It's not a new realization, one might even regard it as prosaic, yet to me it never fails to be striking--sometimes even startling--when I realize that every piece of earth, each plot of land, a rock outcropping, a river or a lake, a grassy knoll, has a rich, sundry history. Sometimes the history of a given place is a secret lost to the amnesia inducing ravages of time; the earth’s arcane arts are buried by the passage of time and interred by the developer’s promiscuous blade. But in some instances the history of a particular place is so powerfully compelling, so majestic, so horrific, that the place forever after becomes a memorial and its events are preserved in the collective human memory. Such a memorializing is often, it seems, not through human agency alone but rather through the insistence of the earth itself whose purpose is to manifest images within us humans that serve as a link to the earth’s intelligence and make us remember. We seem to have forgotten that Planet Earth is as alive as you or I. And like us, the earth is possessed of an unconscious, too, just as sleepily awash in memory, reverie, and dreams as we are, likewise pulsing with exhausting intervals of emotional, intellectual, and physical activity. The world thinks and feels and imagines. It is alive with its own desires, its own memories; it lives with experiences, regrets, and longings that interfuse with our own and influence us the way children are influenced by the way their parents feel and think and live. This truth is among the first things we forget in order to live.
We forget that a most remarkable thing about this planet is that it literally hums with energy, a magical energy which inexplicably, one might even say lovingly, sustains and creates all life on it. Because our sustenance is largely inexplicable it may be regarded as magical, yet because of its sustaining energy the different aspects and emanations of the world are united. In his commentary on the Symposium, Marcilio Ficino insisted that the force of all magic is constituted of love, and it is love that is essential to, perhaps even essentially is, the strong magic of healing ourselves and the earth:
The work of magic is a certain drawing of one thing to another by natural similitude. The parts of this world […] depend on one Love […]. From this community of relationship is born the communal Love: from which Love is born the common drawing together: and this is the true Magic.
I grew up along the Minnesota River, an ancient, beautiful river valley teeming with wildlife, densely wooded hardwood forests, and ravishing, arresting vistas that can be savored from any number of spectacular rocky cliffs and promontories along its entire length. This river valley was formed relatively recently, in terms of geologic time, 13,000 years ago when Glacial Lake Agassiz burst through a natural earth dam creating a massive tsunami which proceeded to carve out the river valley from the flat and relatively featureless grassland plain. The river, which previously ran over the plain in a much smaller, inconsequential form, is known to geologists as the ancient Warren River so as to distinguish it from the modern Minnesota River. There were almost certainly people, though perhaps not particularly great in number, living along the peaceful, humble stream when the earthen dam broke, creating what was for them, a natural disaster of cataclysmic proportions. People and animals died, ecosystems were destroyed; life and all ways of life in the path of the oncoming wall of water were obliterated.
If some similar event happened somewhere today, there would almost certainly be plaques placed, memorials erected, and an understanding that the affected geographic area—the earth as well as the river--would be regarded as sacred. Thirteen thousand years ago no such memorialization would be forthcoming, however, it would be a silly, even grotesque, misunderstanding of human nature to think that in regional narratives of place (which is to say, mythologies) this event was not somehow recalled with solemnity, trembling, and awe.
But in fact, there are memorials placed alongside the Minnesota River honoring the event that heralded its inception. And it was the Earth, herself, who placed them there. Periodically along the banks of the river one finds outcroppings of a particular kind of Granite rock called Gniess. This type of granite is over three billion years old; three billion-year-old rocks on a planet that is perhaps 4.5 billion years old itself, and these rocks were first exposed by the same catastrophic hydraulic forces that formed the valley some 13,000 years ago. Since geologic time is so unfathomable, so unimaginable and utterly inconceivable, we forget the vast, unknowable histories it hides. We tend to think that memory cannot see into nor through what Shakespeare called “the dark and backward abysm of time.” But such thinking is merely a convenient forgetting because the past infuses everything present. Everything from the three billion year old ancient granite rocks and their troves of antediluvian memories, perched like sentinels along the banks of the Minnesota River, to evidence of an ancient and growing human presence evidenced by the spearheads, knives and other Neolithic stone tools found there from around 6,400 years ago, to a vastly diminished yet still visible 19th Century agrarian way of life dependent upon the river’s fertile deposits, to modern, high-tech farmhouses supplemented by solar panels and wind turbines with farm implements that operate with digital precision and ease.
The ancient memory of place seeps into contemporary psyches and without much effort one may vividly imagine ancient inhabitants of the river valley preparing for a buffalo hunt while at the same time half way around the world, Sumerians were measuring the foundations of the first great civilizations; a great flood formed what is now called the Black Sea; and religious practice centered upon the powerful creative energies of ample, fertile goddesses took hold around central Europe. Writing would not be invented for three millennia after these events. Image and imagination, feeling and sensation, intuitive knowing, may well have been the most common and the most effective ways in which our ancestors communicated with each other as well as with the Earth.
Moreover, i believe it is a conceit of human nature to assume that only the human mind and its relationship to the collective unconscious accesses and stores memories of distant pasts. I believe that this earth which produces human beings the way apple trees produce apples, the land that sustains and nurtures us, the land that challenges and tests us and ultimately reabsorbs us, also holds memory and emotion. And we, the current residents of a given place, are influenced by the landscape’s memories, geographic upheavals, and emotions. At some level of consciousness we are made aware of the trauma, the resilience, the hope, and—I mean this quite literally--the dreams of the earth.
One usually doesn’t take the time to consider why one feels certain emotions in particular places. Why do some places feel receptive, safe, and comfortable while others feel forbidding, foreboding, and threatening? Why do some places seem to be filled with a sense of despair or grief that suffuses one’s own consciousness and brings with it an uncomfortable sense of feral remoteness, a quivering sense of the uncanny? Because the earth whispers her story to human ears that are open and attuned, one often finds that the history of a place accords with the intuitions one has of it. It shouldn’t be a surprising or whimsical notion, and yet it is; and unfortunately such intuitive notions are dismissed as fantasy, wild speculation, or neurosis. But in fact, the Soul of Things wants to be seen, it wants to be known, and the Anima Mundi seeks out the often murky and barely conscious depths of the human experience with which to communicate her story.
When I was eleven or twelve years old I spent much of my summers roaming freely through the woods near the river, often alone. In so doing, I presumed to escape the mundane demands of childhood, and yet oddly, I didn’t feel free. I was alone (as far as I knew), far from any house or road, in a pathless wood. Yet I could never escape that most disturbing of sensations, the eerie feeling that I was being watched by something or someone I could not, myself, apprehend. I often had the premonition that over the next hill or around the next bend of the river I would meet with some stranger who would, by challenging my right to be on this particular plot of land, simultaneously challenge my existential right to simply be. I now believe the feelings I had of being watched and the dread such thoughts engendered weren’t generated solely by my own fear or neurosis. I was being watched; watched by the earth herself and unconsciously assimilating her memories and emotions related to the physical and emotional history of the Minnesota River valley; I was connected to the landscape by the suffusing properties of the earth’s intellectual activity and her own processing, her own attempts to understand her experiences through a "dialogue" with another species. Just as it is a principle of human psychological life that we attempt to heal ourselves through remembering and describing our experiences to others--to which they (hopefully) respond with empathy, the Mundi Intellectus, the mind of the world, works in exactly the same way, except more subtly. Human communion with the earth is remarkably effortless, even commonplace, and yet it is also a and deeply sacred act requiring conscious, focused intention.
Prior to my ancestors arriving in the Minnesota River valley from northern Europe it was home to the Dakota Indians, but by the early 19th Century the Dakota were no longer home alone. Newly arrived people who must have seemed utterly strange to them, people who dressed impractically and practiced odd customs along with a convoluted, self-contradictory religion were making shockingly irrational claims to ancient ancestral lands. These "settlers" broke promises and treaties; they lied, they cheated, they enslaved the land. They seemed to treat everything, even themselves, with disrespect and force; soon the Dakota were strangers in their own land. The Dakota right to exist as they had traditionally existed for centuries was challenged at every turn, and by the middle of the 19th Century, a dehumanizing and cruel "American" self-interest was as abundant in the river valley as sources of food were scarce. For the very first time the river was arrested by human construction and dammed, indentured to commerce; land was partitioned and fenced off with barbed wire; swamps and marshes were drained to create more arable land. How absolutely shocking it must have been for the Dakota to see their Great Mother, their benefactrix, so enslaved. Traditional Dakota life was turned upside down and a catastrophe of unimaginable scope unfolded in a short, intense, and bloody conflict.
I married my first wife while standing upon the Minnesota River. It was one of those Minnesota winter days when the sunshine is so bright that it’s too bright and it hurts one’s eyes. The temperature of the air was so cold that the first breath one drew out of doors painfully seared the lungs. The river was frozen solid, a silver and white ribbon winding through a dense welter of barren Ash, Oak, and Cottonwood trees. Not for the first time, I failed to grasp the metaphor, I failed to listen to what the earth was telling me about the wisdom of my impending marriage. Eighteen months later my marriage was in a humiliating shambles and had become an utterly tawdry affair; we were living apart and my wife was involved with someone else. In another eighteen months we would be divorced amid the thick, incensed air of recrimination, rancor, and deep enmity—feelings that often arise from utter defeat. Between two people these kinds of feelings cause a divorce; between two cultures, they start a war. And as wars always do, this war, the Dakota War of 1862, produced unspeakable atrocities and ultimately provoked a program of genocide, undertaken by the Federal Government and heartily supported by the local white settlers, because people cannot even imagine living with another who cannot, or simply will not, think, believe, and live as they do. Each individual exposed to the horror of a war and its inhumane cruelty is forever altered. Altered too, are the lives of their descendants. Life in the valley can never be the same again.
We have forgotten that ghastly traumas, such as those evoked by war, are not only held in human memory, but are remembered painfully by the earth, too, and much like those countries or worlds of mythology that suffer from a miasma (a Greek idea denoting a spiritual pollution that degrades not only a people and a community or state but the very land itself), the land becomes barren and inhospitable; the earth withdraws from interaction with the source of pollution, and sadly, her indulgent benevolence for her human children is withdrawn: businesses fail and main streets are shuttered, a spirit of meanness lives in its residents characterized by a stingy penuriousness, shamefulness, and sordidness, and visitors sense an insular or vaguely besieged energy suffusing the community.
One of the most salient lessons of the 20th Century has been learned from the growing awareness that where atrocity has occurred, acknowledgment of the terrible events through an act of contrition must be undertaken in order to facilitate healing among people. Less salient is the awareness that just such an atonement must be offered in relationship to the land as well. I have come to believe that if events are not properly memorialized, if outrages, obscenities, and abominations are suppressed, repressed, or dismissed, the sufferings of all those involved (especially the wounded landscape which has literally absorbed the spilled blood, and has suffered nearly irreparable spiritual harm and trauma) will continue to live on in that geographical space--in the earth herself, and subtly, unconsciously, in those who currently occupy that particular land. The wounded landscape reaches out and into those of us who occupy it by making its own memories, emotions, and traumas seem to be our own. It whispers to us its story, a story we notice at first in the form of vague feelings, uncanny sensations, and dimly perceived shadows, and finally in suprapersonal, sublimely earthed feelings, sensations, and shadows we are obliged to recognize and honor if we are to understand the story and heal ourselves and our land.
An enthralled, open-minded listening to the stories one's told is the surest path to understanding, and understanding is the surest path to forgiveness. Forgiveness is powerful, and often it is the only effective healing act available to either us or the planet. Forgiveness is an implement of the soul, it is love enacted, it is radical acceptance; forgiveness is the instrument of a loving awareness which is always present to hand and always available to be used. Forgiveness is not particularly effective if one insists upon thinking about forgiveness only in terms of offering a dispensation to another. The most difficult challenge of forgiving, if it is to be truly healing, is the often overlooked stipulation that one must become, often agonizingly, aware of one’s own guilt and then, even more agonizingly, to live with it; to live into the realization that there is nothing else to do with one's guilt but to acknowledge it, to experience it, and to surrender to it. And, paradoxically perhaps, while one is surrendering one must also be committed to continued living that is, perhaps, bittersweet for the confessional humility of one's guilt, but simultaneously richer in the human and humane aspects of the living of life.
I have come to understand that the only purpose, really, of difficult and painful feelings is to simply bear them; one needn’t and shouldn’t find a way to avoid them, or try to offload or project them onto others; instead one must recognize these challenges are in the world because I am in the world, they belong to me, and through the process of radical self acceptance, these feelings and experiences may begin to heal, and in their healing, the world heals, too. But radical self acceptance is very, very hard; so difficult as to be nearly impossible because, as Macbeth bitterly observes, “To know my deed, ‘Twere best not know myself.” Yet the willingness to know, and not just to know, but accept the motives for the deed as a part of oneself as well puts one in proximity to a very deep truth that, from some safe distance, appears to be irrational or at best, paradoxical. Niels Bohr once remarked, “It is a hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.” Deep truths invite paradox, and paradox is a singular quality of what we often call the divine. When we find ourselves in such a paradoxical position, we may be sure that the gods are not far away, and their paradoxical revelation to us is that in our guilty, broken, pained existence we are perfect, and in a position to not only heal ourselves, but our world as well.
What we call history is not merely a dialogue the past has with the present, it is a colloquy involving ourselves and the earth with an aim to engendering a deeper understanding of past, present, and future actions. A proper understanding of history (and when I say history, I am simultaneously saying mythology) may lead to the intentional creation of more accepting, loving relationships between humankind and the landscape upon which the human drama unfolds. There is no single, eternal, unalterable, or immutable meaning of history. One’s relationship to the past, like one’s relationship to self or to the world, is a constantly evolving understanding, the past--history, is relentlessly renewing itself in a state of perpetual becoming.
We necessarily forget who we really are and what our connection to the world really is--we must forget if we want to continue to live life in the way in which we always have. Nevertheless, opportunities for greater awareness and understanding abound and that just once, we may be possessed by a notion, a radically different idea of reality that allows us to make novel connections that inspire a re-evaluation and redefinition of ourselves and the world, and if we're lucky, we discover we like it and search more and more earnestly for the opportunity. Like the startling revelations of heliocentrism in its time or quantum physics in our own, the strangeness and complexities of reality consistently outstrips not only our own subjective experiences and expectations of reality, but those of science as well, and one may only wonder at what sublime strangeness will be revealed as we extend ourselves farther and farther into humanity and into the world with a radical curiosity and openness.
Shakespeare challenged us to “Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” Once you've done this you know in your most secret heart that the earth is alive. The heart knows that the supreme adventure is the road that unfolds before us once we've acknowledged the deep truth that we are unquestionably the earth's children and the umbilical of the human mind connects us to her in all ways and for always. Homer describes a scene in the Iliad in which Glaukos tells Diomedes “I always hears my father’s voice in my head: ‘Be the best, my boy. Be the brightest, and hold your head high above the rest’.” Like Glaukos, we, too, have our parent’s voice always in our heads, and no longer can we afford to dismiss or silence the suffering Vox Mundi and her instructions in the art of healing ourselves and our planet.
This piece was orginally published by the Joseph Campbell Foundation in their MythBlast series, of which I am the editor. I thank them for their kindness in allowing me to republish it on Falstaff Was My Tutor.
At some point, near the end of December or the beginning of January, I read the last lines of Wake and let it bear me serenely along like the Liffey, “So soft this morning, ours” and a bit later, “End here. Us then. Finn, again!” And finally, Joyce tells me I have the key to the whole thing: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” and thus endeth Finnegans Wake. But in this book, as it almost certainly is in life, the end is not really the end. This understanding is the key to life that Joyce offers his readers. That last sentence of the book is the first part of the sentence that begins the novel: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” (Finnegans Wake, 3). That is the nature of mythic time: circular, recurring, non-linear. There are no beginnings or endings, only the eternally recurring flow.
