We Must Be Told Night And Day That The Gods Never Existed
Lessons from my dog and a desert mystic.
Sometimes when I walk the dog she’ll freeze out of nowhere and stare intently at something I can’t see. Her nose will twitch, her brows will furrow, and she will sit there and drink in the knowledge of something I will never myself know.
Isn’t that humbling? I like existing in a world where some things are beyond us, but not beyond the ken of all living things. Dogs and cats famously know that earthquakes are coming before people do; there are of course other applications. In Orla’s case it could be the smell of something cooking a few blocks away or a bird in a tree or a cat mewling behind a closed door. But I remain open to the larger possibilities: a ghost or spirit or fourth dimension. Truths of the world conveyed through means I am unable to access.
I can spend a lifetime searching for answers, knowing that no one will ever have all of them, least of all me. Ken Layne talks about this in a recent episode of his excellent and bizarre solo radio show, Desert Oracle, in the context of the California legend of the Dark Watchers:
But the Watchers remained in these steep misty mountains…the Spanish arriving 300 years ago acknowledged the local apparitions with the name Los vigilantes oscuros. Robinson Jeffers wrote about them, as did John Steinbeck.
…Yes, they are shadowy. Always at a distance. Real but not exactly there…Perhaps they are manifestations of memory, gathered together for a little while in something like corporeal form. Interested in the affairs of humanity but removed from it.
And then this beautiful mystery slams clumsily into a roadblock of garbage: the rational explanation.
In newsrooms of decades past, some local expert would be dredged up from obscurity to cough up some hairball scientific explanation for the mysterious, the transcendent, the unknown. In our present day the editor rarely needs to suggest the other side of the story. The reporter is supposed to provide her own dose of disenchantment—the equivalent of soaking down the campfire you just managed to build from bits of splintered wood and fire in the quiet atmosphere of misty mountains in the deep darkness of night. The Dark Watchers, having spanned the centuries…are now casually, stupidly thrown to the dogs of disenchantment. There’s nothing to it! Nothing to this fantastic mystery, this beautiful folklore that has survived the centuries because it was real. The shoddy evidence offered up to refute this beautiful truth is generally a stray line of text found on a Wikipedia page on deadline…
Layne continues along this train of thought in his rambling mystic’s voice for some time. From the Dark Watchers themselves he zooms out to the larger questions.
What has changed in the telling of history in our time? What has most changed in the telling of history in the years since the Industrial Revolution? We have (out of embarrassment) stripped the supernatural from our lives. Removed the miracles, redacted the guardian angels, the singing mermaids, the Hounds of the Baskervilles. The wailing banshee. The premonitions and visitations. The historical, scientific, and literary works of the 20th century are marked by a stubborn need to explain away the part of life that was most fulfilling for most of us in centuries past. The wonder, the delight, the awe, the fear of a mostly invisible world alongside our reliably physical reality.
…In our anti-culture’s ceasless struggle to tamp out the remnants of a million years of humanity…we must be told night and day that the gods never existed. That spirits are fictions. That our lifelong accumulations of ESP beteween family and friends—gut checks, clairvoyance, foreboding, bad mojo, psychic vampirism, and everyday magic—does not and never did exist. That people of a few centuries ago were somehow more adept at every aspect of daily life, generally in tune with the natural world—as that was where they lived—but they were completely deranged regarding the soul, the dim kingdom, luck, fate, ritual. The pyramids stand around the world but we furiously deny the spiritual reasons they were built at such great cost of resources, time, and human life.
The absolute hubris of thinking we know more now than ever before, you know? I am no zealot or new-agey weirdo but it’s important to remain open to the larger possibilities. Or at least that there are always more things to be learned, and that some of those things were already learned and forgotten ages ago.
On the regular walking route the dog and I have there are countless things to learn that we can be reasonably sure of. The names of things, mostly. (Although even “learning” those implies a relationship between signifier and signified that linguists and poets alike remind us does not exist.) This time of year is almost decadent in the spectacle of flowers and blossoming trees it brings; say what you will about residential north Seattle (and I have) but people here love to make their yards pop with color. Crocuses and daffodils, tulips and roses. I don’t know when I learned any of these; not recently. Others are newer to me. Some recent personal favorites, discovered by running them through my trusty plant ID app: virgin’s bower, Japanese andromeda, Scotch heather.
This identification journey has also taught me just how many plants are out there carrying around a whole stable of names. Japanese andromeda is also called mountain fire and fetterbush and lily-of-the-valley bush. Another I pass on my walks is called annual honesty but also goes by money plant and moonwort and silver dollar. It seems a little unfair that to learn about even one plant you might have to remember a half-dozen names, but then, each of those names comes from some tradition or story or culture, each signifier carrying with it a history richer than I can contemplate. I think that’s just about the neatest thing.
Last winter I took it upon myself to get better at identifying coniferous evergreens, wrapped up as I was in the project of making teas and cookies and pie crusts with them. This spring I have pivoted to seeking out magnolias, which I only recently learned are edible, with a taste like ginger or cardamom. I tried making magnolia ginger snap cookies from a recipe I saw on Instagram the other week, which was basically a total failure. I don’t have a deep roster of desserts and most of my pies look messy but taste great; these were disastrous in both form and flavor. I may be destined for a life of nothing but Tollhouse break-and-bake cookies, which is an outcome I’m okay with.
(Speaking of the history of names: the magnolia, despite getting that moniker in the 17th century in honor of French botanist Pierre Magnol, has existed in the world for longer than bees have. Experts speculate that the flowers of the tree evolved to encourage pollination by beetles, instead. Life, uhhh, finds a way.)
Around this time of year I also focus intently on the cherry blossoms. Cherry trees are hysteranthous, which means they flower before they leaf rather than the other way around. As a result, most years we start to get brightness in the neighborhood in late February as the pale pink and white petals burst forth to announce the beginning of spring. Those cherry blossoms are a talisman of hope to me—a promise that life is beginning anew after another dreary winter. I welcome their coming each year with something like desperation.
But by mid-April many of those flowers have disappeared again, replaced by the leaves of the tree in their comparatively drab colors. Here and gone all too quickly, their mission of carrying us over the emotional finish line complete. That’s okay, though: like all living things they only have much meaning because they have an expiration date.
As is the case with so many of these thoughts and feelings there’s one song that really puts a bow on it. For me that’s Iron and Wine’s “Resurrection Fern,” a lovely and haunting rumination on death and memory and what’s beyond our seeing. It begins:
In our days we will live
Like our ghosts will live
Pitching glass at the cornfield crows
And folding clothes
If there are ghosts, perhaps they are just us. And if they’re just us it would be awfully sad to rule them out.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
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