Nature of Generosity

Part One The Old Animal Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. --Mark Twain DUST LIFTED in slow streaks off the alkaline playa in the dry basin called Long Lake. Tiny orange and white flowers blossomed among boulders of black lava-flow basalt. Ten thousand years ago, when the first humans came to the Great Basin highlands where I stood, Long Lake was part of a sweep of swamps and vast watery basins fed by melting glaciers. Waterbirds lifted to wheel and settle, refolding their wings. Their movements, to my dreaming, are a flowering of momentum--in this, much like music. At the end of a rocky two-track road, Long Lake is lost among the ridges rising from the east side of Warner Valley into an enormous run of uninhabited lava-rock and sagebrush highlands. I grew up believing there was nothing in the vicinity of Long Lake but shimmering distances. Then, sixty-five years old, I found that I'd spent my boyhood near an ancient holy place. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the lava-flow ridge at my back had fragmented into intricate, smooth-sided boulders, which were everywhere inscribed--drawn on by ancient humans attempting to manage their luck and their fate. The inscriptions were particularly thick in places next to fractures, breaks where souls and spirits could be thought to have emerged from an underworld, and through which they might be fortunate enough to reenter. Thousands of designs and figures had been pecked into the basalt surfaces with stone or bone tools, ranging from entropic (behind the eye) patterns of the sort seen in trances--grids and dot complexes--to discernible figures metamorphosing from moss to fish to men and women. Some were colored with pigment; others were delineated by thin encrustations of yellow and greenish lichens. The oldest images reach back ten thousand years. Anthropologists suggest they were created by shamans, priests who thought all things, including stones, possess an innate soul. Animist cultures are a global phenomenon that seems to have lasted thirty thousand years or so, and still endure among people along the Yukon River lowlands of Alaska, in enclaves like the Kalahari Desert of southwestern Africa, and in central Australia. These cultures hold that their shamans talk to animals, that while the shaman's body remains locked in a trance, the soul takes flight through fissures in the rock (actuality) and goes down into the underworld in order to encourage the emergence of hunting animals, or even out to the Milky Way for instruction from gods and ancestors who live there. At least that's what they've told anthropologists. IT WAS NOT that I'd never seen such inscriptions. At various points around the edges of Warner, there are smooth-sided boulders inscribed with what I'd thought were simplistic snakes and sunrises; or maybe the jagged lines indicated days of travel. Those etchings were ordinarily considered the work of ancestors of the northern Paiute, who lived in Warner when the white settlers arrived. But the Paiute were relative latecomers, occupying Warner for less than a thousand years. Earlier cultures had come and gone since those boulders were inscribed. Peter Farb, in Man's Rise to Civilization: The Cultural Ascent of the Indians of North America, explains that the people of the northern Great Basin had fewer than a thousand of what anthropologists call "cultural items." While this seems unlikely-- can a dream of heaven be called a cultural item?--Farb contrasts it to the fact that, in 1942, George Patton's armies landed in North Africa with 547,000 different categories of nonmilitary hardware. This statistic illustrates the vast distance between the Paiute mind-set and our own. In Shoshone, Edward Dorn tells of visKittredge, William is the author of 'Nature of Generosity' with ISBN 9780679437529 and ISBN 0679437525.