“They are the same, and once you see this, you’ll be ready to articulate the animist vision the way you’ve articulated the Taker vision.”
Having said this, B lapsed into a thoughtful silence. Finally, after a couple minutes, she went on. “Sometimes you have to fill a gap in the road to get people going in the right direction, and sometimes you have to dynamite part of the road to keep them from heading off in the wrong direction—and of course sometimes you have to do both, which is where I am right now with you. I think I’ll start with the dynamiting, though I know I don’t have nearly enough dynamite or enough time to destroy this section of the road as thoroughly as I’d like.
“You’ll see people turn onto this section of the road when they start talking about Nature, which is perceived as being something like the aggregate of processes and phenomena of the nonhuman world—or the power behind those processes and phenomena. As people commonly see it, we Takers have tried to ‘control’ Nature, have ‘alienated’ ourselves from Nature, and live ‘against’ Nature. It’s almost impossible for them to understand what B is saying as long as they’re in the grip of these useless and misleading ideas.
“Nature is a phantom that sprang entirely from the Great Forgetting, which, after all, is precisely a forgetting of the fact that we are exactly as much a part of the processes and phenomena of the world as any other creature, and if there were such a thing as Nature, we would be as much a part of it as squirrels or squids or mosquitoes or daffodils. We are unable to alienate ourselves from Nature or to ‘live against’ it. We can no more alienate ourselves from Nature than we can alienate ourselves from entropy. We can no more live against Nature than we can live against gravity. On the contrary, what we’re seeing here more and more clearly is that the processes and phenomena of the world are working on us in exactly the same way that they work on all other creatures. Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable—and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.”
“I think I understand all that.”
“Even understanding all that, I assure you, people will say to you, ‘All the same, don’t you think we need to get closer to Nature?’ To me, this is as nonsensical as saying that we need to get closer to the carbon cycle.”
“I understand. On the other hand, some people do like to be outdoors.”
“That’s fine, of course—so long as they don’t insist that sitting in a forest glade is ‘closer to Nature’ than sitting in a movie theater.”
Through the eyes of deer
“No one would ever think of saying that a duck or an earthworm is ‘close to Nature,’ and it’s similarly true that our animist ancestors were not ‘close to Nature.’ They were Nature—were a part of the general community of life. They belonged to that community as fully as moths and skunks and lizards belong to it—as fully and, I might add, as thoughtlessly. I mean they didn’t congratulate themselves for belonging to it, they took it for granted. The same is true of modern Leaver peoples. They don’t belong to this community of life as a matter of principle or because they think it’s right or noble or ‘good for the children’ or ‘good for the planet.’ I point this out to drag my feet against the current tendency to angelize them, which I personally think is no better than demonizing them the way our great-grandparents did. They don’t need to be angelized. They do indeed have a lifestyle that’s healthier for people and healthier for the planet, but they don’t hold on to it because they’re noble, they hold on to it for the best reason in the world—because they prefer it to ours and would rather be dead than live the way we do.”
I nodded to let her know I was with her so far.
“Living in the community of life did give them something we’ve lost, which is a complete understanding of where we come from. Children in our culture think that life comes to us from our human parents and that food is just another product we manufacture, like paint or plastic or glass. Children in hunting-gathering cultures know that life doesn’t come to us only from our parents. It comes to us just as truly from all the living things we subsist on. These plants and animals aren’t products any more than we are, and if we live in the hand of the god, then so do they in exactly the same way.”
She shook her head, obviously dissatisfied. “There are some things prose just can’t handle, Jared. Let me address this to Louis.”
She closed her eyes. “The people I learned the Law of Life from, Louis, are the people who actually gave the law that name, the Ihalmiut Eskimos, who lived in the Great Barrens of Canada, inside the Arctic Circle. Theirs was a strange life by our standards, but its strangeness makes it very easy for us to comprehend. The Ihalmiut were the People of the Deer. They were this because deer was what they lived on. They were completely dependent on the deer, because other animals were rare, and vegetation that’s edible by humans is practically nonexistent inside the Arctic Circle. It’s hard to imagine living entirely on meat—never a piece of bread, never a piece of chocolate, never a banana or a peach or an ear of corn—but they did and were perfectly healthy and happy.
“They’d never have to explain who and what they were to their own children, but if they did, they’d say something like this: ‘We know you look at us and call us men and women, but this is only our appearance, for we’re not men and women, we’re deer. The flesh that grows on our bones is the flesh of deer, for it’s made from the flesh of the deer we’ve eaten. The eyes that move in our heads are the eyes of deer, and we look at the world in their stead and see what they mi
ght have seen. The fire of life that once burned in the deer now burns in us, and we live their lives and walk in their tracks across the hand of god. This is why we’re the People of the Deer. The deer aren’t our prey or our possessions—they’re us. They’re us at one point in the cycle of life and we’re them at another point in the cycle. The deer are twice your parents, for your mother and father are deer, and the deer that gave you its life today was mother and father to you as well, since you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that deer.’”
She opened her eyes and glanced at me—a signal, I assumed, that she was once again addressing me rather than her son.
“This perception of our kindredness with the rest of the community of life is fundamental to the animist vision, Jared, though it’s naturally very mysterious and improbable to people of our culture. Everyone should spend some time with the cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic—and I don’t mean as an exercise in art appreciation. To identify these paintings as art as we understand it is to look at them very cursorily. They’re magnificent and brilliant, but they weren’t done for the sort of motives that we attribute to painters like Giotto or El Greco or Rembrandt or Goya or Picasso or de Kooning. Nor is there really any reason to suppose that they were painted as magical hunting aids. What’s clear from examination is that these are hunting guides—visual aids for hunting instruction. For example, again and again, instead of being shown in profile—the way the rest of the animal is shown—the animal’s feet are turned up to show the track-making surface they present to the ground. Another way of showing the same thing is to paint the animal’s track right on its picture or beside it, and this too is seen again and again. Attention is paid to animal droppings and to what animals look like when they’re producing those droppings (which I suppose is an activity hunters can take advantage of). Attention is paid to animals rolling on the ground, making wallows, and digging up the ground—all important signs for the hunter. Animals are shown in association with plants they feed on (’find the plant, find the animal’), with animals that prey on them (’follow the predator, find the prey’), and with symbiotic species (’follow the swallows, find the bison’). Attention is paid to animals making characteristic roars and bellows. Attention is paid to what you’re likely to see if most of an animal is hidden by rocks or tall grass—a pair of antlers, a distinctive hump. Attention is paid to seasonal cues to behavior—‘when the salmon are jumping like this, look for the stags to be on the move as well.’ These caves aren’t art galleries or shamanistic temples, they’re schools of the hunting arts—the equivalent of one of our museums of science and industry.”
After trying to digest all this, I told her I was confused. “You brought up the caves as if spending time in them would convince anyone that our hunting ancestors felt a kindredness with the rest of the living community.”
“And here I am stripping away all the magical aspects of the paintings.”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll stand by the recommendation. I guess I’m not talking about magic, I’m talking about something like ‘feeling tone.’ These hunters obviously revered the animals they were painting—were in awe of them, idolized them the way people in our culture idolize movie stars and sports heroes. To paint them the way they did, they had to feel a joyous involvement and identification with the magnificent creatures they hunted. But I can see you’re still not much convinced by all this. It’s difficult to be persuasive in the absence of the paintings themselves. Have you ever seen a reproduction of one that’s usually called The Sorcerer?”
“I think I have, though I don’t recall it in any detail.”
“It’s conventionally interpreted as a shaman wearing a ritual mask, but you have to be pretty literal-minded (and not much of an anatomist) to see him this way. He has the antlers and body of a stag, the ears of a lion, the face of an owl, and the tail and genitals of a horse—and there’s not the slightest indication that he’s wearing a mask. I believe he’s unique in Paleolithic art in that he doesn’t just inhabit the plane on which he’s painted. He does something no other man or creature does; he looks out of the plane on which he’s painted and gazes into our eyes—with his strange owl eyes. The rule in conventional cinematic narrative is that the actor must never, ever look directly into the ‘eye’ of the camera, because if he does that, this shatters the illusion that he’s interacting with the other people we see on the screen. If he looks into the camera, he’s suddenly interacting with us. The man-beast on the wall of Les Trois Frères cave is unquestionably interacting with us—introducing himself graphically in the absence of text: ‘Here,’ he’s saying, ‘you can see what I am—I’m not just a man. I wouldn’t be nearly so marvelous if I were just a man. Look closely and you’ll see man, horse, owl, lion, and stag. I’m a compound of all these, and have you ever seen anything more beautiful?’”
I smiled, shrugged, and shook my head. “I guess I just like the way you said it better than the way these guys painted it.”
She shrugged back. “Lillian Hellman once said something that surprised me: ‘Nothing you write will ever come out the way you hoped it would.’ Not her exact words but something like that. It surprised me because I thought, ‘Hey, you’re in complete control of what goes on the page, so why shouldn’t it come out the way you want it to?’ I suppose the answer is that what we hope to achieve is always beyond human power. We want to make the earth tremble and the stones weep and the skies open up. I wanted to do that for you here, right now, but I know I haven’t.”
For a moment I almost thought this was an odd sort of ambition for anyone to have. Then I remembered myself as a young man. My own ambitions had not been so different, but they’d grown dry and insubstantial, and the winds and rains of time had eroded them to almost nothing.
The web endlessly woven
“I said I was going to be selective in what I revealed to you about the Leaver lifestyle, so you’d be able to articulate the animist vision as easily as you were able to articulate our own vision.”
“I remember.”