In reading the book, Merlin: Shaman, Prophet, Magician, by John Matthews, I ran across a great passage underscoring something that I touched on before, with the help of an excerpt by David Abram: the connection between insight, knowledge, and the land. The quote from the book on Merlin runs thus:

Messages from the Land

Physical contact with the earth is another important part of the transmission of the skills of both the seer and the prophet. The land held information like a great book, which could be accessed by those with the skill to see or hear it. The most subtle methods of prophetic tradition in Britain and Ireland seem always to have been available to those who live within the spiritual continuum of the land, and this, we have seen, is very much a central aspect of Merlin’s life in the wilderness.

The ancient gifts of the seer poets were not fueled merely by clairvoyance or poetic sensibility, but by resonance, touch, connection. Their ability to root into any object, place, or person and discover identity, quality, and answers to questions concerning these is part of this symbiotic continuum. Thus Merlin’s shadowy successor, the bard Taliesin, speaks constantly of “becoming” certain objects — a tree, a staff, a stone or a lantern — as well as being able to slip between the cracks of time to predict future events.

The author goes so far as to reweave the connection between poetry and visionary language, something I feel strongly about:

The Spirit of Inspiration

…We see that the role of the poet and the seer were considered as interdisciplinary. Poets were also seers; seers were poets. Merlin, in his earliest incarnation, is both.

In light of this, it is not surprising that the Celtic prophetic tradition, of which Merlin is very much a part, is primarily fueled by the search for poetic inspiration.

Every place a riddle…every riddle a poem…every poem a spirit…every spirit a place….

From the website for the book “Animism: Respecting the Living World” by Graham Harvey:

I’m indebted to Jenny Blain (Sheffield Hallam University, author of Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic (Routledge, 2002) for introducing me to the word wight.

She tells me that wight can be a synonym of “beings” or “persons”, but, more usefully, that it refers to “sentient beings for which we don’t have other words”. Derived from an old English word (with cognates in Old Norse), wiht, the word seems much more useful that the word “spirit”. Too many people, anthropologists included, add the word “spirit” where it really isn’t needed. If trees, rocks, clouds or animals are persons, then it doesn’t help to speak of them as “tree spirits”, etc., unless you want to confuse people into thinking you are making claims about some spiritualised, metaphysical or non-empirical reality. It is only useful to speak of “tree persons” and so on because we need to educate ourselves and other heirs/victims of modernism to find different ways to perceive and relate to other-than-human persons.

(The term “other-than-human persons”, created by Irving Hallowell to say what his Ojibwe hosts had taught him, is fully discussed in my book. Its another “humpty-dumpty” term in my work.)

Wights seems useful too in more poetic circumstances and one’s in which we’re happy to expect people to ask what we mean. It has become an important part of the language of contemporary Heathens.

Subtitled: My Anti-Literacy Campaign

My mother alerted me to an article in the Nov. 20th, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, “Homer in India: The oral epics of Rajasthan”, by William Dalrymple.

I’ve heard plenty of stories about the amazing feats of “illiterate” storytellers, reciting twelve-thousand stanza epics, lasting days, weeks, months. In this recent article, however, I really found my hair standing on end.

The Mahabharata, a one-hundred-thousand stanza epic, more than six times the length of the bible, stands at the center of a culture of magnificent and overwhelmingly immense epics, carried on the shoulders (and in the heart-minds) of the bhopas, the bard-shamans.

The author asks of one bhopa, during a break after a couple hours of song (belonging to the episode “The Story of the She-Camels”, part of the Pabuji epic), whom he normally performed for

–the local landowners perhaps? No, he said it was usually cowherds and his fellow-villagers. Their motives, as he described them, were less to hear the poetry than to use him as a sort of supernatural veterinary service.

“People call me in whenever their animals fall sick…Pabuji is very powerful at curing sickness in beasts…[or]…any child who is possessed by a djinn…I never forget the words, thanks to Pabuji. As long as I invoke him at the beginning, all will be well. Wherever we perform, the demons run away. No ghosts, no spirits can withstand the power of this story.”

“So you are as much a healer…as a storyteller?” I asked.

“Of course…thanks to Pabuji. It is he who cures. Not me.”

The author then address the problem of literacy.

Illiteracy seems an essential condition for preserving the performance of an oral epic. It was the ability of the bard to read, rather than changes in the tastes of his audience, that sounded the death knell for the oral tradition. Just as the blind can develop a heightened sense of hearing, smell, and touch to compensate for their loss of vision, so it seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not.

To speak in particulars:

This was certainly the conclusion of the Indian folklorist Komal Kothari. In the nineteen-fifties, Kothari came up with idea of sending one of his principal sources, a singer from the Langa caste named Lakha, to adult-edication classes. The idea was that he would learn to read and write, thus making it easier to collect the many songs he had preserved. Soon Kothari noticed that Lakha needed to consult his diary before he began to sing. Yet the rest of the Langa singers were able to remember hundreds of songs–an ability that Lakha had somehow begun to lose as he slowly learned to write.

Truly, the article stunned and inspired me. Read it, if at all possible, if you have any interest in reviving spoken traditions. The bhopas’ techniques and methods hint at so many brilliant methods for holding and releasing story, to heal, transform, and sustain.

If you live in the bioregion of Cascadia (and possibly even if you don’t), you need to learn Chinuk Jargon! I really encourage you to learn your local pidgin, if you can discover it; all the reasons below most likely apply to your area of North America (sorry if you hail from outside of Turtle Island…you’ll have to explore on your own).

Not only do place-names across the region suddenly illuminate themselves once you’ve learned the trade language of Chinuk Jargon, but the language has always served as a cross-cultural talk for those living and working in this area.

Working people here, from northern California to Alaska, and east to Montana, for hundreds of years have spoken this language. If you fished, hunted, crafted, or harvested in any way, and traded, you most likely spoke some form of the Jargon.

As many forms of the Jargon existed as did cultures speaking it; now it contains influences of French, English, Hawaiian, and more, along with the original indigenous foundations of the language.

So learn and play with it; allow your culture to shape it, and allow it to shape your culture.

A good beginning place to start:

The Chinook Book.

In the Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram comments on the oral mapping of place, and indigenous memory, in the following way:

One of the strong claims of this book is that the synaesthetic association of visible topology with auditory recall — the intertwining of earthly place with linguistic memory — is common to almost all indigenous, oral cultures.

I’d go even farther to say it goes beyond simple linguistic memory or auditory recall, i.e. an association with words and sounds, and goes to the root of that language: the personalities, metaphors, associations, resemblances, and experiences of the landscape. To clarify: a boulder that doesn’t just remind one of the “word” grandfather, but where one can actually see the face moving in the stone, each mole and freckle marked out as a feature, the expressive habits of the face, the unique sound of its voice. A fully envisioned reality, independent of language, and yet still a language, but one of deep reality. Though certainly mapped using songlines, ballads, and epic poetry, this languaging just serves as another hook upon which to hang the deep nature of the Flesh reality.

Indeed, even within European culture there is a celebrated example of this propensity, albeit in a throughly altered form…[in] the mnemonic technique utilized by the classical orators of Greece and Rome to remember their long speeches (a technique regularly practiced by rhetoricians up until the spread of typographic texts during the late Renaissance). The orator would imagine an elaborate palace, filled with diverse halls and rooms and intricate structural details. He would then envision himself walking through this palace, and would deposit at various places within the rooms a sequence of imagined objects associated with the different parts of his planned speech. Thereafter, to recall the entire speech in its correct sequence and detail, the orator had only to envision himself once again walking the same route through the halls and rooms of the memory palace: each locus encountered on his walk would remind him of the specific phrase to be spoken or the particular topic to be addressed at that point during the discourse. 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!

In this you can see the true nature of the Wild Library; each being of the landscape speaking wisdom about itself, a repository of knowledge about its perspective and habits, waiting for the one to strike up a conversation with it; a conversation that moves naturally beyond words, and yet those same words provide us with an opportunity to layer even more richness to the Storied Earth.

Investigate your region’s ancient native american trade language.

A full list (go to wikipedia for more info):

America’s Pidgins, mixed languages, & trade languages

1. Labrador Eskimo Pidgin (also known as Labrador Inuit Pidgin)
2. Hudson Strait Pidgin
3. Greenlandic Eskimo Pidgin
4. Eskimo Trade Jargon (also known as Herschel Island Eskimo Pidgin, Ship’s Jargon)
5. Mednyj Aleut (also known as Copper Island Aleut, Medniy Aleut, CIA)
6. Haida Jargon
7. Chinook Jargon
8. Nootka Jargon
9. Broken Slavey (also known as Slavey Jargon, Broken Slavé)
10. Kutenai Jargon
11. Loucheux Jargon (also known as Jargon Loucheux)
12. Inuktitut-English Pidgin
13. Michif (also known as French Cree, Métis, Metchif, Mitchif, Métchif)
14. Bungee (also known as Bungi) (?)
15. Broken Oghibbeway (also known as Broken Ojibwa)
16. Basque-Algonquian Pidgin (also known as Micmac-Basque Pidgin, Souriquois)
17. Montagnais Pidgin Basque (also known as Pidgin Basque-Montagnais)
18. American Indian Pidgin English
19. Delaware Jargon (also known as Pidgin Delaware)
20. Pidgin Massachusett
21. Jargonized Powhatan
22. Ocaneechi
23. Lingua Franca Creek
24. Lingua Franca Apalachee
25. Mobilian Jargon (also known as Mobilian Trade Jargon, Chickasaw-Chocaw Trade Language, Yamá)
26. Güegüence-Nicarao
27. Carib Pidgin (also known as Ndjuka-Amerindian Pidgin, Ndjuka-Trio)
28. Carib Pidgin-Arawak Mixed Language
29. Guajiro-Spanish
30. Media Lengua
31. Catalangu
32. Callahuaya (also known as Machaj-Juyai, Kallawaya, Collahuaya, Pohena, Kolyawaya jargon)
33. Lingua Geral Amazônica (also known as Nheengatú, Lingua Boa, Lingua Brasílica, Lingua Geral do Norte)
34. Lingua Geral do Sul (also known as Lingua Geral Paulista, Tupí Austral)
35. Plains Indian Sign Language

Have fun!

Joseph Rael, of the Thunder Caller Clan, grew up in Picurís Pueblo in northern New Mexico. When he was 6, his family moved there from the Ute Reservation in southern Colorado, and he had to learn three new languages: Tewa, which was spoken at Picurís; Spanish, the language of people in the surrounding villages; and English, which was taught at Indian Day School.

http://www.enformy.com/dmadial2.htm, “Scientists, linguists and Native leaders gather to explore different world views”

The Blackfoot Nation just completed a project where, using a map of western Canada, they took out the modern names and, on consultation with elders, put in the old names of Blackfoot geography. When they were through with Bow Mountains, Elbow River, Flat Tummy Plains, and something with head and foot included, out popped a picture of Nabe the creator as a hunter. Thus, wherever they were on their land, they were also inside the creator’s body, always relating to the heart.

From http://www.enformy.com/dma-b.htm, “Dialogues Between
Western and Indigenous Scientists, A Presentation for the 1993 Annual Spring Meeting of the
Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness - 4/11/93″

I can’t get off this language kick for now. Someday you’ll appreciate this. No, really. Okay, maybe not. Regardless:

As this wikipedia article on Navajo classificatory verb stems shows, some animist languages prioritize communicating the shape and type of movement for a subject.

For example, the English verb “give” is expressed by eleven different verbs in Navajo, depending on the physical characteristics of the given object, such as: solid roundish object, load/pack/burden, non-compact matter, slender flexible object, slender stiff object, flat flexible object, mushy matter (includes drunk people and ice cream!), plural objects (two different types), open container, animate objects.

For example, “give me the tobacco” would change depending whether you meant plug tobacco, pipe tobacco, a cigarrette, a tobacco plant, tobacco leaves, a sack full of tobacco, and so on. Not because the name would change, but because the sense of the shape and relationship to the giver/receiver would change.

Compare this to English, where not only do we not prioritize this type of three-dimensional awareness, but we’d much rather know the brand of the tobacco than its physical properties. We prioritize the names of things, over the things themselves.

As an animal tracker, imagine how much more useful this language-inspired awareness would feel. Speaking in this kind of way keeps you close to observation, to direct experience, and away from “names” that pretend to contain knowledge.

So in a verb-only universe, all reality consists of flows, patterns, forces.

All “things” we formerly considered “things”, we now see as processes.

And all that our senses take in we begin to experience as baskets….containing…emptiness.

Hierarchy falls apart….

and the first bird of dawn begins to sing.

So what does it mean to make good observations? What does it mean to communicate real content, to say things worth saying?

I know that when I turn off my mind, and I just observe, just pay attention, I have an experience full of content. I also stay aware that the habits of my attention, what I seek out and look at in my backyard or on the street, or in the faces of my friends, remains heavily influenced by my personal history, my culture, and how I form my thoughts in language. Silence remains available, however, and I can always go back to that world where I have as much in common with a chair, a fly bouncing against a window pane, and a puff of air, as I do with another human being. And the more time I spend in the silence, the less influence my culture, history, and language have over me. I don’t know that they ever disappear, but they lessen, and I can begin to experience purely, to notice things I hadn’t before. To participate in the weaving of the patterns of the world.

In this realm, I can play with what it means for everything to express itself as a verb, rather than as a noun. That rock there…what verb does that express? Does it shine, sit, what sound does it make when I knock it against another rock, against many other kinds of rocks, does it smell, what does it taste like?

For those of you who’ve read up on the Riddle articles here, you’ll recognize this immediately as the art of questioning.

I form questions out of words, and questioning gives me such rich experience, that I don’t want to give the impression that I have a problem with language itself. Languages can and do expand and deepen our experience, and give us richer lives. I want to know how I can do that even more, by exploring my relationship with language.

I’ve heard before of famous eccentrics and scientists forming their own language (Buckminster Fuller comes to mind, and of course Korzybski’s E-prime), and I’ve really begun to understand their motive now. We can improve and adapt every tool we use, to help us live in this world more richly. Language, always talking but strangely silent when it comes to this, fulfills the role of a tool. Why not look at our language and decide what we think works and what doesn’t?

Hmm. I’ve asked this question several times, and I haven’t quite asked it in a way that satisfies me yet.

Where English and other Western Indo-European languages are noun-dominated, Native American languages are verb dominated-, they are relationship/process-oriented, rather than object-oriented: watching the dancing rather than the dancers — the dancers fade back- into the background as you just describe the rhythms and the motions of what is.
-Dan Moonhawk Alford

Buckle your seatbelts! He says more…

My Indian friends say that they can talk all day long and never utter a single noun. And this is real boggling to us English speakers. We couldn’t even think of doing that. But when you have verbs that are like our English verb “slither,” where there’s basically only one thing that slithers, you know what the subject is; and [it] you multiply that by many thousands, you can get an idea of how you can talk without nouns.

So what, right? Well: when the language that you’re using to describe phenomena no longer adequately describes the phenomena, you want to change the language.

We make a fundamental error when we confuse our words, our language, with reality. So any language we develop and employ must stay clear on this point, that we only attempt to describe, we do not define.

The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski

It sounds like a nice quote, doesn’t it? But what kind of cultural madness makes the statement even necessary? Of course the map does not equate with the territory to which it refers. But perhaps our relationship with maps creates the problem, not the usefulness of maps themselves.

In a language governed by “nounyness”, the speakers must pretend to “identify” objects as nouns, as things, as well…objects. But we know that any line we draw between an “object” and its surrounding environment, we draw arbitrarily, or to point out one aspect of that particular territory. We define the map by excluding the details we don’t find relevant. A map that includes all the details of the territory it maps, would constitute the territory itself!

A perfect map of New York, with every last nuance included, could only constitute New York itself! A perfect map of the planet Earth, well, we live on it, and we call it…the planet Earth.

So a language map of reality would best not pretend to equate to reality itself.

To say, “a cat ‘is’ a cat” means nothing. To say, “Frank ‘is’ a teacher” means nothing. It stands nearly empty of content, except to somehow hint at how Frank might make his living.

I literally had someone once tell me, “hey, but you can’t deny: you ‘are’ you. You can’t deny that.”

Ummm…what? That has no content, except for the word ‘you’.

So the goal remains: to put real content back into our language, to stay true to describing processes, rather than presuming identity. To make observations that matter, rather than loop back in upon themselves.

Does the language we speak blind us to the way the world works?

Can we make better observations, and therefore better choices, by changing the way we speak?

One example of “changing the way we speak” involves removing the verb “to be” from one’s use of english, creating “e-prime”. I’ve written a little bit on this before, and currently write mostly in e-prime.

However, e-prime only addresses two problems with the english language; it removes the “is of identity” and the “is of predication” [Meaning, no one thing exactly equates with anything else (John may farm, but calling him a “farmer” oversimplifies all that John expresses as a human being)], and stresses the presence of an active observer (”I see a red cat” rather than “That cat is red”).

In the end, though, we still have a language fundamentally oriented around abstractions and visual concepts; we tend to “see” what the speaker describes. In the Native American language of Blackfoot (Alford 2002), if you speak about someone riding a horse, in that genderless and fundamentally relative language, the listener receives the feeling of riding, not the picture of riding; the movement, sway, and balance of riding the horse, not the image of a rider. Notice also that the listener identifies empathetically with the one doing the riding. You can see someone riding without much impact, but if you “feel” someone riding you’ve entered their world (and essentially begun tracking them; see any of the many articles I’ve written here on the nature of tracking).

Examples abound how indigenous (non-civilization) languages simply present a more scientifically accurate version of the world, linguisitically speaking. What self-respecting modern scientist wouldn’t drool uncontrollably over the opportunity to speak with an evidential case, allowing one to evaluate or share information/data while easily communicating the quality of the data, such as:

* Witness vs. Nonwitness
* Firsthand vs. Secondhand vs. Thirdhand
* Sensory
o Visual vs. Nonvisual (i.e. auditory, olfactory, etc.)
* Inferential
* Reportative
o Hearsay
o Quotative
* Assumed

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality)

Now, one can, through flogging English enough, communicate these things in a long-winded manner, but just imagine a language that makes it a fact of daily, common conversation, to speak in such a way. No recourse to scientific jargon, or steepling one’s fingers while leaning back in an easy chair while saying “evidence suggests that, if this data holds true…etc. etc.”. Everyday english speakers don’t speak that way.

To our great loss, we have no easy way of communicating the fluid and contextual nature of observation. Languages spoken by animal trackers and animists, however, effortlessly enable their speakers to do so.

Why? Because our science has only just begun to catch up with knowledge that we once had, and that indigenous animist cultures still have (where they still live): that the universe constantly changes, that we make observations about it using both our heads and our hearts, that we cannot separate the observer from the observed, and that we will always stay at least one step behind the track of the mystery that makes it all possible.

This all brings us to Quantum Linguistics. The late Dan Moonhawk Aldorf did some important work in this area, explicating why native languages seem to come pre-equipped to speak about quantum events, while english (and other indo-european languages) come so ill-equipped.

Does language indeed change the way we observe the world? If so, what next? Do we junk English for some indigenous language, wrestled from its original speakers? Do we try to fix English, as in e-prime, tinkering with it to bring it back some measure of usefulness?

Well, I can say one thing: we have a lot of experimenting to do, and no one person will solve this fiendish riddle.

If you live in the bioregion of Cascadia (and even if you don’t), you need to learn Chinuk Jargon!

Not only do place-names across the region suddenly illuminate themselves once you’ve learned the trade language of Chinuk Jargon, but the language has always served as a cross-cultural talk for those living and working in this area.

Working people here, from northern California to Alaska, and east to Montana, for hundreds of years have spoken this language. If you fished, hunted, crafted, or harvested in any way, and traded, you most likely spoke some form of the Jargon.

As many forms of the Jargon existed as did cultures speaking it; now it contains influences of French, English, Hawaiian, and more, along with the original indigenous foundations of the language.

So learn and play with it; allow your culture to shape it, and allow it to shape your culture.

A good beginning place to start:

The Chinook Book.