This way of addressing the physical world is something Chris and I first noticed back in the American West several months prior to our Australian visit, when we pitched up in Wyoming at the Devil’s Tower National Park.
The tower itself is the giant monolith that Richard Dreyfuss famously fashioned out of mashed potato as his worried family looked on in the movie ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. As you may recall, it resembles a huge (1267ft) striated tooth and looks mighty threatening, hence the predictable association with Satan that came courtesy of the white settlers. But the original Native American inhabitants wove stories around this remarkable rock instead of simply dismissing it as the Devil’s work. In fact, no fewer than 5 tribes (the Sioux, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Crow and Kiouwa) all had a pop at teasing out a tale from it.
The prize for the simplest goes to the Crow.
Once when some Crows were camped at Bears House, two little girls were playing around some big rocks there. There were lots of bears living around that big rock and one big bear seeing the girls alone was going to eat them. The big bear was just about to catch the girls when they saw him. The girls were scared and the only place they could get was on top of one of the rocks around which they had been playing.
The girls climbed the rock but still the bear could catch them. The Great Spirit, seeing the bear was about to catch the girls, caused the rock to grow up out of the ground. The bear kept trying to jump to the top of the rock, but he just scratched the rock and fell down on the ground. The claw marks are on the rock now. The rock kept growing until it was so high that the bear could not get the girls.
The circumstances of the story are often completely different in each tribe’s version, although some share certain details (1). But this wouldn’t have bothered the original storytellers. It’s in the nature of an oral culture - and if you haven’t developed a written language (of all the Native American tribes only the Cherokee managed it) this kind of discrepancy is almost inevitable. There’s no definitive version because every version is true. So everyone is free to personalize the landscape, and may the best story win.
I’d also be prepared to bet there was a simple cautionary purpose to them, such as ‘always listen to your elders and betters’, or ‘don’t stray into unfamiliar territory’ or even ‘don’t play with forces you don’t understand’.
The local tribes seem only too happy to tell these tales to anyone who’s interested - far more so than the Aboriginals who, quite understandably, view their culture as something that can be stolen from them, and that by sharing stories, you’re actually losing part of who you are. The Native Americans don’t appear to have woven the meaning of the tales so inextricably into the fabric of their identity - there’s plenty to go round, and the more the merrier (2).
We then motored on to Bryce Canyon National Park, and where we got caught up in the same kind of storytelling process. Ebenezer Bryce, the Mormon farmer who gave the area its name, once remarked that “it’s a helluva place to lose a cow”, a statement it’s difficult to argue with largely on the grounds of incomprehensibility. Clearly Ebenezer had been alone with his livestock for too long.
Bryce is not strictly a canyon at all, in that it lacks the essential canyon-esque prerequisite of a river running through it. For much of the year it’s a semi-arid terra-cotta coloured wasteland, closely resembling the deserts round Alice Springs half a world away that gave rise to the Aboriginal stories. What differentiates it is the presence of thousands upon thousands of limestone sculptures known locally as “hoodoos”, the products of wind, rain, ice and millions of years of geological upheaval.
Many have been fashioned by the elements into pillars resembling chess pieces, and they’re arranged along ridges, valley walls and sometimes into vast semi-circular amphitheatres.
Through the ages, individual hoodoos have been anthropomorphized, and, as you’re tramping round, you can use their distinctive shapes to navigate (3).
Collectively, however, the hoodoos have had stories attached to them by the original inhabitants, the Paiutes. To the locals, they’re known as “the Legend People”, turned to stone by Coyote, the local God Of Mischief (as in Wile E. Coyote), who got mad because they were decorating their city in gaudy colours that were not to his taste. Once petrified for offending his aesthetic sensibilities, he threw the paint they were using in their faces, resulting in the varied colors visible throughout the formations, whose appearance constantly changes as alternating waves of light and shadow play over them.
And this is but one of many Coyote stories - in fact, of all the local deities, he’s the one who seems to crop up most, for reasons we’ll come to in a moment. Here’s another, this time from the Navajo tribe, explaining the provenance of the name ‘Bear’s Ears Pass’, down the road in Eastern Utah.
These two huge rocky outcrops can be seen from as far as 50 miles away, and were a useful landmark for the early wagon trains that struggled through the region (to give you an idea of how inhospitable the terrain was, the nearby town of Boulder was the last place in the mainland USA to have its mail delivered by mule, as recently as 1941). Anyway.
The story tells of a maiden (“Changing-Bear-Maiden”, whose name, I imagine, sounds beautiful and mellifluous in its native tongue, but hopelessly clumsy in its English translation), who liked to consort with Coyote. Despite warnings from the tribal elders, she persisted with the liaison, and found herself gradually turning into a bear. Coyote thought this mightily amusing, but the elders took a violently different view and killed her, hacking off her bear’s ears so she wouldn’t wander through eternity in ursine form.
The ears were tossed aside and landed where we see them today, just south of the stunning Natural Bridges National Park. Another version has CBM as the origin of the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). (4)
Now contrast this wonderfully playful approach to the landscape with that of the early Mormon settlers. These arrivistes didn’t so much choose to dance with the meaning of the landscape as to disregard it completely as they strove to subjugate the wilderness God had ‘bequeathed’ them.
This new breed of farmer, pitching up in the mid-19th century, was incredibly hard-pressed to scratch even the meanest living from a terrain the indigenous Paiutes and Navajo couldn’t be bothered with. But they persevered, and with some drilling here and some river diverting there, they managed to harness what little water there was to gain a toe-hold in the midst of the wilderness. These were intensely practical people, so when it came to place-naming, they didn’t waste their time with ingenuity or invention.
Some settlements were named for their founders or a prominent citizen, or even after the staple crop - Hanksville being an example of the former and Potato Valley of the latter. Many reflect the Mormons’ religious preoccupations and their love/hate relationship with the spartan topography - the Devil, of course, features a good deal, as in ‘Devil’s Pass’ and ‘Devil’s Backbone Ridge’. Add to these some intensely prosaic names like ‘Green River’ (where, sure enough, there flows a river which is green), and you begin to paint a picture of a stoic race who may well have considered linguistic embroidery and embellishment a waste of energy - or even a tad sinful. These were people who said what they meant, and would probably give short shrift or even a jail term to anyone who claimed their local mountain range had anything to do with giant processional caterpillars, or a canis latrans that could turn maidens into giant bears. It just weren’t natural. Hell fire, they even named one of the most beautiful and magnificent mountain ranges on the planet ‘the Rocky Mountains’. Well what else were they going to be made of? Sometimes, this literal-mindedness gets intensely annoying, and you long for even the slightest shred of evidence that there was something imaginative going on between their ears. But you don’t get it. The philosophers call this ‘nominalism’, where there’s a perfect match between form and meaning with no loose ends or overlaps.
This almost pathological insistence on literalistic interpretations of the landscape has been inherited by the modern-day Park Rangers, many of whom are descended from that original farming stock. Not so much on the grounds of any religious scruples, but reservations prompted by that new religion, science, where accuracy is all, and the imagination is once again shut out. The rangers sometimes go to inordinate lengths to make their factually-based lectures entertaining - one even resorted to singing compositions by Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles, Elvis, and, bizarrely, Peter, Paul & Mary to illustrate his talk on the geological evolution of Bryce Canyon. But try as he might (and I would have given him a pay rise on the spot, he was so enthusiastic), it was still a talk about old rocks. And try as I may, I can’t remember a single thing about it. But I can recall Coyote and what he did to the Legend People.
We can plot the different approaches embodied in these namings and explanations on our Meaning Line:
Meaning--------------------Significance
Nominalism Play
Farmers Indians
The farmers are bang up against the left end of the line. They’re having nothing to do with anything they can’t see. The position of the Indians, however, is more ambiguous: although their stories have a definite visual mnemonic, they’ll play with the relationship between the form and meaning within that mnemonic to create fabulous stories. So, like most fiction, they’re pulling in two different directions at once, both left and right. The forms (the rocks or whatever) are largely unchanging and therefore non-negotiable (which steers them leftwards), while the meaning fluctuates depending on who’s looking at it, whose imagination it’s being filtered through, and how they subsequently shape those perceptions (which tugs them rightwards towards significance).
The currently modish school of ‘Magical Realism’ in fiction (embodied in certain works by Angela Carter, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri) is only really a modern take on this type of consciousness that refuses to differentiate between the real and the fantastic. The more ‘unreally’, or the less objectively reality is depicted, the further right it travels on our line.
So the first conclusion we can draw from this criminally truncated account of two oral cultures is that meaning is born out of a desire to explain something that you don’t understand. But the explanation you’re offering is, of course, a big fat lie (though if we’re being charitable, we might choose to call it a contingent truth). But that contingent truth can be far more entertaining than the actual literal truth.
And here we hit a brick wall. If you want to enjoy your literature, you have to enter an tacit agreement with the storyteller that you‘re going to deliberately turn a blind eye to the deception that may underpin the meaning of his tale (unless, of course, he’s recounting something that actually happened). While some people (like my Grandad) feel uncomfortable with this arrangement, the vast majority of us simply short-circuit the entire issue and get on with enjoying our reading. We even dignify this collusion with the phrase ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ to get over the empirical challenges literature presents us with. Coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, this now famous literary term was first used to describe the editorial vision behind his collaboration with Wordsworth in ‘The Lyrical Ballads’ . . .
in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. (5)
Put like that, the transaction between storyteller and meaning sounds entirely reasonable and respectable: let’s sidestep the reality issue, says Coleridge, because this is by far the least satisfactory way of creating art. But Coleridge was a Romantic Poet and would have overlooked the naughtiness of what he was proposing, which he clearly wasn’t viewing from the perspective of a Mormon Farmer or a literally-minded scientific researcher, who would have had no truck with “poetic faith”.
Footnotes:
1. To read the rest, go to www.nps.gov/deto/stories
2. This, incidentally, might explain their initially puzzling devotion to country and western music, whose lyrics tend to feature stories or a memorable narrative hook of some kind. Tuning to Navajo FM in Colorado, you’ll hear some tribal singing or drumming followed straight away by a chestnut from Merle Haggard or Garth Brooks. The station certainly doesn’t play the hokey sub-Enyaesque floaty New Age CD’s with titles like ‘Passing Cloud’ the rangers put on in the visitor centres, no doubt hoping to evoke the mystical spirituality whitey sentimentally associates with an ancient culture he doesn’t genuinely understand and can never belong to.
3. And it’s a process that’s still going on today - one pair of adjacent pillars was named ‘Marge and Homer Simpson’ by the Park Rangers, until Homer’s head fell off during a severe frost.
4. See www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Social/ancient/SH1 for full text
5. He continues, “Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.” So Coleridge was setting out to find truth in the supernatural while Wordsworth was to travel in the opposite direction finding evidence of the transcendent in the physical world - tasks for which their respective poetic gifts were ideally suited. See later for the development of this theme.