Yarn Theory
Talking with my Dad yesterday, we wandered and wondered onto the topic of yarns woven by our ancestors: his Dad and Grandad, my Grand and Great. Before TV, computers, etc., one of the most common pastimes was spinning yarns (for my extra-continental friends, yarns are stories, sometimes true or at least based in truth, often exaggerated, and always entertaining.) It seems like anytime I pick the brains of my Dad, Uncle or Grandad for some family history, I am dumbfounded with amazement at the rich history the Tandys have enjoyed over the years. The cowboy tales I've read about were just everyday life for Tandys just two generations prior. It is a little sad though, because with each one of these stories I hear, I know there are thousands just like them that are lost in between generations.
I heard a new one recently. We got to talking about where the Tandy ranches were located, and apparently they had one that covered most of what is now known as Ft. Worth, Texas. My Great-Grandmother told my Dad about another one they owned previously in New Mexico. An interesting feature of this Ranch was a large whole in the ground. They used to peer down into it as they rode by on their horses, but never really went down into it. They also noticed that bats sometimes flew out of it.
Well, one day, this was sometime in the 1920s I think, National Geographic contacted them explaining they would like to take a peek inside. Sometime later, National Geographic sent a team out from New York to visit the Ranch. Great-Grandmother told my Dad how my Great-Grandad made a tri-pod out of wooden posts, and lowered team members down into the hole. That hole today is called Carlsbad Caverns, and is one of the most spectacular known natural sites, so large that it cannot be seen entirely in one day.
Some years later, as my Dad was touring the museum at the caverns, he came across a picture on the wall, showing that scene his Grandmother had painted in his memory years before. There was the tripod of wooden posts, and a fellow named White, descending into the blackness.
And, having heard another great story, I lamented the fact that so much history is lost with the passage of time. In just three generations, the slate of acquired knowledge is wiped entirely clean. Then my Dad points out that we are only talking about 100 years: a long time when compared to our lives, but shorter than the wink of a hummingbird when you consider that humans were creating complex art on cave walls 35,000 years ago and tracking and predicting the movement of stars with large stones. How much wisdom have we gained and lost since then?
It is clear that through logic, we have made much headway into the frontiers of what we call science and technology. We are steadily gaining an ability to manipulate the material world at frequently smaller grander scales. Today, it is accepted and expected that our knowledge advances exponentially.
However, it is quite possible that we are losing knowledge at this same exponential pace! And if so much material knowledge can be gained and lost in 100 years, what have we gained and lost of the immaterial realms of wisdom encompassing areas of knowledge that no longer exist and that we no longer even imagine in our current paradigms?
Then today, looking through my notebook, I came across notes jotted down while reading "Maya Cosmos", a book about the history and culture of one of the great civilizations known to man. The authors assert that the wisdom and worldview of this "dead" civilization live on today in the people of the Yucatan peninsula (Rage Against the Machine's "People of the Sun"). I had written a couple quotes from around page 36 of the book.
We of the modern world come from a society in which mystical knowledge is sometimes admired and honored, but is more often regarded as lunatic and irrational. When the Europeans conquered the globe, they had to believe themselves superior in knowledge, insight, morality, and technology to the peoples they came to dominate.
People in the West are learning that we live on a planet with many societies, each harboring different visions and ways of looking at things that are, in fact, alternative realities. Acknowledging the equality of these different realities is a matter of human justice. Tapping their strengths to foster cleaner, more humane, and more survival-oriented forms of material power is a matter of common sense. Learning to understand and respect these alternate cultural realities is a first step onto the road toward a better world. Behind us on this road are the byways of our several pasts; ahead is the inevitable coming together of our futures. The ability to successfully pass back and forth between alternate realities is a fundamental feature of mysticism in general, shamanism in particular, and anthropology in practice. A convergence of the spiritual and the material domains is perhaps disturbing to some scholars in their citadels of Western rationality but we believe it is our best hope if we wish to create a future of tolerance and effective collaboration between peoples.
MAYA COSMOS, D. Fredel, L. Schele, J. Parker, William Morrow and Company,
New York, 1993.
And I am again amazed at the beauty of it all.