences, and consuming whatever he encounters along the way.

So I got consumed by her camera, and will be taken back to wherever as part of authentic BC?

The part in the book I remember finding most interesting (it is a very interesting book) was the discussion about what makes something authentic in this consumer-tourist culture. Reality, according to the reviewer, has come to be seen as something other than what the tourist has. That’s why they go where they go, take pictures. They are trying to capture that bit of what was, or perhaps find a place where they feel more connected? It’s the golden age syndrome – somehow the past was more truthful, more real, more what life should be, and if we can recreate it we will all feel better. Bollocks of course, but there you are. In the same review the author says:

So off we go, trying to find something honest in fragments of medieval cities, Gothic cathedrals, Indian pueblos: there one can perhaps glimpse “real life.” In this respect, architects and designers have long been tourists in their enthusiasm for traditional craftsmanship and unself-conscious building. But just as tourism effaces differences, so it destroys the truth it seeks through the application of what MacCannell calls “staged authenticity,” whereby places and events are not left as they are, but are contrived to look as tourists expect them to look.

“Not left as they are…”? What a delightful idea. We could have a permanent exhibition of mass graves to represent the dying. Or huge piles of dead stinking animal carcasses to represent the slaughter, or dioramas of the attempts at Indian slavery, or…. well you get the idea.  But I doubt tourists would come to that.  I think staged authenticity has as much to do with how tourists want them to look, as to how they expect them to look.  I had someone years ago tell me to just get over it – move on. I felt like slitting his kids’ throats and saying, just get over it – move on.

So I was disturbed a bit to have become a tourist destination; it did bring up the rage quick and bright. But it was also pretty funny because like as not she has no idea at all that what she is seeing, that those dishes in the case around the corner, the necklaces and baskets, they are being made and given away all around her, especially at this time of year.  The season of winter dances has just begun, and as far as I know, they have yet to become marked on a tourist map so she will likely never know that what she is seeing in the museum is a living culture, a way of being that is very different from what she is used to.

The thing is that believing that you have the truth of something by just looking at it, or a representation of it, is pretty damn funny.  I mean could I convince my boss that all I had to do to earn my paycheque is to look at a picture of my desk with its pile of waiting work? That I wouldn’t mind at all. Life is something that changes you. It breaks you open, bends what you thought was iron, forces growth or causes death. Tourist attractions are about changing life to fit the known parameters of the tourist.  The touristic desire makes what is something living and breathing, both angry and amused, a digital image. It makes life controllable and, of course, in that moment, separates the experience of seeing irrevocably from the living of it. I mean, what would have happened if she’d talked to me instead of taking my picture?

I can’t help wonder what she will say about me when she shows her pictures to her friends and family back home – “Now here is a real Indian?