by Daniel Quinn
“It must be the domain of the gods.”
“To flip a coin and bet on heads is to enter the domain of the gods. To draw a card to a four-card straight flush is to enter the domain of the gods. To read the marks on this patch of earth and begin a hunt is to enter the domain of the gods. And when the coin turns up heads, when the fifth card fills your straight flush, and when the hunt succeeds, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in one god, a thousand gods, or no gods at all, you know that the universe has taken notice of you, that you’ve been in touch with the fountainhead of meaning and being.”
The sacred harmonic
“Now you understand—or at least I hope you understand—what I meant about the harmonic I was talking about yesterday. I said that when mental process crossed the border and became human thought, perhaps thought itself began to resound with a harmonic that corresponds to what we call religion or awareness of the sacred.”
“Yes. At the time I had no idea what you were getting at. I thought it very unlikely that you’d ever be able persuade me of such a thing.”
“And now?”
“And now it makes sense. Human thought is thought that opens up into the future, and the future is inescapably the domain of the gods. Crossing the border, you can’t help but meet them.”
“And you’re in a position now to understand the universality of the animist experience—to understand why there once was a universal religion on this planet. It doesn’t matter where you cross the border and meet those gods, the experience is the same. The African experience is not different from the Asian or the European or the Australian or the American. Every hunt begins here”—she patted the ground in front of us—“and is pursued into the domain of the gods.”
Dynamiting “Nature”
B asked me to explain again the meaning of our “work of bricolage.” I picked it up and studied it for a moment. “The fossil shell represents the community of life,” I told her. “Animism is bound up with that community and resonates with it. The Law of Life, represented by the pen, is written in the community of life, and animism reads this law, as does science in its own way.”
“Good. We’ve talked about resonance in two connections here, haven’t we, Jared? Human thought resounds with a harmonic that corresponds to awareness of the sacred, and animism resonates with the community of life. What’s the connection? Are these resonances actually just one resonance?”
“I’d have to guess they’re the same.”
“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.”
“I told you this little patch of dirt here in front of us is where it all begins—human thought, human awareness of the sacred, and human history—but as many times as I’ve come back to it, I don’t think I’ve ever been completely forthright with you. I’ve been diffident. I haven’t spelled it out—because, I suppose, in spite of everything, I fear the sneering superiority of your kind.”
I didn’t want to ask what kind “my kind” is (and probably didn’t need to, either). Instead I made the mistake of asking her if she’d ever actually seen me sneering.
“Many times, I’m afraid. I know you’re not aware of it, and I know you try to suppress it, but I also know this isn’t easy for someone with your intellectual and cultural indoctrination.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, inadequately. “Profoundly.”
“I know it. Charles knew it too. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
I pondered that for a while and finally said, “I guess if you want me to do what you say you want me to do, then you’re going to have to say the things you’re afraid to say.”
“You’re right, of course,” she said, “and I know it.”
“Say them to Louis, if that helps. In a way, it helps me too.”
“Okay, I’ll do that when I have to,” she said. “Meanwhile … An hour ago—I don’t know if you’ll remember it—I told you we became human reading the tale of events written here—here in the hand of the god. And I showed you my own hand, like this. Do you know what I meant by that?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you see these marks in my hand?”
“Of course.”
“I’m comparing them to these marks.” She indicated the tracks of the beetle and the mouse. “Both sets of marks are tracks—marks left by the passage of life. It’s my notion—and of course it’s just a notion—that these tracks, found here in the hand and here on the ground, gave rise to the notion that we live in
the hand of the god of this place.”
She reached out and dragged her forefinger across the track of the beetle.
“Shirin’s mark,” she said. “Like the beetle and the mouse, once upon a time, I was here. And if another comes to study these marks, he or she will say, ‘All three were here, at different times, all held in the hand of the god—and all still held in the hand of the god though they’re no longer right here.’ Every track begins and ends in the hand of god, and every track is a lifetime long. Hunter and hunted are both standing in their tracks when they meet, and there are no tracks, however far-flung, that fall outside the hand of god. All paths lie together like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle’s or the mouse’s. All are held together.
“These are things I’d like to say to Louis. We make our journey in the company of others. The deer, the rabbit, the bison, and the quail walk before us, and the lion, the eagle, the wolf, the vulture, and the hyena walk behind us. All our paths lie together in the hand of god and none is wider than any other or favored above any other. The worm that creeps beneath your foot is making its journey across the hand of god as surely as you are.
“Remember that your tracks are one strand of the web woven endlessly in the hand of god. They’re tied to those of the mouse in the field, the eagle on the mountain, the crab in its hold, the lizard beneath its rock. The leaf that falls to the ground a thousand miles away touches your life. The impress of your foot in the soil is felt through a thousand generations.”
In the sea of grass
“I’m at the end of my strength for now, Jared, but I want to take one more field trip before we call it a day. This will be a mental one, so you won’t have to put on your Natty Bumppo hat. Where did you grow up?” I told her Ohio. “I’ve never been there, but it can’t be entirely different from where I grew up, out in the Great Plains. It’s not all cornfields, even today. I want you to travel with me to a place I remember as a child, a plains wilderness…. Once when I was a kid I remember watching an old western movie on TV called The Sea of Grass. I don’t know what it was about. All I remember is one scene where Spencer Tracy looks out over this vast sea of grass stretching from horizon to horizon, and the wind’s stirring it up and sending it into waves just like the sea. The place I’m talking about wasn’t as huge as that, but it was the same kind of place. Close your eyes and see if you can picture such a place.