“The past is not a husk”: it persists not only in our stories, but in and as us. We are the genetic monstrance of deep time, living demonstrations of what the past forged. “The human mind is the result of a long series of interactions with other animals,” writes ethologist Paul Shepard (The Others, 15), foremost of which, in terms of biomorphic resonance, was the hunt. In the provocatively archaic prospect of The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, Shepard speculates that the lapse of hunting (or “cynegetic”) culture was a catastrophe from which our species may not recover:
The virtual collapse of hunting and gathering, the central activity of the ancient culture, would surely have affected the very heart of human existence. The great mystery of domestication is therefore not so much how men achieved control of plants and animals; but how human consciousness was reorganized when the cynegetic life was shattered—that is, the mental, social, and ecological complex based on hunting. All major human characteristics—size, metabolism, sexual and reproductive behavior, intuition, intelligence—had come into existence and were oriented to the hunting life. (7)
What is at stake, then, in speculation about the archaic is nothing less than metabolism, intuition, tactful solidarity with animal life : an inheritance more deeply implicated in physiology than those “lifestyle” options fortified by the biopimping menus of fin de millennium culture. But our genetic makeup imposes limitations. “The ecology of Paleolithic hunters,” Shepard writes, “particularly the sparse population and stable environment, may have allowed the specialization of human intelligence to a degree that is intolerable in dense populations and an unstable environment” (227). As a species we have precipitated environmental changes more rapidly than natural adaptation can keep pace with. But where such changes are often ascribed to technology, Shepard cautions that “the main features of the ten-thousand year span of civilization are war and environmental crisis. Technology, as such, can hardly be held accountable for this. Man was already technological—a toolmaker—when he emerged as a species, and was so for two million years before the disasters of history began” (40). The difference is not in the tool, but in the mind that wields it. Shepard poses the distinction between hunting/gathering and agricultural sedentarity as one involving a shift from participation to manipulation (“Post-Historic Primitivism,” 62). Carl Sauer similarly discriminates between yield and loot (Land and Life, 154). American ecological thinkers have been increasingly alarmed by the manipulative cash-crop orientation of agribusiness, as if natural cycles could be induced to conform to the rhythm of inflated expectations. In 1924 Aldo Leopold lamented “this headlong stampede for speed and ciphers,” “the tragic absurdity of trying to whip the March of Empire into a gallop” (The River, 127).
As Lewis Mumford saw it amidst the carnage of World War II, “Western civilization became mechanically unified and socially disintegrated” (Values for Survival, 190). Twenty years later, from the vantage of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “great society,” Mumford’s prognosis of civilized “development” was equally devastating. The supposed rationalization of technology, he found, often concealed pockets of irrationality : “immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were canceled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination” (Lewis Mumford Reader, 314). In a longer view, as Mumford noted in The City in History, the global pattern of civilization can be charted as a transit from polis to necropolis, “living urban core” became a “city of the dead” (53). City and history converge in the necropolis, a site disclosing the perspectival arrest of history as such. “History is not a neutral documentation of things that happened but an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past,” Shepard wrote. Given the inadequacies of the historical sense, Shepard affirms “the prehistorical unconscious” in a final leap of faith (Coming Home, 14–15,17).
With Shepard, poets like Clayton Eshleman and Gary Snyder regard the last ten thousand years as anomalous. In Hades in Manganese, Eshleman writes:
By beginning to look at paleolithic cave art from the viewpoint of simultaneous psychic organization and disintegration, I hope to be extending our sense of “gods” and imaginative activity way beyond the Greeks, so that human roots may be seen as growing in a context that does not preclude the animal from a sense of the human … the crisis behind the making of what we call art as involved with the hominid separating the animal out of himself. (19)
“Therioexpulsion” is the term Eshleman coins for this separation. The ancient cosmological lore of hunter-gatherers accompanied the animals in their exodus. The poetics of open field/open form poetry is much engaged with the old lore as a legacy affording access to the remote past. The lore ranges from Greece and the Ancient Near East through native cultures around the planet, those “technicians of the sacred” in Jerome Rothenberg’s sense. The biological awareness of human species-life animated by the compost library is a crucial link between dormant animal tact and the metabolism of intelligence as it flourishes in writing. Marking the extremity of therioexpulsion and its human cost is the image of Bibles bound in Indian skin in the University of Texas Humanities Research Library (Davenport, Geography of the Imagination, 355), in which biology and library blend in a single irreparable atrocity. But it attests to what is at stake in distinguishing the old lore from any putative historical record (particularly those records invested in valorizing History as the master narrative of imperial destiny). The moral charge is evident : to read is simply to scan words on a page, whereas wreading is feeling the texture of the skin on the binding of the book as it is held together by a spine.
The natives of the Americas—a rich culturally diverse array ranging from nomads to sedentary cultivators—were sloughed off into that capacious category of the “people without history” (which, for Europeans, could mean even the Chinese). By this same rhetorical subterfuge they were then inserted into history, into that scripture-soaked catalogue the civilized predators took pride in : “big masculine history / on tap.” To be without history (in terms of the Texas icon above) is to be skinned for the binding of a prophetic canon, the Bible, its scripture used to sanction atrocities in the name of History.* This apocalyptic resource perpetuates in turn a “nature” left increasingly out of the equation, as vanishing animal species are commemorated in the names of cars (Cougar and Impala)—although the alienation is now so advanced that animals no longer connote automotive glamour, supplanted by formulaic names like Neon, Altima, Célica.† “In the Indian culture,” Muriel Rukeyser writes, “the songs had religious presence. We have the spectacle of a culture which values its poetry driven into captivity and repression by a power-culture which sets no store on this art” (Life of Poetry, 91)—a plight memorably realized in The Professor’s House, Willa Cather’s fictionalized account of the excavation of Mesa Verde. “The capacity for invasion alive in the human heart is the openness to an otherness that cuts both ways. Our inspiration is also our peril, a risk of inflation whose would-be rise can take us down into hell” (Mackey, “From Gassire’s Lute,” 211). The lost world is unrecoverable, and this entails the difficult realization of the alchemical nigredo : the fertilizing dark of the white whale’s plummet in Moby-Dick, or the dissolution of entire cultures—extinction implicated in the larger creative adventure.
Darkness is another kind of light,
and stones are sweet as air to breathe.
The Anasazi, the old people, knew.
In the depths of canyons
for a thousand years, they unlocked
the rocks themselves and slipped
inside like bones fit into skin.
what history itself is longing for to demonstrate, not with names and not with dates, but these, our inter-interventions
for solitude and grieving are also instruments of vision
shall we not shout and stomp to tell deep grief, and wild fandango celebrate the being able to, to be at all