Typical Indian -- he completely neglects to mention that The Holy People are not Alive People.
There is an ancient Indian saying that
Something Lives only as long as The Last Person Who Remembers it.
My People have come to trust Memory over History.
Memory, like Fire, is Radiant and Immutable
while History serves only those who seek to control it,
those who douse The Flame of Memory in order to put out
The Dangerous Fire of Truth.
Beware These Men,
for they are Dangerous Themselves
and Unwise.
Their False History is written in The Blood of Those Who Might Remember and of Those Who Seek The Truth.
The men who had come and threatened us did not return to our house again but the following day... Some of the boys from the reservation came to tell us they had seen buzzards flying out near the quarry where Eric had first encountered the men.
The buzzard is a large but cowardly bird.
It does not work for its prey, letting others provide the kill.
When I see them circling in the desert, this can only mean that something has died and they are going to pick its bones... or that Death is close and they are waiting for it to do its work for them.
We did not see what they saw but I remembered something I had seen as a younger man.
Just as my grandson had done, I, too, had found a body at the quarry in a hole, half-buried under rocks, but the buzzards, who will eat anything, would not touch it.
This spot is where we found what the buzzards had come for.
We could not tell at first who or what it was but I knew what the buzzards knew... that the smell of Death was upon it.
The Desert does not forgive Man his Weakness. Weak or Strong, it takes no mercy and can kill A Man in less than a day.
To survive, one must develop skin like leather, know where to find water and when to take shelter.
The F.B.I. man would have surely died had he not stayed underground, protected like The Jackrabbit or The Fox.
Even so, death was near.
In accordance with our ancient traditions, we put for twigs on the beams of the hogan to summon the holy people and tell them that a ceremony will be held.
It is called "The Blessing Way" chant.
Only the holy people can save the F.B.I. man's life now.
A VERY SUBSTANTIAL NUMBER OF SHOTS WERE F IRED WITHIN A VERY SHORT DISTANCE OF YOU AND A NUMBER OF PEOPLE WERE KILLED AND A NUMBER OF PEOPLE WERE WOUNDED, AGAIN WITHIN A VERY SHORT DISTANCE OF YOU—
DO YOU HAVE NO RECOLLECTION AT ALL?
SOLDIER O:
NO, SIR,
IT HAS ALL FADED AND GONE.
QUESTIONING OF SOLDIER L, DAY 381 :
Q:
AND THE NIGHTMARES THAT YOU HAVE, ARE THOSE RECURRENT NIGHTMARES?
A:
YES, YES.
Q:
DO THEY DISTORT REALITY FOR YOU?
A:
I DO NOT THINK THEY DISTORT IT, THEY BRING IT OUT MORE VISIBLY,
DETAILS I MISSED BEFORE, YOU KNOW, SOMETIMES SEEM MORE VIVID.
“During the vast Inquiry some of the riddles of Bloody Sunday were finallyanswered.
And plenty more were raised.
This whole search for The truth had a disadvantage :
The Problem of Time.
Hearings for the Inquiry started almost three decades after the events of 1972.
The Report finally came almost four decades after the day.
A more thorough effort to get to The Truth could not be imagined.
Yet thirty years on is no time to start getting to The Truth.
A single, disturbing example relating to the Death of Barney McGuigan may demonstrate The Problem.
In her Saville evidence a woman who was a married mother of four in 1972 testified that the morning after Bloody Sunday a group of children were playing by the place where McGuigan had been shot.
A small boy had been picking bullets out of the nearby wall.
He came to her, she said, because he had found something “stuck to the wall."
‘When I looked I saw that it was part of an eyelid.
It was stuck on the side, about half a yard down from the top of the seat.
I realised that it must have come from somebody who had been shot and so I put it into a matchbox.
Later I gave the matchbox to A Priest who said that he would make sure that it was buried.
I do not know the name of The Priest.’
This might only provide one last grim detail of the shooting of Barney McGuigan.
But even on this relatively simple and certainly memorable detail about one of the victims there is no agreement over What Had Happened or When.
Seamus Carlin testified that on the day of the march itself, after the bodies had been taken away, he saw a blue civil rights banner on the floor steeped in McGuigan’s blood, and that on top of that banner was A Matchbox.
He testified,
‘Someone gave me The Matchbox which contained Barney McGuigan’s lower eyelid.
I took it away and gave it to My Brother who asked A Priest what to do with it.
The Priest told him to put it on The Ground.’
John Patrick Friel testified that after the shooting (when The Body itself may or may not have still been there, he was not sure) ‘someone pointed out to me that Bernard McGuigan’s eyelid was stuck to the wall of Block 2.
It was about four or five feet above the pavement, directly below the kitchen window of our flat.
I had simply never seen anything like it.
I will stand over this statement until the day I die.
I definitely saw this but I am still confused as to the exact time.
It is possible that Barney McGuigan’s body had already been removed from the spot where he died.
This could have been shortly after my first sight of his covered body or it may even have been the next day.’
Noel Millar said that immediately after the shooting finished, and before the body was covered, ‘I could see the body of the man whom I had seen fall, whom I know to be Barney McGuigan.
He was not covered by anything at this time.
Someone drew my attention to the eyelid and eyelash which was stuck to the gable end wall at about head height.
Someone asked whether anyone had a matchbox.
I did so I lifted the eyelid off the wall with a matchstick, put it in the matchbox and placed it near Barney McGuigan’s head, on the ground.’
James Patrick McCafferty, who spent the day itself trying to tune in to army radio on the airwaves, testified that he went back down to the Bogside the day after Bloody Sunday and there ‘noticed about five feet up the wall on my right (the gable end) north wall of Block 2 of the Rossville Flats that there was a perfectly formed eyelid complete with eyelashes stuck to the wall.
There was not a tear in the eyelid; it was so perfect.
‘The eyelid was stuck to the wall about five feet up and approximately halfway along the wall. I cannot recall precisely how far but believe it may have been a little further towards the car park end of the wall… Blood was splattered all around it.
‘I was drawn to the eyelid on the wall, I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
A small crowd gathered around and some body got a matchbox out and put the eyelid in it.
Personally I did not think that was the right thing to do, but we did not know what else to do.
The box was placed on the ground on the civil rights banner which had been used the previous day but which was now saturated with blood and on the floor near the barricade…
Since then I have learnt that the bullet that killed Mr Bernard McGuigan, the father of my school friend Charlie McGuigan, came out of his eye.
From this I concluded that the eyelid that I found must have been Mr Bernard McGuigan’s eyelid.
Although I have talked to Charlie about that day, I did not tell him what I saw.’
The story has a number of other variants from numerous other sources.
Some claimed to have taken the eyelid down themselves.
Others claimed that they were with the person who did but name different people.
One said her daddy took it down, others a friend.
For some it happened straight after the shooting, for others the next morning, some late the next day.
Others claimed that they saw two eyelids.
No two stories match and if you named all the number of people who claimed to have been the person or to have been with the person who did this small act, the list would run to more than twenty.
Were any of these people wrong? Certainly.
Possibly all of them.
But were they lying? Almost certainly not.
They were Saying What They Remembered.
Perhaps one of them was the person who placed the eyelid by the body. Or perhaps whoever it was that carried out this small, stunned act of kindness has been dead for years.
In any case very many people transferred something they had either seen or heard about and took it into their own memory.
When The Call went out for those with evidence about the day to come forward, the day itself was a long way back in memory.
In the intervening years some people embellished or inventedsmall parts of what they did on that day. Some consciously. Some entirely unconsciously.
Some must have come to the Inquiry and decided that they were not willing to backtrack on a story they had been telling for years.
Others may have told the story so often in pubs and at gatherings that the invented or elaborated memory had become a real one – as accurate a description of what was in their mind’s eye as anything that they actually saw.
Still others may never have intended to mislead anyone.
Some witnesses admitted that they feared their memory might have become contaminated over the years by images they saw subsequently on film or television.
If The Truth of what happened on Bloody Sunday was already messy, over the course of decades it became far messier.
Memories had amalgamated, shifted and in some cases been remade.
And of course for some, who had never had any intention to mislead, the subconscious and indeed the conscience played a consoling trick.
There were many people who had helped those who were dying. But under the circumstances not only was there little they could do; for most people, like the Knights of Malta first-aid volunteer tending to McGuigan, there was nothing they could do even when they wanted to.
The guilt of those who saw neighbours, family friends and community figures killed before them, and the knowledge that at a central point in their own lives as well as in the life of their city they could not save somebody, meant that their consciences consoled them with facts – even created ones.
One man who was with a local priest who went to the aid of a dying boy said with rare candour, ‘I had the normal human instinct to stay and see what I could do to help, but another part of me was telling me to get away to safety as soon as I could.
I think that one of the reasons that Father Daly is so remembered from that day is that he stayed with Jack Duddy while he died, and did not think about his own safety.
I wanted to get away.’
That is a perfectly normal instinct. But it is a rare one to express. Extraordinary acts of bravery by ordinary people were carried out that day, Barney McGuigan’s efforts to aid a dying man among them. But most people are not heroes and have to find ways to comfort themselves in the meantime.
The case of McGuigan’s eyelid is just one relatively unimportant example. But it is a reminder of something crucial about this search for justice. Even during everyday incidents, people come up with wildly different versions of what they have seen. Place people amid deeply traumatic events, with crowds fleeing down narrow lanes, bodies lying in familiar streets and shots ricocheting in all directions, then try to recreate what people think they saw three decades later, and arriving at a truth becomes, if not impossible, then certainly extremely hard.
Yet this was exactly the task that Lord Saville and his Inquiry had been set. It was their task to sift through the evidence. It would take twelve years to try to find the complex and upsetting truths about what had happened in the space of a few minutes, one day in 1972.”
Stories are where Memories go when they’re forgotten.
Maybe some of them become Songs.
"Some who cling to the traditional Shakespearean biography sneer at Oxford’s poetry, declaring it too inferior to be written by the great author; what these critics may not realize, however, is that many (if not most) of the earl’s signed poems were actually songs.
Moreover, most were published in The Paradise of Dainty Devices of 1576, when he was twenty-six, and that he may have written them much earlier.
Much later, in The Arte of English Poesie of 1589, he would be cited first among “noblemen and gentlemen of Her Majesty’s own servants, who have written excellently well as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest.” "
- Hank Whittemore
"Pre-literature people aren’t stupid;
They just aren’t literate.
Their brains are organized differently,
in many ways."
— Jordan Peterson
I that am lost, oh who will find me?
Deep down below the old beech tree.
Help succour me now the east winds blow.
Sixteen by six, brother, and under we go!
Be not afraid to walk in the shade
Save one, save all, come try!
My steps - five by seven
Life is closer to Heaven
Look down, with dark gaze, from on high
Without your love, he’ll be gone before.
Save pity for strangers, show love the door.
My soul seek the shade of my willow’s bloom
Inside, brother mine -
Let Death make a room.
Before he was gone - right back over my hill.
Who now will find him?
Why, nobody will.
Doom shall I bring to him, I that am queen.
Lost forever, nine by nineteen
.
The Mounds have been here since The Time of The Titans.
Kings buried in them... Great Kings...
Domains once glittered like The Light on a windy sea.
Fire won't burn there... no Fire at all.
That's why I live Down Here, in The Wind. Conan:
Do you care for these places?
The Wizard: I sing to them.
On nights, when they wish,
I sing of the tales of battles, heroes, witches and women.
Nobody bothers me down here.
Not even...
Thulsa Doom.
Conan:
Do flowers grow around here?
Wizard:
Flowers?
[laughs]
Flowers...
"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.
"At this time of the rolling year," the spectre said "I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!"
Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the spectre going on at this rate, and began to quake exceedingly.
"Hear me!" cried the Ghost. "My time is nearly gone."
"I will," said Scrooge. "But don't be hard upon me! Don't be flowery, Jacob! Pray!"
"How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day."
It was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge shivered, and wiped the perspiration from his brow.
"That is no light part of my penance," pursued the Ghost. "I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer."
"You were always a good friend to me," said Scrooge. "Thank `ee!"
"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by Three Spirits."
Scrooge's countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost's had done.
"Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?" he demanded, in a faltering voice.
"It is."
"I -- I think I'd rather not," said Scrooge.
"Without their visits," said the Ghost, "you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one."
"Couldn't I take `em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?" hinted Scrooge.
"Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!"
When it had said these words, the spectre took its wrapper from the table, and bound it round its head, as before. Scrooge knew this, by the smart sound its teeth made, when the jaws were brought together by the bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again, and found his supernatural visitor confronting him in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over and about its arm.
The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open. It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did. When they were within two paces of each other, Marley's Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.
Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.
Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked out.
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step.
The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.
" When I was first married, I’d have fights with my wife—arguments about this and that. I’m fairly hot-headed, and I’d get all puffed up and agitated about whatever we were arguing about. She’d go to sleep, which was really annoying. It was so annoying, because I couldn’t sleep. I’d be chewing off my fingernails, and she’d be sleeping peacefully beside me. Maddening. But, often, she’d have a dream, and she’d discuss it with me the next morning. We’d unravel what was at the bottom of our argument. That was unbelievably useful, even though it was extraordinary aggravating. I was convinced by Jung. His ideas about the relationship between dreams, mythology, drama, and literature made sense to me, and his ideas about the relationship between man and art.
I know this Native carver. He’s a Kwakwaka’wakw guy. He’s carved a bunch of wooden sculptures, totem poles, and masks that I have in my house. He’s a very interesting person—not particularly literate, and really still steep in this ancient, 13,000-year-old tradition. He’s an original language speaker, and the fact that he isn’t literate has sort of left him with the mind of someone who is pre-literature. Pre-literature people aren’t stupid; they just aren’t literate. Their brains are organized differently, in many ways.
I’ve asked him about his intuition for his carvings, and he’s told me that he dreams. You’ve seen the Haida masks; you know what they look like. His people are closely related to the Haida. It’s the same kind of style. He dreams in those animals, and he can remember his dreams. He also talks to his grandparents, who taught him how to carve, in his dreams. Quite often, if he runs into a problem with carving, his grandparents will come, and he’ll talk to them. He sees the creatures that he’s going to carve, living, in an animated sense, in his imagination. I have no reason to disbelieve him. He’s a very, very straightforward person, and he doesn’t have the motivation—or the guile, I would say—to invent a story like that. There’s just no reason he would possibly do it. I don’t think he’s told that many people about it. He thinks it’s kind of crazy. When he was a kid, he thought he was insane, because he’d had those dreams, all the time, about these creatures, and so forth. It wasn’t something he was trumpeting.
I’ve found it fascinating, because I can see in him part of the manifestation of this unbroken tradition. We have no idea how traditions like that are really passed on for thousands and thousands of years. Part of it is oral and memory, part of it’s acted out and dramatized, and part of it’s going to be imaginative. People who aren’t literate store information quite differently than we do. We don’t remember anything; it’s all written down in books. But if you’re from an oral culture—especially if you’re trained in that way—you have all of that information at hand. It’s so that you can speak it. You can tell the stories, and you really know them. Modern people really don’t know what that’s like, anymore. I doubt there’s more than maybe two of you, in the audience, that could spout from memory a 30-line poem. Poetry was written so that people could do that. That’s why we have that form—so that people could remember it and have it with them. But we don’t do any of that, anymore.
Anyways, back to Jung. Jung was a great believer in the dream. I know that dreams will tell you things that you don’t know. Well, how the hell can that be? How in the world can something you think up tell you something you don’t know? How does that make any sense? First of all, why don’t you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream? It’s like something’s going on inside you that you don’t control. The dream happens to you, just like life happens to you. There is the odd lucid dreamer who can apply a certain amount of conscious control, but most of the time you’re laying there, asleep, and this crazy, complicated world manifests itself inside you, and you don’t know how. You can’t do it when you’re awake, and you don’t know what it means. It’s like, what the hell’s going on?
That’s one of the things that’s so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts—you get this both from Freud and Jung. You really start to understand that there are things inside you that control you, instead of the other way around. You can use a bit of reciprocal control, but there’s manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you, that determine the manner in which you walk through life, and you don’t control it. And what does? Is it random? There are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neural firing. I think that theory is absolutely absurd, because there’s nothing random about dreams. They are very, very structured, and very, very complex. They’re not like snow on a television screen or static on a radio. I’ve also seen, so often, that people have very coherent dreams, that have a perfect narrative structure. They’re fully developed, in some sense. So that theory doesn’t go anywhere, with me. I just can’t see that as useful, at all. I’m more likely to take the phenomena seriously.
There’s something to dreams. You dream of the future, then you try to make it into reality. That seems to be an important thing. Or maybe you dream up a nightmare, and try to make that into a reality. People do that, too, if they’re hellbent on revenge, for example, and full of hatred and resentment. That manifests itself in terrible fantasies. Those are dreams, then people go act them out. These things are powerful, and whole nations can get caught up in collective dreams. That’s what happened to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It was an absolutely remarkable, amazing, horrific, destructive spectacle. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union, and the same thing happened in China. You have to take these things seriously—you try to understand what’s going on.
Jung believed that the dream could contain more information than was yet articulated. I think artists do the same thing. People go to museums and look at paintings—renaissance paintings or modern paintings—and they don’t exactly know why they are there. I was in this room in New York that was full of renaissance art—great painters, the greatest painters. I thought that, maybe, that room was worth a billion dollars, or something outrageous, because there was like 20 paintings in there, priceless. The first thing is, why are those painting worth so much? Why is there a museum, in the biggest city in the world, devoted to them? Why do people from all over the world come and look at them? What the hell are those people doing? One of them was of the Assumption of Mary—a beautifully painted, absolutely glowing work of art. There were like 20 people standing in front of it, and looking at it. What are those people up to? They don’t know. Why did they make a pilgrimage to New York to come and look at that painting? It’s not like they know. Why is it worth so much? I know there’s a status element to it, but that begs the question: why do those items become such high-status items? What is it about them that’s so absolutely remarkable? We’re strange creatures.
Where does the information that’s in the dream come from? It has to come from somewhere. You could think of it as a revelation, because it’s like it springs out of the void, and it’s new knowledge. You didn’t produce it; it just appears. I’m scientifically minded, and I’m quite a rational person. I like to have an explanation of things that’s rational and empirical, before I look for any other kind of explanation. I don’t want to say that everything that's associated with divinity can be reduced, in some manner, to biology, an evolutionary history, or anything like that. But, insofar as it’s possible to do that reduction, I’m going to do that. I’m going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air, because they can’t be pinned down. In that category, I would put the category of mystical or religious experience, which we don’t understand, at all.
Artists observe one another, and they observe people. Then they represent what they see, and transmit the message of what they see, to us. That teaches us to see. We don’t necessarily know what it is that we’re learning from them, but we’re learning something—or, at least, we’re acting like we’re learning something. We go to movies; we watch stories; we immerse ourselves in fiction, constantly. That’s an artistic production, and, for many people, the world of the arts is a living world. That’s particularly true if you’re a creative person.
It’s the creative, artistic people that move the knowledge of humanity forward. They do that with their artistic productions, first. They’re on the edge. The dancers, poets, visual artists, and musicians do that, and we’re not sure what they're doing. We’re not sure what musicians are doing. What the hell are they doing? Why do you like music? It gives you deep intimations of the significance of things, and no one questions it. You go to a concert; you’re thrilled. It’s a quasi-religious experience, particularly if the people really get themselves together, and get the crowd moving. There’s something incredibly intense about it, but it makes no sense whatsoever.
It’s not an easy thing to understand. Music is deeply patterned, and patterned in layers. I think that has something to do with it, because reality is deeply patterned in layers. I think music is representing reality in some fundamental way. We get into the sway of that, and participate in Being. That’s part of what makes it such an uplifting experience, but we don’t really know that’s what we’re doing. We just go do it, and it’s nourishing for people—young people, in particular. Lots of them live for music. It’s where they derive all of their meaning—their cultural identity. Everything that’s nourishing comes from their affiliation with their music. That’s an amazing thing.
The question still remains: where does the information in dreams come from? I think where it comes from is that we watch the patterns that everyone acts out. We watch that forever, and we’ve got some representations of those patterns that’s part of our cultural history. That’s what’s embedded in fictional accounts of stories between good and evil, the bad guy and the good guy, and the romance. These are canonical patterns of Being, for people, and they deeply affect us, because they represent what it is that we will act out in the world. We flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people. There’s waves of behavioural patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd, across time. Great dramas are played on the crowd, across time. The artists watch that, and they get intimations of what that is. They write it down, tell us, and we’re a little clearer about what we’re up to.
A great dramatist, like Shakespeare—we know that what he wrote is fiction. Then we say, ‘fiction isn’t true.’ But then you think, ‘well, wait a minute. Maybe it’s true like numbers are true.’ Numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality, but no one in their right mind would really think that numbers aren’t true. You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent, because the abstraction is so insanely powerful.
Once you have mathematics, you’re just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. It’s not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality. You take a work of fiction, like Hamlet, and you think, ‘well, it’s not true, because it’s fiction.’ But then you think, ‘wait a minute—what kind of explanation is that?’ Maybe it’s more true than nonfiction. It takes the story that needs to be told about you, and the story that needs to be told about you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and it abstracts that out, and says, ‘here’s something that’s a key part of the human experience as such.’ It’s an abstraction from this underlying, noisy substrate. People are affected by it because they see that the thing that’s represented is part of the pattern of their being. That’s the right way to think about it.
With these old stories—these ancient stories—it seems, to me, like that process has been occurring for thousands of years. It’s like we watched ourselves, and we extracted out some stories. We imitated each other, and we represented that in drama, and then we distilled the drama, and we got a representation of the distillation. And then we did it again, and at the end of that process—it took God only knows how long. They’ve traced some fairy tales back 10,000 years, in relatively unchanged form.
It certainly seems, to me, that the archaeological evidence, for example, suggests that the really old stories that the Bible begins with are at least that old, and are likely embedded in prehistory, which is far older than that. You might say, ‘well, how can you be so sure?’ The answer to that, in part, is that the ancient cultures didn't change fast. They stayed the same; that’s the answer. They keep their information moving from generation to generation. That’s how they stay the same, and that’s how we know. There are archaeological records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years: it was discovered in caves, in Japan, that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe. So these things can last for very long periods of time.
We’re watching each other act in the world, and then the question is, how long have we been watching each other? The answer to that, in some sense, is as long as there have been creatures with nervous systems, and that’s a long time. That’s some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that. We’ve been watching each other, trying to figure out what we’re up to, across that entire span of time. Some of that knowledge is built right into your bodies—which is why we can dance with each other, for example. Understanding isn’t just something that you have as an abstraction. It’s something that you act out. That’s what children are doing, when they’re learning to rough-and-tumble play. They’re learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious way—learning to cooperate and compete. That’s all instantiated right into their body. It’s not abstract knowledge, and they don’t know that they’re doing that. They’re just doing it. We can even use our body as a representational platform. |
