the land speaks

In “reading” these words, do you say anything? More likely, you read silently—or more accurately, subvocalize. Like microexpressions, reading, like emotion, still inheres to movement of the human body. It cannot take place solely in an incorporeal “mind,” our fantasies of such aside. We can fool ourselves into that notion only because we’ve reduced the motions involved to the most fleeting versions, giving the superficial impression that they barely happen at all.

In fact, throughout most of history (even using “history” here in its narrowest sense, as the chronicle of events that someone wrote about), silent reading seems like the exception. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine wrote of Saint Ambrose, “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” While this does confirm that at least some people did read silently, it also clearly marks Ambrose off as possessing a special talent for doing so. We have some earlier accounts that seem to refer to silent readers, such as Demosthenes in Aristophanes’ play, The Knights, but they generally reinforce the idea that very few people ever did so.

For Saenger (2000), the innovation of spaces between words has everything to do with the advent of silent reading. In medieval and ancient script, words ran together. Since people would read them aloud, this posed less of a problem. The spaces separating words help distinguish words as individual units if you need to interpret the meaning of each word separately. As a stream of spoken sound, they serve somewhat less purpose. Yet, even into the nineteenth century, the scarcity of books meant that most people still experienced reading from someone reading aloud (Klinkenborg, 2009).

This realization seems to move reading almost into the realm of an involuntary reaction. We have, at least, trained ourselves to react with only subvocalizations, rather than reading aloud, but the sight of the written word carries a synaesthetic magic in it so powerful that we feel compelled to create the sound. Other magic once worked just as powerfully on us. Consider the story related by the great poet, Gary Snyder:

We were traveling by truck over dirt track west from Alice Springs in the company of a Pintupi elder named Jimmy Tjungurrayi. As we rolled along the dusty road, sitting back in the bed of a pickup, he began to speak very rapidly to me. He was talking about a mountain over there, telling me a story about some wallabies that came to that mountain in the dreamtime and got into some kind of mischief with some lizard girls. He had hardly finished that and he started in on another story about another hill over here and another story over there. I couldn’t keep up. I realized after about half an hour of this that these were tales to be told while walking, and that I was experiencing a speeded-up version of what might be leisurely told over several days of foot travel. Mr. Tjungurrayi felt graciously compelled to share a body of lore with me by virtue of the simple fact that I was there. (Snyder, 1990:82)

These sound like the stories sometimes referred to as “songlines.” These stories criss-cross Australia’s landscape, knitting together camp sites, watering holes, and sacred places. They delineate the rights and responsibilities of peoples, families, and individuals. “Not just anyone can sing any song, dance any dance, perform any action. … Only the person conceived or born in a particular place has the right and responsibility to sing that song or perform that ceremony.” (Harvey, 2006:72). When an individual aboriginal Australian walks across the landscape, the seemingly paradoxical relationship with the Dreamtime as simultaneously ancient past and imminent present comes into focus. He does not just re-enact the creative mission of his ancestor, in a very real way, he becomes the ancestor, undertaking the ongoing work of creation himself. Indeed, they will often tell the stories of the Dreaming in the first person. (Ingold, 2000:53)

I gained my own insight on this, appropriately enough, from a place. Feeling the impact of my feet on the trail, and seeing new tracks laid upon older ones, I felt a very immediate and physical corroboration of what I’d read from Tim Ingold: “…for every path or track shows up as the accumulated imprint of countless journeys that people have made… In this network [of paths and tracks] is sedimented the activity of an entire community, over many generations.” (2000:204) For Ingold, the veneration of ancestors has nothing whatsoever to do with superstitions or beliefs in the supernatural projected onto animists by Westerners keen to fit them into their own typology of development; rather, it has everything to do with their continuing felt presence in everyday life. Walking the trail, for instance, creates the trail anew. Only by walking it regularly does it remain a trail; otherwise, it will become overgrown and cease to exist as a trail. It seems a small realization, but I suspect that in it, we can perceive a germ of the logic behind the Australian Dreaming—or, for that matter, many of the native traditions about stories and place.

We might feel wonder that an aboriginal Australian might recite the story for a particular itinerary, a recitation that might rival or even eclipse the Iliad or the Odyssey, apparently from memory. In fact, they read it from the landscape as clearly as we might read a book. Like our own grandparents or great-grandparents might have once read aloud, Jimmy Tjungurrayi tried to read the landscape as quickly as he could, even as it past him by too quickly. “In the absence of any written analogue to speech,” David Abram writes (1997:140), “the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates.”

The Gods Must Be Crazy movies have more than their share of ethnographic problems, but I can think of few better examples than the beginning of the second film for putting tracking into its proper context. In both films, the San remark on the “illiteracy” of European people, because they do not know how to track. As two San men go looking at the tracks, the narrator says, “In the morning, they like to read the news. They can read that the hyena has a new girlfriend, that the cheetah has lost one of her babies, that the oryx has gone migrating to the west. The older children teach the younger ones all about how to read all the gossip about their neighbors, the animals, because everything that happens in the Kalahari gets printed out in the sand.” But rather than printing the next day’s gossip sheets on new paper, it gets printed out on the same canvas, as the old news slowly fades. Likewise, the sound of a spoken word, though it quickly dissipates below the level of any animal’s hearing, will actually continue to echo, quieter and quieter, forever. For traditional hunter-gatherers, reading the earth constitutes a basic survival skill. Ultimately, the landscape itself slowly forms from so many stories laid down, one upon the other, over generations.

Yet, even in the European tradition, we have remnants of this kind of tradition of reading a place. Classical orators, right up until the Renaissance, would memorize long speeches by imagining an elaborate palace, filled with rooms and halls. He would then imagine himself strolling through this palace, placing parts of his speech in its various nooks and crannies. To recite the speech, the orator would imagine taking that walk again, and pulling out each part of the speech. “Rather than striving to memorize the composed speech on its own, the orator found it much easier, and certainly much safer, to correlate the diverse parts of the speech to diverse places within an imaginary structure, within an envisioned topology through which he could imaginatively stroll. Yet while the classical orators had to construct and move through such topological matrices in their private imagination, the native peoples of Australia found themselves corporeally immersed in just such a linguistic-topological field, walking through a material landscape whose every feature was already resonant with speech and song!” (Abram, 1997:77)

For another native xample, we can look to Dishchii’bikoh (”Cibecue” in English), some 150 miles northeast of Phoenix, home to some of the Western Apache studied by anthropologists. There, natives tell stories called ‘agodzaahi (”that which has happened”) whenever someone acts improperly. These stories tell the consequences of breaking social norms, not in terms of punishment, but in terms of what those actions ultimately lead to. These stories always begin and end with a statement locating where the story took place. They call this “shooting” someone with an “arrow.” One elder said, “The place will keep stalking him … It doesn’t matter if you get old—that place will keep on stalking you like the one who shot you with the story. Maybe that person will die. Even so, that place will keep on stalking you. It’s like that person is still alive.” So, when the Western Apache walk the desert around Cibecue, they hear the lessons and admonishments of their grandfathers and grandmothers speaking to them in every place they go, as much as you hear me as you read these words. The land itself constantly tells you how to live your life, in the voices of your family. The same elder tells of his time in Los Angeles, and how he “start[ed] drinking, hang around bars all the time. I start getting into trouble with my wife, fight sometimes with her. It was bad. I forget about this country here around Cibecue. I forget all the names and stories. I don’t hear them anymore. I forget how to live right, forget how to be strong.” (Abram, 1997)

In his wonderful example of the richness of native oral tradition, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun Martín Prechtel talks about the layers of meaning “hidden” within the story. I think the story itself, and the layers of meaning he pulls from it, say otherwise: the story says what it has to say as plainly as it can. It hasn’t hidden anything. It cannot state it more plainly; to state it any more plainly would mean saying less, and then, by not giving the whole story, lying, in a way. I think the (often exasperated) experience of anthropologists trying to collect oral tales corroborates my point. Time and again, I read of anthropologists who ask a native elder what a story means. In response, the elder will patiently tell the story again.

Julie Cruikshank, for example, experienced precisely that. She spent several years among Yukon elders in the 1970s. They trusted her with their stories, insisting she write them in English and share them, hoping through her study to preserve their stories for their own grandchildren, whom they expected would no longer speak their native language. One of these elders, Angela Sidney, told her, “Well, I have no money to leave to my grandchildren. My stories are my wealth.” Since reading those words, they have stayed with me. They seem to say something more profound than just an old woman’s admission that she has no monetary inheritance to leave behind. “Spoken stories were the living encyclopedias of our oral ancestors, dynamic and lyrical compendiums of practical knowledge,” David Abram writes (2009). “Hidden in the magic adventures of their characters were precise instructions for the hunting of various animals, and for enacting the appropriate rituals of respect and gratitude if the hunt was successful, as well as specific insights regarding which plants were good to eat and which were poisonous, and how to prepare certain herbs to heal cramps, or sleeplessness, or a fever. The stories carried instructions about how to construct a winter shelter, and what to do during a drought, and—more generally—how to live well in this land without destroying the land’s wild vitality.”

In general, we do not value local knowledge; we honor generalized theorems and hypotheses that we can test and replicate in any environment. The Enlightenment began by dismissing Europe’s accumulated wisdom and oral tradition wholesale as superstition, and it has continued to discount and disrespect local knowledge everywhere to this day. “Because it is specific to the way things happen here, in this high desert—or coastal estuary, or mountain valley—this kind of intimate intelligence loses its meaning when abstracted from its terrain, and from the particular persons and practices that are a part of its terrain.” (Abram, 2009) Yet, no one lives “in general.” We all live our lives in a particular place. The Enlightenment has often espoused a view of humanity’s ennoblement by reason, even to the point of apotheosis, so it seems only natural that would aspire to a god’s eye view of the world. But for those of us who dwell in the world, it seems that only the kind of local knowledge that oral traditions preserve really matters.

Yet such stories didn’t just recapitulate the usefulness of an encyclopedia for “pre-literate” people, either. It put all knowledge into a social context. Everything you learned, you learned in the context of a social encounter with another person. So, everything that happened, happened in a particular social context. In such a context, stories themselves seem like persons. In his studies of the Ojibwa, Irving Hallowell learned that they would only tell some stories at a specific time of the year. Like plants, different stories had a particular season, and you would no more want to tell a story out of season than eat an unripe fruit. Of course, the Ojibwa don’t treat all their stories like this. They joke, gossip, share news and anecdotes as freely as anyone else, but they treat certain stories as persons, as grandfathers. “Seasonal stories are named grandfathers not only because they are ‘traditional’ and therefore venerable. They are grandfathers like other grandfathers: persons deserving of respect who, if approached respectfully, communicate matters of significance. Grandfathers entertain as they educate, if they will, and may withhold words and therefore power, if they will.” (Harvey, 2006:42)

The stories of such oral traditions not only contain the knowledge of how to live in a particular place; they also create the bonds of kinship and relationship that bind us to a particular place. Like the rights and responsibilities of the Australian Dreaming, they let us in, and give us a sense of belonging. They tie together family and land into a single whole. They draw us into the place, making us native to it.

The singular magic of a place is evident from what happens there, from what befalls oneself or others when in its vicinity. The songs proper to a specific site will share a common style, a rhythm that matches the pulse of the place, attuned to the way things happen there—to the sharpness of the shadows or the rippling speech of water bubbling up from the ground. In traditional Ireland, a country person might journey to one distant spring in order to cure her insomnia, to another for strengthening her ailing eyesight, and to yet another to receive insight and protection from thieves. For each spring has its own powers, its own blessings, and its own curses. Different gods dwell in different places, and different demons. Each place has its own dynamism, its own patterns of movement, and these patterns engage the senses and relate them in particular ways, instilling particular moods and modes of awareness, so that unlettered, oral people will rightly say that each place has its own mind, its own personality, its own intelligence. (Abram, 1997:182)

I previously suggested that we might understand a great deal about our civilization by realizing that the Neolithic entailed a sudden die-off of elders, leaving us reeling and traumatized as we suddenly found ourselves cut off from the traditions that guided us. I have read accounts from other native people who echoed sentiments very much like Angela Sidney, who said, “my stories are my wealth.” When asked what gave them that crucial ability that our civilization seems to inherently lack—the ability to live sustainably—I have not heard a one refer to primitive skills, hunting and gathering, or anything like that. For a long time, we have looked for technical solutions to our problems, so it seems natural to look for the key difference in technology. But the people I have heard who live natively, and talk about what that life means, typically credit their success to their stories. It makes me think that we can tell precisely what lost tradition so traumatized us, that 10,000 years later we still reel from it: our oral tradition, the tradition that knits together family and land into a native whole, that helps us to hear when the land speaks.