Project Gutenburg has a copy of Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts by Dr. Herbert Silberer. This famous rendition pictured here of the goal of alchemical practice has always been one of my favourite emblems of human desire and the western European narrative that tries to make sense of the experience of wanting. The whole project of alchemy as it pertains to the human psyche is fascinating.

Silberer lived between 1882 and 1923. He was four years old when Emily Dickinson died. Dickinson had been influenced in her thinking by many things but one of them was Transcendentalism, or at least Emerson’s writings about it. Emerson was influenced by the various magical traditions of the west largely through Swedenborg (1688-1772) just as Ethan Allen Hitchcock (1798-1870) was. Although Hitchcock and Emerson focused on different things, one thing stayed the same, they were both obsessed by the notion of the transcendence of the individual human being, as was Dickinson in her own fashion.

Hitchcock was fascinated by alchemy. In fact, it seems as if the finest literary collection of early alchemical works in the United States was his. Hitchcock knew Emerson, and certainly Emily Dickenson had access to Emerson’s essays in her daily papers.  Emerson and Dickinson: arguably two of the most influential writers in American history. And of course there are the Great Awakenings, the first occuring between the (approximate years) 1730 and 1775 and the second between 1790 and 1840. The third rolled around only 10 years after that, between 1850 and 1900. I don’t think it can be underestimated how woven a magical world view is in American society and Letters.

I have been writing all day. Trying to anyway. I have been working on a piece that talks about the Venus of Laussel bas-relief. The piece refuses to stop drifting off and I can’t seem to corral it. So finally in desperation I went into my files and copied all the bits of writing that talk about that carving or the person who created it. I found a lot. Can’t keep it all clear in my head so I created a little table with the titles and the first lines so I could see what issues were prompted by Laussel.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 in D is playing – the Allegro con spirito. I can feel myself like the music, a powerful current running but it’s skipping from instrument to instrument, like sparks of static jumping from roof top to roof top. A power that is beautiful, but not that coherent, and writing needs some form of coherence.
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Whenever I hear the word “uprightness” or it is triggered by some other means, whether in the swinging stance of a walker, the moment by moment balance in movement or whether by the five pointed star (pentagram) on its “feet”, I get this little packet of resonant feeling. That “resonant feeling” is the signal that the connotations of things, words, activities is active. With language users, things are never simple and words are never conscribed by their denotative meaning. Words like “upright” carry multiple meanings and many of them will not be found at dictionary.com. For me, one of the connotations of “uprightness” has something to do with how human beings first came to walk bipedally.

Things, whether words or symbols, carry a (usually) hidden payload of meaning. The specific content of that “payload” is contingent: what books you read, who you meet, what culture you were born into, what films you see, what languages you have learnt to speak, what accidents occur around you, what superstitions you carry, what your parents told you was true. For example, someone I know says that for her, “uprightness” is mostly to do with morality; the word carries a sense of surety and an image of some human being standing tall in his or her goodness. Not for me. Paradoxically, the word triggers an image of a human male slightly crouched over while another postures, flinging his arms back, expanding his torso, his leg stance wide, exposing his groin to view. For this bit of hilarity, I blame Maxine Sheets-Johnstone.
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I am at a dim sum restaurant. I am the only non-Asian person here. I have American Gods on the table. I have ordered taro and pumpkin in coconut milk with rice for lunch. Later I am going to see Angles and Demons at a small independent theatre nearby. What a miraculous thing such choice. Along the street here, just in one block, there is a Starbucks, a dim sum place, a modern Thai restaurant, a Korean bakery, a bar and pizza place, a theatre, a shop that sells lingerie that makes Victoria Secret look prudish, a small grocery store and a bank on the corner. Why did I choose the dim sum? Good question. Walking back from the bank I passed the pizza place and the bakery and then the Thai restaurant. As I passed the dim sum window I noticed the wall inside. Yellow stripes, tan relief, coordinated table cloths, bright, sunny, warm looking. My feet chose for me; when I got to the door I went in.
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Art is seen as a fundamentally human experience. I would argue this because the capacities for symbolic reasoning, artistic expression, meaningful projections of self onto the surfaces of the world, are often cited as evidence for how human beings are fundamentally different from other animals, and yet as animal studies show, there is essentially nothing that is not, in some manner also practiced by some non-human animal species. Even those authors who most want to maintain some specialty for humans alone have a difficult time finding ground from which to say only we come here.

One thing of deep interest to me is to concept of ownership amongst people whose life ways are still organized around mobility. Of course now, with all the changes brought by life on a Reservation, people own many things. Cars, for example, are important because it is hard to get groceries and get to Powwows and other events without a ride. Yet despite this cars are not treated with the reverence that they are often treated in other societies. People can own houses too, of course, but the same thing seems to be true. However, there is considerable pride in personal accoutrements—if there are Indian designed patterns, good Pendletons on the beds, a star quilt or two, pictures of Indian ancestors, necklaces, baskets, corn-husk bags, regalia—things that display historical continuity and contemporary vitality—things like that are of real value: there is emotional attachment that just doesn’t seem to be much present for the house itself.

The land and what it produces, which is very often the basis of Reservation wealth, is often tied to a family line and not really disposable wealth for the individual. The land is often in trust for those who come next in the family line. So for example, one piece of land can have twenty or more shared owners.

Tribal money: the Tribe is like a corporation that pays dividends to its “share-holders” those being tribal members. It earns the money by selling timber, running a casino, or other such industries and the money is divided up between all registered members of the tribe, the children’s money going half into an account that will not be accessible to them until they turn 18 and half going to their parents for things like school clothes and gifts. The details differ from tribe to tribe but the idea of community shared ownership and wealth dispersal is basically the same. So what individuals actually own are things that have cultural relevance and therefore some emotional attachment and some pride-worth—like the necklaces and regalia. Things that cam be owned in this more important way include stories, medicine items and songs. It is these last things—things I call keystone artifacts—that carry all the weight of custom that goes with the really important aspects of a people’s life.

So for example if something is taken without permission, like a car or a stereo, usually the person who has had his or her item taken may get mad but they will shrug. “It’s just a thing” is something I have heard a great number of times when things go missing. But in one case to which I was privy, where a person used another’s song in a ritual circumstance without permission, there was a huge furor, necessitating a dance to get us all together to take the affront to the spirits and many hours of prayer, dancing and singing to set it right.

A song is like a name: it is the key to one’s relationship with not only the spirits of the now-time and the land but it is also key to one’s relationship with the whole history (and therefore future) of the People. Imagine for a moment that your family name is one that belongs to the House of Windsor and you are British. That name would probably be of some import to you. In just the same way a song is an identifier of relationship, of belonging, of history. A song and also one’s stories are the place from which one’s life takes meaning and stealing them is the same as stealing the breath from one’s mouth. It is an act of inexcusable arrogance and contempt. This is, in part, why it is so awful when any person simply steals the patterns and ways of Indian people. It is like they are trying to steal the spirit or the soul. Imagine for a moment that the Shroud of Turin were actually Jesus’ shroud. Now imagine some completely uncontexted, unbaptized Christian-in-name-only borrowed it and used it as a ground tarp to hold some hastily invented para-Christian ritual. The outrage a committed Christian would feel is probably akin to what a Native American feels when he or she is told that non-contexted non-Indian people are holding a “traditional Sioux sweatlodge” or an “authentic Plains sundance.”

The core of any tradition is the web of relationships between the experiences, stories and traditions that connect the core (keystone) valuables of the people. These stories, traditions or experiences cannot simply be borrowed, anymore than a new genetic code can be borrowed. Change can happen and adaptation occurs but what a person grows with, what sets of experiences and values shape a person as a child are not fully eradicable. The fact that songs and stories form the core of real wealth and position in many tribal societies is not something that is easily shared. If you come into a society like this and have no connection with the songs and the stories then you have no position and since wealth like this cannot be bought, it is very difficult to become “visible” in the system.

I have recently been watching a discontinued TV show called Dead Like Me. It posits a world where some people, when they die, become grim reapers whose job it is to take the souls of other people who are themselves imminently dead. The main character, an 18 year old girl, dies in the pilot episode – dies by flying toilet seat – and starts her (eternal?) unpaid job as reaper. The show only went to two seasons. I have watched all of the first and 3 episodes of the last. It’s delightful.

I tend to like shows like this. Ones that create a world where there are things like paranormal insight, bodiless souls and odd creatures (in the case of Dead Like Me that’s gravelings –they’re the ones that set up the deadly accidents). When I am really tired, really stressed, I will watch (or read) something like this and feel soothed, reoriented.

I wonder about this, what this says about the power of atavistic notions for, of course, there is no life after death, no soul to take, no gravelings and accidents are just that. But really, of course, the show isn’t about death at all. It’s about living, about being in the world, and there is nothing to heighten the value of life like the closeness of death. Positing a world where death has a positive presence, where it exists as a thing itself, allows all kinds of life-moment mirrors. For example, the young woman in the TV show finds herself suddenly responsible for herself. She has been a real pain in the ass with regard to her parents: taken what they offer (home, food, clean sheets) for granted but now, as a reaper, there is no one offering. She suddenly has no place to live, no dinner waiting, no one to hurt by her sarcasm. Her death forces her to begin looking at her life. This is what I mean by a life-moment mirror.

I think that anthropomorphizing death in the form of human reapers is an easy way to create these “mirrors.” (Nothing grabs our attention quite like death, except perhaps sex and there are plenty of shows about that as well.) Human social life is something we deeply understand. Giving something completely alien and nonhuman (like meaningless accidents and death) an animal-like existence as well as a human face allows us to think about it, to try to extend ourselves outward into the world a little more from the relatively safe perch of humanity. Doing this is one aspect of learning: emotional learning, becoming more conscious of who and what we are.

I am a creature of the world. That means at least two things. First, I am born of a long line of apes and carry the complete history of primate evolutionary history in my genes, my behaviours, my senses, my reactions, my desires, my fears and my consciousness. So when I am at risk (even mildly) I turn naturally to what has always worked for my ancestral line – I make the world into a place I can understand. Hence the TV. Second, when I feel most myself, when I don’t feel so discombobulated, I still turn to the world of earth for answers. But at this point, I can try for more exacting insight. For the second that often either means science or poetry.

Like this poem by Melissa Kwasney:

Madrone

Animal, this nakedness, the bark
rolled back
as a bear or dog would bare its teeth.

Whose limbs, red and gold as mango,
flare like lanterns
among the darker, creek-side trees.

Glowing above the charred wrist
of root, they light
the wild iris in the muddy bottom.

They glow. They grow acrobatic,
offering their arms
shameless, they coil through the forest.

What is hidden inside us is suddenly
exposed to air.
The trunks gleam like a wound gleams.

Here is a mirror; a much subtler statement than Dead Like Me but still an anthropomorphizing of the world: a madrone-mirror. What ever it is to be a tree, it is not shameless or its unspoken corollary, shameful. This is an emotion we experience and find hard to understand consciously since its power is archaic and limbic and thereby not easily dis- and re-membered by our awareness. Looking at the world through narrative builds backdoors into our psyche and allows us to sneak in, peering around with the lantern that is narrative. So I watch paranormal TV shows and read poetry. I do this for my primate, worldly self, the one that is obsessed by what it means to be human, to be me. If I want to understand madrones themselves, or what death actually is, then for that, I need science.

One night during the dark of the moon,
I walked home from an evening
session teaching someone to read
symbols, tired, thinking about how thought
is communicated by picture, by position and movement,
thinking about a little deaf girl I am related to by adoption, about how
she learns to sign and speak, about her love of dogs, about a dog I had to leave
out at the Reservation where, until recently, I lived, how I got an apartment in town to make working and writing easier…

and then halfway down the hill along the river, a dog barked at me from across the road. I stopped wandering, stopped my feet and turned to pay attention to the dog. She sat on the sidewalk, where the dim edges of light from two street lamps met. It is unusual in this area of the city to see a dog running loose. She was a big, young, mixed-breed. In the light of the street lamp her coat seemed a light tan. She barked again. Twice: sharp bites of air. Her tail did not move. I spoke to her a little sharply; told her no, I am not a threat.

I started walking down hill again. I spoke again, forcing a soothing, quiet voice. Good dog. It’s ok. I kept walking, an even, calm gait. Where I lived on the Reservation there are a lot of feral dogs. Many are more than willing to reestablish ties with human beings, but some are not. Some are dangerous, whether from old histories of their own, or from a sense of possession of space and food sources into which human beings fit only as a threat. Her tail didn’t move, her body was tense but her lips had not pulled back to expose her teeth and so I didn’t know if she just wasn’t sure which kind of human I was or if she didn’t know if she could best me in some territorial dispute. I kept walking because normally if you get out of an animal’s personal territory he or she will simply forget you exist and you can walk out in peace. She didn’t stop though. She came across the road, circled round me, got behind me, her body a little jerky from the tension of her not-knowing who and what I was going to be to her. When she got within twelve feet of me I stopped and turned sideways to her, slid my heavy bag off my back and into my right hand. I gripped it hard, looping the shoulder strap around my hand. I sighed. I do not like fighting if I can avoid it. Good girl. Good dog. I moved a few more feet down the hill; she followed. I spoke a little sharper. Mind your manners and I will mind mine. I will hit you if you come at me. In this way we came inside the block where my building sits on its earth shelf half way up the steep river bank.

She had been creeping closer to me as we moved in tandem down the hill. I turned, stopped and faced her with my bag clenched in my hand, my arm just slightly extended to allow for a strong swing should I need it. When she got to a place about four feet from me she stopped and sat. She looked at me. Didn’t bark; didn’t move her tail. I lowered the bag and stared back. Ok, so what? I asked the dog. I stood there for a while, maybe as much as two minutes, her looking at me, me looking back. You want some food? By this time I could see her clearly under the street lamp. She had a collar, looked healthy and well fed. It seemed clear that she was a house dog, probably just out for a night walk with an owner frantically calling for her dog. I kept up the conversation and walked to my front door, put down my bag, got out my keys and unlocked the door. Wait a minute; I’ll get some food for you. I went in, put my stuff on the floor and got a bowl of food. I came back out. She waited by the door. I put some Kibble out for her, sat in the little plastic chair on the concrete pad in front of my ground floor apartment, about two feet from where I had put the food, and then waited while the dog decided what she wanted to do.

I sat there for about ten minutes. At first she ignored the food. She went around the back of the building, checked out the woods which my living room windows overlook, looked at the road that kept going down the hill, smelled the garbage cans, clicked back along the concrete sidewalk, her nails tat tat tatting up to where I waited. Then she lowered her head to the food dish. She lifted it again without eating, walked over to me and placed her head in my lap. I rubbed her ears, smoothed the brown hair down along the crown of her head. She stood there receiving attention; I talked. So what now? I can’t have a dog here. I have two cats who wouldn’t like you at all. I rubbed her ears. Come by now and then; I’ll leave food. I felt for her collar, her id tag, felt that and her rabies tag. I patted her shoulder. After about another five minutes I went inside. As I went in I said be careful. She left, trotting down the hill, without eating the food.

The next day I came outside, just after the light came, to drink my coffee. The food was gone. Maybe the dog ate it, but I think it was probably the skunk or badger, or some of the outside cats around here, or if the food was still there in the morning, maybe it was the flock of starlings. They really like cat food. About a week or two later, coming home from a workshop, I saw her—on a bright green leash being led by a woman in her early 30s. I waved. I think the woman thought I was waving at her.