Back on the Fire by Gary Snyder

Author:Gary Snyder [Snyder, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2009-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Soaring just over the sea-foam

riding the wind of the endless waves

albatross, out there, way

away,     a far cry

down from the sky

9.

Entering the Fiftieth Millennium

LET’S SAY we’re about to enter not the twenty-first century but the fiftieth millennium. Since the various cultural calendars (Hindu, Jewish, Islamic, Christian, Japanese) are each within terms of their own stories, we can ask what calendar would be suggested to us by the implicit narrative of Euro-American science—since that provides so much of our contemporary educated worldview. We might come up with a “Homo sapiens calendar” that starts at about 40,000 years before the present (B.P.), in the Gravettian/Aurignacian era when the human tool kit (already long sophisticated) began to be decorated with graphs and emblems and when figurines were produced not for practical use but apparently for magic or beauty.

Rethinking our calendar in this way is made possible by the research and discoveries of the last century in physical anthropology, paleontology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. The scholars of hominid history are uncovering a constantly larger past in which the earlier members of our species continually appear to be smarter, more accomplished, more adept, and more complex than we had previously believed. We humans are constantly revising the story we tell about ourselves. The main challenge is to keep this unfolding story modestly reliable.

One of my neopagan friends, an ethnobotanist and prehistorian, complains about how the Christians have callously appropriated his sacred solstice ceremonies. “Our fir tree of lights and gifts,” he says, “has been swept into an orgy of consumerism, no longer remembered as a sign of the return of the sun,” and, “People have totally forgotten that the gifts brought from the north by Santa Claus are spiritual, not material; and his red clothes, white trim, round body, and northern habitat show that he represents the incredibly psychoactive mushroom Amanita muscaria.”

My friend is one of several poet-scholars I know who study deep history (a term he prefers to “prehistory”)—in this case that of Europe—for clues and guides to understanding the creature that we have become and how we got here, the better to steer our way into the future. Such studies are especially useful for artists.

I went to France one summer to further pursue my own interest in the Upper Paleolithic. Southwest Europe has large areas of karst plateau, which allows for caves by the thousands, some of them enormous. Quite a few were decorated by Upper Paleolithic people. With the help of the poet and paleo-art historian Clayton Eshleman, my wife and I visited many sites and saw a major sampling of the cave art of southwest Europe, in the Dordogne and the Pyrenees. Places like Pêche-merle, Cougnac, Niaux, El Portel, Lascaux, and Trois Frères. The cave art, with its finger tracings, engravings, hand stencils, outline drawings, and polychrome paintings, flourished 10,000 to 35,000 years ago. The Paleolithic cave and portable art of Europe thus constitute a 25,000-year continuous artistic and cultural tradition. The people who did this were fully Homo sapiens and, it must

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