Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  Many people regard rock art as “primitive,” meaning the techniques are not refined and the ideas behind the art are unsophisticated. From there it’s a short step to believing that “primitive” man’s sense that his powers were limited and his fate beyond his control are fears made obsolete by sophisticated technologies. The vast majority of people in the world, however, find every day, sometimes in harrowing ways, that their fate is not theirs to control. A relative handful of people, primarily in business, engineer the plans for social and economic change that determine the fate of most ordinary people.

  In my experience, even the most decent people in positions of power believe that ultimately they know best, that their experience, education, intuition, and instincts have made them authoritative. I am forced to object, with my memories of the slums of Jaipur and São Paulo, of ravaged landscapes in the Texas oil fields around Midland or of carbonized air in Beijing, and the sea ice gone from Arctic seas in late summer, to say that perhaps they do not know best.

  Once, years before I traveled to the Pilbara, I had the opportunity to accompany a guide through the Paleolithic art galleries at Altamira, a cave in northern Spain. For half a day I had these galleries to myself, time to linger with Magdalenian Cro-Magnon imaginations. When I emerged from this prolonged encounter with their work, I was so acutely aware of the humanity of these people—their capacity for courage, for love, for innovation, for amazement; their ability to provide for one another here on the Cantabrian coast, 14,000 years ago—so awed I lost my orientation in time. From the edge of a cliff just past the entrance to the cave, I stared down into the gardens and stock pens of domesticated animals that belonged to those living there in two-story stucco houses, a semi-rural neighborhood of Santillana del Mar. Between the lives of the artists working in the cave and these people with their small plots of land—the rows of corn, chicken yards, milch goats, grape arbors, and fruit trees—there seemed to be no time at all. I indulged myself with the thought that both groups wanted the same—a feeling of allegiance with one another, relationships that were just, openness to the numinous character of their worlds, from time to time a quickened heart, and the ability to give as well as receive love.

  These thoughts about Altamira, which came to me on the veranda that evening, gazing out toward the ruined galleries of the Burrup Peninsula, led me to think of my stepfamily. Their ancestral home sat on a hill above the town of Cudillero, a hundred and twenty miles up the coast from Altamira, to the west. Their casa del Indio, with its formal chapel, its extensive arbors and gardens secured behind high walls and a massive set of gates, always spoke to me of inordinate wealth and aloofness. I did not feel superior to those people and their families. Their God approved of their murdering los indios in the Americas, and their wealth made them seem good in the eyes of those who believed as they did; but I wanted a different path, one less violent, less indifferent. As the decades passed for me, I began to think that the path many of us now share, a path of self-realization and self-aggrandizement, might eventually leave us stranded, having arrived at the end of exploitation, but with most of us standing there empty-handed. And what is it that we have found through the injustice of exploitation that these Magdalenians at Altamira did not already possess?

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  WHILE WE WERE VISITING the Aboriginal center at Roebourne, I met a woman named Loreen Samson, a thirty-seven-year-old Aboriginal artist and perhaps the most accomplished painter at the center. She had faced a certain amount of personal hardship earlier in life, I was told, but her focus was now elsewhere—on the goals FORM helped her set for herself. She told me she wanted to use her creative energies to open people’s imaginations to better ways of responding to conditions in the Pilbara. She did not want more despair or anger, or to encourage the feeling that the people here were trapped. She taught art as a way of seeing, of being in the world. She was an instructor at both the Roebourne art center and at the Roebourne Regional Prison, where between 90 and 95 percent of the male inmates are Aboriginal.

  Loreen had prepared written statements to accompany eight or ten of her landscapes, some of which hung on the walls at the art center. They were not explanations of the work but continuations of the paintings, set out in idiosyncratically punctuated sentences with misspelled words, her syntax the syntax of spoken rather than written English. Bill Fox and I sat in an annex of the studio where Loreen and four or five other Aboriginal women were working, reading half a dozen of her statements, handing them back and forth to each other.

  She wrote in one statement:

  Every day I see my Dream Times grounds are drifting away from me. I cry out too stop[,] you are taking away the heart of my people. This lands is what we have[,] the grounds of knowledge for you and me too learn each other about culture. Our children would come and teach their kids of the great lands of knowledge. It hurt me of what I see now[.] We don’t have any solid ground to stand on just the tears that come down from my eyes[,] of shame of what our people have done for the prices of dollars. Look at this land[.] Now trains go by night and day with the richness of this wise old country […] Look around[,] that what have mining done to it will hurt people [who] shouldn’t [have] aloud mining [to] destroy the land of [the] knowledge that our ancestor put on rock art many years ago.

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  THE EVIL BEHIND colonial subjugations, from Portugal’s Brazil to France’s Algeria, has generated a wealth of contemporary anti-colonial writing, criticizing the quests for material wealth and economic control. In the New World, the criticism might be said to have begun with Bartolomé de las Casas and to have come forward to Eduardo Galeano and writers like Jhumpa Lahiri. The centuries of moral and ethical outrage over the colonial politics of race, over ethnic and national exceptionalism, have recently produced eloquent critiques of cultural ignorance and indifference to human life, both of which lie at the core of colonial expansion. These critiques of exploitation and profiteering have continually been deemphasized as international concerns because their logic makes people in power uncomfortable.

  As much as anti-colonial literature looks back on colonial history’s injustices, it also looks forward today to what is arguably a far more important question: What are we to do? Or put another way: What is going to happen to us as temperatures change, as our numbers climb toward eight billion, as the Pacific becomes more acidic, and as more freshwater goes into making jet fuel from Canada’s tar sands?

  While “turbocharged” capitalism is routinely singled out as the villainous cause of so much of what is socially and environmentally evil, eliminating hypercapitalism doesn’t seem to answer the central question, which is: Why do we harm one another so grievously? Or to phrase this differently, What is the root of our fundamental disagreement, now that the size of our population and the scarcity of essential supplies like uncontaminated freshwater have come into play?

  As I read anti-colonial literature from different parts of the world, in English and in translation, what I’ve come to feel is that a disagreement over which path leads to the more desirable future is a disagreement about the place of empathy in public and corporate life. On the one hand are the ideals, unfortunately, of capitalism: progress, profitability, ownership, control of the marketplace, consumption. On the other hand are the ideals not of a system of economics but a system of social organization best represented in modern times by a group of flawed individuals who nevertheless became the iconic representatives of tolerance, respect for beauty, a preference for reconciliation over warfare, and compassion: the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the 14th Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Archbishop Óscar Romero.

  The question the latter group consistently addressed was, Why is there so much suffering in the world? Each person in their way tried to do something about suffering created by intolerance, injustice, and ethnic and national exc
eptionalism. This has always been a hard road to keep. It is not that most people don’t support such ideals but that the implementation of the ideals is so extremely difficult that it makes people cynical. Reflecting on the social, economic, and environmental harm that fracking engenders, or on Russia’s aggressive efforts to regain its stature as a world power, one must consider whether allowing human misery to develop further in order to gain some sort of short-term economic or political advantage isn’t an incurable, systematic problem. Perhaps the actual source of humanity’s trouble is genetic. Meanwhile, attempts to address these questions continue to be ridiculed, held in suspicion, or patronizingly dismissed by many people who have the power to make a major difference in the way disenfranchised people live.

  Apparently it’s regrettable but finally all right to let thousands starve in order to ensure that a few have the yachts they require. Apparently it’s all right for thousands to die of lung cancer and for tobacco companies to withhold the evidence that would incriminate them, as long as the companies can show a profit. Apparently it’s all right for China to dam a tributary of the Brahmaputra River and endanger the flow of freshwater to Bangladesh if this will help develop a wealthy middle class in China.

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  WHEN I FIRST began traveling in Australia in the 1980s—not that Australia stood at the nexus of any particular world problem then; it was just that at this time I began to see more clearly the outline of what disturbed me—I was trying to understand a question about human fate. With the horsemen of a coming apocalypse so obviously milling on the horizon, riding high-strung horses, why was there so little effort to bring other ways of knowing—fresh metaphors—to the table? Why was it that, for the most part, it was only the well-groomed, the formally educated, the economically solvent, the white, the well-connected that were invited to sit at the tables of decision, where the fate of so many will be decided? Why, for example, were there no elders invited from indigenous traditions like the Sami, the Mapuche, the Onondaga, the Iñupiat, the Nuer, the Kuku Yalanji? These were people who valued wisdom as much as or more than intelligence, whose traditional concerns lay with the fate of the group, not the self. Were they not worldly enough? Were they too obscure?

  I went to Darwin once, a coastal city in Australia’s Northern Territory, to listen to an assembly of anthropologists present papers, mostly to one another. These men and women were studying the last few remnant hunting and gathering cultures in the world—Hadza in Tanzania, for example, and Inughuit in Western Greenland. They get together regularly to share what they know. (The more humble say what they think they know.) Over a period of three days I listened to about sixty presentations. When I left, I felt informed by many specificities, and warned again of how perilous it can be to try to collapse any single complex idea, like feeding the members of your family, into one sentence that will serve everyone.

  Among those I met at the international meetings in Darwin were a few Australian anthropologists with whom I later became friends. Eventually I returned to the Northern Territory to travel with them. They introduced me to Warlpiri, Arrernte, Pintupi, Luritja, and Pitjantjatjara peoples and their not-entirely-congruent ideas about the world and reality. I appreciated and savored the experiences we shared, but I never felt, as I’d never felt among Eskimo people or Native Americans on my home continent, that I wanted to trade places. What I wanted to understand, really, was what they might know that would be of use to my own people, whom I saw traveling very fast on a spavined road. I was looking for anyone who could speak the language of the god of no particular religion.

  I returned to Australia a year later to dive on the Great Barrier Reef, to immerse myself in the mostly benign waters there, the blazing colors of tropical fish, the transparency of the water, and the expanse of the coral reefs, in order to remind myself that no matter how steep the spiral of despair might become, beauty without design, without restraint, was all around. You only had to step into these realms—Alexandra Fjord lowland, Roca Redonda, Victoria Falls in the moonlight—to remind yourself of the possibilities, of the things you too rarely thought of. Then you go back to the world of people who are not able to travel to Lake Clifton, to watch unsuspecting caribou through the clear air of a High Arctic summer evening, to behold the panoply of life flickering, like thousands of small colored lights, in an anodyne basin of tropical water.

  You feel while you are witnessing such things that you must carry some of this home. That what you’ve found are not your things but our things.

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  WHEN I RECEIVED an invitation to speak at a literary festival in Hobart and was told that my escort for those days would be a Mr. Peter Hay, I began reading Mr. Hay’s poetry. I admired the integrity of his lines and was charmed by some of his Tasmanian locutions. When I reached him by phone and asked about going to Port Arthur together, I told him I was trying to understand why those in power so often seek to humiliate and punish those who disagree with them. Or perhaps I only wanted to look at the evidence of an episode in Western history that’s too little known in my country. And to consider how class distinctions, the harsh divide between the rich and the poor, for example, lead people to believe that “solutions” like Port Arthur are both just and sane. He said whatever I might make of Port Arthur, grasping the essence of the place would help me greatly in understanding what it means to be Australian.

  I could never hope to understand what it meant to be Australian, but appreciated the latitude he seemed to be giving me to think about it. To be freighted off to Port Arthur in the eighteenth century was more than to be banished. It was to be seriously punished—and, it was hoped, to thereby be reformed. Parliament believed it could create at Port Arthur a valued and self-sustaining commercial trading enterprise, and that the penal colony could be profitably operated. It proposed reforming the “dregs” of its own society to run the place, and to achieve that reform through public whippings, long periods of solitary confinement, hard labor, and instruction in Christian living. The notion, of course, was daft, but Parliament thought it could work. Whatever happened, the experiment would cost Parliament very little, if you just ran the numbers with the right attitude and kept the details quiet.

  This is an old story. It’s unfolded in many places, under many guises.

  So one April morning I went with Pete Hay to Port Arthur to take in the aftermath of the experiment. We drove down from Hobart to Eaglehawk Neck, a narrow isthmus that connects the Forestier Peninsula to the Tasman Peninsula. From there it was just a matter of twelve miles to the historic site.

  Eaglehawk Neck gives you a good sense and a quick read of the place. In the years the colony was in operation, the authorities maintained a picket line of dogs here to attack and savage any convict attempting to escape to the north. (Fewer than half the convicts at Port Arthur were held in cells. The others, encouraged to ascend the ladder of “good attitude and good works,” were permitted to roam freely over the peninsula, logging trees, digging coal, building a railroad, constructing buildings, and competing with one another through their endeavors for privileged positions in the penal hierarchy.) Writing in 1837, the artist Harden Melville said of the picket-line dogs, “The white, the brindle[d], the grey, and the grisley, the rough and the smooth, the crop-eared and the long-eared, the gaunt and the grim [stood chained to wood platforms erected across the isthmus and its salt marshes]. Every four-footed, black fanger individual among them would have taken first prize for ugliness and ferocity at any show.”

  Mostly ill-tempered to start with, the Eaglehawk dogs were spaced so that two dogs might attack a man together but not get their chains crossed. Their handlers abused them to keep them vicious and edgy, depriving them of food, water, and affection, no doubt making them all the crazier by this treatment. When they wore out, they were shot.

  Prisoners confined at Port Arthur were generally held to be “ignorant, stupid,
revengeful, hardened, sullen, cunning, thievish, restless, disobedient, and idle.” To improve the character of each man, to make him “clever, informed, cheerful, contented, simple, cleanly, obedient, industrious, and faithful,” the prison staff implemented a plan for the reform of its incarcerated prisoners based on a system employed at Britain’s Pentonville prison, in London. Each inmate in Port Arthur’s Model Prison was isolated in solitary confinement. They were not allowed to speak, to make eye contact with the guards or, indeed, to make any audible sound. All prisoners and guards were required to wear slippers to muffle their footsteps. Attendance at religious services was mandatory, with each prisoner quartered in his own small closet within the chapel. One hour of daily exercise was permitted, but prisoners were roped together in the prison yard in such a way that no prisoner could draw closer than five yards to another. All inmates were required to wear visored hats, the visor to be lowered upon leaving the cell, to prevent anyone’s seeing anyone else’s face. It was believed that anonymity, depersonalization, and silence would provide the right environment for the “divine spark” of enlightenment to ignite in each man the desire to see and accept the road to personal reformation.