Jorie Graham poses a question in the form of a delicately hanging mobile:
Is the emptiness housed?
Paleolithic cave art represents approximately twenty thousand years of applied human perception. Hunting-gathering cultures made this graffiti panorama in the form of outlines, stains, dots, and meanders, in abstract and cryptic as well as recognizably mimetic figures. This was all produced well after hominid evolution had resulted in people like us, but with slightly larger cranial capacity. A relatively undocumented period followed, probably linked to deglaciation. This time—between the Gravettian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian cultures of the late Paleolithic, 14,000 B.C., and the early food-producing Mesolithic communities of 9000 B.C.—is a psychic blank. We know little of what went on, but it is during this period that humans became sedentary, developing a new relation to food resources.
With animals domesticated for their meat and other products as well as for sacrificial ritual, and plants domesticated for fruit, seeds, and leaves, “food” became an expedient generalization for what had formerly been utterly specific : every animal taken in the hunt is explicitly singular. It is an auspiciously mortal drama. Domestication breeds animals exempt from the existential drama of the hunt, and men lose contact with the dramatic privilege of their skill as hunters. In the sedentary state, the world is broken up into anthropocentric spaces, understood less and less in terms of animal partners, biospheric conditions, weather, migration routes, and the old star lore. However, with the stimulation of energies in social congregation on a metropolitan scale, a tremendous flowering of human capability occurs. In the space of about four thousand years : an agricultural urban-based trading and shipping economy develops, with utilization and transportation of a prodigious variety of materials, sophisticated tools and boats, “status kit” prestige burials, mining of copper around 5500 B.C., and a fuller metallurgy by 4600 B.C.
In the foothills of the Zagros Mountains and along the Mesopotamian flood plain, all those forces finally concretize into the first megalopolis, from which emanate the earliest myths, lore, laws, and social customs of which there is evidence. And from there—the Sumerians down to the early Minoans—we have a full two thousand years, out of which we retain Mediterranean civilization as our self-declared origin. Charles Olson took Americans to be “the last ‘first’ people,” meaning the last to feel themselves—however presumptuously—first-comers.* In the same way we can regard the Greeks as “the first last people”: the earliest crisis-cult hubristic civilization, and earliest battleground of cultural syncretism. Mesopotamian civilizations, like Rome much later, simply adopted or colonized alien myth and lore. The Greek tension (fantasized as a “synthesis” in eighteenth-century neoclassicism) is described by Weston LaBarre:
Greek religion was a compost of shamanistic nature gods of people from the north and the old fertility rituals of the native country folk. Despite the differences, however, the two were rooted in the same animistic world view, with no intrinsic factor impeding a tolerable amalgamation. But the fusion was never quite successful because, to a degree, the two traditions ran side by side on different social levels. On one, that of Ionian philosophy, the nature gods were subjected to increasingly refined and rationalized statements of the nature of reality, and the man-like was gradually driven out of nature—an intellectual movement toward science imperfect only in certain limitations of method that were in essence socio-political. On the other level, folk religion continued to dramatize, by analogy and symbol, recurrent seasonal events in nature that, misconstrued as “immortality” when applied to man, came into violent contradiction with the other tradition. The Ghost Dance catastrophe of this unstable acculturation was in the end as much socio-political as it was philosophico-religious. (Ghost Dance, 477)
To LaBarre’s account here we might add Hyams, in Soil and Civilization, addressing the social and religious disintegration of Greek culture through soil abuse, as much our legacy as democracy and Ionian philosophy.
LaBarre finds in Plato an imprint of the Ghost Dance : Plato, he writes, “has polytheized the One into an indefinite number of noetic Ideas, each Idea being the pattern for the appropriate species of particulars” (546). “Like every metaphysical system it is an unwitting statement of the misunderstood facts of life; it confounds the communication of organic pattern with the communication of patterns in speech” (547). Abandoning the cyclic vitality inherent in traditional chthonic worship, anthropocentrism referred all authority to human prestige; and once the polis becomes the measure of all things, politics emerges as the measure of affairs, commodifying nature as the standing reserve of man’s bidding. For twenty-five hundred years Hellenistic legacy has been accepted as the “seed” from which civilization grew. But as the modern Greek poet George Seferis put it, “We are the seed that dies. And I went into my empty house.”